In 2005 the FBI shuttered EliteTorrents, a popular ‘private’ BitTorrent community that came to a sticky end after making available a pre-release ‘workprint’ copy of Star Wars Episode III. By 2010 the agency was focusing its resources on Operation in Our Sites, an initiative which closed down several domains including the notorious NinjaVideo. Then two years ago the FBI played a key role in the closure of Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload.

While few would doubt the gravity of the cases highlighted above, it may come as a surprise that in addition to commercial scale infringement, the FBI also views unauthorized personal copying as a serious offense. While it may not actively pursue individual pirates, it doesn’t want them in-house.

Monday this week Sacramento State‘s Career Center welcomed the FBI for a visit concerning recruitment of students for its paid internship program. One of the topics discussed were historical actions that could exclude applicants from the program.

In addition to drug use, criminal activity and even defaulting on a student loan, students were informed that if they had illegally downloaded content in the past, that could rule them out of a position at the FBI. It appears that to the agency, downloading is tantamount to stealing.

While some students might be tempted to tell a white lie or two about their piracy experiences during their initial interviews, that appears to be a dangerous course of action. All responses are recorded and sent to a polygraph technician and if the student fails the lie detector test they are excluded from the FBI forever, even if they tried to cover up the smallest thing.

But what if applicants have a bit of personal piracy to hide, but choose to tell the truth? Information is limited, but a 2012 posting on 911JobForums by a rejected applicant reveals that while honesty might be the best policy, it can be enough to rule someone out of a job.

“My reason for posting this is to help give fair warning to those who don’t think pirating copyrighted information from the internet will trip them up later on. While I sometimes ask myself what might have been, I can honestly say I gave it my best shot,” the poster explains.

“I had downloaded songs while at college 10 years prior (300+) and a few recently (<20). I had an illegal copy of Windows XP in my possession and 10 years ago had watched fewer than 8 pirated full-length movies which I had downloaded then promptly deleted. I had copied a Redbox DVD to my iPod I wasn't able to watch before returning but then promptly deleted the movie after watching once."

According to the student-run newspaper The State Hornet, the FBI are interested in the amount of illegal content applicants have downloaded, so it’s possible that people downloading very small amounts might be shown leniency.

Those interested in how the polygraph procedure itself works can find details of the equivalent CIA test here. Interestingly the writer has a tip for former pirate students.

“[The CIA] were concerned mostly about crime, drugs, and misuse of technology systems. Downloading music, though it is illegal, does not disqualify you. Most people especially college students did this, just pretend you didn’t know that it was illegal,” he notes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Home mass manufacturing of copies of culture and knowledge started some time in the 1980s with the Cassette Tape, the first widely available self-contained unit capable of recording music. It made the entire copyright industry go up in arms and demand “compensation” for activities that were not covered by their manufacturing monopoly, which is why we now pay protection money to the copyright industry in many countries for everything from cellphones to games consoles.

The same industry demanded harsh penalties – criminal penalties – for those who manufactured copies at home without a license rather than buying the expensive premade copies. Over the next three decades, such criminal penalties gradually crept into law, mostly because no politician thinks the issue is important enough to defy anybody on.

A couple of key patent monopolies on 3D printing are expiring as we speak, making next-generation 3D printing much, much higher quality. 3D printers such as this one are now appearing on Kickstarter, “printers” (more like fabs) that use laser sintering and similar technologies instead of layered melt deposit.

We’re now somewhere in the 1980s-equivalent of the next generation of copyright monopoly wars, which is about to spread to physical objects. The copyright industry is bad – downright atrociously cynically evil, sometimes – but nobody in the legislature gives them much thought. Wait until this conflict spreads outside the copyright industry, spreads to pretty much every manufacturing industry.

People are about to be sued out of their homes for making their own slippers instead of buying a pair.

If you think that sounds preposterous, that’s exactly what has been going on in the copyright monopoly wars so far, with people manufacturing their own copies of culture and knowledge instead of buying ready-made copies. There’s no legal difference to manufacturing a pair of slippers without having a license for it.

To be fair, a pair of slippers may be covered by more monopolies than just the copyright monopoly (the drawing) – it may be covered by a utility patent monopoly, a design patent monopoly, possibly a geographic indication if it’s some weird type of slipper, and many more arcane and archaic types of monopolies. Of course, people in general can’t tell the difference between a “utility patent”, a “design patent”, a “copyright duplication right”, a “copyright broadcast right”, a “related right”, and so on. To most people, it’s all just “the copyright monopoly” in broad strokes.

