EU court: 'convictions for file sharing violate human rights'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 8th Feb 2013 02:02 UTC
Legal "This means that people can no longer get convicted for violating the copyright monopoly alone. The court just declared it illegal for any court in Europe to convict somebody for breaking the copyright monopoly law when sharing culture, only on the merits of breaking the law. A court that tries somebody for violating the copyright monopoly must now also show that a conviction is necessary to defend democracy itself in order to convict. This is a considerably higher bar to meet." Well, that's progress, I guess.
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RE[3]: Interesting
by WereCatf on Fri 8th Feb 2013 03:46 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: Interesting"
WereCatf
Member since:
2006-02-15

Technology does not discriminate based on intent, so it doesn't matter WHY it came into being, and who the intended recipients were is really irrelavent. Either you're going to allow sharing wholesale, or you're not. And really, it's futile to try and prevent it; that would be kind of like pissing into the wind.


That's exactly the kind of an argument I was expecting and you swallowed the hook, sinker and all. You see, you didn't really think this through: technology may not discriminate based on intent, but we are humans being and we are indeed capable of doing that. If you go by the "it's just data and all data should be free," then you've just basically said that your social security IDs, your real name, address, the names of all of your relatives, the filenames and contents of anything you produce, your e-mails, your banking details, even your god damn passwords should be shared freely -- after all, they're all data, and you just yourself said "it doesn't matter WHY it came into being, and who the intended recipients were."

You might wish to re-think this thing through.

Edited 2013-02-08 03:50 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 7

RE[4]: Interesting
by WorknMan on Fri 8th Feb 2013 07:26 in reply to "RE[3]: Interesting"
WorknMan Member since:
2005-11-13

If you go by the "it's just data and all data should be free


Except that is not what I said. What I said was that if you take a piece of content, and you say it's ok to share this whether the content owner wants you to or not, then you have no moral ground to tell others not to share things that you wish them not to. To that end, I think it's dumb to try and prevent sharing, period. Not because 'information wants to be free', but because if information is out there and somebody wants to share it, we do not have the technology to prevent them from doing so, and laws don't seem to do much to help in this regard, because it's easy to get away with. It's kind of like people smoking weed; in the US, we spend all kinds of money and resources to try and stop it, but it keeps going on, so now they have legalized it in two states (as welll they should havve).

Insofar as my name, address, phone number, names of family members, etc, this is all publically accessible information anyway, so why would I wish to keep it private? Anybody who wants to obtain this info can do so without much difficulty. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't in the phone book. And anyway, most of the tracking that goes on is because companies want to spam you with ads But if we had stricter 'do not call/do not mail' laws, what purpose would they have to track you anymore if they couldn't profit from it? Maybe they could use my personal info in the aggregate/statistical sense, but do I give a shit? As long as they're not calling my house during dinner and trying to sell crap to me, not at all.

And what about sensitive information like passwords and credit card numbers? Sure, companies COULD share that, but why would they? Any company that was caught sharing its customers' passwords probably wouldn't stay in business very long, so it's in their best interest to keep that stuff private. And who the hell would they share that with, besides people who wanted to hack into their system? Fail.

And anyway, we REALLY need to find better ways of identification so that this info does not have to be stored in databases. As for stuff you put online and need to keep private, that is what encryption is for. I've always said that if you have very sensitive data that's not secure enough to be stored on the server of your worst enemy, then it's not secure enough.

Edited 2013-02-08 07:32 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 4