Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 42

Cynicism Redefined: Why The Copyright Lobby Loves Child Porn

Copyright Monopoly: “Child pornography is great,” the man said enthusiastically. “Politicians do not understand file sharing, but they understand child pornography, and they want to filter that to score points with the public. Once we get them to filter child pornography, we can get them to extend the block to file sharing.”

The date was May 27, 2007, and the man was Johan Schlüter, head of the Danish Anti-Piracy Group (Antipiratgruppen). He was speaking in front of an audience where the press had not been invited; it was assumed to be copyright industry insiders only. It wasn’t. Christian Engström, who’s now a Pirate Member of the European Parliament, net activist Oscar Swartz, and I were also there.

“My friends,” Schlüter said. “We must filter the Internet to win over online file sharing. But politicians don’t understand that file sharing is bad, and this is a problem for us. Therefore, we must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that’s something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet.”

“We are developing a child pornography filter in cooperation with the IFPI and the MPA so we can show politicians that filtering works,” he said. “Child pornography is an issue they understand.” Schlüter grinned broadly.

I couldn’t believe my ears as I heard this the first time. But the strategy has been set into motion worldwide.

Schlüter’s plan worked like clockwork. Denmark was the first country to censor AllOfMP3.com, the (fully legal) Russian music store, and is now censoring The Pirate Bay off the internet. The copyright industry is succeeding in creating a fragmented Internet.

COLUMN REPOST, UPDATED

This is a repost of a previous TorrentFreak column, which has been updated to reflect recent events. The book The Case For Copyright Reform also describes the scene with Mr. Schlüter, on page 14.

This is why you see the copyright lobby bring up child pornography again and again and again. They are using it as a battering ram for censoring any culture outside of their own distribution channels. You can Google the term in any language, together with the copyright lobby organization’s site in that language, and see them continuously coming back to it.

In Sweden, the copyright industry lobbyist Per Strömbäck has publicly admitted it being one of his best arguments. Try Googling for the Swedish word for child pornography on the Swedish lobby site and see if you get any hits in any articles. If there was no direct association strategy, you’d not expect to get any hits at all – you’d not expect them to touch that subject. Instead, you get over 70 hits.

The reasoning is simple and straightforward. Once you have established that someone who is in a position to censor other people’s communication has a responsibility to do so, the floodgates open and those middlemen can be politically charged with censoring anything that somebody objects to being distributed.

It is not hard to see why the copyright lobby is pursuing this avenue so ferociously.

It doesn’t really matter that censorship at the DNS level – legislating that one particular set of DNS servers must lie – is ridiculously easy to circumvent: it’s just a matter of changing your DNS provider. The idea is to create a political environment where censorship of undesirable information is seen as something natural and positive. Once that principle has been established, the next step is to force a switch to more efficient censorship filters at the IP or even the content level.

News reached us this week that the so-called six strikes arrangement with Internet Service Providers in the United States has been delayed, but is expected to take effect this year. This is a quite unpopular agreement between ISPs and the copyright lobby to police the net outside the realm of the law. The arrangement, it turns out, also stems from the copyright industry’s love of child pornography.

“We pointed out to [the governor] that there are overlaps between the child porn problem and piracy,” Mr. Sherman [The RIAA president] said, “because all kinds of files, legal and otherwise, are traded on peer-to-peer networks.” (New York Times)

Sound familiar? It should. It’s a page right out of the 2007 scene where the Danish Mr. Schlüter talked about the copyright lobby’s policymaking strategy of associating non-monopolistic sharing of culture with the rape of defenseless children.

This association strategy has now worked in the United States, too.

In the United Kingdom, when the courts ruled that the Internet Service Providers must use their existing child porn filter to also censor The Pirate Bay, who do you think gave the courts that idea? When the court didn’t just mandate that The Pirate Bay be censored, but gave the ISPs explicit instructions for what technology to use to do it? That incident is probably the clearest example of the success of this association strategy, yet.

Just when you think the copyright lobby can’t sink any lower, they surprise you again. And it gets worse. Much worse.