Therefore, it’s irrelevant to most people whether the person who gets sued out of their home for fabbing their own slippers from a drawing they found is technically found guilty of infringing the copyright monopoly (maybe) or a design patent (possibly). To 95% or more, it’s just “more copyright monopoly bullshit”. And you know what? Maybe that’s good.

The next generation of wars over knowledge, culture, drawings, information, and data is just around the corner, and it’s going to get much uglier with more stakes involved on all sides. We have gotten people elected to parliaments (and stayed there) on the conflict just as it stands now. As this divide deepens, and nothing suggests it won’t, then people will start to pay more attention.

And maybe, just maybe, that will be the beginning of the end of these immoral and deeply unjust monopolies known as copyrights and patents.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The campaign video titled “Everything is NOT Awesome” is inspired by the popular “Everything is Awesome” song, a callback to the LEGO movie. The video shows LEGO figures drowning in oil with a cover of the song playing in the background.

Over the past several days more than three million people have watched the video on YouTube. However, a few hours ago the video suddenly became unavailable due to a copyright claim by Warner Bros.

TorrentFreak contacted Greenpeace who informed us that the email YouTube sent doesn’t clarify on what grounds the video was taken down. The group assumes that the use of the song is the culprit, but says it won’t let this case go without a fight.

“Our film was designed as a creative way of letting people know about the threat to the Arctic from Shell and the role LEGO has in the story. It seems to have struck a nerve with some important corporate bigwigs, but this crude attempt to silence dissent won’t work,” Greenpeace’s Ian Duff says.

Greenpeace will appeal the takedown request, a process that can take up to 10 days to complete. In the meantime the group has uploaded the video to Vimeo, along with a call to its millions of social media followers and mailing list subscribers to re-upload it elsewhere.

“We fully intend to challenge this claim, and we’re asking supporters to upload the video wherever they can,” Duff says.

In the appeal Greenpeace will argue that the video uses satire and parody and that it is in the public interest. The video should therefore be protected under the right to free speech.

This is not the first time that Greenpeace has had one of its campaign videos removed from YouTube. Previously a video featuring several Star Wars characters was taken down. The video was later reinstated after Greenpeace successfully appealed the takedown request.

Warner Bros’ motivation for the takedown remains unclear. It seems unlikely that it is an automated request since there are still more than 700 video on YouTube that use the same ‘Everything is Awesome’ song.

Whatever the reason may be, the takedown attempt will clearly backfire.

During the days to come the rift between Greenpeace and Warner Bros. will be widely covered by the media while hundreds of copies of the video will be uploaded and shared.

Update: The video is back online.

“18 hours later we’ve seen that the video has been re-instated. WB have withdrawn their complaint. It seems who ever wanted it censored has spotted the error in their ways,” Duff informs TorrentFreak.

Update 2: Warner Bros. now removed the video from Vimeo….

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Suing the hell out of file-sharers might currently be popular with trolls, but the mainstream entertainment companies are increasingly opting to “educate” consumers via emailed warnings instead.

However, getting into the hearts and minds of young people before they become budding adult pirates is also an option, some believe.

The likes of the RIAA and MPAA have been dabbling in this area for many years and just last year it was revealed that the group behind the U.S. “six-strikes” program had developed a curriculum targeted at kids from kindergarten through sixth grade.

Yesterday ideas along the same lines were put forward by UK authors during a debate in the House of Commons. Bemoaning the state of renumeration for writers and authors in the UK, Joanne Harris MBE, the author of the Oscar-winning movie Chocolat starring Johnny Depp, said that downloading literature from the Internet was not “sticking it to the man”.

If children could understand that not everyone is as lucky or rich as J.K. Rowling, and that “real” people are behind these works, progress might be made, Harris said.

“Authors and creators should go into schools. Let children see what an author is like, let them go out into the community and talk to people, let them understand that we have children, we have mortgages; we do not simply get showered with Hollywood money because we happened to write a little story about wizards one day,” Harris said.

Award-winning poet Wendy Cope OBE was in agreement, noting that a general failure to do anything effective against illegal downloading meant that educating children about copyright is the only solution left.

“There is a need of education, because so many people are so completely ignorant of the basic fact of copyright. It seems to me it would take five minutes to explain, once a year in assembly, that there is such a thing as the law of copyright,” Cope said.

