What do they offer?

Master flash files and bitmaps of every piece of art used in this season of Odd Job Jack. Every character, prop, and background from every episode plus tutorials and other support material. All free to hack, use, remix under a share-friendly license.

And why?

We love animation and we just know you do too. We’re proud of Odd Job Jack and we’ve put lots of work into our show. Our art deserves to live beyond broadcast and who better to give a free gift to than the entire planet?

The torrents are tracked by legaltorrents.com, and can be found a the freejack site. This is a great initiative, let’s hope more will follow.

Source: Odd Job Jack For Free

If the woman is convicted for copyright theft, she could face up to five years in prison, or a fine between 6000 and 90.000 USD.

However, the staff of the cinema in question may have responded a little too adequate (early), it might be hard to get someone in jail for recording an anti-piracy commercial.

Source: Woman Caught Recording Anti-Piracy Commercial

Although Grokster caved and accepted the judgment, paying a substantial amount to MGM, Streamcast hasn’t given up. The case is now being heard in US District Court in L.A. (Source: Hollywood Reporter.com)

The new “inducement test” is being hotly debated by entertainment and technology lawyers in and out of court. Even if StreamCast loses, attorney Charles Baker will seek to block damages by asserting the affirmative defense of copyright misuse. “The motion picture companies, record labels and publishers have for years colluded to limit the distribution of digital content”, pointing out the unfavorable licensing contracts that indie labels and others not associated with the majors are forced to accept.

Baker says, “The fight is far from over”, as the Supreme Court, in its ruling, invited anyone to take the case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Has anything changed in the real world of p2p? Yes, quite a lot.

The Hollywood Reporter, ESQ., invited RIAA general counsel Steven Marks, Universal Music Group eLabs president Larry Kenswil, and EFF’s Fred Von Lohmann to take part in a “spirited” roundtable discussion on the court ruling, filesharing, and digital distribution.

Kenswil believes that rather than shaking up the music industry, the Supreme Court’s ruling brought stability to the industry, setting rules about what people can do with copyrighted material. Von Lohmann disagrees. Except for the “inducement test”, the court failed to clarify the basic rules, pointing out that it’s still unclear whether a technology that has substantial non-infringing uses can be held responsible if people misuse the technology.

Both Marks and Kenswil believe that the inducement test has “nudged” technology companies to approach the labels and studios, looking for ways to work together, in effect taking the position that any technology not approved and sanctioned by the cartels is illegal. This, they claim, doesn’t stifle technological innovation, but encourages it (as long as the cartels can control it). Von Lohmann rightly puts them in their place and tells them they’re putting “the cart before the horse” when it comes to encouraging innovation.

The cartels claim the Betamax precedent doesn’t exist, as concerns the Supremes’ decision , or that if it does exist, it can be ignored because they want to work with “legitimate services”, which has already “enhanced” the market, citing the growth (haha!) of the legitimate digital market year to year.

Did we miss something here? As all parties acknowledge, free p2p has increased monthly since the original Napster case. They also acknowledge that the cartels will always have to compete with free p2p, although Universal’s Kenswil claims Napster had nothing to do with the “billions of dollars now being spent on digital music” and the technology behind it. He calls that idea “preposterous”. I guess he should know because it was the RIAA which shut Napster down, coerced it into joining the “legitimate” marketplace, which then turned Napster the useless piece of p2p crap it is today. He wouldn’t want to admit that billions were wasted in that arena.

On the other hand, while the rate of shared music files has slowed down – but still moving in an upward direction – in comparison to just a few years ago, film and TV filesharing has risen dramatically, constituting the bulk of files being shared around the world.

On the lawsuits in general, this roundtable had some obvious observations and a few surprises for the reader:

Marks: “I don’t think we’ve ever targeted technology or technology services.”

What’s that?

Didn’t the cartels sue Grokster, Streamcast, and Kazaa? Aren’t they trying to make a case against XM’s Inno? Didn’t they try to influence (read blackmail) the Swedish and U.S. governments into closing down Pirate Bay, ultimately failing – an endeavor which in turn gave birth to more filesharers and the creation of numerous political “Pirate Parties” in several countries, including Sweden and the U.S.?

Marks: “We’ve targeted companies who were, in our view, facilitating copyright infringement.”

Ah, so that’s how they blackmailed Bram Cohn. Okay, I get it now. As long as they can control the technology, everything’s kosher. If they can’t control it, in their view it’s illegal. Gotcha. First, threaten to sue the pants off the inventor of the most popular filesharing software. When he capitulates to your demands, pay him off with a house, a car, lifetime education for his kids, health insurance for the family, a seven-figure salary, and an exclusive contract (compulsory gag order/non-disclosure codicil included) .

Don’t forget to go after the users of the software, either.

Marks: “We very reluctantly began filing cases against individual users. But we think that both of those efforts have borne through. [The problem of piracy is now one] that is exemplified more by a hard-core group of users than it is by a continuing growth of users.”

LOL! That’s very funny because every statistical survey of file sharing has continually shown that more and more people are sharing files every day.

As Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne – the main analyst of p2p facts and figures – tells in a separate Hollywood Reporter interview, at any one time there are 10 million people sharing files on free p2p networks.

That’s roughly ten times as many as when Napster was in its heyday. And the numbers are going up, not down.

The lesson, according to the view of the cartels and their interpretation of the Grokster ruling is, if you have – or want to create – a filesharing program, go to the cartels first and ask for permission to innovate. Then you’ll get a sweet deal like Bram did. If you don’t you’ll be viewed as a thief and sued.

Marks: “Eradicating every last act of piracy is something we understand is futile, and has never been an objective of the industry.”

Really? So what’s with the 19,000 + lawsuits then? The ones you have no proof of copyright infringement? The ones, which will cost the industry billions of dollars and millions of customers? The ones you’ll ultimately lose because public awareness of and disgust for these frivolous cases and their waste of tax payer money will do more to turn people away from “legal” product than any p2p program ever could? What about these lawsuits? Are they just symbolic token lawsuits to grab headlines before they’re lost or thrown out of court? Hmmm?

I think it’s so cute they still consider free filesharing as “piracy” when nothing has been stolen, no money or services have been exchanged , ergo, no profit , no theft – and there’s no proof that a shared file equals a lost sale.

On the other hand, entertainment cartel practice of colluding to fix prices, bribe radio stations, arrest customers and plant spyware into computers everywhere is considered business as usual.

The cartels have never been able to prove that a file shared is equal to a lost sale or rental. In fact, several court cases have either been dropped by the cartels or thrown out exactly because they can’t prove it. And at the same time, the music and film industries are reporting record profits.

Big Champagne, the most-noteworthy and respected compiler of free p2p statistics, the place where even the MPAA and RIAA go to for reliable information, has continually shown that free p2p has increased, despite the thousands of unlawful lawsuits filed against innocent people. But no-one can show that money is lost due to free p2p.

The entertainment industry is stuck in, and unwilling to leave, the past. The future is here. The future is now. The future is free p2p.

Free p2p doesn’t have to be seen as something negative or evil. It can also be a useful tool for the cartels.

