In the late 1700s, the United Kingdom was the empire that established laws on the globe. The United States was still largely a colony – even if not formally so, it was referred to as such in the civilized world, meaning France and the United Kingdom.

The UK had a strictly protectionist view of trade: all raw materials must come to England, and all luxury goods must be made from those materials while in the UK, to be exported to the rest of the world. Long story short, the UK was where the value was to be created.

Laws were written to lock in this effect. Bringing the ability to refine materials somewhere else, the mere knowledge, was illegal. “Illegal copying”, more precisely.

Let’s look at a particularly horrible criminal from that time, Samuel Slater. In the UK, he was even known as “Slater the Traitor”. His crime was to memorize the drawings of a British textile mill, move to New York, and copy the whole of the British textile mill from memory – something very illegal. For this criminal act, building the so-called Slater Mill, he was hailed as “the father of the American Industrial Revolution” by those who would later displace the dominance of the UK – namely the United States. This copy-criminal also has a whole town named after him.

Copying brings jobs and prosperity. Copying has always brought jobs and prosperity. It is those who don’t want to compete who try to legislate a right to rest on their laurels and outlaw copying. It never works.

We can take a look at the early film industry as well. That industry was bogged down with patent monopolies from one of the worst monopolists through industrial history, Thomas Edison and his Western Electric. He essentially killed off any film company that started in or at New York, where the film industry was based at the time. A few of the nascent film companies – Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, MGM – therefore chose to settle as far from this monopolist as possible, and went across the entire country, to a small unexploited suburb outside of Los Angeles, California, which was known as “Hollywoodland” and had a huge sign to that effect. There, they would be safe from Edison’s patent enforcement, merely through taking out enough distance between themselves and him.

Yes, you read that right – the entire modern film industry was founded on piracy. Which, again, lead to jobs and prosperity.

The heart of the problem is this: those who decide what is “illegal” to copy do so from a basis of not wanting to get outcompeted, and never from any kind of moral high ground. It’s just pure industrial protectionism. Neo-mercantilism, if you prefer. Copying always brings jobs and prosperity. Therefore, voluntarily agreeing to the terms of the incumbent industries, terms which are specifically written to keep everybody else unprosperous, is astoundingly bad business and policy.

I’d happily go as far as to say there is a moral imperative to disobey any laws against copying. History will always put you in the right, as was the case with Samuel Slater, for example.

For a more modern example, you have Japan. When I grew up in the 1980s, Japanese industry was known for cheap knock-off goods. They copied everything shamelessly, and never got quality right. But they knew something that the West didn’t: copying brings prosperity. When you copy well enough, you learn at a staggering pace, and you eventually come out as the R&D leader, the innovation leader, building on that incremental innovation you initially copied. Today, Japan builds the best quality stuff available in any category.

The Japanese knew and understand that it takes three generations of copying and an enormous work discipline to become the best in the world in any industry. Recently, to my huge astonishment, they even overtook the Scottish as masters of whisky. (As I am a very avid fan of Scottish whisky, this was a personal source of confusion for me, even though I know things work this way on a rational level.)

At the personal level, pretty much every good software developer I know learned their craft by copying other people’s code. Copying brings prosperity at the national and the individual levels. Those who would seek to outlaw it, or obey such unjust bans against copying, have no moral high ground whatsoever – and frankly, I think people who voluntarily choose to obey such unjust laws deserve to stay unprosperous, and fall with their incumbent master when that time comes.

Nobody ever took the lead by voluntarily walking behind somebody else, after all. The rest of us copy, share, and innovate, and we wait for nobody who tries to legislate their way to competitiveness.

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

In some countries, coding is now the most common profession. All growth sectors are heavily technology-dependent, which always means that the net is at underpinning all of it. All celebrated entrepreneurs have built super-scaling businesses enabled by the net. We also shop for food online, we date online, we build things together online.

It stands clear that the net is by far the most critical piece of infrastructure existing today. Not only does it build all future jobs, growth, economy, and entrepreneurship; we also exercise all our civil liberties, civic duties, and spend a lot of our social activities on this infrastructure. It’s more important than any other piece of infrastructure in society. We can do without the phone network, without cable TV, even without paved roads when we have the net.

So why are we letting this infrastructure get regulated by a cartoon industry?

This is not just figurative: we quite literally are. The Walt Disney Corporation has been instrumental in lobbying for limiting the utility of the net, taking leadership within the copyright industry at large. It’s no random chance that the latest copyright monopoly extension in the United States was called “The Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act”.

