For those that doesn’t know, the idea of market liberalism is that no market shall not be regulated and companies shall grow, shrink or fail, depending on the demands of their products.

The market liberals in the Swedish Government has now decided not to follow their own ideology and to limit the availability of free (as in freedom) culture and media through regulation. Their outspoken goal is to, by doing this, save the recording industry from going under in this new and networked world as they have been unable to adapt during the previous 10 years.

They have also decided to give away policing powers to these companies and their lobbying organizations, not only limited to filing suits. They’re also allowed to do raids on citizens homes and freeze bank accounts, with the help of the Swedish Enforcement Agency.

This is not a joke and it is not an overstatement.

So what they’re basically saying is that they do not give a rats as about what the voting public want them to do, that is to realize liberal markets, and also they do not care if twelve year old’s gets their parents houses raided by downloading Britney’s latest hit.

There goes the meaning of “due process”.

So, what can one do to protect himself from the government and the media companies?

First of, you might want to join some group that fights to limit this madness. Second, you should send e-mails, call or send regular mail to your political representatives explaining your views on the new digital world. If they do not know how many people want them to stop acting like idiots, they’ll never do.

Also, start scrutinizing your media consumption and do not pay the industry that limits you freedom. It’s very important to understand that without money, these companies don’t have any power to push any other idiotic legislation through our politicians. Use RIAA RADAR as a start, but do your research and you are recommended to actually call the record labels and ask what their stance on IPRED (for example) is. Do not pay to get your liberties shattered!

After doing this, first thing to do is to open your network, and get a shared or insecure wireless setup. You should set that up in a nice way, so that you do not expose your internal computers to any others connecting from the outside. Consider using WEP as encryption, as that isn’t hard to break but will keep most people away. You should do this to be able to question if any packets to or from your network is actually “yours”. Offering an open network is also in general a nice thing to do for you fellow man.

The next step is to encrypt all data. Not only the operating system partitions, but all disks in your computer. For both Windows and Linux this can be done in a secure way using TrueCrypt which is also free. The only downside to doing this is that you’ll have to enter your password(s) everytime you start the computer. The performance impact is not that hard and I use it on my gaming computer without any negative impact. Remember to use a long (preferably over 30 characters) passphrase. Use a sentence from a book for example.

Start encrypting your network traffic and hide your real IP-address when consuming “pirated” or remixed media. There are several services that can offer you this service today, and I’m not sure which one is the best. Some of the ones that seem the most serious are Relakks (PPTP tunnels) and PRQ (plain tunneling or IPSEC tunneling, swedish site). There are also services such as TorrentPrivacy, but I do not know who’s behind it or if you can trust their applications.

It feels kind of sick writing a guide on how you can protect yourself from the people that are supposed to protect you, but I can live with it. I’ve thought about doing this before, but never wanted to as I would also be teaching some potentially bad guys how to stay hidden. But when I’m backed into a corner I’m the kind of person that fights, not the kind that lies down and waits to get beaten. Soon enough we’ll be in this reality and then it’ll be too late.

30 pills.
For politicians missing contact with reality.“

The Government has now released their final suggestion for our Swedish IPRED1 directive and it’s just as messed up as we had feared.

I’m not even going to go into the details, as I’m too tired of reading about them myself. I’ll link to some information instead. The common thing with all of these new laws is the discrepancies between what is being said in the media and what is actually in the lawtext… it’s sick that politicians are allowed to lie in that way and get away with it. If I were to do the same to any of my customers we would get sued and I would get fired.

The worst part of this mess really isn’t the law on its own, but the fact that the people that are really criminal, and commits real commercially motivated crimes against our copyright laws, will not be affected. It’s only the regular citizens that doesn’t know better will be affected and criminals (and other people with deep technical knowledge like me) will be unaffected as we know how to avoid being caught in this kind of surveillance.

So, in short, the Swedish politicians has once again shown their incompetence and inability to adapt to an increasingly connected world. I just get so tired of this…

Theoretically there is one hope left, and that is that the parliament votes down the suggestion. This is however not likely as our representative democracy has failed long ago and the government controls all votes in the parliament…

Not so cheery cheers,

So these old lads are going to be some of the first ones to embrace the web as a distribution channel? Even though they “have to release everything for free”

Monty Python’s official Youtube channel can be found here! Support their effort, buy their merchandise and DVD-sets!

Credit for the news goes to the (swedish) blog Opassande.

While checking my RSS feeds this morningI find two things sticking out of the masses. First is the Pirate Party’s vice chairman Christian Engström which replies to a request for an IPRED1 alternative. It’s the swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that posed the question.

The answer can be summarized in three points, and these are the official ideas of the Pirate Party:

1) Keep copyright legislation more or less as it looks right now
2) Keep the I.P. owners rights to decide who can make money using hers/his creations.
3) Legalize copying (incl. file-sharing) for non-commercial purposes

Foreseeing a rush of “but how will artists earn their living” comments he then continues detailing the record and movie industries profit margins and overall gains the previous years, highlighting the fact that the works that are shared most frequently is also the ones that make the most money over the traditional distribution channels.

The next interesting post I found was from Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing which highlights IPRED1-alike laws being questioned as unconstitutional in the US. As the American cases and laws are precedents of the ideas now being pushed in the EU, these cases are going to be groundbreaking if “the good guys” win them. I’d suggest keeping a close eye on this.

Cheers,

What politicians seem to miss (every time) is that progress is driven by innovation. All evolution of the internet as we know it has been driven by information sharing, and this is getting more evident.

The whole term “The Cloud” proves this fact. This new hype which everyone tries to fit their life or product into really is nothing else than simple sharing between large groups of users.