For decades the Nielsen TV ratings system has decided the rates advertisers must pay.

The Nielsen ratings system is based only on overnight results in certain markets, whereas free p2p is immediate and virtually open-ended time-wise, and isn’t tied to age or gender demographics. Instead of calculating viewers per capita or by region, they can see exactly how many times a file was downloaded and use this info to help in setting advertising rates. There’s no reason why the Nielsen system can’t work with the Big Champagne system. There will always be people who either first watch a program on TV with ads and then download it, or vice verse. The two sets of statistics, taking this knowledge into account, can be used to create a better and more accurate picture.

True, when files are shared ads are edited out. But looking at the total worldwide viewership, instead of just measly overnight ratings, including the statistics from p2p networks will give a much better idea of how many people are interested in a program, which can be used to calculate ad rates.

Too many times a good program is cancelled because of either low ratings (Star Trek: Enterprise) or because of pressure from political or religious groups (The Book of Daniel). Both of these shows were extremely popular on p2p networks, but were canceled due to outdated ratings systems and the extreme-right activist groups. Ad revenue was lost, but not because of free p2p.

Even though more people might be downloading a program, that doesn’t mean they won’t watch it on TV as well, just as downloading a film doesn’t mean a DVD or cinema ticket won’t be purchased. But a new way of calculating ad revenue can be created using all the tools available.

I don’t know how this can be done, but I believe it can be done to satisfy networks and advertisers, without losing viewers. Keeping these shows on the air will increase the numbers of broadcast viewers, whether they have access to a computer or not. And p2p will be the cause of this increase.

Has anything changed in p2p since MGM v. Grokster? Yes, most definitely.

There are more and more files and file sharers and file sharing networks than ever before. This, despite , or as a result of , the backward-thinking cartels and their ridiculous claims of losing money, as well as the thousands of lawsuits being illegally and immorally brought against innocent people.

And as mentioned cinema tickets, and CD and DVD sales and rentals have increased.

Will the cartels change with the times? Probably not. As long as they can continue influencing political parties and the lamescream media; as long as they can control the distribution of “product” and the technology behind the distribution; and as long as there are lawyers willing to make a buck off the backs of innocent people, the entertainment industry will lag behind real innovation.

But free p2p is here to stay.

p2pnet

Source: The Past and Future of Filesharing

In the documentary “done the impossible” the fans tell their part of this success story. They explain why and how they managed to get their Firefly heroes on the white screen in the popular movie Serenity.

The makers of the documentary offer a free, Creative Commons licensed .torrent download of their film. They state:

In our opinion, the modern state of copyright is counter productive to creativity and free culture. It puts unnatural restraints on “fair use”, hinders the creative process and has fundamentally destroyed an entire industry before it was even born.

Personally I’m impressed with the quality of this documentary, I highly recommend this one if you are interested in the story behind Firefly and Serenity.

You can view the trailer over here or download (.torrent) Done the impossible

Source: Done The Impossible .Torrent

The Pig and the Box is about a pig who finds a magic box that can replicate anything you put into it. The pig becomes so protective of it, and so suspicious of anyone that wants to use it, that he makes people take their copied items home in special buckets that act as… well, they’re basically DRM. It’s like a fable, except the moral of the story is very modern in tone.

link!

related to this:

Files are not for sharing
The Corruptibles
Don’t copy that floppy

Source: The Pig and the Box

Although The DVD sniffin Dogs “Lucky and Flo” help a little bit, the pirates are on the loose. The MPAA claimes “major victories” in their war against piracy but if you take a closer look at what’s really happening… nothing

“They talk a good game, but piracy is still a very significant problem,” Jack Kyser, chief economist at the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., said to LA Daily news. “It’s still basically out of control. Regardless of what they say … it’s still rampant.”

LA daily news cites James Boyle, a law professor at Duke University. He maintains that for the most part, so called “piracy” is harmless.

“When they go after people who are engaged in mass-market copying of DVDs, where they’re producing trademark goods and distributing them as if they’re the legitimate ones, there’s absolutely no doubt it’s illegal and it should be stopped and I totally support that, but, Making a mixed CD of music you legitimately own and giving it to your friend … when those kinds of things are lumped in and put under the label of piracy, then I think we do ourselves an injustice.”

Arrrrr?

Source: Pirates On The Loose

Firefighters attacked the fire from a ship, but it is unknown if they succeeded and what the damage is.

Sealand and it’s hosting company havenco have no regulations concerning copyright, patents, libel, restrictions on political speech, non-disclosure agreements, cryptography, restrictions on maintaining customer records, tax or mandatory licensing, DMCA, music sharing services, or other issues; child pornography is the only content explicitly prohibited.

BBC

Source: Sealand on Fire

There are rumours that the Swedish government was indirectly acting on behalf of the U.S. MPAA in shutting down the site. Do you feel that your government is beholden to U.S. interests?

Oh, the MPAA said so themselves in a press release, it’s more than a rumor. Check their press release “Swedish authorities sink Pirate Bay”.

And yes, this particular fact has caused something of an uproar in Sweden. It’s widely believed that Swedish authorities were more or less ordered by a foreign power to act forcefully against an entity that was in, at worst, a legal gray area according to Swedish law.

The raid must have boosted your recognition. How many members do you currently have, and how successful has your fundraising effort been so far?

Our member count is at 6540, no, 6541, no wait, 6543… well, you get the picture. Our members register themselves on our website after paying the membership fee electronically, which helps reduce our admin load considerably.

Fundraising brought in 108,000 SEK (approx. 14,700 USD or 11,600 EUR), enough to buy 3 million ballots, which is some kind of at-least-we’re-not-starving minimum. We’re not full, but we’re not starving, either. Following the raid on the Pirate Bay, we have received another 50K in donations. My sincere thanks to everybody who wants to help out; we are now looking into getting more ballots to make sure we don’t run out on election day. (10 million ballots was our initial full-score aim.)

Do you think you will be able to cover future expenses such as radio and television ads?

Following the raid on the Pirate Bay, and our tripling of the member roster, we don’t need advertising. :-) We’ve been mentioned almost every news hour across all channels on national television in the last week.

Also, the established parties have now started to turn, following our success. Parties representing almost half of the elected parliament are now describing today’s copyright situation as not working. They still don’t understand why, though, they are just echoing what we say without understanding what the words mean. We’ll get around to teaching them – them and the voters alike.

This might be hard for people not following the Swedish media to grasp, but we have made a big splash. Today, our Minister of Justice was quoted as saying that he’s open to changes to copyright laws that would make file-sharing legal, with the headline “Bodström (his name) flip-flops about file sharing.” Immediately underneath were the Pirate Party’s comments to his suggestions. Let’s take that again: when a minister makes a statement about file sharing, media calls us for comments, and publishes them next to that statement. That’s how big we have become since the raid on the Pirate Bay.

The Minister of Justice later denied having made that statement to the press that reported it.

We will never be able to pay for television ads, the way I see it. Unless a very wealthy donor comes on stage. (If any such person is reading this, we have planned how to spend up to $375,000 in a cost-efficient way up until the elections, on the chance that donations appear. That spending does still not include any TV ads.)

