Very interesting example of how metaphors affects our thinking and perception of matters. I hope people will take the time to read the whole paper.
I do think however that a much simpler solution, assuming that it was politically viable in the short term, would be to simply drastically reduce the copyright term (something which the author herself seems to agree with).
I'm a bit divided. I'm all for the free market, but the more volontary filtering there is the easier it will be for courts and politicians in the longer run to argue for the introduction of mandatory filters for other things than porn - pointing to the existing filtering solutions as examples of how this can be done at a relatively low cost and that it's already accepted and widely used.
Well, I don't think they are that naïve. They might not expect that the letter in itself will have any effect. The contrast between the contents of the letter and the nonresponsive and dismissive attitude of the government however could serve to create a public opinion against secrecy. So in essence they set something that's bigger than just the letter in motion.
Not directly related to this blog post, but just a general reflection:
isn't "three strikes" a bit of a misnomer when it's actually more of a "three allegation" system? Shouldn't we be more careful with adopting a language that implicitly seem to assume that someone can be guilty of something before being tried?
"Around 200,000 young Swedes aged 15-25 have adopted anonymization techniques with products such as Relakks, IPredator and Mole. This is 15 percent of the whole age group.
Btw. I think many of the articles about VPN usage forgets about geographical IP restrictions as a driver for the adoption of VPN - again ironically something created by the copyright industry that then comes back to bite them.
I disagree with you on A. If you store the IP address then of course it will be possible to retrieve it later. How much it will tell you is another matter.
Please note that PST may not be interested in the data for the purpose of prosecution but for further investigations. I wouldn't rule out that it might be useful in some cases, but it's still a totally unbalanced proposal that restricts basic human rights in an unacceptable way.
No, but it is part of the EEA. The request by PST is directly related to the norweigian implementation of the EU data retention directive. It seems to be a bit uncertain to what degree Norway is bound by the directive (some analysis in norwegian can be found here).
The strange thing about the norweigian legislation is that it seems to give the authority that's appointed to oversee the data retention the power to extend the obligation to retain traffic data to new parties. One would think that the parliament or at least the government would have to give its approval to such restrictions of fundamental human rights.
So what PST is doing here is making a request to this authority (PT) to extend the obligation to retain data. And it's not just internet communities and chats either. PST wants to extend the obligation to IP-adress data to internet cafés and it wants ISPs that use NAT to store the URLs that people access.
Btw. in Sweden the police requested that the geographical position of people who make a mobile phone call should be registered every minute to track the movement of the person. Thankfully the government disagreed and the data is now to be stored "only" at the start and end of the phone call. We can only hope that this PST request ends up being rejected too. I think that's quite likely since the EU data retention directive introduces no obligations for providers of services over the internet (eg. webmail, IP-telephony, etc) unless they are offered by a company that also provides internet access or physical network infrastructure. So internet communities and such are not covered and although the PST seems to pretend otherwise it should be clear to most people that this is a quite massive extension of what the directive says.
"decided that it is perfectly reasonable for ISPs to be ordered to hand over customer info -- if certain specific conditions are met to keep it in-line with the EU data retention rules"
I believe those specific conditions are set out in other directives -- not the EU data retention directive. The data retention directive quite explicitly states that data stored for the purpose of that directive can only be handed out to competent authorities - not private parties. Now if the data was stored in a database that was not mandated by the data retention directive, then it's another story.
It's not entirely clear to me how one should reconcile this verdict with the earlier suggested verdict by the advocate general. Specifically point 60:
"For the disclosure of personal data to be possible, EU law requires that an obligation to retain data be provided for in national law, in order to specify the types of data to be retained, the purposes of retaining the data, the period of retention and the persons with access to said data. It would be contrary to the principles of the protection of personal data to make use of databases that exist for purposes other than those thus defined by the legislature."
There is no law in Sweden that says that IP address logs should be retained for the purpose of being used in civil suits. This verdict doesn't really seem to explicitly contradict the statement of the advocate general. I wonder if that's because the court disagrees, agrees but didn't find it relevant in its answer to the questions, or if I have misunderstood something (I'm not a lawyer after all).
