Apr 09
16
Piracy, Decriminalization And P2P
It is a crazy world out there.
There are pirates on the high seas capturing ships and holding them to ransom for millions of dollars. And the content industry insists on calling people who share a piece of music with a friend a pirate.
The Spanish decriminalized drugs a number of years ago and The Cato Institute has just released a report that shows that drug use and crime generally has decreased in Spain since that. And meanwhile in the US the statistics show that there is a greater percentage of the population in jail than in any other country and the highest proportion of those are for drugs.
It just goes to show that things do not play out the way that the media likes to paint it, and the merchants of spin like to spin it.
What people need to appreciate is that P2P is not bad. And people who share files are not bad.
The problem is in the demonization of the consumer…
But wait there's more:
We have been noticing more and more (and blogging about it) that there is an uncanny co-incidence in terms of timing of legislation around the world relating to the Internet.
Here is a story on the EFF site about some legislation that is working its way through congress in the US. This is the sort of thing that should scare your pants off. And it is very similar to the things that are being quietly being discussed in Australia.
Here is what they say in the story:
access to “all relevant data” without any privacy safeguards like
standards or judicial review. The broad scope of this provision could
eviscerate statutory protections for private information, such as the
Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Privacy Protection Act, or
financial privacy regulations. Even worse, it isn’t clear whether this
provision would require systems to be designed to enable access,
essentially a back door for the Secretary of Commerce that would also
establish a primrose path for any bad guy to merrily skip down as well.
If the drafters meant to create a clearinghouse for system
vulnerability information along the lines of a US/CERT mailing list,
that could be useful, but that’s not what the bill’s current language
does.
A privacy threat still in the cocoon is the provision mandating a
study of the feasibility of an identity management and authentication
program with just a nod to “appropriate civil liberties and privacy
protections.” There’s reason to fear that this type of study is just a
precursor to proposals to limit online anonymity. But anonymity isn’t
inherently a security problem. What’s “secure” depends on the goals of
the system. Do you need authentication, accountability,
confidentiality, data integrity? Each goal suggests a different
security architecture, some totally compatible with anonymity, privacy
and civil liberties. In other words, no one “identity management and
authentication program” is appropriate for all internet uses.