Are you aware of similar initiatives in other countries?

Some are trying, but none have achieved the necessary momentum and critical mass that we have. We expect that momentum to happen once we get into Swedish Parliament and show that it can be done.

(The US Pirate Party lauched two weeks ago)

The name “Pirate Party” seems to identify the party with what is currently defined as a crime: piracy of software, movies, music, and so on. Will a name like “Pirate Party” not antagonize voters, given that the label is so negatively used? How about potential allies abroad who argue for a more balanced copyright regime, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Creative Commons?

Oh, it is a crime. That’s the heart of the problem! The very problem is that something that 20% of the voters are doing is illegal by punishment of jail time. That’s what we want to change. Where the established parties are saying that the voters are broken, we are saying it’s the law that is broken.

Besides, it’s a way of reclaiming a word. The media conglomerates have been pointing at us and calling us pirates, trying to make us somehow feel shame. It doesn’t work. We wear clothes saying “PIRATE” in bright colors out on the streets. Yes, we are pirates, and we’re proud of it, too.

Also, the term is not that negative at all in Sweden, much thanks to the awesome footwork of the Pirate Bureau (Piratbyrån), who have been working since 2003 to educate the public.

If you are elected, and have the opportunity to become part of the next government of Sweden, do you intend to focus only on the issues in your platform (IP law and privacy)?

Our current plan is to support the government from the parliament, but not be part of it. If we’re part of it, that means we get a vested interest to not overthrow it, which puts us in a weaker position if they start going against our interests.

Overall, our strategy is to achieve the balance of power, where both the left and right blocks need our votes to achieve a majority, and then support the issues of whichever government that agrees to drive our issues the strongest. Basically, we sell our votes on other issues to the highest bidder in exchange for them driving ours.

Have you already made any contacts in Swedish politics?

Contacts… I’m not sure what you mean. Several of us have been shaking hands with some of the established politicians, particularly in the youth leagues, if that’s what you mean.

I was thinking along the lines of exploring possible modes of cooperation with established political parties , are you already taken seriously?

We are taken seriously by most of the youth leagues and by at least one of the represented parties. In particular, which is what counts, we are now taken seriously by national media. However, we can’t tie contacts that explore modes of cooperation quite yet , since our strategy depends on holding the balance of power, we need to not express a preference for whom we’d like to cooperate with, or we’d put ourselves in a weaker bargaining position.

What is your position on moral rights, as recognized by European Union copyright laws: the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. Do you think these rights should be preserved?

We safeguard the right to attribution very strongly. After all, what we are fighting for is the intent of copyright as it is described in the US constitution: the promotion of culture. Many artists are using recognition as their primary driving force to create culture.

Publishing anonymously or pseudonymously happens every day on the Internet, so no big deal there either.

The right to integrity, however, is an interesting issue. We state that we are for free sampling, meaning you can take a sound that I made for my tune and use it in your own tunes, or for that matter, a whole phrase. That’s partially in line with today’s copyright law on derivative works; as long as you add your own creative touch to a work, you get your own protection for the derivation. We want to strengthen that right.

You might want to consider the alternative. In the 50s and 60s, a lot of rock and roll bands started doing covers of old classical music. This would almost certainly have been considered to violate the integrity of the original artist – and was considered to do so by many – but in the eyes of many others, it was instead great new culture of a previously unseen form and shape.

So I don’t have a definite answer on the integrity issue. While I am leaning towards the promotion of new culture taking precedence over a limitation right, there may be unconsidered cases.

Do you feel that trademark law is adequate as it is?

Yes. We have not seen any hidden costs to trademarks that outweigh the benefits of reducing transaction costs on a market where seller and buyer are not personally acquainted.

How do you intend to deal with EU treaties which define certain legal frameworks for the protection of intellectual works?

What can they do? Fine us? Send us an angry letter?

Come on, countries need to think more like corporations. If the fine is less than the cost to society, which it is in this case, then the right thing to do is to accept the fine with a polite “thank you”.

Actually, national media just called me about this very question; the Department of Justice has stated that we can’t allow file sharing, as it would break international treaties. My response was that it is more important to not have 1.2 million Swedes criminalized, than it is to avoid paying a penalty fee.

Do you think that weaker intellectual property laws would lessen the amount of products released in Sweden by foreign companies, such as Hollywood studios?

As long as they believe that they will have a revenue here that exceeds the cost of operations, they will keep coming here. Anything else would be wrong from a corporate standpoint.

Besides, you need to remember what we are doing is to change the map according to what reality looks like. We do not want to change people’s behavior. We want to change the law so it reflects what the world actually looks like.

So, as they apparently make a profit today, I expect that to continue.

Do you feel that the music industry in its current form will still be needed in a world where non-commercial copying is permitted?

It’s not so much if they are needed where non-commercial copying is permitted, rather if they are needed when they’re not necessary any more to be the middle man between consumer and artist.

The music industry will lose its current chokepoint, because they don’t add any value to the end product any longer. They will probably survive as a service bureau for artists, but they will not be able to control distribution.

It’s actually quite simple: if they get their act together and provide a service that people want to buy, they will remain. If not, they will vanish. Today, they have legislated that people must buy their service regardless of whether it adds value or not, and that’s not gonna hold in the long term.

Why fight against intellectual property laws, instead of focusing your energy on creating freely licensed content, such as Creative Commons films or open source software?

I want to raise the issue a level, to show that it’s not about payment models or what level of control the copyright holder chooses to exert over his or her work.

Let me put it this way: we have achieved the techical possibility of sending copyrighted works in digital, private communications. I can send a piece of music in e-mail to you, I can drop a video clip in a chat room. That technology is not going away, leaving us with two choices.

So , if copyright is to be enforced , if you are to tax, prohibit, fee, fine, or otherwise hinder the transmission of copyrighted works in private communications, the only way to achieve that is to have all private communications constantly monitored. It’s really that large.

Also, this is partly nothing new. We’ve been able to do this since the advent of the Xerox copier – you could photocopy a poem or a painting and put it in a letter in the mail. Again, the only way to discover or stop that would have been for the authorities to open all letters and check their content.

So we’re at a crossroads here. Either we, as a society, decide that copyright is the greater value to society, and take active steps to give up private communications as a concept. Either that, or we decide that the ability to communicate in private, without constant monitoring by authorities, has the greater value – in which case copyright will have to give way.

My choice is clear.

The Pirate Bay was shut down and re-opened days later on a Dutch server. According to a Swedish newspaper report, traffic has doubled since then. How long do you think the cat and mouse game will continue?

Until one of two things happen: The authorities realize they can’t enforce laws that require monitoring all private communications, especially given the large international level of grassroots support, or [they] actually start monitoring all private communications.

Original article can be found at Wikinews

Source: Interview with Swedens Pirate Leader Rickard Falkvinge

Wired: When did the party start, and who started it?Allison: The party started on June 6, 2006 with two members, myself and my friend Alex English. A couple of days later, I received around 300 e-mails from people I didn’t know expressing interest in joining and helping out. This was thanks to publicity from the original Swedish party, Piratpartiet, who found out about it when I edited their Wikipedia entry to include mention of the U.S. version I founded.