In Europe, the copyright lobby succeeded in pushing Commissioner Cecilia “Censilia” Malmström to create a similar censorship regime, despite clear setbacks in these ambitions from the European Court of Justice which defended human rights and freedom to communicate against internet censorship.

But taking one step back, would censorship of child pornography be acceptable in the first place? Is the copyright industry perhaps justified in this particular pursuit, beyond their real goal of blocking non-monopolistic distribution?

There are two layers of answers to that. The first is the principal one, whether pre-trial censorship is ever correct. History tells us that it plainly isn’t, not under any circumstance. End of story.

But more emotionally, we can also turn to a German group named Mogis. It is a support group for adult people who were abused as children, and is the only one of its kind. They are very outspoken and adamant on the issue of censoring child pornography.

Censorship hides the problem and causes more children to be abused, they say. Don’t close your eyes, but see reality and act on it. As hard as it is to force oneself to be confronted emotionally with this statement, it is rationally understandable that a problem can’t be addressed by hiding it. One of their slogans is “Crimes should be punished and not hidden”.

This puts the copyright industry’s efforts in perspective. In this context they don’t care in the slightest about children, only about their control over distribution channels. If you ever thought you knew cynical, this takes it to a whole new level.

The conclusion is as unpleasant as it is inevitable. The copyright industry lobby is actively trying to hide egregious crimes against children, obviously not because they care about the children, but because the resulting censorship mechanism can be a benefit to their business if they manage to broaden the censorship in a follup-up stage. All this in defense of their lucrative monopoly that starves the public of culture.

It’s hard to comprehend that there are people who are so shameless that they would actually do this. But there are. Every time you think the copyright lobby has sunk as morally low as is humanly possible, they come up with new ways to surprise you.

“With time, it becomes clearer that these people will stop at nothing.” — Danish reporter Henrik Moltke, about a (different) recent run-in with the copyright lobby, and who reminded me of this episode and who observed firsthand the next occasion when Schlüter and I met, when I reminded Schlüter of his remarks in front of a silent audience. (Thanks, Henrik.)

My Fight Is For Love

Personal – Travis McCrea: Our world has become so much about how much worse other people are making things, and finding ways to promote our own ideology while putting down another person or group for their beliefs. While I find it important to highlight abuses, I want us to take a second and remember that the Pirate fight, is a fight for love.

I have found myself being drawn into it myself, my social media feeds spew negativity from my various social acquaintances and it’s very easy to get drawn into these negative emotions. You find people who line their pockets with cash, and they try to change the law to allow themselves to not only make what they do acceptable, but enable it as well. We blame these people for what is wrong with our world, but the truth is that these people are not evil.

There is no (well minded) person on Earth, in my belief, that is out to do wrong: simply to do wrong. It comes from generations of beliefs being passed down, and comes from those who themselves believe that by carrying out their beliefs they are actually making the world a better place. I cannot hate another person for wanting to do what’s right, I can only love them for their effort and attempt to guide public opinion in another direction.

We are pirates because we believe in the true social good. This blog post doesn’t belong to me, this blog post belongs to all the people who have inspired me and educated me. Everything from my mannerisms to my poor punctation skills all were influenced by other people. I am an accumulation of my past, and I pass that on to others in the future (hopefully not my poor punctuation, but that too probably).

When we say we want the right to privacy, we are not asking for privacy so we can then break the law or to protect people who wish to harm others. We demand a right to privacy because we feel that all people are entitled to the basic right of security of their persons, and we (through our enhanced knowledge we gained through the internet) have seen the dangers of a society which deprives people of that right. We want privacy because we love, and we recognize that while we might (and a big might at that) all be safer if there was 100% transparency in every detail of every persons life and if we all walked around naked, sharing every fleeting thought that crosses our mind… but that we must trust each other enough to know that it is not in any persons nature to want to harm another person for no reason.

We recognize that we must put our faith in those around us, because they are the ones who make our democracy work. They provide the services that we rely on to live, and have services provided to us which make our job easier. The people around us all have a general purpose of making the world a better place. While some people do what they need to do to survive or to provide short term gains for themselves, there is no well minded person who wishes to have the world be a worse place when they leave it.

