TorrentFreak

The MPAA and RIAA have submitted their policy recommendations to Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel. In a joint submission the groups explain that despite the broad availability of legal content, online piracy is still rampant. The groups say that services including The Pirate Bay, Rapidgator, Turbobit, DepositFiles and PutLocker are piracy havens, and they urge the U.S. Government to help them quash these sites.

When making laws, there are nominally quality criteria that need to be met for each new law. Are these quality criteria really fulfilled for the copyright monopoly?

In a strange developing story the FunnyJunk image site is threatening to sue popular humor site The Oatmeal. The war between the pair dates back a year when The Oatmeal accused FunnyJunk of profiting from its copyrighted images, but now FunnyJunk is demanding $20,000 to end a defamation lawsuit. The Oatmeal say they won’t pay and have instead gathered huge support from fans, who in less than 24 hours have donated more than $90,000 to charity. Is there an interesting lesson in here for copyright holders?

Defeat in a single battle in the war over net liberty doesn’t concern me too much. I know that the net freedom forces have the strategic and intellectual upper hand in this war over our freedom, but there is something else that concerns me gravely. Why are people seriously thinking that the copyright industries have the final say in shaping society?

With the ongoing success of the world’s Pirate parties, I’ve seen the copyright industry start to push back, claiming that copyright enforcement can’t be tied to civil liberties; that they are two separate issues. That’s not a true statement from the copyright industry. The whole point of the fight for net liberties is that the copyright monopoly cannot be enforced without cutting down civil liberties. Here’s why.

Rupert Murdoch, media tycoon, founder and Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, has been a fanatical supporter of tougher anti-piracy legislation including PIPA and SOPA in the US. But this week it was claimed that Murdoch’s piracy crusade is a rather hypocritical one, with his News Corporation now at the center of a major piracy scandal in which it’s accused of encouraging piracy to cripple competitors.

All too often I hear that the copyright industry doesn’t understand the Internet, doesn’t understand the net generation, doesn’t understand how technology has changed. This is not only wrong; it is dangerously wrong. In order to defeat an adversary; you must first come to understand their state of mind, rather than painting them as evil. The copyright industry understands exactly what the Internet is, and that it needs to be destroyed for that industry to stay even the slightest relevant.