“Assemblies in every school in the country that such a thing of copyright exists – so these people who tell me I have photocopied your poem and sent it to all my friends know that they are breaking the law.”

And herein lies a problem.

While Cope undoubtedly works very hard to produce her poetry, one might think that the sharing culture facilitated by today’s social media phenomenon would be a useful ally, not a foe, when it comes to getting her noticed by young people. But Cope was born in the 1940s and clearly still views photocopying (Xeroxing) as something to be concerned about, so there’s a bit of a disconnect here.

Also, when one compares Cope’s views with those of Paulo Coelho, one of the most widely read authors in the world, who loves BitTorrent and people pirating his books, it becomes clear that the failure of an author to gain an audience won’t be overcome by talking about copyright in a classroom once a year.

Finally, Cope’s idea of informing children that illegal downloading is the same as stealing sweets or candy presumes that children can not only tell the difference between a legal and illegal copy of her poems, but also between a purchased Paulo Coehlo book and a ‘pirated’ one – and all the shades of fair-use gray in between.

Whether copyright proponents and anti-piracy outfits will care about those subtle shades once they’re allowed inside a classroom is another matter entirely – especially if they only get five minutes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

If you don’t want a few spoilers as you intend to watch later, please stop reading now.

The show begins with Homer’s co-workers gathered around the watercooler discussing Radioactive Man’s latest movie. Homer hasn’t seen it and he gets upset that no matter where he goes people are discussing how great it is. Desperate to see the movie, Homer took the entire family to the theater. Sadly it cost a fortune and was riddled with advertising.

“If I wanted to pay for commercials I can’t skip i’d sign up for Hulu Plus,” he complained while launching into a rant that got him ejected from the theater.

Seeing his father’s sadness, Bart taught Homer how to illegally download from the best pirate website around – The Bootleg Bay. His precise instructions were continually interrupted by a PSA-style voiceover explaining how Fox does not endorse piracy.

Back at work, Homer walked in on another water-cooler chat about the latest Bond movie. He hadn’t seen that either but when his colleagues told him to go the theater to see it, he explained that wouldn’t be necessary.

“All I need to see this movie is a laptop and a website based in a country that is really just an offshore oil platform,” Homer said.

This is a delightful reference to The Pirate Bay planning to buy the island nation of Sealand way back in 2007. Groening certainly does his homework.

After showing his colleagues the Bond movie on his laptop, one commented that it was a great experience that combined the fun of the theater with the thrill of stealing. Another said that what the movie industry needs to understand is that the people have needs – brand new, big budget entertainment, in their homes – for nothing. It’s clear that Matt Groening is as happy as ever to take shots at both sides.

What followed was an interesting parallel. Many times in the past The Pirate Bay has made it clear that its mission is to offer ‘culture’ to all. In the show Homer does something similar by opening his own free mini theater for the people of Springfield using movies downloaded from The Bootleg Bay.

However, when Marge later discovered that she’d been watching a pirate movie, she sent a check to Hollywood to pay for the ticket she never bought. This set off a chain of events which saw Homer investigated by the FBI. The size of the movie piracy department next to the drug enforcement office is a clear nod to the resources being expended on piracy-related issues.

Inside the FBI’s movie piracy department was a large bustling nerve center with agents sitting at workstations and a world map glowing with pirate locations. The FBI were clearly going to put a lot of resources into tracking Homer down.

Although most will probably miss it, the next scene almost certainly referenced another important event in file-sharing history. Homer presented a downloaded copy of Cosmic Wars VII, a movie which was clearly meant to be Star Wars. He noted that the copy he was about to show was a leaked version “direct from the computer of an angry editor at a special effects house.”

This inclusion is very interesting. Back in 2005, file-sharing site EliteTorrents was subjected to a massive FBI raid after it offered for download an unfinished ‘workprint’ version of Star Wars Episode III which had obviously originated from an industry pre-production source. While several staff members at Elite were all jailed, no one was ever prosecuted for the actual leak, something which remains highly suspicious to this day.

Before long though, a Kim Dotcom-style raid was being carried out against the animated pirate cinema, complete with plenty of armed officers seeking to intimidate “and stage the prison suicide” of Homer Simpson. He’s taken away to prison but things didn’t go quite to plan, with Homer quickly becoming a fugitive. Desperate for sanctuary he flees to the only place in America that doesn’t care about Internet piracy laws – the Swedish consulate.

“The people of Sweden believe that all movies should be shared freely,” explained Lisa to a confused Marge.