The notion that the copyright industry’s distribution monopoly is somehow more important to society than the super-infrastructure we call the Internet is not just laughable; it’s absurd and bizarre. And yet, the latter is being limited to appease and safeguard the former, instead of the other way around.

Of course, it’s easy to speak of the copyright industry as a cartoon industry in the figurative sense, too. It’s hard to find an industry that’s exaggerating its own importance more while failing at its core business more at the same time.

Policymakers have completely failed in realizing what the growth engine in society is today, and are letting a completely irrelevant industry negate it from the sidelines. This is not just baffling but limits growth, jobs, and future entrepreneurship.

The industries inhibited by the copyright monopoly are contributing more to the economy by almost a factor of twelve-to-one compared to the copyright industry. In other words, for every job lost in the copyright industry, twelve more are created. (Even formal studies agree that more than one job in technology is created for every job lost in the copyright industry.)

For a tangible example of this, observe how Linux- and Unix-based computers now have a market share of over 50% both on the client and server sides. In other words, over half of our service offerings and the consumption of them – across all categories – are now dependent on technology which was written in defiance of the copyright monopoly, and which states outright that the copyright monopoly is a problem at best and absurd at worst.

It’s more than time we saw the cartoon industry for the cartoon industry they are, and kick them out of making policy for critical infrastructure.

Quite regardless of whether they like being kicked out or not, and especially regardless of what they think of the policies we need for the Internet instead of the ones they want.

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.

Then, as now, they were used to telling people what was true and what wasn’t, telling whatever story that fit whatever it was they wanted to do.

“Cannabis is dangerous. Tobacco is not harmful at all. Oh, and there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

When police troops in Ferguson launched tear gas grenades at a television team from Al-Jazeera, that is a symptom of the exact same thing as web censorship: governments are losing control of the story. Governments can no longer invent whatever truth that fits what they want to happen. Police firing at press is actually something very rare – even in the worst of war zones, it’s a rare occurrence that press teams are deliberately targeted, and yet, this was precisely what happened in Ferguson, USA.

The reason is the exact same as for web censorship and mass surveillance:

The governments and the people working for them are attacking anybody who exposes what they do, using whatever power they have to do so.

Tear gas grenades against a TV crew may have been both overviolent and counterproductive, but it’s still the same thing. It’s exactly what happened when the printing press arrived, and the penalties for using a printing press – thereby circumventing the truthtellers of that time – gradually increased to the death penalty (France, 1535).

Not even the death penalty worked to deter people from using the printing press to tell their version of events to the world, which more often than not contradicted the official version. The cat was out of the bag. As it is now. Governments and police still don’t understand that everybody is a broadcaster – attacking a TV crew was futile in the first place.

During the initial, hopeful months of the Arab Spring, a lot of photos circulated of young people gathering for protests. What was interesting about the photos were that they were taken with mobile phones, but also that they showed a lot of other people at the protest taking photos of the same crowd at the same time with their own mobile phone. Thus, the photos of the ongoing revolution contained instructions in themselves for how to perpetuate the revolution – take pictures of crowds defying the edicts and dictums.

This is why it’s so puzzling that the police even bother to give special treatment to people from television stations and newspapers. Strictly speaking, they’re not necessary to get the story out anymore, even if they still have some follower advantage for the most part.

“Police are being transformed from protecting the public into protecting government from the public”, as @directorblue just tweeted. That could be said about pretty much anything concerning the net, too — from oppressive applications of copyright monopoly law to strangling net innovations or giving telcos monopolies that prevent the net’s utility.

The attacks on the public by police troops in Ferguson, attacks from the copyright industry against those who want a free net, and web censorship by governments are all different sides of the same story. And all of this has happened before. Last time this happened, it took 200 years of civil war to settle the dust and agree that the printing press may have been a nice invention after all.

Can we please not repeat that mistake?

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

“How will the artists get paid?”.

The copyright industry has been absolutely phenomenal in misleading the public in this very simple matter, suggesting that artists’ income somehow depend on a distribution monopoly of publishers. If the facts were out, this debate would have been over 20 years ago and the distribution monopoly already abolished quite unceremoniously.

There are three facts that need to be established and hammered in whenever somebody asks this question.

