fildeling – Modpress

Casper Christensen og Frank Hvam: Bare download vores film

– I skal sgu ikke være bange for at piratkopiere filmen. Download den – fyr den af – og lav den i mange kopier. Casper og jeg har det sådan – og det er med hånden på hjertet – at når vi tæller sammen hvad vi er blevet snydt for af penge, så er det ikke piraterne der har snydt os. Det er distributørerne og producenterne der har snydt os, det er ikke jer søde piratbrugere … Fyr den løs!

Distribution via download er jo også blevet en del af den virkelighed, som filmmagere og musikere må forholde sig til i disse år. Det er uden tvivl langt klogere at ride med den bølge fremfor at forsøge at svømme imod den.
Klovn - Frank Hvam og Casper Christensen

EU-parlamentet vedtager anbefaling om at lukke for fildeleres Internet

En kniv i ryggen på borgernes rettigheder, skriver La Quadrature du Net i en pressemeddelelse:

This very repressive text is one more step in the entertainment industries’ crusade against their own public. The Members of the Parliament have failed to recognize that the measures called for in this non-legislative text profoundly undermine fundamental freedoms1. For the next steps, citizens must remain on their guard and should continue to inform their elected representatives about the lies of the industry, and the importance of the Internet for the future of our societies.

In the end, the lobbying from the entertainment industries proved extremely powerful, as demonstrated by the nefarious influence of a few members of the ALDE group who helped rejecting alternative approaches and thereby paved the way for a call to ruthless enforcement2. Baseless studies3 and letters signed by dead or unknown movie producers, fake signatures4, or 7 years old singers5 were used among other deceptive techniques to get this vote, against the general interest of EU citizens.

“The Gallo report is an illustration of the will of the entertainment industry to try to impose private copyright police and justice of the Net6. Repressive schemes such as the “three strikes” policies and other Internet access restrictions –typified by the French HADOPI or the UK Digital Economy laws– negate fundamental rights, such as the right to a fair trial, the freedom of communication or the right to privacy. So far, they have also turned out to be a political and technical failure. Even if they are encouraged by the European Commission and the draft ACTA agreement, such measures giving investigation, evidence collection and sanction powers to private actors are not tolerable in democracies abiding by the rule of Law.” analyses Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesperson of the citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net.

“EU citizens must remain watchful and continue their essential work of informing their elected representatives about the crucial role that a free Internet plays for the future of our societies and an expanded creative economy. Only through civic engagement and democracy can the lies of the entertainment industries be rejected as such. Soon, elected representatives across Europe will realize that the crusade of these industries against their own public undermines the founding values of our democracies, and that it should be stopped by all means.” concludes Zimmermann.

Ole Wolf opsummerer konsekvenserne på dansk:

Når man tænker på, hvordan visse pladeselskabers lobbyisme har gjort grænsen mellem mistanke til dom temmelig tynd, skal der ikke meget til. Eller antag alternativt, at jeg ikke kan kontrollere, om mine børn deler filer, og således bliver dømt på grund af dem, fordi et passende indrettet juridisk system ikke finder det relevant at bære bevisbyrden.

Tredje gang risikerer jeg at miste internetforbindelsen. Det har EU-Parlamentet netop vedtaget mulighed for, selvfølgelig takket være de Konservative.

Det vil betyde:

At jeg ikke vil kunne være en del af “det digitale Danmark”, hvilket i praksis betyder fratagelse af en del borgerrettigheder.

At jeg ikke ville være i stand til at arbejde hjemmefra.

At også min familie, hvor min kone og vores to børn ikke har hver deres internetforbindelse, bliver afskåret fra kommunikation med det offentlige og således frataget borgerrettigheder.

At min kone ikke ville være i stand til at arbejde hjemmefra.

At mine børn ikke ville kunne logge på Elevintra og se, hvad de havde for af lektier.

At mine børn ville være afskåret fra de samme sociale netværk, som deres venner deltager i.

Der er indtil videre intet af dette, der er omsat til dansk lov, men det er umiddelbart helt usædvanligt dårlige perspektiver.

Fildeler retsforfølges for 25 millioner og fortæller sin historie

Joel Tenebaum fortæller i The Guardian om sine genvordigheder, efter at pladebranchen har sagsøgt ham for fildeling, og han har nægtet at bøje sig og erkende, at han skulle have gjort noget galt:

To a certain extent, I’m afraid to write this. Though they’ve already seized my computer and copied my hard drive, I have no guarantee they won’t do it again. For the past four years, they’ve been threatening me, making demands for trial, deposing my parents, sisters, friends, and myself twice – the first time for nine hours, the second for seven. I face up to $4.5m in fines and the last case like mine that went to trial had a jury verdict of $1.92m.

When I contemplate this, I have to remind myself what I’m being charged with. Investment fraud? Robbing a casino? A cyber-attack against the federal government? No. I shared music. And refused to cave.