Christians have done horrible things in their past, and I believe that most religious organizations have been corrupted into doing the wrong thing, but these organizations are not doing wrong simply because they are evil but because of a series of events that have happened in the past which have given these organizations the warped view that their path is the nobel path.

Instead of finding our differences within the Christians though, what we must show is that we have far more similarities than we do differences. The Pirate movement is a near living embodiment of the desires of Jesus Christ had he been living in modern times. Do you think Jesus would want every person to have a minimum income? I think he would have.

I am tired of hating, we have too much hate. I used to smile more often than anyone else, but I have allowed my strong emotions towards the goals of our ideology and the wrong doings of others to polarize me. I still smile, and I still like giving random people high fives, but I need to do more of that. I want the Pirate Party to not only protect civil liberties, and share in the way that we all have been taught from our parents (and as they were taught by their parents), but let us bring our love to the world too.

Make a post about something beautiful, tell the world what is making you happy. Why get your joy and entertainment from putting other people down? When we speak hate, we are not making the world a better place and from an ideological standpoint, people are tuning us out from it. People want to hear good news, people want to hear about love.

It’s not about being a hippy, you can love and be well dressed and have a job. It’s a mindset you must have. Next time you are going to post something about a person or organization that is doing something wrong, I would like you to find something that they do good and post that instead or at the very least post the good thing along side the negative:

“X, I know you guys are doing Y because you feel it is good for society, but I feel that it will cause Z”

I love the Pirate Party, and because I am a bit socially awkward — I find it hard to make friends. You guys have been my best friends, and you make my life better. Thank you.

Study: Despite Tougher Copyright Monopoly Laws, Sharing Remains Pervasive

Copyright Monopoly: 61% of 15-25-year-olds engage directly in sharing of culture. The social pressure for upholding the copyright monopoly laws is close to non-existent. The few who are deterred by harsher monopoly enforcement tend to compensate by anonymizing. These are the conclusions of a fresh study on the youths’ sharing of culture.

The Cybernormer group at the University of Lund has published a followup report from a 2009 study, showing that the current ban on sharing culture and knowledge remains utterly without public support, despite harshenings of the copyright monopoly law itself as well as of its enforcement.

61% of 15-25-year-olds in Sweden share culture online, in violation of the copyright monopoly.
This fraction has not changed in size over the past three years.
The fraction who share heavily has even increased somewhat, from 18% to 20%.

The results are conclusive; despite tougher laws against sharing knowledge and culture in the past years in Sweden, these laws have not even made a scratch in the attitudes around file-sharing. If anything, the activity has even increased slightly. In the Swedish experience, the social pressure is typically to be a good citizen and share, and not to obey the monopolies. The study agrees:

“We can safely say that the repressive legal developments in this field have very weak support in informal social control mechanisms of society”, says Måns Svensson, Ph.D. in judicial sociology, one of the researchers doing the study. “The social pressure is close to non-existent.”

Yet, the overall political trend has been tougher monopolies as well as harsher enforcement of them. Svensson sees a small dent in the behavior, but not necessarily the kind that leads to respect of the monopoly laws against the social norms – rather, many people find other ways to keep sharing and sleep well at night:

“Such strategies seem to have a minor deterrent effect on young people’s inclination to fileshare online”, Svensson continues. “However, without support in social norms, people tend to look for countermeasures, such as anonymity services. Or they turn to sneakernets when sharing media.”

(“Sneakernet” is a general term for offline technologies for sharing culture – such as bringing your two-terabyte portable hard drive over to a friend’s home.)

The researchers also note the overall implications on society of having monopoly laws that are this disconnected from the social norms:

“Of course, laws that lack societal support risk undermining people’s trust in democracy and the rule of law in the long run”, Svensson concludes.

This study – that harsher enforcement only serves to move file sharing into unenforceable territories, and even then, only in small amounts – is interesting in itself. But we should also take a look at the almost-two-thirds that share culture, and put that number in a household context.