First: Less than one percent of artists’ income comes from the copyright monopoly. Read that sentence again. The overwhelming majority of artists get their income today from student loans, day jobs, unemployment benefits, and so on and so forth. One of the most recent studies (“Copyright as Incentive”, in Swedish as “Upphovsrätten som incitament”, 2006) quotes a number of 0.9 per cent as the average income share of artists that can be directly attributed to the existence of the copyright monopoly. The report calls the direct share of artists’ income “negligible”, “insignificant”. However, close to one hundred per cent of publishers’ income – the income of unnecessary, parasitic middlemen – is directly attributable to the copyright monopoly today. Guess who’s adamant about defending it? Hint: not artists.

Second: 99.99% of artists never see a cent in copyright monopoly royalties. Apart from the copyright industry’s creative accounting and bookkeeping – arguably the only reason they ever had to call themselves the “creative industry” – which usually robs artists blind, only one in ten thousand artists ever see a cent in copyright-monopoly-related royalties. Yes, this is a real number: 99% of artists are never signed with a label, and of those who are, 99% of those never see royalties. It comes across as patently absurd to defend a monopolistic, parasitic system where only one in ten thousand artists make any money with the argument “how will the artists make money any other way?”.

Third: Artists’ income has more than doubled because of culture-sharing. Since the advent of hobby-scale unlicensed manufacturing – which is what culture-sharing is legally, since it breaks a manufacturing monopoly on copies – the average income for musicians has risen 114%, according to a Norwegian study. Numbers from Sweden and the UK show the same thing. This shift in income has a direct correlation to hobby-based unlicensed manufacturing, as the sales of copies is down the drain – which is the best news imaginable for artists, since households are spending as much money on culture before (or more, according to some studies), but are buying in sales channels where artists get a much larger piece of the pie. Hobby-based unlicensed manufacturing has meant the greatest wealth transfer from parasitic middlemen to artists in the history of recorded music.

As a final note, it should be told that even if artists went bankrupt because of sustained civil liberties, that would still be the way to go. Any artist that goes from plinking their guitar in the kitchen to wanting to sell an offering is no longer an artist, but an entrepreneur; the same rules apply to them as to every other entrepreneur on the planet. Specifically, they do not get to dismantle civil liberties because such liberties are bad for business. But as we see, we don’t even need to take that into consideration, for the entire initial premise is false.

Kill copyright, already. Get rid of it. It hurts innovation, creativity, our next-generation industries, and our hard-won civil liberties. It’s not even economically defensible.

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

I realized immediately that this point torpedoes the most common fallacy against culture-sharing completely: that of the artist having some sort of “right to money” when you enjoy work that they once created. There are many ways to show that as a complete fallacy, some more convoluted than others (planned economy, libraries, market value, street musicians…) but I realized this is one of the most straightforward yet.

Nobody, especially not technophobic dinosaurs, object to second-hand book and record shops. And yet, when somebody buys there, the author or musician doesn’t get a cent – and we think that’s completely in order, just as completely without question.

When this sinks in, you realize that it was never about the money at all in the first place. It was merely about what the self-appointed cultural elite saw as their territory and their habits, where they can allow others to tread or deny them the privilege. Second-hand shops have always been a central part of a cultural rich life. The Internet is something completely new (well, perhaps not anymore) that denies the old elite the privilege of having their established ways remain the norm.

And yet, there it is in black and white. There is no connection at all between “you enjoying a fine work” and “the artist getting paid”. None whatsoever. When you’re buying something at a second-hand store and enjoying it, the original writer doesn’t get a cent, and everybody thinks that’s okay. (Even if a few people in the copyright industry are trying to outlaw second-hand sales, they’re not being very successful at it.)

So try this conversation the next time a self-appointed Guardian Of The Ways criticizes the good art of sharing culture and knowledge:

- You shouldn’t enjoy somebody’s work without paying them for it.

- That’s nonsense. Second-hand bookstores and record stores are the backbone of a rich culture, and people are enjoying fine works there without the artist getting a cent.

- But, but, the artist got money when somebody originally bought it!

- Yes, maybe so, but that’s not what you said. You said that somebody must pay the artist to have a right to enjoy their work. That’s clearly not true.

At that point, the argument is derailed, and they will probably talk about how the Interwebs should be outlawed instead. Try it, it’s fun!

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

On one hand, you have the copyright industry, now content thinking it won the war against the net generation – or net generations by now (plural). File-sharing has stopped growing, the copyright industry observes, and controlled streaming is growing exponentially. New technology has produced a better offering that outcompeted the inferior pirate alternatives, and in the end, people wanted to do the legal thing, the copyright industry argues.

