Pirate Bay related decision

In November this year, a decision by a Norwegian District Court concluded that there were no grounds for ordering internet service supplier Telenor to block internet access to The Pirate Bay. According to the IPKat:

“In June 2009 the music and film industry filed a petition for a preliminary injunction requiring Telenor to block its customers’ access to The Pirate Bay. The Asker og Bærum District Court delivered its decision 6 November in favour of Telenor. The court concluded that Telenor did not unlawfully contribute to copyright infringements that take place by its customers’ use of The Pirate Bay. Accordingly, the court held that that there was no legal basis for ordering Telenor to block access to the website. Telenor has repeatedly emphasized that it does not support infringements that take place through use of The Pirate Bay. On the contrary, Telenor co-operates closely with rights holders by establishing solutions for legal downloads and streaming of content. The case did not concern the question of whether customers of Telenor infringed copyright by using The Pirate Bay, but whether Telenor - by granting access to The Pirate Bay -- committed an illegal act. ... In its assessment the court emphasized the unfortunate consequences of imposing blocking obligations on internet service providers. The decision is not yet legally in force. The music and film industry are considering appealing against the decision.”

Artigo de Christian Engström, Pirate party’s member of the European Parliament

Copyright laws threaten our online freedom

If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot oftext and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not“ours” at all. On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixesf or others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down. This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicatewith each other in private, without being monitored. File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all communication between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade, the volume of file-sharing has grown exponentially. Even if the authorities closed down all other possibilities, people could still send copyrighted files as attachments to e-mails or through private networks. If people start doing that, should we give the government the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks? Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to make a choice. The world is at a crossroads. The internet and new information technologies are so powerful that no matter what we do, society will change. But the direction has not been decided.The technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every detail ofour lives. In the former East Germany, the government needed tens of thousands of employees to keep track of the citizens using typewriters, pencils and index cards. Today a computer can do the same thing a million times faster, at the push of a button. There are many politicians who want to push that button. The same technology could instead be used to create a society that embraces spontaneity, collaboration and diversity. Where the citizens are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture through one-way media, but are instead active participants collaborating on a journey into the future. The internet it still in its infancy, but already we see fantastic things appearing as if by magic. Take Linux, the free computer operating system, or Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Witness the participatory culture of MySpace and YouTube, or the growth of the Pirate Bay, which makes the world’s culture easily available to anybody with an internet connection. But where technology opens up newpossibilities, our intellectual property laws do their best to restrict them. Linux is held back by patents, the rest of the examples by copyright. The public increasingly recognises the need for reform. That was why Piratpartiet – the Pirate party – won 7.1 per cent of the popular vote in Sweden in the European Union elections. This gave us a seat in the European parliament for the first time. Our manifesto is to reform copyright laws and gradually abolish the patent system. We oppose mass surveillance and censorship on the net, as in the rest of society. We want to make the EU more democratic and transparent. This is our entire platform. We intend to devote all our time and energy to protecting the fundamental civil liberties on the net and elsewhere. Seven per cent of Swedish voters agreed with us that it makes sense to put other political differences aside in order to ensure this. Political decisions taken over the next five years are likely to sett he course we take into the information society, and will affect the lives of millions for many years into the future. Will we let our fears lead us towards a dystopian Big Brother state, or will we have the courage and wisdom to choose an exciting future in a free and open society? The information revolution is happening here and now. It is up to us todecide what future we want.

Christian Engström
Pirate party’s member of the European Parliament

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Pirate Bay

Tendo os fundadores do site “Pirate Bay” sido dados como responsáveis por violações em sede de direito de autor, o site foi subseqentemente adquirido pela empresa sueca, Global Gaming Factory, por SEK 60 milhões (US $7.8 milhões). Pretende-se que o site continue a prestar um service P2P, mas, desta feita, sendo as partilhas de conteúdos jusautorais autorizadas pelos respectivos titulares de direitos (ou seja, legítimas porque remuneradas) e sendo os utilizadores que disponibilizam os seus computadores, na rede P2P em questão, remunerados para o efeito.