Eventually Homer hands himself over to the many FBI agents massing outside and, like pretty much all big file-sharing cases in the US, later finds himself up in court to answer for his sins.

Overall the episode is a clever one that highlights both sides of the debate. It makes clear that big budget content needs to have a funding mechanism, but even more apparent is the overblown response to the issue encouraged by Hollywood and executed by law enforcement.

Definitely one to watch – which raises another issue of course. Right at the start of the episode Homer found himself pirating movies because the official experience fell short of his expectations. Equally there will be plenty of people wanting to watch this episode who will have no local access to the show. It’s a self perpetuating cycle that cannot be solved with law enforcement.

The release of the episode follows a Fox lawsuit and a $10.5m judgment against a Canadian who ran a Simpsons download portal. Coincidence or….?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In a response Defense Distributed, the people behind the first 3D printable gun, threw up a website to host the designs that had been banned at Thingiverse. This included the popular blueprints of their own gun “The Liberator.”

The worldwide release of the prints did not sit well with the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls who kindly requested that DEFCAD remove the availability of the 3D printable gun documents, citing a possible violation of International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

The files in question were removed, but at the same time DEFCAD was already working on a new project that would be harder to censor. Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson had started to raise funds for a separate meta-search engine, the first to focus on 3D print models.

“In March of this year, seeing an opportunity to expand the DEFCAD concept to fight the prevailing ideas about intellectual property in the entire physible space, I split Defense Distributed and DEFCAD and turned the latter into another company,” Wilson tells TorrentFreak.

“The idea was to move away from direct hosting to employ the first amendment victories won by Google in the courts and become a meta-search engine as a more robust way of spreading and preserving physibles. We hope to build a piece of infrastructure to help stem the next wave of the IP wars in advance, if you will.”

DEFCAD raised a significant amount of funds and has now quietly rolled out the meta-search engine to the public on DEFCAD.com. While still labeled as an Alpha release the site already indexes more than 74,000 files, all stored on external sites.

DEFCAD has been labeled the “Pirate Bay of 3D printing” as Wilson and his team previously pledged not to take any content down. Those who take a good look at the site will also notice some other Pirate Bay references, including the “kopimi” logo at the bottom and the use of magnet links. In addition, many of the files linked on DEFCAD are hosted on the Bayfiles hosting site which was launched by two Pirate Bay founders.

While DEFCAD doesn’t mind being linked to The Pirate Bay, Wilson believes that the title doesn’t apply as much after they were forced by the authorities to censor their own work. He sees the Pirate Bay comparison mostly as “convenient headline writing,” which we were kind enough to make use of.

“After the State Department came after Defense Distributed and our hand was forced, I believe the Pirate Bay is still the Pirate Bay of 3D sharing. But nothing would be better than building complementary structures in the spirit of TPB,” Wilson says.

The involvement of government changed a few things, and unlike The Pirate Bay, the company has registered Wilson as DMCA agent to deal with takedown requests. While they initially received some complaints from Thingiverse users, DEFCAD has not yet received a single official DMCA takedown notice.

“There was some dissatisfaction with our public testing earlier in the summer. A handful of makers felt like we were taking advantage of Thingiverse’s bandwidth or not adequately respecting their ‘rights’ to their ‘property,’ but since we’ve appointed a DMCA agent we’ve received no takedown requests.”

Of course it is still early days for 3D printing and at the moment the scale of 3D print piracy is rather minimal. This is bound to change in the years to come, but DEFCAD’s founder doubts that it will ever compete with the size and prevalence of more traditional forms of piracy, such as sharing movies and music.

“I’m of two minds about this right now. Having grasped the state of 3D printing at the top and the bottom, I think the deck is stacked against movement physible piracy,” Wilson tells us.

“What I mean is that I don’t see the same passions being exercised to liberate copyrighted design as I see used to liberate entertainment media. This is probably obvious, and it may mean nothing for the future political defense of the physible, but I think the distinction is worthwhile.”

Wilson expects that when the ball starts rolling the entertainment industry might be the first to jump in to protect their 3D designs, as they have done already on a small scale.

“It’s interesting that the old movie and film giants were the first to issue physible takedown notices. It’s quite likely entertainment-related physibles are going to be the battleground in the near future,” Wilson says.

Earlier this year HBO was one of the first to issue a 3D print takedown request for a Game of Thrones iPhone cover. Those who search DEFCAD for the name of the popular series will see that they have plenty of work to do.