Seeing that the 61% in the study covers people who directly partake in sharing of culture, a reasonable conclusion would be that practically 100% in this age group do it directly or indirectly – meaning that it’s usually one person in a household who does the file sharing, but all people in the household happily enjoy that culture once it’s brought to the household. When those who share directly reach as high a fraction as 61%, we are far beyond the saturation point where there are no more indirect beneficiaries of the activity. So while this was not part of the study, modeling on other social patterns, it would be a safe assumption that culture sharing has a practical 100% penetration in people’s daily lives in this age group.

This holds great promise for the future. The young of today do not accept repressive laws, and either ignore them or actively subvert them.

The Cybernormer group has its home here (in Swedish).

Photos, Footage From Election Win In Germany

Pirate Parties: Here is useful footage and photos from the Pirate Party’s election win in North Rhine-Westphalia. Free for any use.

All media here is public domain / CC-zero: any and all remix, cutting, republication and broadcast is not just permitted but explicitly encouraged. The whole point of supplying the world with this media is to make it easier to create stories about the Pirate Party, after all.

Photos and video were taken on Sunday May 13, at or around 18:00, at Zakk on Fichtelstrasse 40 in Düsseldorf.

First, here is some useful video footage of when the exit polls are presented. There are several good shots here – the countdown at 00:17, the exit poll results at 00:52, and some onward cheering later afterwards. This video is beautiful in full 1080p HD.

Some of the photos in the photoset from the party afterwards are just too good:

Check the full photoset at Flickr – both people cheering and general atmosphere photos. Free for any use, misuse, abuse, reuse or refuse.

Also check Christian Engström’s collection of more photos, also CC0 / public domain, which are likewise free for any use, reuse and misuse.

On Tone Of Voice, Sensationalism, Visibility, And Electability

Metaposts: Selecting the correct tone of voice for an article is so much more than just writing what you think – or what you feel. It has quickly grown to a complex game of politics and playing various informal games to get people’s attention for what you really want to say – not much different from how oldmedia works.

I’d like to write mostly thoughtful, reflective articles on information policy and the growth of the Pirate Party movement in historical parallels (there are many). Those articles get a couple of thousand readers, and while I get a lot out of writing them, they don’t really increase my audience, which you need to do if you want to change the world.

It’s also a matter of your relative size and footprint. In the election campaign leading up to the 2009 European Elections, right after the gross injustice of the #spectrial (the trial against the former operators of The Pirate Bay plus a fourth unrelated individual), I was angry as all hell and wrote and spoke in the according tone of voice. All of a sudden, the Pirate Party was the third largest party, and there was no longer any need to use a loud voice to get attention; people were actually listening to what you had to say, and you could afford to be reflective. So I tend to be mostly philosophical and reflective, but I don’t hesitate to raise hell when I see injustices being committed, no matter against whom. This variation of my tone of voice is part of a larger strategy, which I’ll returning to later in this article.

In writing those angry articles, I am still very careful with language – I use as strong terms as can be objectively motivated, but no stronger. I use “corruption” if that is what a person on the street would call it. I use “censorship” only in its most lexical sense – when a (government-mandated) third party prevents specific communication between two consenting parties. For some reason, this always results in some people relativizing the terms I use in their thoroughly lexical sense, saying “it could be worse”, and then using that as an argument that the entire article is factually wrong. This frustrates me; I perceive it as intellectually dishonest. Perhaps it’s just an easy attack surface, and other people are playing by their own rules as well; I don’t know.

One recent example was the censorship of the German Piratenpartei three days ahead of the elections; the party was being censored in schools. Somebody on Reddit painted my entire article as false with the statement “there’s no centralized censorship in Germany! This article is ludicrous!”. Well, no, there may not be. But I didn’t claim there was centralized censorship. That wasn’t in my description at all. I claimed there was local censorship, yet one that the state was responsible for. That there’s a strawman if I ever saw one. There were plenty of them, attacking over semantics rather than discussing the quite democratic problem that a particular party’s platform could be selectively made inaccessible by the state without anybody being accountable.

