Ah, so in your own words then, when a copyright owner decides to distribute his creation to hundreds of thousands of people everyone other than the copyright owner should be held responsible for ensuring that his “property” is safe.

I have news for you – that’s not the way it works. It’s equally impossible for providers of services to know whether something is copyrighted, links to copyright, or links to a site which links to copyrighted material.

Instead of one person – the holder – to perform an impossible labor you want everyone else to perform an equally impossible labor.

If you do get what you want then the net result will be the darknet where neither you nor congress has a say whatsoever since your demands have become beyond ridiculous and no site, “legitimate” or not, can afford to run a business given that expected extra overhead.

So once again, whatever you do will have no impact on piracy. It will have collateral effects on legitimate sites which will spur the migration to safer conduits while wrecking what you have in the form of infrastructure supporting legal business.

The internet may not be “broken” in China. However, please take note that in that, the most draconian of current information-control countries, online filesharing is higher than anywhere else by a far margin. This is the future you envision for the US and the west as well. It doesn’t matter what you want or who you ge to support your wishes. The human race as a whole rejects your absurd claims by simply ignoring them.

However, his stand on making copies of information is quite naturally that he, just like the US supreme court, does not consider it “theft”.

Making a copy of information is not stealing. Not in any law of the land and not according to any interpretation ever made by any judge or jury.

As for “Property Ownership” you should be aware that ownership of information is only possible given one, extremely stringent criteria. Keeping said information a secret. This was conclusively proven the last time when people invented the printing press.

So no, Falkvinge is no hjypocrite. He holds himself to exactly the same standards as he holds everyone else. And has verifiably done so for all the time in which he has been in the limelight.

I am not too surprised to hear you spewing bile in lieu of facts since the facts appear to be solidly on the pirate side of things. Which might be why you want to tarnish anyone telling them out loud with some vague guilt-by-association and clumsy insulting rhethoric.

Although they’re often treated as such, from what I could find on the subject, ISPs aren’t actually covered by Common Carrier status in the US. Web sites definitely aren’t.

Before the DMCA, there was _never_ intermediary liability. Somebody said something bad, you could go after that end person if and only if you could locate him or her, and no one in the world owed you a finger in that effort.

Common sense would indicate that you should go after the person who committed the offense and not the intermediary, however the entertainment industry has never been known for having too much common sense.

They might not have been suing web sites and ISPs back in 1998 when the DMCA was passed, but they’d already demonstrated that they were more than willing to go after intermediaries.

In 1976, Universal Studios and The Walt Disney Company sued Sony over their development of the VCR. They didn’t wait to see how it would be used. They didn’t wait and go after people who used it to make illegal copies, they went right after the company who created it and tried to hold the company liable for the potential illegal uses of it. Thankfully they failed.

So why weren’t they suing ISPs and web sites before the DMCA? Well, when the DMCA was passed, a large percentage of internet users, and perhaps the majority, were still using dialup, which made transferring large files impractical. Although it would have been technically possible to pirate movies and TV shows, nobody was doing it because of the time required to do so. Even downloading a handful of MP3 files on dialup could take more than an hour. So, there wasn’t much need for entertainment companies to sue anyone involved with the internet because few people were using it to pirate.

The few cases of copyright infringement that came up could be handled fairly easily. When broadband took off and people could then upload and download large files, handling each case individually became too time consuming and costly. The ideal solution in the entertainment industry’s opinion would be to hold the providers liable and force them to police their users, but they’re prevented from doing this (in the US) by the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. Which is why SOPA seeks to get around those provisions.

In countries which don’t have safe harbor provisions in law, the music industry has sued ISPs to get what they want. Viacom sued YouTube, even though it should be protected by the safe harbor provisions. In Italy, a court found that the owners of YouTube were liable for allowing a video of kids abusing a retarded youth to be posted.

So, I disagree that all the ineternet companies would be safe if the safe harbor provisions are removed from law. The music industry has already tried to demand that ISPs should inspect and filter their traffic for copyright infringement. If the law barring them from suing intermediaries was abolished, do you truly believe that they wouldn’t happily use the threat (or even the actual application) of a lawsuit to bully ISPs into doing what they want?

No, distribution rights, as in the copyright monopoly, is an intrusion into other peoples property rights.

> “I guess if IP is considered information/ideas and not property to begin with..”

You seem to confuse the intellectual work with intellectual property. An intellectual work is never any kind of property, either physical, intangible or intellectual. Property, regardless of what kind, is something that is scarce in supply, and that can be owned, sold or bought. If it ain’t scarce, it’s not property. An intellectual work can’t be owned, sold or bought.

The unfortunately misleading term intellectual property does not refer to the intellectual work in itself, it refers to the copyright monopoly, which indeed is a piece of intangible property, that can be owned, sold or bought.

The copyright monopoly in turn is something that only exists as an intrusion into other peoples property, forbidding them to do with it as they wish.

The only property involved when people fileshare, is property belonging to the people filesharering. When people fileshare person A instructs his property, i.e. his computer, to manufacture a copy on his harddrive, according to the pattern of person B’s harddrive, a pattern which he distributes to others as information.

> “..that it might be a potential freedom of speech issue.”

Since distribution of intellectual works, whether it’s through P2P- or F2F-filesharing, or an intermediary such as Youtube, always is about the transference of information originating from a person, it’s always a freedom of speech issue.

> “While I don’t agree with current law, right now our government and voting majority of the population regard it as property..

Well ignorance is a problem. But just explain it to them as i did to you, most people tend to understand that explanation in less than two minutes, except those who are paid no to understand it, and never acknowledge it.

The “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” was never realized to be in the order of importance. Americans (and many peoples of the earth) are spoiled enough to never know what it was like to have to build their own shelter, find their own food or water. They will believe whatever the system tells them to, because they can’t imagine the hardships of life without a corporate collection of babysitters.

So the question is this: how many modern citizens be willing to give up having spoon-fed lives for a realistic perception of freedom? I’m a pessimist, but my guess is about 99.9% of them.