No matter how many people I explain this to, the reaction is always the same: dumbfounded surprise and visceral indignance, both of which are a result of the amazing secrecy the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has operated under. “How did they get you?” I’m asked. I explain that there are 40,000 people like me, being sued for the same thing, and we were picked from a pool of millions who shared music. And that’s when a look appears on the face of whoever I’m talking to, the horrified “it could have been me!” look. […]

in August 2007, I came home from work to find a stack of papers, maybe 50 pages thick, sitting at the door to my apartment. That’s when I found out what it was like to have possibly the most talented copyright lawyers in the business, bankrolled by multibillion-dollar corporations, throwing everything they had at someone who wanted to share Come As You Are with other Nirvana fans.

I had assumed that as an equal in a court of law in the United States, my story would be told and a just outcome would result. I discovered the sheer magnitude of obstacles in your way to get your say in court. And even if you get to trial, (which only one other person, Jammie Thomas Rasset, has done) you’re still far from equal with the machine controlling 85% of commercial music in the US. […]

My sisters, dad and mother have all been deposed. My high-school friends, friends of the family too. My computer’s been seized and hard drive copied, and my parents and sister narrowly escaped the same fate for their computers. And the professor who supervises my teaching is continually frustrated with my need to have people cover for me, while my research in grad school is put on hold to deal with people whose full-time job is to keep an anvil over my head. I have to consider every unrelated thing I do in my private life in the event that I’m interrogated under oath about it. I wonder how I’ll stand up in a courtroom for hours having litigators try to convince a jury of my guilt and the reprehensibility of my character.

Er der nogen af mine læsere, der kan genkende denne følelse af “det ku’ have været mig!”, som jeg har fremhævet?

Tak, Morten Jørgensen!

Link: How it feels to be sued for $4.5m, Joel fights back

The Pirate Bays kommercialisering og demise

Mange af The Pirate Bays brugere er vrede over bagmændenes beslutning om at sælge domænenavnet og forretningen og selv komme videre med noget andet – en vrede, der på den anden side kan være lidt svær at forstå i betragtning af, at folkene bag siden faktisk har ydet en rimeligt stor indsats for at kunne hjælpe deres brugere med at dele filer.

Og det er jo rigtigt, at nu hvor varemærket The Pirate Bay bliver kommercielt og lovligt, vil den også holde op med at køre en bittorrent-tracker til fri fildeling.

Rasmus Fleischer skriver på copyriot.se, at tiden måske er kommet for alle de folk, der gerne vil dele filer og er kede af, at The Pirate Bay forsvinder, at praktisere noget “fri fildeling” og selv kopiere selveste piratbugten:

“The Pirate Bay”, finally, is fundamentally transformed by the act of selling “The Pirate Bay”. It does not really mean that the symbol can be sold. Rather, any attempt by the owner of the domain name to change what the symbol stands for, would mean that the symbol is dissolving and its associations re-projected at multiple other symbols. This could have quite interesting results. Even if The Pirate Bay and its associated projects have been able to use the power of one singular symbol, there has also been an awareness of the problem with The Pirate Bay’s oligopolic status.

File-sharing was never about leaning behind and letting other people do the work. The act of selling “The Pirate Bay” (which really means selling some of the components in a larger assemblage) could work as a wake-up call. Ideally, the anger of some users will transform into action, so that more open bittorrent indexing website, maybe even trackers, will be set up. That would mean that The Pirate Bay, finally and paradoxically, reaches its goal, which is to be copied. The Pirate Bay never asked to be the sole representatives of file-sharing. When large parts of the world’s internet traffic depends on whether Fredrik is too drunk to fix a server error, a radical diversification is needed to maintaing the power of P2P file-sharing. Dissolving the centered subject, abandoning a trademark to multiply what it stands for. That’s the implicit schizo-politics of The Pirate Bay’s recent move.

Link: The schizo-politics of The Pirate Bay, Inc.

Musikindustriens piratsludder – Bad Science regner efter

Den britiske musikindustri har bekendtgjort, at den britiske befolkning hvert år downloader 4,73 milliarder ophavsretsligt beskyttede kunstværker til en værdi af 120 milliarder pund.

Før vi lige spørger os selv, om alle disse ting virkelig er £25 værd stykket, var det måske også værd at kigge lidt på de andre tal.

Det gjorde Bad Science:

You are killing our creative industries. “Downloading costs billions” said the Sun. “MORE than seven million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, Government advisors said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material.”

That’s about a tenth of our GDP. No wonder the Daily Mail were worried too: “The network had 1.3 million users sharing files online at midday on a weekday. If each of those downloaded just one file per day, this would amount to 4.73 billion items being consumed for free every year.”

Now I am always suspicious of this industry, because they have produced a lot of dodgy figures over the years. I also doubt that every download is lost revenue since, for example, people who download more also buy more music. I’d like more details.