But this is very far from the truth. The only true part of it is that the number of people sharing culture and knowledge is no longer growing exponentially, but that’s because the habit is saturated. One-third of young people in the US and Europe today share culture – in violation of the copyright monopoly – daily or almost-daily. A phenomenon can’t keep growing exponentially forever in a finite population: eventually, everybody’s doing it, and that’s the point we have arrived at now.

Apart from that, it is true that the copyright industry has produced better offerings: Pandora, Netflix, and HBO streaming. But so have the people who manufacture their copies without a license. The Pirate Bay is ten years old; almost as old as Microsoft’s Windows XP, to put it in context. (Anybody remember Microsoft?) Yet, despite HBO’s successful and profitable subscription model, record numbers of us get our latest fix of Game of Thrones delivered automatically directly to our desktop the instant it is available, courtesy of RSS torrenting and EZTV, or your own favorite supplier.

And if we don’t like torrenting, but actually like streaming? Turns out that the pirate equivalents of the commercial offerings far surpass the simplicity, accessibility, and ease of use of the copyright industry’s technology – and that’s not even going into selection and absence of laughingly stupid “not available in your country” messages. From Popcorn Time to Zona, the happy amateur sharers are miles and leagues ahead of the copyright industry. The technology that the copyright industry claims “already has won the war” for that obsolete industry? Well, it turns out that the net generation could use the same technology to build a lot better services still. Teens today make absolutely no distinction whether services are “legal” or not; they just grab stuff from where it’s easiest.

In this environment, people on the other side – the people manufacturing unlicensed copies of knowledge and culture, and sharing those copies in turn – have also taken a victory for granted. We’re getting our Game of Thrones, we’re getting our movies and porn as we always have, what’s the big deal? The Pirate Bay team was sentenced in a mock trial five years ago to largely no effect whatsoever (except for those poor individuals), the site itself is still up, and new great services for manufacturing our own copies of knowledge and culture are appearing by the month. Why bother fighting? This is long over, right?

Not so fast. SOPA and ACTA was just two years ago, in 2012. They were struck back, but their obfuscated spawn are already appearing. We’ve seen and heard the acronyms TPP, TTIP, CISP, CETA, and others. The copyright industry keeps working, it just does so out of the sunlight.

In the end, this is about the power of narratives, the greatest power anybody has ever had. And the copyright industry isn’t giving it up without a fight.

The file-sharing wars are far from over. There may be a bit of silence on the fronts at the moment. Enjoy it, and prepare for what’s coming.

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

When you are challenging a copyright industry lobbyist over the concept of public libraries, and ask them if they are opposed to people having access to such culture and knowledge without paying, they are smart enough to not deride public libraries – as this would weaken their political position considerably. However, online sharing of culture and knowledge is the Analog Equivalent Right to the public libraries we’ve had for 150 years. Lobbyists will sometimes try to change the subject around this, or more commonly, lie using one of three myths. Here are those myths and lies, and why they are untrue:

Lobbyist lie: The library buys all its books. Therefore, it’s not comparable with online sharing of culture.

Fact: Laws in most countries say that for every, every, book published, the publisher must send a number of copies of that book to certain large libraries at their own cost, to be available without charge for reading by the public.

When the copyright industry complains that they “can’t possibly accept” laws that mandate them to “give away their product for free”, as they tend to put it, it’s only prudent to point out rather sternly that those laws already exist, and have done so for more than a century. The key difference with online sharing is that the analog-equivalent mechanism wouldn’t incur any cost at all to the publishers, something that would normally be seen as a good thing, both from a political and publishing perspective.

Obviously, it’s true that many if not most libraries buy additional books and additional copies of books. However, the main point here is that there are already laws on the books that say that every single book published must be supplied to a library, in order to be available to the public free of charge.

In addition, this ignores the point that the copyright industry doesn’t get to “accept” or “not accept” laws. They get to run a business in a particular legal environment or choose to not do so, and that’s where their prerogative starts and ends. On a functioning free and fair market, entrepreneurs do not and should not have any say whatsoever in what the legal environment looks like. (We still have some distance to go with regards to this point in replacing clueless and dangerous yes-men politicians.)

Lobbyist lie: The rightsholder gets paid when a book is borrowed from a library.

Fact: This is a myth on two fronts – what we would call a “double-fault” in popular sports such as Counter-Strike.