Source: US Pirate Party Interview

Lars Ilshammar, an information-technology historian who recently suggested Sweden to impose a fee similar to the one proposed in France said to the IHT:

“The process for change has now begun in Sweden, but it’s clear that this problem cannot be solved by one country alone,” said “More countries have to come out of the closet.”

One thing is for sure. Things will, and must change. Don’t expect that the copyright restrictions will disappear, but we will definitely need more “rights” to copy. It almost seems like the easier it gets to share things, the harder the restrictions get. I mean, come on, how insane are those people if they request to take down clips of children dancing on their favorite song on youtube or google video? Uma Suthersanen, a professor of international copyright law at Queen Mary, a college at the University of London sums it up quite nice:

“The way it works now, it is a little as if you give the consumer a lollipop, and then smack them over their heads, saying that they can’t use what they’ve bought,”

Go Pirates.

Source: Sympathy for the Pirate

Over 75 percent of those asked said it was OK to download illegally from the Internet, said the survey.

These figures indicate that the Swedish Pirate Party (piratpartiet), may collect a significant number of votes.

The survey was conducted a week before the Piratebay raid and the pro-piracy demonstration, and it’s likely that filesharing got even more popular after that.

read more

Source: Young Swedes Love Filesharing

The Reboot8 conference is “a journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas”.

The Grey Commons

Intro
There has been a lot of grey zone activity the last few days. You know that if you’ve followed the story about the Swedish police seizing the servers of the BitTorrent indexing site The Pirate Bay, a raid initiated by Hollywood’s MPAA and probably through several more than dubious stages of political influence, raising more question marks for every hour.
Anti-piracy is operating in its their own grey zone. But I would like to start this talk from another direction, the positively grey, which was what was I originally was invited to talk about here at Reboot, to sum up some of the crucial points in copyright’s current crisis.

We are the many shades of the Grey commons
DJ Danger Mouse took the vocals from Jay-Z’s The Black Album and re-mixed it with the Beatles’ White Album and in his creation, The Grey Album, he was ignoring copyright law.
The whole circulation of the Grey Album would never have been possible without P2P file-sharing. These networks exists in the same space as remix or mash-up culture; a space of production, of inspiration, obtaining, downloading , remixing and reinserting distribution and up-down-loading of data. This grey zone is fading in and out of historically dominant forms of circulations, slowly tearing them apart and replacing them with new ones, through rapidly multiplicating small habits.
It is not a grey commons in terms of the law, but inscribed in the technical habits we use every day. The grey is not optional, it is not here by an effort but rather as the shortest way to make life work with technology. The test, the query, the shading, the tuning and twisting is omnipresent; it is not something you can wish away. This is the way we live and come alive.
The Grey Album could escape the claws of copyright owners, because the channels of distribution where there and rather untouchable. But this claw is stretching to bring us all back to a time before internet, P2P file-sharing and the universal computer. Two days ago, there was a major clampdown in Sweden, with the police seizing a large part of the world’s filesharing infrastructure, The Pirate Bay, as well as silencing the voice of PiratbyrÃ¥n. Of course only temporarily. We’ll get back to that. But below such dramatic outbursts, the copyfight is raging on a conceptual level, where the permanented crises of copyright is masked by images grounded in a one-way mass-medial logic, images with no room for greyscales.
In this dislocated situation piracy is about reestablishing connections that has been lost or cut-off. By developing the tools and discourses of file sharing, we try to expand the grey zones and make room for the unforeseeable. Instead of talking about things in the copyright industry’s universal terms, and instead shift the focus to the diverse reality of cultural circulation: what we call The Grey Commons.
On this Grey Thursday I would like to present som thoughts that have been cooking around projects like Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay. About pirate ontologies, geneaologies and strategies for the grey commons.

Some words on the projects
Piratbyrån (The Pirate Association or Bureau of Piracy) in Sweden and Piratgruppen (The Pirate Group) in Denmark are sister organizations that tries to develop and deepen the questions about intellectual property and file sharing, through discussions, events, media appearances, publishing, lectures; developing and deepening
Piratbyrån was born in late summer 2003, emerging out partly from an integrated internet radio broadcast community and partly from IRC channels populated by the Swedish hacker community and demo-sceners. Piratbyrån was initiated to support the free copying of culture and has today evolved into a think-thank, running a community and an information site in Swedish with news, forums, articles, guides and a shop and has to date over 60000 members.
But two days ago, it was closed down by the Swedish police seizing the servers, that stood in the same server hall as The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker. It was started by PiratbyrÃ¥n in november 2003 but grew faster than anyone could imagine, therefore it was naturl to branch it off and today, The Pirate Bay is a fully independent entity, but in a very friendly relation to PiratbyrÃ¥n.
[Presentation about the razzia and current events left out in this version.]

It’s not about downloading, stupid!
For a long time it was legal to download copyrighted files in Sweden, while the uploading of copyrighted material was criminal. But with the 2005 implementation of the EU copyright directive in Swedish law, also downloading was turned illegal. The anti-piracy lobby of course wanted everyone to believe that it suddenly has become very dangerous to be a file-sharer. While many voices have spoken up against the supposed “mass-criminalization of teenagers”, PiratbyrÃ¥n has tried to present a more realistic picture.
Most file-sharers use BitTorrent, where every downloader is also an uploader, and thus were probably in a formal sense criminals also before this law, that doesn’t really seem to have changed anything.
It is of big importance not to accept this terminology where “downloading” appears as some kind of activity completely separate from the uploading. We instead insist on talking about file-sharing as an horizontal activity.
Just like the activity of breathing includes both taking in air in the body and letting it out, filesharing has the same symmetry between up and down. Taking them apart, if even only through language, can only fill the purpose of replacing open exchange with centralized control.
Talking about “downloading” obscures the fact that horizontal P2P-communication is essentialy different from vertical mass-distribution. It is not the same “content” taking different paths to the “consumer”. It is about different archives and different architectures.

There is a constant buzz, driven by mass media, about so called “legal download services” for digital movies and music, presented as an alternative to P2P networks.
But the aim of “legal download services” is not primarily selling movies or music. It is rather about selling language, selling ideology, appropriating the very notion of “legal download”. In that ideology, “legal” is understood as “for payment”, and “download” as an up-down-transfer from a central server offering a limited range of so-called “content”, to a consumer.

So, we are totally mistaken if we think that we are criticising the content industry by saying that “offering legal downloads is good, but DRM sucks and prices are too high…” etc , because with that terminology we have already swallowed the ontology of undifference.

Horizontal exchange or vertical distribution? Open and unstable archiving, or centralized and limited? Those are the fundamental questions. Much more fundamental than the questions asked in the discourses about accessibility, consumer rights, social justice or compensation.

Metadata, not copyrighted material, is the war on piracy’s target
Pirated copies will be produced, no matter the fate of file-sharing networks. We’re all too often today equalising unauthorised digital copying with file-sharing networks, but it’s a fact that a lot of the illicit warez arrives at the hard disk from a physical storage medium, like an usb-device, a borrowed cd or a burned dvd.
To the extent that some people may avoid P2P networks, research shows that they just reconnect to other sources of data , be it physical copying from family and friends or files exchanges with mail and chat clients. It’s all a piracy performed in a grey zone outside surveillance.