For now, however, the most downloaded files on the new meta-search engine are, perhaps fittingly, guns. With more than 6,000 downloads The Liberator v1.1 is the most popular, followed by other gun designs, the FOSSCAD Atlas SSR and DMR Shanrilivan with over 5,000 downloads.

Of course there are thousands of other designs available as well, and for the pacifist pirates out there DEFCAD also has plenty of booty.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

For years the above argument has been used in response to ever-increasing piracy rates. However, the start of Breaking Bad’s second half of the fifth and final season shows that mere availability is not always good enough.

Just a few hours after the first unauthorized copy of Breaking Bad appeared online, 80,000 people were sharing the episode simultaneously through the most popular torrent file. After 12 hours, half a million people had already grabbed a copy via BitTorrent, and this number is increasing rapidly.

From the looks of it, Breaking Bad is well on its way to beat the record of 2,580,000 downloads it set last year.

Data gathered by TorrentFreak throughout the day reveals that most early downloaders, a massive 16.1%, come from Australia. Down Under the show aired on the pay TV network Foxtel, but it appears that many Aussies prefer to download a copy instead.

The same is true for the United States and Canada, with 16% and 9.6% of the total downloads respectively, despite the legal offerings.

In the UK, Netflix subscribers could stream the latest episode a few hours after the U.S. premiere. However, tens of thousands preferred to download a copy via BitTorrent, good for 8.5% of all downloads.

The Netherlands, where Breaking Bad actually premiered on public television several hours before the U.S. release, takes fifth place in the country rankings, followed by Poland, Spain, Brazil, India and Sweden.

Breaking Bad’s latest download figures make the show one of the most pirated in 2013 thus far. Nevertheless, it doesn’t come close to the record set by Game of Thrones, which became the most pirated TV-show of the spring season with 5.2 million downloads.

While one might think that the people connected to Game of Thrones are outraged by this mass piracy, the opposite appears to be true according to several insiders.

Game of Thrones director David Petrarca previously said he believes that the buzz created by pirates eventually leads to more paying subscribers, and last week Time Warner CEO Jess Bewkes said that it’s better than winning an Emmy.

“Our experience is that it leads to more paying subscribers. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world. That’s better than an Emmy,” Bewkes said.

In other words, Breaking Bad fans have to step up if they want the show to capture the most prestigious TV award of the year. An almost impossible task, but with seven episodes to go the race is still open.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In 2006 Scott was sentenced to 5 months in jail and 5 months home confinement, and that was not the end of it.

After his release in 2007, Scott was fitted with a monitoring ankle bracelet which restricted his freedom.

He also had to use special software on his computer to monitor his online activities. This meant giving up his beloved Ubuntu, because the software was Windows only.

After four years McCausland was finally “”free” and he now uses his software development skills to fill the App Store.

McCausland is co-founder of the AppFlixion Group which released its first two iOS Apps a few weeks ago. The former EliteTorrents admin says that he has learned from his mistakes and that he’s delighted to move on.

“We’ve all made mistakes,” Scott McCausland says.

“It’s not about the mistake, it’s about what we do with the knowledge we’ve gained from the mistakes that we’ve made. I hope I can inspire someone else to pick themselves up, learn from their past and follow their passion in life.”

AppFlixion’s apps “Bust a Caption” and “Scholar or Scumbag” are available in the App Store.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The group in society that can control what the other groups know and don’t know will rise to power in every other aspect. Therefore, information technology has always been policed and even militarized to some extent, by any group that obtains the ability to control it.

It has been the case since the dawn of civilization that some group has told everybody else what the world looks like, how it works, and what happens in it. (Usually, that group is placed at the center of that particular world view in one way or another.) This continues today, with governments all over the world trying to put their spin of events on the newsflow, putting themselves in a good light to literally get away with murder.

The quest for the net’s liberty is not a fight for some silly right to download free music. It is much larger than that: it breaks a hegemony that has stood for millennia.

This is why the old guard is terrified of the Internet. It’s not that you can copy and spread their propaganda without asking – heck, that’s what they want, and have always wanted. What they fear is that you can fact-check it and publish your findings without asking anybody’s permission. Or worse still, you can start communicating your own view of the world, rather than relating everything you think to their image of the world.

All of this has happened before.

When the printing press was invented, it wasn’t a revolutionary invention as such – it was a revolutionary combination of four other inventions: metal movable type, block pressing, oil-based inks, and cheap cloth-based paper. It revolutionized society by its ability to distribute information cheaply, quickly, and accurately.