Another was the example of the corrupt judge Chris Hensen, who shared commercial activities with the plaintiff’s lawyer in a monopoly case. There was no shortage of people lashing out at my use of the word “corruption”, and saying that in their favorite specific context, the word would not be applicable. Well, as I said, I am a geek and acutely lexically aware; I use words to their exact meaning and nothing else. Also, this corruption is not a superficial incidence; it is the root of the problem, in more countries than NL. The judges have associated for so long with copyright-maximalist lawyers that they have internalized the worldview of the monopoly hawks, and read the law in a completely different way than somebody who hadn’t associated with those people. They’re biased but without capability to realize it, and judge relentlessly against anybody who reads the law in a non-hawkish way.

(If we were describing any court system in a foreign faraway land where cases were predetermined like this, over 95% of us would use the word “corrupt” without hesitation. What was rare in this case was that I had come across documentation showing that judge and plaintiff’s lawyer didn’t just associate, but associated commercially. The exact same thing happened in the trial against The Pirate Bay in Sweden, where the judge Tomas Norström was a formal member of the same copyright-maximization association as the plaintiffs’ lawyers.)

When I see things like that, I get very angry, very fast. And I write exactly what I feel, while still being careful about not using stronger words than I can motivate from a purely lexical standpoint. At the same time, many social news sites complain about the emotion-laden, tabloid-style writing that results from such anger of mine – yet, upvote them into the outer stratosphere. They easily reach Reddit’s front page, and can even top it.

That article about the corrupt judge Hensen is one such example. It got 250,000 views in the first 24 hours. That’s a good result for any article. That draws attention to the other, more thoughtful and reflective articles here – I have designed this site quite intentionally to show many old articles beside the one you’re currently reading, with a lot of eye-candy to them for easy attention. So my idea is to mix reflective with emotional, using the emotional to draw an audience in quantity and reflective articles to retain the philosophical high ground.

Just to put those numbers in perspective, it would have taken an old-style newspaper a circulation of 10-20 million to reach that kind of readership for an article. Thoughtful articles don’t get readers. Angry sensationalism does. Despite everybody’s claims and wishes to the contrary.

TL;DR: Scumbag Reddit complains about sensationalism, then upvotes every piece of tabloid writing to outer frakking space.

To carry this reasoning over to electability, yet other people again get nervous about when I use that strong a tone of voice, as it decreases the overall likeability of the Pirate Party brand. Indeed it does, but that’s confusing likeability with electability. I write to optimize the latter factor. I write to optimize the vote count, not the like count. They are completely different mechanisms, and to quite some extent, are opposing concepts: you must get disliked by some to get votes by others.

The nightmare scenario is that 100% of people think that the Pirate Party are quite nice chaps and all have us as a second-hand voting preference. That means we don’t get any votes at all. I write to optimize for the scenario where 10-20% think we’re radical and aggressive enough about very real problems to get their vote, but where the other 80-90% or so most likely hate us with all their guts. That scenario means real election winnages.

Of course, this article will not get a lot of readers, being philosophical and reflective. It doesn’t work like that. But this particular article is not written to optimize readership numbers. Its purpose is to be a reference post — one that I can link to the next time people complain about me using a certain tone of voice for a certain occasion, and explain why I write like I do.

German Pirate Party Scores Fourth Consecutive Election Win

Germany: Today, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany went to the polls. This election is always closely watched in Germany, as it is the country’s most populous state. As expected, the Pirate Party won seats and entry into parliament – again – making this the Piratenpartei‘s fourth consecutive win.

After Berlin (8.9%), Saarland (7.4%), and Schleswig-Holstein (8.2%), the time had come to Nordrhein-Westfalen. As the exit polls were just presented, it is clear that the German Pirate Party has achieved its goal and secured seats in a fourth parliament: the exit polls indicate 7.5%, well clearing the five-percent hurdle for entry, and predicting 18 new Pirate Members of Parliament.

As the night progresses, and the actual votes are counted, this number will adjust somewhat. But the exit polls are always precise enough to give the end result with at most one percent unit of deviation in either direction.