So the question is not piracy or not, nor if darknets are desirable or not, but what infrastructures piracy will take use of.
Burning cd’s or gmailing files or giving them away with services like Yousendit.com, means quite much that piracy is stuck in the same infrastructure that it had during the era of the cassette tape and the photocopier, only multiplied by digital effectivity. There is still a dependence of finding someone (a friend, a library) with access to the source. File-sharing networks, however, connects every private archive that in one particular moment is connected, into the largest and most accessible archive ever.

The war against file-sharing is essentially a war against the distribution of uncopyrighted metadata, not against the distribution of copyrighted material. It is about hindering the ever-present piracy from globalizing and open indexing, pushing it back to the family and the schoolyard and the workplace. Scaling-down, not in quantity but in network scale, from peer-to-peer to person-to-person.
The result is not less piracy, but less plurality in piracy. More dependence on personal contacts means that more iPods will be filled with mainstream music that is exposed through mass media, while less people will curiously sneak around shared folders just to try out stuff.
But the iPods will no doubt be filled anyway. And you can forget that it will be according to an “one copy – one payment” formula.

Mental rights management
The grey zone also becomes visible if we consider how arbitrary the very definition of “copying” is. How it is based upon outdated technical cathegories.
We emphasize and affirm the tendency that it is getting harder to distinguish between local transfers of data and “file sharing” between different systems, for example in wireless environments. Digital technology is built on copying bits, and internet is built on file-sharing.
Copying is always already there. The only thing copyright can do is to impose a moral differentiation between so-called normal workings and immoral.
For the copyright industry, it is of extreme importance to keep people uninformed of the real workings of networked computers. They want to make an artificial distinction between “downloading” and “streaming”, as equivalents to record distribution and radio broadcasting.
But , and we should keep insisting that , the only difference between “streaming” and “downloading” lies in the software configuration on the receiving end. However, copyright law will never be able to acknowledge that. It has to rely on fictions, on a kind of cognitive mapping, where notions valid for traditional one-way mass media are forcefully applied to the internet. We call it Mental Rights Management (and it is the very precondition for DRM).
It is essential for the copyright industry to keep the majority of computer users trapped in the belief that the “window” of their web browser is exactly a window, through which they can look at information located elsewhere, under someone else’s control. Then our job is to clarify that everything you see on your screen or hear through your speakers, is already under your control.
Zeros and ones have no taste, smell or color , be they parts of pirated material or not. Therefore it is impossible to construct a computer that cannot reproduce and manipulate these zeros and ones , as such a machine would no longer be a computer, but something as grotesque as a digital simulation of the machines of the last century.

From one-way to read/write
But of course the aim of copyright is to do exactly that. Copyright was born in 18th century England in order to regulate the use of one specific machine, a machine that was expensive, few in numbers and that could write but not read, namely the printing press. Ever since, copyright laws have tried with varying success to make other machines imitate the characteristics of that one-way medium.
The concept was pretty easily adapted to the first technologies of sound and image recording, as grammophone and film entered around the turn of the last century, both being one-way media.
But in the seventies, machines that could both read and write, like the Xerox photocopier, the audiocassette and video recorders, came into the hands of a wider population. This transformed the production of culture, as well as the distribution. Remix, cut-up and mash-up cultures flourished, with early adopters like William S. Burroughs.
The record industry started to claim that home taping was killing music. Initially, they wanted to stop the cassette technology altogether. However, the common compromise solution in Western Europe gave the introduction of a special tax on magnetic tapes, in order to “compensate” the copyright holders for a calculated loss of sales.
Since that time, the sampler, the CD-burner and portable memory devices has continued to make the possibilities greater. Now we’ve got the combination of home computers, broadband, network protocols and compression algorithms that together define what we know as P2P file sharing.
As we stand here today a fair question must be if a principle that was implemented for controlling printing presses in 18th century England should be the hole which our present world must circulate through.

The threefold division: A parenthesis in musical history
In the beginning, copyright was simply a regulation of the reproduction of printed matter. Anything that was not made with printing presses, was not really under copyright’s domains.
Sound was something essentialy fleeting and intangible, something that happened in real time. In particular cases, musical notation was used, but primarily as a simple memory-helper for musicians. The Western classical tradition, however, evolved on its on way, more and more dividing the role of the composer from the role of the performer, by making notation more and more exact. But music and musical performances had nothing to do with copyright. Only the printed graphical representations of music was affected.

But things changed with the new reproduction technologies for sound and film, some time roughly around year 1900. Legislation transformed as a response to the possibility to reproduce sounds and not only symbolic representations of sound. Copyright went from covering texts to covering Works.
A Work can be defined as the abstract product of any artistic creation, existing independently of its material forms.
Now, composers not only owned the symbolic representation of music in form of a musical score on a printed paper, but also the melodies themselves. The realm of copyright conquered two new territories: public performances and recorded music. But it was still based in the concept on written music.
The symbolic score secured its power over the real vibrations stored in records, as well as over the live music experience. That meant that a lot collecting societies had to be funded, responsible for channeling money to composers and publishers, who still were the only musical copyright holders.
Radio broadcasting meant a growing cake, and soon some musical performers and record companies demanded their share from it too. And they got it in the early 1960s, when the Rome Treaty gave international copyright two new layers: performer’s rights and producer’s rights.
Music copyright, and the whole phonogram economy, is still built on this threefold division between the composer, the performer, and the producer. Those are the three main roles, each one represented by a different collecting society, each getting their own share of money for every song played on the radio and every CD-R sold.
But since this system was institutionalised, the division itself has shown clear signs of dissolution, and in quite many cases, one can observe how all those three roles are converging into the figure of the bedroom producer.
A convergence driven by the development of recording and mixing technology, from the multitrack tape recorders of the 1960s, to the contemporary average computer able to simulate what only some years ago demanded very expensive studio time.
But lowered production costs wasn’t saluted by everyone.

Mechanical music menace
At first, synthesizers were marketed as a substitute for living musicians. Advertisements presented the Roland MC-8 Microcomposer as a huge orchestra. No wonder that the musicians’ trade unions, all over the world, depicted electronic instruments as a threat. They preserved the traumatic memories of when the introduction of talking films created mass unemplyment amongst cinema musicians, and held a strong belief that technical reproduction of music was a threatening rival to live performances.
During the early eighties, the American Federation of Musicians fought against use of synthesizers to mimic string and wind instruments, in the name of employment. One idea, seriously considerated in several countries, was to impose a special fee on synthesizers, to make them less attractive and to support orchestras with “real” instruments.
The London chapter of the British musicians’ union went one step further, demanding a complete ban on synthesizers , which caused a split in the union, where musicians affirming electronics started their own Union of Sound Synthesists (USS).
Both electronic musicians and DJ:s were being labelled as sell-outs who played the game of commercial interests. The unionist resistance against the synthesizer, was rooted in ideas about how capitalists tries to lower production costs, just for their own profit.
The basis for that argument, was the hegemony of a very narrow definition of a musical performer: Only people mechanically controlling the production of sound in an instrument, like a violin or a saxophone.
But that narrow view was soon to be undermined by a number of experiments in hacking and indeterminacy, that explored the sonic machines as something else than just representational technologies. DJ:s hacked the turntable, transforming it into an instrument of musical production, and the discjockey became a cathegory of creators not fitting in any of the roles in the tripartite division of composers, musicians and producers.
The Roland TB-303 was designed to reproduce the sound of a bass-guitar, but was hard to configure and made interesting mistakes. Soon the misuse became the norm, as the unique squelching sounds produced by its filters came to define a whole genre of music , acid house.

