Iran and Egypt did the one thing they could in order to stop the bad bad internet. By storming the ISP’s and pulling the plug completely.

The choice is either no internet at all – which would break any nation with active industry today. Or to have internet in which case – surprise – you get people communicating that which you don’t want communicated.

DO YOU THINK…that if Wikileaks could have been stopped, by any means at all, that it would still exist? And yet it does. On 1500 mirrored sites at last counts.

I’m very sure “governments” will keep trying to control the internet for some time but the main battles have already come and gone. The cost is simply too high. There is no government in the world which can justify to it’s electorate why they need to spend more money on enforcing communications restrictions than what they spend on health care, education, or in most cases, the military. But that’s what it would take.

So, with all due respect…you are talking out of your ass and need to learn some hard facts before you put your tinfoil hat back on.

Not necessarily. As the university of washington showed in a study, any dynamically distributed ip may have been anything at all. And they proved this by simply counting the number of DMCA notices which were sent them on behalf of ip numbers belonging to laser printers and router switches.

It’s more accurate to say that the average RIAA “DMCA notice” is comparable to a crayon drawing of a “red car with slanty-looking headlights” made by a three-year old as far as concerns verifiable identification.

That’s a far cry from photographic evidence and a doppler radar gun.

And that aside there’s still the problem that when you drive on the highway you are operating a ton of metal at high speeds for which the law requires education and a license. Going on the internet is basically comparable to walking around in the streets and starting conversations. There is no proportional requirement which meets the standard to demand similar checks on personal communication as that which is considered all right on a highway.

The mere exchange of information on the internet however is comparable to talking. Last time i checked most western countries require some form of court order before you are allowed to secretly monitor day-to-day conversations of people and in order to obtain that warrant the people to be investigated must already be under reasonable suspicion.

Your entire argument is therefore irrelevant as it is based on severely flawed assumptions.

What you are actually doing is trying to build a case for the DDR’s type of mass surveillance of personal communication and information control. Peddling sovjet-style censorship “for the good of society”.

Finally you need to understand something – the “government” – who ever they may be – do not possess the power to “take away” anonymized or encrypted communication. They keep trying to do this in China and after ten years of trying and god alone knows how many billions worth of dollars the Great Firewall of China is and remains a standing joke for even the average filesharing script kid or dissident. As long as there is an internet at all, preventing unwanted communication is an unachievable goal. Egypt and Iran are the only nations ever to have succeeded in preventing the temporary “misuse” of the internet and then only because they were able to storm every ISP and simply pull the plug on the national level.

Bsically your thinking is flawed from top to bottom. Either we have the internet and thus we have filesharing. Or we do not have the internet at all.

It happens in many other fields, and has been a problem with them for centuries. Not years or decades, but centuries.

Countries blocking foreign IP’s wont work, simply from a diplomatic point of view. Do you block China? The USA? Germany? What would the repercussions be? Nearly 10 years ago I raised this as an issue locally and basically got told it was in the too hard basket. Its not an easy answer, because the laws in one country are never the same as the laws in another country, and those differences create major issues.

You’re seeing it now with some countries coming down hard on filesharing, others giving the blunt end of the stick to the lawyers with their spamming tactics. Every case decided is creating case law that will be very hard not to follow, and that is going to create very different playing fields around the world.

This advice here, presuming its followed, potentially creates a near continent wide safe haven when tied to other decisions supporting the IP not being enough. While copyright protectors can go deeper, by chasing the person and their machine for hard evidence, the cost of doing that is prohibitive.

These issues have to be worked through on a global scale, and that is very very hard to do in practice.

That isn’t like a 12-year-old getting arrested for sharing Blue’s Clues with some friends online, that is like some dude cranking out DVD in a child-molesting sweatshop to be sold as original retail copies.

I don’t see how the burden falls to the entrepreneur to make sure the world can afford the luxuries they are selling. These are not products of utility but of entertainment, and the companies that choose to sell them at unaffordable prices should be going out of business. Freely distributed works have quite a presence, there is no need to pretend like labels and studios hold the world hostage. This is the basics of supply and demand.

If we are dealing with monopolies then we don’t need to attack the price point, we need to deal with their monopoly.