It is true that, under certain conditions and in several countries, some spare change is sent to somebody when a book is borrowed from a library. However, that somebody who receives money is not the rightsholder, nor is it some kind of compensation for a lost sale. In most European countries, it is a governmental culture grant intended to boost the amount of culture available in the local language. Therefore, and this context is crucially important, that spare change has absolutely nothing to do with the exclusive rights of the copyright monopoly. It is a unilateral cultural governmental grant that happens to be based on library statistics, as they are a convenient measure.

If a book in Swedish is borrowed from a Swedish library, then the person who made it available in Swedish gets a very small amount, provided they hit a minimum threshold and hasn’t hit a maximum threshold. Sometimes, this happens to be an author that wrote originally in Swedish, but much more often, it is somebody who translated a book into the Swedish language. Other countries have similar arrangements.

To wit: When somebody borrows Harry Potter in Swedish translation from a Swedish library, J.K. Rowling – the rightsholder – doesn’t get a single penny from that. The myth is just not true on any account.

Lobbyist lie: A library can only lend its book to one person at a time, and therefore, this limit must be artificially imposed in the digital age.

Fact: This was a physical limitation, not a conceptual one. If a library could lend its books to multiple people, it would have done so in a heartbeat long ago. To argue that this physical undesirable limitation should form a basis for limiting legislation in a new environment where the limitation doesn’t exist is worse than a logical fallacy; it makes no sense on any level.

The purpose of the public library is not and was never to “lend books”, as is asserted in this myth. It was, and is, to “make knowledge and culture available to as many people as possible at no cost to them”. What’s possible has expanded greatly with online sharing, and it is only proper that we take advantage of this fantastic potential.

The online sharing of culture and knowledge is the greatest public library ever invented, and the ability for all humankind to take part of all culture and knowledge 24/7 is arguably one of the largest steps of civilization of this century. All the technology has already been invented, all the tools have already been deployed, the ability to use it has already spread to all of humanity: nobody needs to spend a dime to make this happen. All we have to do is to lift the stupid ban on actually using it.

What we need to do is to replace the yes-men politicians who let themselves be puppeteered by an obsolete but lucrative gatekeeper industry in order to make this great leap of civilization. Often, the mere trend to replace such politicians is enough for bad policy to change on a dime.

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

I’ve done all of that this morning and none of it has worked. In fact, I might be even more fired up than before. This website blocking nonsense that is beginning to pollute the Internet has gone way too far and is becoming my sworn enemy.

Here at TF we’ve long been opponents of website blocking. It’s a blunt instrument that is prone to causing collateral damage and known for failing to achieve its stated aims. We recently discovered that thanks to Sky’s Broadband Shield filtering system, TorrentFreak is now blocked on one of the UK’s largest ISPs by users who think they are protecting their kids.

Our crimes are the topics we cover. As readers know we write about file-sharing, copyright and closely linked issues including privacy and web censorship. We write about the positives and the negatives of those topics and we solicit comments from not only the swarthiest of pirates, but also the most hated anti-piracy people on the planet.

If the MPAA, RIAA, FACT, BPI, RightsAlliance, BREIN and every DMCA takedown company on earth want to have their say they can do that, alongside the folks at The Pirate Bay. We won’t deny anyone their voice, whether it’s someone being raided by the police or the people who instigated the raid. Getting the news out is paramount.

We are not scared to let anyone have their say and we embrace free speech. But apparently the people at Sky and their technology masters at Symantec believe that we should be denied our right to communicate on the basis that we REPORT NEWS about file-sharing issues.

That’s just utter nonsense.

Symantec write about viruses and malware ALL THE TIME, so are they placed in the malware and virus category? Of course not. Thanks to their very own self-categorization process they wear the “Technology and Telecommunication” label. Is their website blocked by any of their own filters? I won’t even bother answering that.

Examining other sites helpfully categorized by Symantec and blindly accepted by Sky reveals no more clarity either. UK ISP Virgin Media runs its own Usenet access, customers can find it at news.virginmedia.com. From there it’s possible to download every possible copyrighted movie and TV show around today, yet that service is listed by Symantec as a “Technology and Telecommunication / Portal” site. Download.com, possibly the world’s largest distributer of file-sharing software, is also green-lighted through.

On the other hand, TorrentFreak – which neither offers or links to copyrighted files and hosts no file-sharing software whatsoever – is blocked for any Sky household filtered for under 18s? Really? Our news site is suitable for all ages yet when Sky’s teenager filter is turned on we are put on the same level as porn, suicide, self harm, violence and gore.