Music is, as it were, performance
When making electronic music, the bedroom producer is programming patterns that are interpreted not by musicians but by machines, and then mixing the components together. But the bedroom producer is not really a composer and not a producer , but truly a performer.
In contrast to the institutionalised image of the musician interpreting the symbolic notes of a composer’s score, the bedroom producer interprets not symbols but real sound samples and the imaginary musical styles.
Recombining, refining. Redefining bugs to features. Performing a beat, that in real time is performed again by the dancing crowd, interpreting sounds into bodily movements. Or maybe recorded, encoded as MP3, copied though Soulseek, and psychogeographically performed by playlist fanatics. Music is, as it were, performance. Even the uses of recorded sound must today be understood as real-time experiences , if we are not to be stuck in a dead-end road like the musician’s unions fighting the synthesizer.

Similar tendencies , with selection and recombination as an ever more important creative role , can be seen everywhere on the artistic fields. Without openly confronting copyright law at all, these practices subtly marks out a line of flight. Along that line, creativity and artistic interpretation migrates out from the realm of copyright, leaving its gateways to the realm of semantics wide open and leaking.

Beyond the consumer/producer-dichotomy
The copyright industry today likes to present the problem as if internet were just a way for so-called “consumers” to get so-called “content”, and that we now just got to have “a reasonable distribution” of money between ISP:s and content industry. But we must never fall in that trap, and we can avoid it by refusing to talk about “content” altogether. Instead, we talk about internet as communication.
Therefore, it is totally wrong to regard our role as to represent “consumer interests”. On the contrary, it’s all about escaping the forceful division of humanity into the two groups “producers” and “consumers” that copyrights produces in different ways.
An obvious example is the movie industry’s bizarre lobbying to “plug the analog hole”, by introducing a law banning video equipment able to rip analog media. The law proposal put forward by the MPAA mentions that so-called professional producers of course should have a license to use these video cards anyway. The effect would of course be an extreme consolidation of the split between producers and users.
But so-called “alternative compensation systems”, that some voices put forward as a progressive alternative to DRM and mass-criminalization, they are no less reproducing this split. The idea is usually to impose a special fee on every internet connection, so that a bureaucracy could channel the money to publishers and other rights holders.
This way we can save both the copyright system and file sharing, says amongst others Lawrence Lessig, the EFF, and the Swedish Green party. However, none of them likes to specify exactly how it should be decided which creators that should get money. If book authors should get compensation when their books are digitally transmitted, why should not bloggers get a part of this compensation as well? So, for the very notion of “compensation” to work, there must be someone filtering out the “worthy” forms of artistic creation from “unworthy”. (Or the system could give every internet user money for every line they are writing in a chat, but that would maybe better be called an universal basic income.)
This dilemma also illustrates the schizophrenic nature of industry. Companies like Microsoft and Sony on one hand tries to use DRM to block out independent cultural production. But on the other, they are already totally dependent of what they call “user-generated content”.
Clever entrepreneurs of course do understand that internet business is not about selling information. It is about selling the possibility to interact. Overcoming the split between producers and consumers is not some utopia of a world to come, but a necessity to let communication media be communication media instead of simulating one-way media.

Copyright’s three points of crisis
I have mentioned two key points in copyrights’ permanent crisis, points where concepts that where evolved to handle the separated flows of one-way mass-media clashes with the reality of networked computers.
One was the fact that the very concept of copying is rather arbitrary when it comes to digital technology, as using digital information already implicates that it is copied. Another was the extreme problems with institutionalizing a producer/consumer-division, inside a media technology used for horizontal communication. Both anomalies seems totally unsolvable, from the perspective of copyright, and indicates that the copyfight is very unlikely to cool down. Now I will go on to the third point of crisis: the form/content dichotomy.

Three key points in copyright’s permanented crisis
• RAM/ROM; the very definition of “copying” is arbitrary
• Consumer/producer; impossible to institutionalize, especially in communication media.
• Form/content; the distinction can only pass a digital cable as simulation

The form/content-division belongs in the age of postal distribution
Year 1793, Johan Gottlieb Fichte wrote a piece that for the first time clearly separated “form” and “content”, with the specific and successfull goal of establishing literary copyright. While an author’s ideas are the universal content of writing, he gives them an unique individual form, which is his intellectual property. Then, on another level, the copyrighted material itself usually is described as content, then understood as abstracted artefacts, not bound to a specific media form.

Communication media are, on a kind of third level, also logically divided between form and content; or, more specific, in address and message, or instruction and information. That division could seem totally unproblematic at Fichte’s times around year 1800, at the dawn of modern copyright and a couple of centuries after the postal system got public. The postal system has always built upon the physical separation between the address outside the envelope, and the message inside it, the latter hidden and legally protected.

Already with telephony, however, this separation wall started to leak. The “hole” between form and content was signified by the frequency of 2600 Hz, used by phreakers to insert information that the central servers interpreted as instructions to connect calls for free. But, as the servers were still centralised, this tiny hole never grew to be a huge gap in the wall.

Networked computers, however, are not only media, but universal semiotic machines. Computers makes no difference between information and instruction, they’re storing text and code in just the same way: Form and content cannot be distinguished objectively.

But that distinction is what European politicians today are trying to resurrect, in the implementation of the data retention directive. What they say and probably believe, is that data retention has nothing to do with supervising what people say to each other on the net , it’s not about the content, only about who is communicating with who.
And that is maybe possible if this is restricted to e-mail communication using the SMTP protocol. But what for, if every criminal knows that they can just communicate in chatrooms or with community messages?
Either politicians must give up their stated ambition, or they are bound to go into ever more detailed regulation of specific internet protocols. But Sweden’s judiciary minister thomas Bodström, that has been spearheading the European plans for data retention, still talks about supervising only the address layer and not the content layer.

The important point, in criticising data retention and similar surveillance measures, is not about so called “privacy” or “personal integrity”. We would like to stress the importance of different media logics. The distinguishing of form and content is a physical part of an postal letter, but it cannot pass a data cable. The only way for it to pass, is as a simulation.
And every single regulation that is based on such a simulation, will inevitabely kill one thousand other possible simulations. It will block the exploring of one thousand paths.

Instead of assuming the holiness of privacy, we are questioning the technological consequences of data retention, in terms of detailled regulation of communication protocols, and the ban on anonymous internet connections.
The main problem with surveillance and with the war against filesharing, is maybe not about an unfair trespassing on what should belong to the individual subject , it is about an unfair and absurd attempt to turn networked computers into individual subjects.

