Well it looks like Canada and the United States of Torture are not the only countries with embarrassingly incompetent judges. Tomas Norström, the Swedish judge that recently found the Pirate Bay founders guilty of copyright infringement, is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for Industrial Legal Protection. So let me [...]
Check out this story about how the MPAA sponsored a study linking piracy to organized crime and terrorism. The mighty Motion Picture Association of America, you see, has a problem: prosecutors are reluctant to waste millions of dollars in public money going after millions of software, music and movie downloaders. Somehow, the MPAA has to [...]
Software companies are throwing a collective tantrum about unauthorized downloading and use of their products. They accuse downloaders of violating copyrights and stealing their work. Due to the systematic bias in favor of corporations of North American law, the opposite case is rarely made. Namely, software companies are robbing their customers blind. Here are six [...]
Bell insists that throttling Internet services is necessary. More specifically, Bell engages in “deep packet inspection,” which means they figure out what kind of data your downloading, and slow down the stuff they don’t like, i.e., peer-2-peer traffic. They argue that this is all for their customers: before traffic throttling, 5% of users ate 33% [...]
Previously in this segment, I discussed how the RIAA fabricates a link between unauthorized music downloading and shrinking music industry profits. After some insightful discussion, I also differentiated the treatment of piracy in criminal and tort law. Today I turn to what might be called the Robin Hood argument. Francois writes: “And even if such [...]
Several interesting points came up in the discussion of my last post, which addressed how the RIAA deceives the public regarding its imaginary losses due to music piracy. Paul wrote: “Saying that it’s not a loss if the person wouldn’t buy it if it weren’t available for free is like saying it’s not stealing for [...]
(or, “Why the RIAA is full of BS”) The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) wants you to believe that unauthorized music downloads are responsible for the music industry’s recent decrease in sales and profits. It has two primary arguments (and since they made The War on Bullshit Blog, you can probably guess what I [...]