Anti-piracy group BREIN is caught up in a huge copyright scandal in the Netherlands. A musician who composed a track for use at a local film festival later found it being used without permission in an anti-piracy campaign. He is now claiming at least a million euros for the unauthorized distribution of his work on DVDs. To make matters even worse, a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.

Här har vi alltså ett kontroversiellt avtal, med lagstiftningsliknande effekter. Utlåtandet om huruvida det är lagligt eller ej hemligstämplas. Diskussionen förs bakom stängda dörrar. Alla som kan ha invändningar luras att tro att frågan inte kommer att behandlas i dag. Och när det ändå sker, då tillåts utskottet inte ens rösta om huruvida mötet skall vara offentligt eller bakom stängda dörrar.

Sedan undrar våra ledare villrådigt och bekymrat vad de skall göra åt EU:s demokratiska underskott...

The movie industry claims that piracy is costing them billions of dollars a year.

Luckily for Hollywood, many Americans choose to consume their online media through legal services such as Netflix. In fact, there are now so many that the total Internet traffic generated by Netflix has outgrown that of BitTorrent.

This made us wonder – what would happen if all movie-downloading BitTorrent users made the switch to Netflix? What if movie piracy via BitTorrent disappeared?

Google knows it. Viacom knows it. The Chamber of Commerce knows it. Internet democracy groups know it. BoingBoing knows it. But, the Internet hasn't been told yet -- we're going to get blown away by the end of the year. The worst bill in Internet history is about to become law. Law is very real here in the United States and legal language is often different than stated intentions -- this law would give government and corporations the power to block sites like BoingBoing over infringing links on at least one webpage posted by their users. Believe the EFF, Public Knowledge, Google when they say this bill is about much more than copyright, it's about the Internet and free speech everywhere.

2011 råder det inga tvivel om hur de friserade sanningarna staplades på rad för att driva igenom kriget mot terrorismen och invasionen av Irak. Men där vi åtminstone i Sverige har haft lätt att fälla kritiska omdömen om de ansvariga politikerna för deras agerande, har vi haft så mycket svårare att betrakta nöjesindustrins aktörer som medansvariga för det samhälle som vi nu håller på att skapa. Där vi gång på gång väljer slutenhet i stället för öppenhet och kontroll i stället för frihet.

GfK Group is one of the largest market research companies in the world and is often used by the movie industry to carry out research and studies into piracy. Talking to a source within GfK who wished to remain anonymous, Telepolis found that a recent study looking at pirates and their purchasing activities found them to be almost the complete opposite of the criminal parasites the entertainment industry want them to be.

The study states that it is much more typical for a pirate to download an illegal copy of a movie to try it before purchasing. They are also found to purchase more DVDs than the average consumer, and they visit the movie theater more, especially for opening weekend releases which typically cost more to attend.

“Child pornography is great,” the man said enthusiastically. “Politicians do not understand file sharing, but they understand child pornography, and they want to filter that to score points with the public. Once we get them to filter child pornography, we can get them to extend the block to file sharing.” The date was May 27, 2007, and the man was Johan Schlüter, head of the Danish Anti-Piracy Group (Antipiratgruppen). He was speaking in front of an audience from which the press had been banned; it was assumed to be copyright industry insiders only. It wasn’t. Christian Engström, who’s now a Member of the European Parliament, Oscar Swartz, and I [Rick Falkvinge] were also there.

Det är förmodligen så man ska se på Spotify; det är ytterligare en livsuppehållande åtgärd för en industri som egentligen borde få somna in för gott. Det kommer heta att det är piratkopierarnas fel, man kommer skylla på ungefär allt som går att skylla på för att försöka skyla de egentliga orsakerna; en trasig och förlegad upphovsrätt och fullständigt föråldrade affärsmodeller inom upphovsrättsindustrin.

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Spotifys affärsmodell är väldigt rätt, en Internetbaserad tjänst som ger dig ett musikbibliotek som är många gånger större än det du själv orkar sortera och indexera på egen hand, men det hjälper inte när de samtidigt tvingas hålla en obsolet och döende dinosaurie vid liv. Utan den dödvikten tror jag att Spotify hade varit markant mer framgångsrik, artisterna hade definitivt fått markant mer betalt och mycket av dagens kritik hade aldrig ens uppstått men med dagens beslut kommer kritikerna knappast bli tystare.

This latest trend to devise and deploy legal strategies against open source seems to me to represent an admission on Microsoft's part that it can no longer compete on technology. Instead, the dinosaurs have decided that it's time to play really dirty – and nothing is dirtier than enforcing bad monopolies using worse laws.

A copyright lasting many decades actually makes all the works with short lived commercial value disappear faster. It also limits the benefits of those very few works which are still profitable many years after their publication to people who were not their creators, be they music company stock holders who didn't create anything, or descendants who weren't even alive when the work was created.

Consequently, the most important action, maybe the only really necessary one to put an end to copyright abuses, the one which would make all the other proposal in this document happen almost automatically, is to reduce copyright duration, worldwide and as soon as possible, to five or ten years from the moment a work is published.

Such a measure would still reward fairly those who deserve it the most, that is the actual creators: in almost all cases there would be no significant financial loss for them. At the same time, reducing copyright duration would cancel all long term dangers.