A vital experiment of complexity
Maybe what is most important now, is to bypass the urge for solutions, for victory in battles or for compromise and stability.
For example, talking about how to “compensate the creators” is to obscure the truth about the social production of culture. Such talk establishes the myth of copyright as some kind of “wage” for artists, and the strange idea that real-time performative aspects of culture are secondary or unimportant.
And while some of the Creative Commons licenses can of course be usable sometimes, it would also be a wrong to believe in that a “some rights reserved”-approach would do anything to cool down the three anomalies mentioned before. Instead, that approach sometimes just seems to move the problem to another field: Instead of the producer/consumer-dilemma, you get something quite similar, namely the commercial/uncommercial dilemma.
Making general statements about the alternative to copyright always brings the danger of strengthening copyright’s universality claim. On the contrary, trying to keep the grey zone as open and wide as possible will almost automatically produce better conditions for cultural production to go beyond prevalent economic imperatives.
We think that our projects have generally succeeded in escaping the most obvious re-territorializations, like explaining file-sharing just as a response to expensive records. Instead, they aim is to open up and explore new grey zones.
The Pirate Bay is one example , a grey zone currently under attack. Much of the mass-medial reporting are still blind to the grey. Paradoxically, they represent the binary world in an all-too-binary way. In their black and white picture, the conflict is about certain “content”; the picture is painted with The Pirate Bay on one hand and “the rights holders” on the other. Everything that is not juridically plain white like a penguin, is in that picture black.
But we would like to direct the attention to the grey zone, that is all the movies and music and text on The Pirate Bay that no rights holder ever thinks about trying to stop, either because they affirm it as a possibility or because they really don’t care or because the works are actually orphaned.
The attack on Pirate Bay is an attack on that grey zone. Rather than securing their own copyrights, the movie industry are attacking an infrastructure that is needed for many kinds of independent production. They are not attacking piracy in general, as the sharing of digital files can always take its physical routes. They are attacking the very possibility to interconnect metadata of private archives. But while intellectual property will surely continue to be a battleground for major clampdowns in our society, there will always be enumerable lots of open ways.
The drive of discovering, thinking and inventing alternative processes of production is the affirmative power of life as a vital experiment of complexity. Internet piracy is all about desiring-production, and its long-term effects are beyond our human capacity to compute.

Rasmus Fleischer

Source: Piratbyrån Speech

“Fans who share music are not thieves or pirates,” they state unequivocally. “Sharing music has been happening for decades.”

A lot of artist joined together and formed a coalition, among them:
Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Sum 41, Stars, Raine Maida (Our Lady Peace), Dave Bidini (Rheostatics), Billy Talent, John K. Samson (Weakerthans), Broken Social Scene, Sloan, Andrew Cash and Bob Wiseman.

Viva la revolucion

The key principles of the CMCC are clear (press release)

Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical
Artists do not want to sue music fans. The labels have been suing our fans against artists’ will, and laws enabling these suits cannot be justified in artists’ names

Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive
Artists do not support using digital locks to increase the labels’ control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music or laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures. Consumers should be able to transfer the music they buy to other formats under a right of fair use, without having to pay twice.

Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists
The vast majority of new Canadian music is not promoted by major labels, which focus mostly on foreign artists. The government should use other policy tools to support actual Canadian artists and a thriving musical and cultural scene.”

All wise words. Finally

Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa responds:

No one should underestimate the importance of this development. After today, House of Commons committee hearings on copyright must include representation from the CMCC. Policy makers and politicians must take the time to consult with the artists themselves. Most importantly, government ministers will no longer be able to make policies in the artists’ name, when those policies represent the views of lobbyists, not artists.

more on this

Source: Don’t treat our fans as thieves, let them share music!

Dr Michael Geist has become a power in Canada and much further afield when it comes to matters centering on Net issues in particular, and free speech and the freedom of the Net in general.

Born and raised in Toronto and the proud father of “three great kids” (7, 5, and 2), he’s the University of Ottawa’s Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, a position he’s held since 2003. Before going to U of O seven years ago, he was at a long list of law schools including Columbia Law School in New York, Dalhouse Law School in Halifax, Canada, Cambridge University in England, and Kobe University in Japan, where he was doing graduate work and some teaching.

His editorial output is prolific. He produces numerous professional publications and writes for Canada’s Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen, and England’s BBC, and p2pnet is proud to regularly run his columns. He’s also on the director and advisory boards of several internet and IT law organizations including the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, the dot-ca administrative agency, the Canadian IT Law Association, and Watchfire.

The former chair of a global Internet jurisdiction project for the American Bar Association and International Chamber of Commerce, Geist is regularly quoted in the national and international media on internet law issues and has appeared before government committees on e-commerce policy.

Obviously, with a work-load such as that and three lively children, he doesn’t have much in the way of free time but when he does, he’s a big sports fan who, although he’s an Ottawa Senators season ticket holder, is also a “a die-hard Toronto Maple Leafs hockey fan”. And when he gets the chance, he takes in “a fair amount of music” on his iPod, “in addition to a growing list of podcasts.”

One of his favourite bands is Green Day, and he’s also a Springsteen fan.

“I really like Pandora for listening to new stuff,” he says. “I buy music on Apple iTunes and also download occasional stuff. Frankly, most of my P2P downloading tends to be torrents of video files of recent lectures or other video content.”

BitTorrent is his application of choice for downloads.

Do you think Canada will ever be in the same situation as the US where even young children will become CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) victims? – we asked him in the Q&A below.

“I hope not,” he says.

p2pnet: You’ve become a virtual spokesman for copyright common sense not only in Canada, but in other parts of the world. Is this something you deliberately set out to achieve?

Geist: No, not at all. My focus has traditionally been on Internet issues and I’m very active on privacy, spam, Internet governance issues. The growing attention to copyright merely reflects its critical importance to the Internet and to creativity and culture more generally.

p2pnet: Does the role sit well with you?

Geist: I think there are a lot of people who do great work in this area. I’m fortunate to have some platforms to speak out and educate – such as a regular newspaper column and my blog. These are issues that have not gained significant awareness in the past and I’m happy to help change that.

p2pnet: How much real influence do you think the entertainment and software industries have over decisions made in Ottawa and elsewhere?

Geist: Enormous influence – they’re clearly one of, if not the single most successful lobbying concern worldwide as their influence extends internationally, nationally, and even at the local levels. In Ottawa, I think that policy makers are genuinely interested in hearing all perspectives. Once their work turns into a bill, however, we’ll see the power of the lobby come to the fore.

p2pnet: Do you think they have undue influence? If so, should it be curbed, and can it be?

Geist: They certainly have far more resources than any other stakeholder group. I think it is essential that other stakeholders – particularly those who represent the public interest – receive active support so that their views are heard.

In the US, there are many groups (EFF, CDT, Public Knowledge, ACLU, EPIC, IP Justice, etc) that work in the area.

We don’t have nearly that kind of support in Canada as I think CIPPIC, the public interest technology law clinic that I helped establish at the University of Ottawa, is one of the only similar groups in Canada.

p2pnet: Is it acceptable for elected politicians to accept benefits from the entertainment and software industries, and to so obviously (and actively) represent their interests against those of their constituents?

