Deeplinks Blog posts about File Sharing
Copyright Lawsuits Won’t Stop People from Sharing Research
In principle, everyone in the world should have access to the same body of knowledge. The UN Declaration of Human Rights says that everyone deserves the right “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”
The reality is a bit messier. Institutional subscriptions to academic databases don’t cover every article someone would ever need. When scholars and professors find a reference to an article that they don’t have access to, they’ll often turn to less orthodox approaches: asking for the paper on Twitter or Facebook, emailing a friend at another institution, or even asking the author directly. For a lot of people, research amounts to a patchwork of sources culled together through authorized and unauthorized methods.
Right now the FCC is considering a set of rules that would allow Internet providers to offer faster access to some websites that can afford to pay. We need to stop them.
Let’s start with the obvious: The Internet is how we communicate and how we work, learn new things, and find out where to go and how to get there. It keeps us connected to those we love and informed of political events that affect our everyday lives.
The content lobby's narrative about the Internet's impact on the creative industry has grown all too familiar. According to this tiresome story, Hollywood is doing everything it can to prevent unauthorized downloading, but people—enabled by peer-to-peer technologies, “rogue” websites, search engines, or whatever the bogeyman of the moment is—keep doing it anyway. As a result, say groups like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), creators are deprived of their hard-earned and well-deserved profits and have little incentive to keep creating.
There's a lot that's wrong with this story (like the assumption that most copyright royalties actual end up in the pockets of the artists). But one of the most pernicious aspects is the idea that Hollywood is actually making a sincere effort to meet user demand.
In July 2009, South Korea became the first country to introduce a graduated response or "three strikes" law. The statute allows the Minister of Culture or the Korean Copyright Commission to tell ISPs and Korean online service providers to suspend the accounts of repeated infringers and block or delete infringing content online. There is no judicial process, no court of appeal, and no opportunity to challenge the accusers.
U.S. Copyright Surveillance Machine About To Be Switched On, Promises of Transparency Already Broken
The "Copyright Alert System" – an elaborate combination of surveillance, warnings, punishments, and "education" directed at customers of most major U.S. Internet service providers – is poised to launch in the next few weeks, as has been widely reported. The problems with it are legion. Big media companies are launching a massive peer-to-peer surveillance scheme to snoop on subscribers. Based on the results of that snooping, ISPs will be serving as Hollywood’s private enforcement arm, without the checks and balances public enforcement requires. Once a subscriber is accused, she must prove her innocence, without many of the legal defenses she’d have in a courtroom.
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