At its invention, Gutenberg pictured the Catholic Church using the printing press to distribute its bibles better and faster, being able to get a more consistent interpretation of Christianity out to the smallest village. But that’s not quite what happened.

Rather, a new movement emerged, one that was much better at using the new technology, and which used its superior ability to distribute information in getting the upper hand over the Catholic Church. It was called Protestantism and it differed from Catholicism in one crucial aspect: It printed bibles in people’s own languages.

The power to interpret the bible from Latin had been shattered, ruined, destroyed – and with it, a large amount of the power of the Catholic Church. They tried every trick in the book to put the cat back in the bag and sabotage this technology – up to and including the death penalty, which was instituted in France on January 13, 1535, against the crime of using a printing press at all.

It didn’t work. The cat was indeed out of the bag. People could publish and distribute their own ideas. The hegemony fell, but not without some 200 years of horrible wars. On the surface, they were about minute details of Christianity – about how you should go about worshipping a particular god.

Looking closer at the situation, a bloody war between Catholicism and Protestantism seems odd and puzzling. They are two branches of the same religion that worship the same god, using the same instruction manual. Only the language of the instruction manual differs – one branch has it in local languages, the other branch has its instruction manual in Latin. Why was this worth 200 years of warfare across the entire known world at the time?

The differences are indeed superficial, but the consequences of those differences are not. In one branch, it means that those who know Latin – the clergy and academics – get the ability to tell everybody else what to do, and it was ruled in a strict religious top-down hierarchy. In the other branch, that power of interpreting the instruction manual (the bible) rested with the people themselves.

The religious wars were never about religion as such. They were about who held the power of interpretation, about who controlled the knowledge and culture available to the masses. It was a war of gatekeepers of information.

Does this narrative feel familiar?

Interestingly, one of the methods used by the people on the Catholic side of the fight was to suppress dissent by censoring the printing press. While criminal and harsh penalties didn’t work, commercial incentives to kill freedom of speech worked flawlessly. Mary I of England gave a printing monopoly to London’s printing guild, the London Company of Stationers, on May 4, 1557. This monopoly gave them exclusive rights to printing in all of England, in exchange for allowing the Queen’s censors to prevent any threatening ideas from seeing the light of day.

This monopoly was very beneficial for the new gatekeepers – the printers – and the ruling class alike, with every member of the public losing their freedom of information from it. But how would those members of the public know what ideas were never before their eyes, and understand their impact to society?

This monopoly stands to this day. It was the copyright monopoly that started like this.

Yes, that means that you can view today’s copyright monopoly wars as a logical continuation of the 16th century religious wars. There is nothing new under the sun.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Today we can easily observe that this hasn’t happened. We’re in exactly the same positions today as we were a decade ago.

As I was talking on this debate panel, representatives of the (obsolete) middlemen repeated two themes over and over: “we have rights, we have rights, we have rights” and “we need more time to adjust, we need more time”.

The latter was quite easily defused by asking “So… you demand that the world must wait for you to catch up with it?”, whereas the former will probably be heard for another forty years.

People who think they have the moral right to control what other people discuss, transmit, use, and copy simply are not going to abandon that point of view. They will assert that right as superior to any civil liberty, forever.

Anybody who is able to adapt by reading the dead-obvious writing on the wall has already done so. Those who religiously keep repeating the same mantra today as they did a decade ago will keep doing so.

In other words, we’re pretty much stuck with the copyright monopoly pundits and maximalists we have today for the rest of their natural lives.

Of course, this doesn’t include the masses of people who merely have a casual interest in the copyright monopoly. But it does include those who were schooled in the wonders of monopolies twenty or thirty years ago, and have been working in a bubble protected from outside influences ever since then. Almost all the world’s new creators are already working in the new paradigm; creating despite the copyright monopoly, rather than because of it.

So what I said to the “we have rights, we have rights” panelist was that they should be careful asserting rights given by law, for those laws can and will change as the 250 million Europeans who share culture come into power. 250 million people is not an adolescence problem; it is a power base of 250 million voters. As these people start writing laws, they can and will kill those monopolies at the stroke of a pen.

So, sadly, it seems that a universal truth comes into play here: Viewpoints of society don’t change because people in society change. Viewpoints of society change because people defending the obsolete viewpoint die out.

In other words, prepare for another forty years of corporate bullshit.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.