Geist: No. That issue sat at the heart of my very public fight with former MP Sarmite Bulte. These are tough issues and I think it is critical that the process be both fair and seen to be fair. When you have MPs in decision making positions, they shouldn’t be seen to be aligning themselves with any single stakeholder group. It was for that reason that I proposed the copyright pledge. It didn’t say that politicians couldn’t take money from lobby groups – only that they couldn’t take the cash and then directly influence policy by sitting as Minister, Parliamentary Secretary, or on the relevant House of Commons committee.

p2pnet: Have you ever been approached to work with, or for, any of the entertainment or software companies?

Geist: I talk with many groups and companies all the time. While we may disagree on certain issues, the complexity of copyright is such that your opponent on one issue, may be your ally on another.

p2pnet: Are you able to sit down and have a reasoned, and reasonable, discussion on copyright and other related issues with the people who make the corporate decisions?

Geist: I am. There are some people who don’t want to talk, but they’re in the minority.

p2pnet: Is it acceptable for the purely commercial labels, studios and software houses to so easily use, and be an integral part of, police and other agency raids and enforcement operations the industries themselves usually initiate?

Geist: I think true commercial piracy – the sort where commercial operations churn out infringing software or DVDs for sale and profit – is obviously wrong and the law should be used to stop such activities.

p2pnet: Is copyright ‘crime’ a crime at all?

Geist: I think it’s fair to say that the commercial piracy described above is a crime. I don’t think that the non-commercial copying that we see on P2P networks falls into that category, however.

p2pnet: Would you agree that if the software and entertainment companies were to use p2p technologies for handling and distribution, a reduction both in counterfeiting and duplicating and in costs associated with physical product would follow?

Geist: I think P2P represents a tremendous commercial opportunity for those groups. I think it has the potential to reduce distribution costs. I’m not sure that it would have an impact on commercial counterfeiting.

p2pnet: Should the cartels be allowed to have a definite presence in schools and universities via their so-called ‘educational’ programs?

Geist: I think it’s up to the schools to ensure that their students gain a balanced perspective on these issues. Educators wouldn’t tolerate commercial messaging in other areas and shouldn’t here either.

It’s essential that educators take that role seriously by educating their students on the full range of copyright issues including their user rights to use works without prior permission.

p2pnet: Do you believe people who share files with each other online are ‘thieves’ and ‘criminals’ as the CRIA, et al, claim?

Geist: No.

p2pnet: Is file sharing really “devastating” (to quote the CRIA claim) the music industry and its various elements ?

Geist: I don’t believe so. I’m sure it has some impact, but it’s hard to know precisely what that impact is as there’s some evidence that the impact is positive, not negative.

Regardless, the decline in sales that the major labels have experienced in recent years is almost certainly about a host of issues that have little to do with P2P, including more consumer entertainment choices, pricing, changes in the retail distribution of music, the decline of radio, and the releases being brought to market.

p2pnet: Do you think the wholesale price of between 60 and 80 cents for a single Big Four digital file is fair?

Geist: I don’t know. In an open market, the market would set the price. Obviously people like NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer are skeptical that the market is truly functioning appropriately without unlawful and anti-competitive interference.

p2pnet: Does a download equal a lost sale?

Geist: No. I don’t think anybody would argue that it does. Even the Copyright Board of Canada has valued a downloaded song as a lesser value that the CD version for purposes of the private copying levy.

p2pnet: Are file sharers and counterfeiters equally and jointly responsible for entertainmment and software industry downturns, as the CRIA and other trade-cum-PR units suggest repeatedly?

Geist: I don’t think file sharers and counterfeiters should be equated – there is a significant difference between the two.

As for industry downturns, I’m not sure that those industries are making those claims. For example, the video game software industry is enjoying enormous growth, while the movie industry is experiencing terrific revenues from DVD sales and other new licensing opportunities.

p2pnet: Should parents he held responsible under the law for something their children may, or may not, have done?

Geist: Well, certainly not for something their children didn’t do.

The better question is whether we should hold anyone liable to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for P2P activity. I think not – statutory damages provisions should be amended to address this misuse of the law.

p2pnet: Do you agree that blogs and bloggers are replacing the traditional media as disseminators of news and information?

Geist: I’m not sure they’re replacing traditional media, but they are obviously having an enormous impact on the dissemination of news, opinion, and information. I think blogs often provide more timely, more informed analysis that you will find in the mainstream media and thus either replace or complement MSM coverage.

I also think that we’re seeing a growing convergence between the two – newspapers are starting to look a lot like blogs – take the redesign of the Globe and Mail as an example.

p2pnet: Do you think they’re having, or will have, an influence on what the labels, studios and software makers do?

Geist: I think bloggers are having an influence on all aspects of society, including public policy and corporate decision making.

p2pnet: Do you think Canada will ever be in the same situation as the US where even young children will become CRIA victims?

Geist: I hope not.

I’m hopeful that Canada can develop a model that benefits all stakeholders and does not resort to damaging litigation that serves no one’s best interests.

p2pnet

Source: Michael Geist Interview

“The surprise vote caused outrage among record companies and film producers, who say illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) copying costs their industries millions of euros every year,” says the BBC. “It was an embarrassing defeat for the government, which had planned to introduce large fines and possible jail terms of up to three years for internet pirates.

“Seventeen year old Aziz Ridouan became so angry at the number of people already being taken to court that he started up his own pressure group.

“Today, the Audiosurfers Association has 6,000 members. It campaigns for a change in the law and helps defend those being prosecuted.”
Socialist MP Patrick Bloche, who helped draft the amendment, argues, “Rather than outlawing, punishing, and paradoxically maintaining to a certain extent an illegal system. Let’s make a different choice: authorising peer-to-peer downloading, but in return, putting in place a system allowing artists to be paid.”

Then the Big Four, Vivendi Universal (France), EMI, (Britain), Sony BMG (Japan, Germany) and Warner Music (US) pulled their well-worn trick of mobilising contracted performers such Johnny Hallyday, “to protest, arguing that revenue from a global licence wouldn’t compensate for the millions they say they risk losing through falling CD sales,” says the story.

Nonetheless, “The MPs’ vote in December sent the government scuttling off to redraft its bill,” says the BBC. “It has since spent two months in consultations with artists, industry representatives and internet users to try to reach a compromise. More than 13,000 musicians signed a petition in favour of the global licence. A website set up to encourage a debate on P2P copying was inundated with replies.”

France’s latest plan still rejects global licensing, “although it agrees that private copying should be allowed,” and, “The sanctions for illegal copying have been reduced considerably, with fines beginning at 38 euros (£26, about $46) ) for small-scale piracy.”

Meanwhile, people in France aren’t entitled to make personal copies of DVDs, even if they don’t distribute them, France’s highest court, the Cour de Cassation in Paris, has ruled, overturning an earlier decision by a lower court.

P2Pnet.net

Source: Record labels want to Kill French Filesharing law

SXSWeek takes place March 10-19, 2006 in Austin, Texas.

Source: BitTorrent inc. supports free music and movie trailer downloads