Re: <nettime> France unveils anti-"piracy" plan

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>]

The focus of the resistance to the copyright enforcement seems to be
shifting to complaints about collateral damage, ie. unrelated ("innocent")
parties being sanctioned either by loss of privacy (this affects almost all
consumers that don't have anonymizing abilities) or by more direct
punishment or, in prosecuted cases, both. Eventually the technology will
eliminate the latter and direct punisment will be applied mostly to the
infringing parties, but we will all be snooped on.

This is a major shift, I think, because the legitimacy of copyright law
enforcement on the Internet have been finally acknowledged on all sides.
This automatically means recognition of legitimacy of large-scale snooping
(because there is no other mechanism available short of thieves turning
themselves in voluntarily), which of course will be used for many other
purposes (as "terrorists" have been used.)

While designers and proponents of anonymizing software and P2P transport
always declared highly ethical goals of helping some "chinese dissidents",
in reality 99.9% of the traffic is stolen content, spamming etc. Dissidents
are simply not creative enough to produce any volume, it seems.

My question is - what is the point of opposing the actual prosecution? Once
the survelliance system is in the place, actual prosecution of the
infringers is the last thing I care about (I personally think that whoever
facilitates distribution of the mainstream crap should be spayed.) Once we
get to this stage, catching pirates is "free" and positive as it reduces
kitsch in the system.

No, the real issue is "is privacy more important than copyright law
enforcement" and the answer seems to be a resounding "No".

> the digital equivalent of chopping off the hands of supposed
> thieves... this bonapartist bastard is really someone we should all
> unite against, online and offline.

end
(of original message)

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