There’s no indication that enforcement of non-profit sharing of copyrighted material (piracy) would be against article 10.

About costs:

The budget for the police in Finland last year was 699 million €. The cost to get hadopi started in France was 12 million.

The car example was anecdotal evidence that judiciaries don’t really have a problem with impacting people, that’s kind of their job. He didn’t need to have his car impounded, his right to use it was still gone for a month.

Music, movies etc that someone has released for sale are “commercial speech” . That doesn’t change even if a third party decides to take them for free and share them on.

Let’s look at what they say at the start of the blog:

“the European Court of Human Rights has clarified that a conviction based on copyright law for illegally reproducing or publicly communicating copyright
protected material can be regarded as an interference with the right of freedom of expression and information under Article 10 of the European Convention. Such
interference must be in accordance with the three conditions enshrined in the second paragraph of Article 10 of the Convention.”

Ok, what are those conditions in the second paragraph? From Wikipedia:

“Article 10 – Freedom of expression

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.”

As we can see the exercise of freedom carries with it duties and responsibilities and that’s why paragraph 2 has quite a few circumstances that make it ok to restrict these freedoms.

Most relevant in this case perhaps “for the protection of the rights of others”. That would be the rights of the creators that need to be protected when looking at filesharing.
A protection which is a fundamental part of a democratic society.

The court is merely stating that copyright enforcement has to be a balancing act between article 10 and article 1 of the first protocol (the right to property, including IP.)

They are NOT saying copyright enforcement shouldn’t be done at all.

And I did no redefining of words when discussing article 27. “Freely” is not generally considered a synonym to “for free” and I also provided the text in swedish, finnish and french showing that the words that would mean “for free” in those languages aren’t present in article 27.

But they aren’t, and that’s exactly what the court is stating.

In order for anything to be “commercial” it needs to involve commerce. An exchange of currency. Sales.

This is the case of the magazine which published the fashion show pictures. No commerce of any kind takes place in filesharing however, which is why it is referred to as “non-commercial’.”

In short, you have to redefine the entire meaning of “commercial” to apply it to items exchanged without any commercial interest.

Again, moving the goal post. And in this case, flat-out redefining what words mean. Just as you did when we discussed Article 27 of the human rights.

Short corrected version – the court did not consider money-driven exchanges to be in conflict with article 10. This was what the original case was about, remember?

“About the costs: As it’s taxpayers breaking the law and taxpayers that are being protected by it, it’s not totally unreasonable that taxpayers should pay the bill. This is what we do with other forms of law enforcements (including the enforcement of shoplifting.)”

The public purse is finite. You may try to push the suggestion that ebnforcing copyright should cost the public taxpayer a hundred or a thousand times what is spent on tracking murderers, terrorists, and arsonists.

I doubt you will make much headway. Car crashes due to speeding cost lives every year. 40,000 of them. And yet it still doesn’t merit outlays even a hundred thousandth of what you propose should be set aside for adressing filesharing.

You seriously need to sanity-check your sense of reasonable proportions.

“Just last week I gave a ride to a guy who had his driving permit hung up to dry for a month. This wasn’t for a case of serious speeding, but for having been given three separate tickets within a year.”

That wasn’t the comparison though. Come back when the court has decided to impound his car and perform a forensic examination on it, at the cost of 10k dollars. Based on those three tickets. I call moving the goal posts AND straw man on that argument.

“The judiciary here seems pretty ok with it.”

As I just showed you, probably not.

And this, no doubt, applies to the nature of the material.

Expression and content contributing to an issue of public debate or a debate of general interest for society IS protected by article 10.

Copyrighted music, movies etc. are “commercial speech” and are NOT protected by article 10 and therefore sharing of them can’t be expected to be either.