Are you kidding me?

Thanks to Ernesto’s annual ‘most-pirated‘ charts we have been cited countless dozens of times in the past few weeks by fellow news resources all over the Internet. Yet Sky users who are “protecting their children” find that when they try to follow the link to the source of those stories they are effectively informed that TorrentFreak is unsuitable for anyone under 18. What does that do for our reputation?

As an earlier statement from Sky points out, the parental filters can be modified to let certain sites through, TorrentFreak.com included. However, when someone in a family asks the account holder for a site to be unblocked (they are the only person who can do that), why would they do so when Sky and Symantec make it very clear on their block screen that we are a file-sharing site? Who will most people believe, a teenager or a “respectable” corporation that cares so much about kids? Furthermore, what are the chances that the account holder even remembers how to turn filtering off once the initial ‘default on’ settings are accepted?

There can be little doubt that little by little, piece by piece, big corporations and governments are taking chunks out of the free Internet. Today they pretend that the control is in the hands of the people, but along the way they are prepared to mislead and misdirect, even when their errors are pointed out to them.

I’m calling on Sky, Symantec, McAfee and other ISPs about to employ filtering to categorize this site correctly as a news site or blog and to please start listening to people’s legitimate complaints about other innocent sites. It serves nobody’s interests to wrongfully block legitimate information.

And to Sky, please don’t try pretending that you’re actually trying to stop file-sharing with your parental controls, because if you really meant business you would have blocked the actual protocols, not merely some websites. But that would cost you money in customer churn, and we obviously need to avoid that at all costs.

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

The past 15 years is littered with casualties. Dozens of file-sharing services have been shut down, with Napster, Kazaa, Grokster, LimeWire, Megaupload and isoHunt merely heading up an almost endless list of sharing tools subjected to destruction. Sadly they are just the tip of the iceberg, with much of the action this year going on under the surface.

During 2013 Hollywood and the music industry deliberately calmed down in the United States, putting citizens there at ease after the SOPA debacle. But while the United States sleeps they are doing their work overseas in countries such as the UK. Grabbing a domain is out of the question on home soil, but doing it through a foreign proxy is easy. It’s a depressing land grab with worldwide implications that no one is doing anything about.

Other miserable developments have their roots in the past. Last decade the RIAA decided it would be a good idea to sue its own customers and continued for years until finally realizing they were getting nowhere. The same cynical practice is today being carried out by dozens of bottom-feeding troll companies such as Prenda Law, Malibu Media and GoldenEye International, each looking to profit from piracy and doing so by the most damaging and cruel means possible.

So when an article gets published that states that Iron Maiden, a huge band with a massive following, has decided to look at piracy and do something positive with it, people get properly excited. And rightly so.

Learning that the band monitored BitTorrent networks and collected pirate location data not to sue their fans, but to find out where they are in order to play for them, was a wonderful juxtaposition to the snarly image Metallica cultured when crushing Napster at the turn of the century.

Here was a band being smart, using piracy data to intelligently develop their product and image, casting their lawyers aside and putting their energies into something positive. At the same time, to the delight of the crowds and quite clearly the majority of the tech press, pleasing and embracing fans in a way that the file-sharing scene has advised for more than a decade.

But sadly the story isn’t true and CiteWorld, the publishers of the original article, have printed a full apology and heavily edited their report to reflect the much less exciting reality.

How disappointing is that? That ray of light in a sea of bad news was not only welcome, but badly needed. Now it’s gone and we’re left with that sinking feeling because let’s face it, we’ve had a pretty depressing year.

Site closures, site blockades, six strikes, the specter of ISP filtering, not to mention intensive lobbying that threatens to further restrict freedom on the Internet in the name of protecting copyright.

The Iron Maiden story is just what we needed, a story that opened up new ways of thinking and gave us hope that things can be handled in a different way. It reinvigorated the belief that bands, artists and file-sharers really can come together in a way that not only makes sense but is productive for everyone concerned.

At this point we really want to believe, we want to have hope that someone, somewhere, will come along and take away the negativity. That’s why the Iron Maiden article was repeated so many times and that’s why people wanted to spread the news. It gave us a chance to share being positive and was cool – very cool indeed.

CiteWorld may have got it wrong but their story has the potential to spark good things, so here’s to a 2014 fueled by people who see potential and want to drive the good news train. There’s a big audience out there ready to ride it – and hand over their money to do so.

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