Pirate Bay Verdict and Voter Registration Restrictions
A verdict has been issued against The Pirate Bay by a Swedish court, but they'll be appealing. This is bad news for freedom of speech online, following a dangerous precedent in line with the RIAA vs. 2600 decision in U.S. court, which essentially holds that simply informing someone where to obtain illegal materials is in effect "trafficking" in said illegal materials.
The Pirate Bay doesn't have as much going for them as 2600 did, unfortunately, since 2600 was just informing people where to obtain enabling utilities that could be used for things other than circumventing anti-copying technologies on copyrighted materials. (Although these materials had already been made illegal under the DMCA since they did have this capability, 2600 could have tried to overturn the DMCA in a separate case). The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, was specifically promoting the availability of materials that were copies potentially in violation of copyright. The similarity between the cases, though, is that the court ruled to the letter of the law regarding the nature of the materials in question, but to the spirit of the law regarding providing information about access to them.
If you told someone where they could buy a gun, and they shot someone with it, would you want to be liable for that? If you told someone that there's a guy in Chinatown selling bootleg DVDs on the street, and the street merchant was arrested for copyright infringement, would you want to be liable for his actions or those of his customers? the courts still seem to hold that the Internet is somehow fundamentally different from other forms of communicationbecause it allows more people to communicate more rapidly, but what state would we be in today if they had applied the same logic to the telegraph or telephone? (Oh, wait, they did, and we got warrantless wiretapping.)
In other distressing news today, a professor in my department testified before the Senate Rules Committee that his Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) "revealed that four million voters were prevented from voting in the 2008 election due to registration problems. Another four to five million people were kept from voting because of administrative problems, such as long lines and voter identification requirements." To put that in perspective, that's about six percent of the voters who would have turned out for the 2008 election that were instead turned away, and there has been evidence that the disqualification has not been uniform, but has disenfranchised some groups more than others.
The Pirate Bay doesn't have as much going for them as 2600 did, unfortunately, since 2600 was just informing people where to obtain enabling utilities that could be used for things other than circumventing anti-copying technologies on copyrighted materials. (Although these materials had already been made illegal under the DMCA since they did have this capability, 2600 could have tried to overturn the DMCA in a separate case). The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, was specifically promoting the availability of materials that were copies potentially in violation of copyright. The similarity between the cases, though, is that the court ruled to the letter of the law regarding the nature of the materials in question, but to the spirit of the law regarding providing information about access to them.
If you told someone where they could buy a gun, and they shot someone with it, would you want to be liable for that? If you told someone that there's a guy in Chinatown selling bootleg DVDs on the street, and the street merchant was arrested for copyright infringement, would you want to be liable for his actions or those of his customers? the courts still seem to hold that the Internet is somehow fundamentally different from other forms of communicationbecause it allows more people to communicate more rapidly, but what state would we be in today if they had applied the same logic to the telegraph or telephone? (Oh, wait, they did, and we got warrantless wiretapping.)
In other distressing news today, a professor in my department testified before the Senate Rules Committee that his Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) "revealed that four million voters were prevented from voting in the 2008 election due to registration problems. Another four to five million people were kept from voting because of administrative problems, such as long lines and voter identification requirements." To put that in perspective, that's about six percent of the voters who would have turned out for the 2008 election that were instead turned away, and there has been evidence that the disqualification has not been uniform, but has disenfranchised some groups more than others.