This has a number of interesting ramifications. The immediate question is whether the expected weakening of the FDP, Angela Merkel’s junior coalition partner, will cause Germany’s government to collapse prematurely. That’s still too early to say – and with them staying in both the Schleswig-Holstein and Nordrhein-Westfalen parliaments (exit polls indicate 8.5% here), the risk of a premature collapse has lessened somewhat.

So we’re realistically looking at one more state election – Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) – before Germany, Europe’s most populous country, goes to elect its parliament in late summer of 2013.

(Germany is a federation of 16 states, each approximately the size of a more normal European country or a typical American state. The state voting today, Nordrhein-Westfalen, is the most populous of them with about 18 million people.)

This leads us to the interesting question – why did Germany of all countries have such breakthrough success with their Pirate Party? I can see five reasons.

The first reason is that the German Piratenpartei was long-term from the get-go. Where most pirate parties are started like any internet project – “we’re going to change the world come next weekend” – the Germans knew they would be around for a long time, and invested early in the organizational foundation for that.

The second reason is timing and ripples on the water. When the Swedish Piratpartiet had its breakthrough in the European Parliament, and was in media all over the world, the German Piratenpartei was able to exploit that momentum when a local minister named Ursula wanted to create a net censorship to fight CP. T-shirts with the name “Zensursula” were common, zensur being German for censorship. The goverment did not win the narrative on that one, and the idea of censorship was abandoned while the Piratenpartei raked in new members. I’d say that this was the breakthrough in activist critical mass.

The third reason is Germany’s federal party support. Having won 1% in the European elections and 2% in the federal elections in 2009 entitled the Piratenpartei to considerable governmental funding, which is paid out to all parties that beat the half-percent mark in elections. This has allowed the Piratenpartei to buy themselves the appearance of an established party out in the streets – their posters and banners are everywhere on paid billboards, as well as on streetlights and more activist-associated locations. But all of it looks professional, yet with a new message. It looks electable, which is key.

The fourth reason is the Piratenpartei‘s early broadening of the party platform. In Sweden, we learned the hard way in 2010 that not enough people will vote a party with a narrow platform to the general parliament. The European parliament was fine, but not the Swedish one. While we were busy running an election campaign, the German pirate party were busy discussing if – and if so, how – their program should be broadened. This was rewarded with 15 seats in the Berlin parliament, which leads me to…

The fifth reason is Berlin and the breakthrough there. In hindsight, Berlin was the perfect breakthrough location. With its characteristics of a melting pot between the government-suspicious East Europe and the progressive West Europe, mixed with a dash of political forward-thinking in the city culture itself, it would have been an obvious election to bet on for a breakthrough. But when it happened last September, it changed the game – and the media spotlight was taken so well care of, that the Piratenpartei managed to convert the progressive Berlin votes to enough votes in the industrial and traditional Saarland to enter into that parliament too. The Berlin victory of 8.9% was the definite breakthrough into mainstream awareness, and here we are.

Comments? Anything obvious I’m missing from the analysis?

Dutch Judge Who Ordered Pirate Bay Links Censored Found To Be Corrupt

Corruption: Judge Chris Hensen, who ordered the Dutch Pirate Party to censor all links to The Pirate Bay recently (something Techdirt calls Censorship Crazy), appears to have quite a bit of dirt in his baggage.

This morning, @Kanarieman pointed me to an article of my own from 2010: just under two years ago, another very strange case went down in the Netherlands. The same judge, Chris Hensen, ordered that talking about file names was legally the same thing as distributing the actual files so named, and ordered the discussion forum FTD shut down. Yes, a discussion forum distributing no files was ordered to be shut down.

At its time, this case was decried as a blatant violation of free speech (but, alas, actually confirms that you can’t have the copyright monopoly and free speech at the same time).

However, something odd appeared in the aftermath. A brochure was discovered, where the plaintiff’s representative in the case – a professor Visser – offered commercial courses in anti-piracy, together with the judge, Chris Hensen. The plaintiff and judge were running a commercial enterprise together, one that had a direct bearing on the subject matter of the case.