"Rapidshare must monitor what pages on it's site are getting visited, and then check those pages to see if the material is infringing. The best way to do that is to look at the referring sites, to see how the file is linked, etc."
If this refers to the http referer header it easy to add a level of indirection that obscures it rendering that method pretty useless. If the court means that Rapidshare is to determine what constitutes an infringement and what doesn't, then that seems like a dangerous ruling.
Does anyone have a link to the ruling? I find the obligation to monitor third-party sites really strange and would like to read the court's own words about this.
This is what the EU E-commerce directive article 15 says: "1. Member States shall not impose a general obligation on providers, when providing the services covered by Articles 12, 13 and 14, to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity."
To me it seems that the german court has found that there is "a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity", which runs counter the meaning of article 15.1 above.
"Do all of this OUTSIDE of the USA where Software patents are unenforceable! Some nice country with a great economy maybe.. Brazil springs to mind."
news.swpat.org: "Brazil’s patent office has launched a consultation about granting software patents" :-(
"Even better, the Doctors could altruistically make the code Open Source (GPL at minimum) and release it into the wild."
Or the state could finance the development and it could be released for free (both as in beer and as in speech). That might turn out to be cheaper than subsidizing proprietary aids anyway.
It's simply a result of the power balance. A too long patent term would also hurt some big and influential companies, so in the patent case you have a company vs. company struggle. In the copyright case you have to a large degree companies/special interests vs. the public. The former have traditionally been better organized which is why we see unfair and undemocratic rent-seeking in the area of copyright today.
It's going to be interesting to see if this increases the willingness of people to engage in a political fight concerning these issues. After all, all this file hosters combined should have a quite significant user base.
Same thing could be said about people expressing themselves on sites censored for copyright reasons: "well, they can always find some other place - some less controversial part of the net". I don't think that's a valid argument.
(untitled comment)
Very interesting example of how metaphors affects our thinking and perception of matters. I hope people will take the time to read the whole paper.
I do think however that a much simpler solution, assuming that it was politically viable in the short term, would be to simply drastically reduce the copyright term (something which the author herself seems to agree with).
Re: If you can not to write - don't write
> Pushkin said: "If you can not to write - don't write"
Apparently he didn't heed his own advice... :P
Slippery slope
I'm a bit divided. I'm all for the free market, but the more volontary filtering there is the easier it will be for courts and politicians in the longer run to argue for the introduction of mandatory filters for other things than porn - pointing to the existing filtering solutions as examples of how this can be done at a relatively low cost and that it's already accepted and widely used.
Re:
Well, I don't think they are that naïve. They might not expect that the letter in itself will have any effect. The contrast between the contents of the letter and the nonresponsive and dismissive attitude of the government however could serve to create a public opinion against secrecy. So in essence they set something that's bigger than just the letter in motion.
Strike vs. allegation
Not directly related to this blog post, but just a general reflection:
isn't "three strikes" a bit of a misnomer when it's actually more of a "three allegation" system? Shouldn't we be more careful with adopting a language that implicitly seem to assume that someone can be guilty of something before being tried?
Re: This myth was busted.
If that's the reason, using a phone during take off and the final part of landing should be fine then I suppose...
VPN Usage
Maybe this recent article describing the Swedish situation is a foreboding of what is to come: VPNs used to defeat censorship and data retention in Sweden
Btw. I think many of the articles about VPN usage forgets about geographical IP restrictions as a driver for the adoption of VPN - again ironically something created by the copyright industry that then comes back to bite them.
Re:
I disagree with you on A. If you store the IP address then of course it will be possible to retrieve it later. How much it will tell you is another matter.
Please note that PST may not be interested in the data for the purpose of prosecution but for further investigations. I wouldn't rule out that it might be useful in some cases, but it's still a totally unbalanced proposal that restricts basic human rights in an unacceptable way.
Re: Re:
No, but it is part of the EEA. The request by PST is directly related to the norweigian implementation of the EU data retention directive. It seems to be a bit uncertain to what degree Norway is bound by the directive (some analysis in norwegian can be found here).
(untitled comment)
The strange thing about the norweigian legislation is that it seems to give the authority that's appointed to oversee the data retention the power to extend the obligation to retain traffic data to new parties. One would think that the parliament or at least the government would have to give its approval to such restrictions of fundamental human rights.