In the future we will see media, music and art turn more prominent on the Internet than IRL. The companies that stick to old business and distribution models will be left behind and those trying to keep up will prosper. This is not something aggressive, it’s just a fact. No legislation in the world will change this, but it might slow it down.

“The web will own every bit”

What we are now calling the cloud is constantly, and at an increasing speed, growing and becoming more capable and integrated into our lives. Today I’m happy that I can stay connected and share my experiences while traveling in the middle of nowhere, tomorrow I will feel extremely secluded if I cannot do the same thing.

In my opinion, what should be further researched is;

How can we enable people to share more freely?

This is a much bigger and more important question than “How can we restrict people from sharing”, as people will always do that anyway.

Apparently the swedish interpretion of IPRED1 has got the “Go ahead” from Lagrådet (those that check that everything is compatible with other legislation etc.).

Next step is that the Government gives the law to the parliament for voting. And if they vote yes, well, then we have the harshest IPRED1 implementation cemented in law here in Sweden.

So? One might ask. Well, the biggest problem is that we are giving private, commercially motivated organizations more power than our regular police. Second, we’ll be stepping into a world of hurt as all previous implementations have made those countries hellish.

In Denmark, for example, the citizens has been harassed and there has been one suicide because of the extortion attempts by these organizations. Seems harsh but I got the facts to back it up (sorry, just Swedish and Danish, try the translator.).

Anyways, I hope that our politicians see the absurd legislative situation as it is and do not grant anyone except our police the rights needed to fight real, commercially motived, piracy.

But as usual, we’ll see what happens…

Others posting this image to raise awareness of DRM-dangers (in Swedish) are Opassande, Dennis, Daniel. Probably a lot of others as well but these were the ones conveniently linked from Emma (Opassande) and I’m lazy today

And another comment in english on the suggested swedish IPRED1 implementation from paf (also posted the XKCD image).

Cheers,

Even though it doesn’t need to be… Here we go again… Not really sure I’ve got the energy for this lunacy…

First off, what’s the IPRED1 directive?

Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive 1 (IPRED1) is a directive created by lobbyists and pushed through the EU by a woman married to a record company executive. The gist of the directive is to enable rightsholders to force counterfeiting middle-men to tell where they got the goods from. So in the beginning this was but this was about physical counterfeiting. Along the way it got a bit manhandled by the IP-lobbyists and record companies and finally was voted through in the form of a law that would allow private companies to demand ISPs to hand over their client data for a specific client, so that the rightsholder could sue.

However,

The EU IPRED1 directive is not forced upon any member state in the European Union as ruled by the European Court of Justice (source EFF). From the article:

In a much-anticipated decision, the European Court of Justice ruled yesterday that European Community law does not require EU Member States to impose an obligation on ISPs to divulge customer data in response to a request from a copyright holder who alleges that copyright infringement has taken place. The decision in Promusicae v. Telefonica involved a request made by a Spanish music rightsholder association (Promusicae) to Spain’s leading ISP (Telefonica) for personal data about Telefonica subscribers using particular dynamic IP addresses, which Promusicae alleged were engaged in filesharing.

The European Court of Justice was asked to interpret a mesh of overlapping EU Community laws and answer the question: does European community law require EU Member States that are implementing this suite of EU directives to impose an obligation on ISPs to divulge their customers’ personal data to rightsholders in a civil copyright lawsuit? The court ruled no, but with some qualifications. Thus, the Spanish law is valid and Telefonica will not be forced to divulge its customers’ data.

And what does the Swedish government, with the help of record company lobbyists do now?

They go ahead and suggest a Swedish implementation and law which would grant MORE power to the IP-holders, effectively creating a corporate police which can, without any real evidence, get the identity of the person owning a specific IP-adress.

The law that is now proposed actually grants these commercial interests more power than the Swedish police.

Actually, it is so over-implemented so it actually breaches the directive’s own regulations which states:

3. Paragraphs 1 and 2 shall apply without prejudice to other statutory provisions which:
(a) grant the rightholder rights to receive fuller information;
(b) govern the use in civil or criminal proceedings of the information communicated pursuant to
this Article;
(c) govern responsibility for misuse of the right of information; or
(d) afford an opportunity for refusing to provide information which would force the person
referred to in paragraph 1 to admit to his own participation or that of his close relatives in an
infringement of an intellectual property right; or
(e) govern the protection of confidentiality of information sources or the processing of personal
data.

I mean come on.. If I, an uneducated IT-nerd with a taste for bodybuilding can find, read, and understand this, then why can’t the people preparing our laws do the same?

So, the question remains;

WTF?

Yep. That’s really the question. What the f*ck?

This, if voted through in parliament, will create a situation like the one in the US where companies threaten with lawsuits that no one can afford to challenge, effectively forcing you to pay up even though you haven’t done anything wrong.

Next question is the use of IP-addresses as evidence. What value does an IP-address have in Sweden today where most ISPs ship unsecured wireless APs as the default router? Not much.

This also presents more questions, like “If downloading torrents in an internet café, is the café liable?” and “What are your rights if a neighbour uses your WLAN, willingly or without knowing it, and downloads pirated material? Are you liable?”.

And again, why does this law grant commercial interests powers that now even our police have? Where’s the logic? It’s so glaringly see-through, ordered and paid for, lobbyist crap that has been suggested as a law.

As I wrote in some of the first FRA-posts… Where will this end?

Other writing about this in Swedish (plz use Google translate): Rick Falkvinge (PP), Opassande, HAX, El Rubio.

And here’s the whole crapfest that our swedish, newly suggested, law claims to be born out of.