Let me take that once more, for this is truly mind-boggling: not only was the plaintiff and judge personally and closely acquainted, the plaintiff in a controversial copyright monopoly case was running a commercial anti-piracy outfit together with the judge in the case. Money was involved. Commercial interest was involved. The judge was, as it appears from this brochure for the quite expensive course, getting money. Shortly after the case. In a directly related matter together with the plaintiff. That makes the judge not only corrupt, but textbook corrupt.

(UPDATE: @LeHoax explains, “It’s not just any course they do together, it’s part of the Dutch bar association’s official training program for lawyers.” This is relevant to the context, of course, and mitigates the situation somewhat, but doesn’t detract from the fact that plaintiff and judge were together in a commercial venture on the direct subject matter – the plaintiff’s side, piraterijbestrijding (fighting piracy), is clearly readable in the brochure.)

This judge, this corrupt judge Chris Hensen, is the exact same judge Chris Hensen that has now banned links to the Pirate Bay from a political party, another equally crazy whackdown on fundamental freedoms of speech. But seeing this background, things fall better into place: the judge Chris Hensen was corrupted to begin with, and has been since at least 2010.

I can’t help feeling that this is getting ridiculous. From the IPRED champion in the European Parliament who was married to the Vivendi chairman, to the lead police investigator in The Pirate Bay case who got a job with Warner Brothers (a plaintiff) immediately on finishing the investigation, to the judge in the Pirate Bay case who was a member of the plaintiff’s pro-copyright organization, and now this – can’t the copyright industry fight for the monopoly ideas on their own merits, without needing biased, prejudiced, and corrupted officials?

(Footnote: before somebody points out that this would be libel or slander against the corrupt judge Chris Hensen, I am a licensed journalist in the Kingdom of Sweden, making this site run under constitutional Freedom-of-Press laws (Swedish: utgivningsbevis). This kind of whistleblowing against corrupt officials is what those laws were made for.)

Three Days Before Elections, Largest German State Censors Pirate Party From The Net

Repression: Reality sometimes does exceed fiction. Three days ahead of the elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s largest and most populous state, the Piratenpartei‘s website has been discovered to be censored in schools. These state-run institutions do not allow people – voters – to read what policies the challenger party stands for.

Specifically, it is the election program of the German Pirate Party that is being actively censored in schools, under the category “illegal drugs”. It is no secret that the German Pirate Party wants to change the law to regulate, rather than prohibit, cannabis. Apparently, expressing a desire to change the law is seen as just as dangerous as breaking the law – just questioning the current policy: enough to suppress freedom of speech in the state-run schools.

It should be noted that the Piratenpartei is currently polling at levels that would give the party 8-10% of the seats in the state parliament, so the challenge is real and the challenger is expected to win seats in the elections this Sunday. It is far from a nonsense minority party; rather, it currently has a lot of the media spotlight.

The censorship was first discovered by Kai Schmalenbach, who posted a “website censored” screenshot when trying to access the election program in a school in the city of Soest.

The censorship being used in schools is called Schulfilter Plus (“School Filter Plus”), who, according to Netzpolitik, washes their hands and say that they just use another censorship list from IBM, which they claim “has a good reputation”. Assuming this censorship is revoked immediately, which we don’t know, officials claim it may take as much as 24 hours before voters may again see what the challenger party stands for. At such a point in time, it would be less than 48 hours before the election stations open on Sunday morning.

If this is not a demonstration of the utter rejectability of censorship and why it should never be allowed under any circumstance, as events like this will happen, I don’t know what would be the necessary demonstration.

The Swedish Pirate Party had a similar episode in the run-up to the 2006 elections, when the Swedish Pirate Party’s website was censored on August 23 from all public offices in Västra Götaland, one of Sweden’s largest regions. (The election was held on September 17.) After a media outcry, and the responsible IT people essentially saying “we have delegated this censorship to corporations in the United States, so we cannot be held responsible”, the censorship was lifted.

Via Netzpolitik (in German).

Congratulations On First Elections, Greek Pirate Party

Pirate Parties: While the Germans voted their Piratenpartei into Parliament in Schleswig-Holstein last Sunday, the Greeks also went to the polling stations. The Greek Pirate Party did an amazing first election.