So what PST is doing here is making a request to this authority (PT) to extend the obligation to retain data. And it's not just internet communities and chats either. PST wants to extend the obligation to IP-adress data to internet cafés and it wants ISPs that use NAT to store the URLs that people access.
Btw. in Sweden the police requested that the geographical position of people who make a mobile phone call should be registered every minute to track the movement of the person. Thankfully the government disagreed and the data is now to be stored "only" at the start and end of the phone call. We can only hope that this PST request ends up being rejected too. I think that's quite likely since the EU data retention directive introduces no obligations for providers of services over the internet (eg. webmail, IP-telephony, etc) unless they are offered by a company that also provides internet access or physical network infrastructure. So internet communities and such are not covered and although the PST seems to pretend otherwise it should be clear to most people that this is a quite massive extension of what the directive says.
But who knows what happens in the future.
(untitled comment)
"decided that it is perfectly reasonable for ISPs to be ordered to hand over customer info -- if certain specific conditions are met to keep it in-line with the EU data retention rules"
I believe those specific conditions are set out in other directives -- not the EU data retention directive. The data retention directive quite explicitly states that data stored for the purpose of that directive can only be handed out to competent authorities - not private parties. Now if the data was stored in a database that was not mandated by the data retention directive, then it's another story.
It's not entirely clear to me how one should reconcile this verdict with the earlier suggested verdict by the advocate general. Specifically point 60:
There is no law in Sweden that says that IP address logs should be retained for the purpose of being used in civil suits. This verdict doesn't really seem to explicitly contradict the statement of the advocate general. I wonder if that's because the court disagrees, agrees but didn't find it relevant in its answer to the questions, or if I have misunderstood something (I'm not a lawyer after all).
(untitled comment)
Unless it's really social (as in open-minded discussions rather than one-sided campaigns) it's just media - not social media.
Re:
"Rapidshare must monitor what pages on it's site are getting visited, and then check those pages to see if the material is infringing. The best way to do that is to look at the referring sites, to see how the file is linked, etc."
If this refers to the http referer header it easy to add a level of indirection that obscures it rendering that method pretty useless. If the court means that Rapidshare is to determine what constitutes an infringement and what doesn't, then that seems like a dangerous ruling.
(untitled comment)
Does anyone have a link to the ruling? I find the obligation to monitor third-party sites really strange and would like to read the court's own words about this.
This is what the EU E-commerce directive article 15 says:
"1. Member States shall not impose a general obligation on providers, when providing the services covered by Articles 12, 13 and 14, to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity."
To me it seems that the german court has found that there is "a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity", which runs counter the meaning of article 15.1 above.
Re:
"Do all of this OUTSIDE of the USA where Software patents are unenforceable! Some nice country with a great economy maybe.. Brazil springs to mind."
news.swpat.org: "Brazil’s patent office has launched a consultation about granting software patents" :-(
"Even better, the Doctors could altruistically make the code Open Source (GPL at minimum) and release it into the wild."
Or the state could finance the development and it could be released for free (both as in beer and as in speech). That might turn out to be cheaper than subsidizing proprietary aids anyway.
Re: Smear campaign in EU parliament
I meant to say "fresh" - not "refresh".
Smear campaign in EU parliament
This refresh blog post by Falkvinge is perhaps relevant to this story:
How Microsoft Pays Big Money To Smear Google In European Parliament
Re: I have often wondered
It's simply a result of the power balance. A too long patent term would also hurt some big and influential companies, so in the patent case you have a company vs. company struggle. In the copyright case you have to a large degree companies/special interests vs. the public. The former have traditionally been better organized which is why we see unfair and undemocratic rent-seeking in the area of copyright today.
Re:
It's going to be interesting to see if this increases the willingness of people to engage in a political fight concerning these issues. After all, all this file hosters combined should have a quite significant user base.
Re: Re: free speech is for everyone, even opponents of your views. Above all opponents .
Same thing could be said about people expressing themselves on sites censored for copyright reasons: "well, they can always find some other place - some less controversial part of the net". I don't think that's a valid argument.