But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the figure of 4.73 billion items downloaded each year, worth £120 billion. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25. Now before we go anywhere, this already seems rather high. I am not an economist, and I don’t know about their methods, but to me, for example, an appropriate comparator for someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental value, not the sale value. And someone downloading a £1,000 professional 3D animation software package to fiddle about with at home may not use it more than three times. I’m just saying.

In any case, that’s £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids, or students, and even if not, that’s still about a third of the average UK wage. Before tax. Oh but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473 million items and £12 billion (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist. I can find no public correction.

I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of ten and were widely reported in news outlets around the world. SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful.

In the “believe it or not” dept.

Link: Home taping didn’t kill music

Britiske internetbrugere: Dommen over Pirate Bay er uretfærdig

Den britiske avis The Guardian har en online-afstemning hvor de forsøger at lodde stemningen blandt deres læsere.

I øjeblikket er stemningen, som det fremgår af billedet – de har desværre ingen opgørelse over, hvor mange stemmer, der er opgivet (det kommer måske, når afstemningen er afsluttet).

I skrivende stund kan du forresten selv hoppe ind og give din mening til kende. Konklusionen synes at være, at hvis formålet med dommen og retssagen var at statuere, at fildeling er forkert, som vort eget danske IFPIs overfjols Jesper Bay antyder på sin JP-blog, er det lige præcis det stik modsatte, man har opnået: Dommen ses som formålsløst overkill af en befolkning, der for længst har vænnet sig til, at fildeling og downloads er vejen frem. Det er lov om ophavsret og branchens forretningsmodeller, der må ændre sig her, ikke teknologien eller promovering af musik og kunst via fildeling.

Og hvis denne ændring skulle føre med sig, at musikerne ikke længere har brug for de pladeselskaber, der i dag gør hvad de kan for at udsuge og udbytte dem, det bedste de har lært, vil i hvert fald mine øjne være tørre.

Link: A fair sentence for pirates?

Folkene bag Pirate Bay kendt skyldige, idømt fængselsstraf

… hvilket der er en masse at sige om.

Som ofte påpeget har The Pirate Bay som “piratside” lige så meget været en politisk aktion som en side af praktisk betydning, eftersom det vrimler med andre og mindst lige så gode hjemsteder for torrents af vekslende lovlighed.

Så hvad er betydningen af denne afgørelse? Vil Pirate Bay forsvinde, og hvis den gør, betyder det noget, og hvad vil komme i stedet? Vi giver ordet til Cory Doctorow på Boing Boing:

After the illegal seizure of its servers in 2006, The Pirate Bay supposedly adopted a distributed architecture with failover servers in other jurisdictions that were unlikely to cooperate with EU orders. If The Pirate Bay shuts down, it’s certain that something else will spring up in its wake, of course — just as The Pirate Bay appeared in the wake of the closure of other, more “moderate” services.

With each successive takedown, the entertainment industry forces these services into architectures that are harder to police and harder to shut down. And with each takedown, the industry creates martyrs who inspire their users into an ideological opposition to the entertainment industry, turning them into people who actively dislike these companies and wish them ill (as opposed to opportunists who supplemented their legal acquisition of copyrighted materials with infringing downloads).

It’s a race to turn a relatively benign symbiote (the original Napster, which offered to pay for its downloads if it could get a license) into vicious, antibiotic resistant bacteria that’s dedicated to their destruction.

Slippe af med downloads og fildeling kan man ikke – ånden kan ikke puttes tilbage i flasken igen, så lidt som man i 70erne kunne forhindre folk i at kopiere musik fra plader og over på kasettebånd. Kopiering er billig i den digitale alder, og befolkningens retsfølelse har endegyldigt flyttet sig i retning af, at fildeling er OK. Det bedste, industrien kan gøre, er at opdatere deres forretningsmodeller.

I mellemtiden må vi jo tage bestik af dommens indhold og dens mulige konsekvenser:

One of the defendants, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, admitted that Pirate Bay had lost its case.

“Stay calm – nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or filesharing what so
ever. This is just a theatre for the media,” he said.

“Really, it’s a bit LOL. It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release.”

The trial began on 16 February in Stockholm district court, when the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Fredik Neij, Carl Lundstrom, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Kolmisoppi, were put in the dock on charges of assisting copyright infringement.

The Pirate Bay does not itself host audio and video files, but provides links to torrents hosted elsewhere on the internet.

Throughout the trial, the Pirate Bay defendants have played up their image as
rebellious outsiders, arriving at court in a slogan-daubed party bus and insisting that their position was to defend a popular technology rather than illegal filesharing.

Prosecutors made a major slip-up on the second day of the trial after failing to convince the judge that illegally copied files had been distributed by the site.

The trial has further polarised the tech community and the music industry with both sides eagerly awaiting the result, which will be regarded as a precedent for future filesharing cases.

Link: The Pirate Bay trial: guilty verdict