The Greek Pirate Party, Κόμμα Πειρατών Ελλάδας, was founded on January 14 this year. To get 32,487 votes less than four months later – just over half a percent of the Greek votes – is nothing short of phenomenal. Even breaking through to mainstream awareness in four months is phenomenal.

It should be noted that the distance between nothing and 0.5 per cent is much larger than the distance between 0.5 and 5 — once you start hitting 2-3 per cent, you get your own bar in the polls, and become “electable”. You have a shot at parliament, so you’re not a wasted vote anymore.

The Greek PP has posted a letter thanking all 32,487 citizens for the confidence. Well done, and classy.

I had the privilege of meeting some of the activists in the Greek PP while I was in Prague last month, at the Pirate Parties International meeting. On that meeting, our Greek brothers and sisters were also taken up in the community.

I think this signifies the depth and breadth of the Pirate Party community and the strength of the underbrush that we come from. Greece is quite diverse from Sweden, where the movement started six years ago, and yet the same political movement can make quite rapid advances in Greece, too. It’s like the difference between Germany’s Berlin and Saarland elections, which were also different and day as night, and still, the Pirate Party prevailed.

I’m really looking forward to the next five years. In the meantime, Συγχαρητήρια, Ελλάδα.

UK Considers Opt-in Freedom Of Speech

Freedom of Speech – Andrew Lee: As outdated as a broken record, the UK is once again considering a plan to force Internet Service Providers to censor adult content online.

With the recent censorship of The Pirate Bay being forced onto UK ISPs, and Virgin Media’s quick follow through thereof, it is evident that the captain of the ship is steering it into an iceberg. It is universally agreed that Albert Einstein was a genius, and he defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and over again expecting different results.” So why, exactly, does the UK Government and David Cameron expect the results to be any different when heading down this path than that of North Korea, who censors everything?

The Opt-In Plan

The new plan to censor adult content involves allowing ISP customers to check a box which indicates that they are willing to, or desire to, view adult material online. Just like SOPA and PIPA, the move is touted as a way to protect children online, since children are not exposed to sexually explicit material in Lady Gaga’s music videos. However, without a need for an explanation, this is an invasion of privacy on so many levels.

Casting a Shadow over the internet is Shady.

The opt-in plan is corrupt. To begin, as many journalists have already pointed out, whoever governs the lists and boundaries of censored content will essentially have control over the internet comparable to the current media conglomerates. Secondly, it should be up to parents to protect their children from provocative online content. A plethora of tools already exists that can censor racy content online, such as Net Nanny amongst others.

Additionally, if the UK Government really wants to run companies like Net Nanny out of business, and parents would like to protect their children, then the opt-in program should be an opt-in to censorship instead of an opt-in to un-censorship. This would protect the privacy of many without taking away the freedoms of access to content. However, this would weaken the government’s totalitarian control over censorship.

Have the Government’s Prohibitions Worked in History?

Myself, journalists, and readers of this article, of course, will never be able to make perfect decisions and predict the future. However, what we as a society have evolved to be able to do is analyze mistakes in history and make sure to never repeat them again. When is the last time prohibition has worked out? Did it work on alcohol? Did it work on drugs? While this is not an essay on prohibition, it is a proven fact in history that prohibition leads to organized crime while not really helping to prohibit that which is prohibited in the least. It simply drives it underground and completely out of the control of the government. Just ask El Chapo! Tor will definitely earn itself a grand world tour.

A Battle of Control

To make a long story short, with every little “win” the government makes with new legislations on censorships, surveillance and the overall removal of our privacy, each generation grows up in a different setting where this new environment is the “norm.” In other words, it is the slow and steady desensitization of society to accept full and complete subordination to the totalitarian rulers who are making their come back. It is quite evident that the world of rulers and peasants is coming back, just ask the 1%. As new laws continue to be made in favor of rulers, all of society outside of the ruling class will lose the opportunity to live life and fulfill their dreams.

Opt-in is not an option.