As some of you might already have heard, the second appeal to the
Pirate Bay courtcase ended up with the conviction of four people
behind the popular bittorrent tracker and website, Alan Toner give us
two extensive accounts about the situation on his blog:

http://knowfuture.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/pirate-bay-defendants-convicted/

http://knowfuture.wordpress.com/2009/04/18/more-on-the-pirate-bay-conviction/

Further below you’ll find the statement that the Internet Society
Philippines Chapter released about the happenings. What I find
particularly interesting about the point of view offered by ISOC-PH
president Fatima Lasay is the deep awareness of political implications
in this and other similar court cases also quoted, for which the
Pirate Bay case covers a prominent role.

Seen from an Asian perspective, the criminalising campaigns lead by
Western business interests represent a worrying threat to the
planetary opening that “peer to peer” cultures and practices provide
for developing countries.

Behind the surface of this court case lies a tension that lasts since
several centuries in history, as the historical account of professor
Boron Ben-Altar outlines in his book “Trade Secrets: Intellectual
Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power” (obviously
intended as North American here).

Almost 2 years ago I’ve done my best exploring the topic from the
perspective of “border economies”, as well outlining the complementary
dynamic of loss of privacy for Internet citizens.

http://jaromil.dyne.org/journal/piracy_privacy.html

Going further in connecting dots, let me now mention that these
dynamics are evolving into a worrying threat to free speech and wide
access to media offered by contemporary participative technologies, as
outlined by the European campaign http://www.blackouteurope.eu

As Alan documents in his reports a popular uprise is raising
specifically on the PB case, still as a symptom of the wider concerns
it raises: examples are the “#fullboycott” campaign launched by
Monochrom activists http://www.monochrom.at/fullboycott

as well the
dedication of the First Internet Pavilion at the Venice Biennial to
The Pirate Bay cause noticed by Miltos Manetas on this list.

Obviously the Pirate Bay court case is not just a concern for the
Swedish jurisdiction: it is configuring as a crucial node for the
evolution of knowledge sharing policies on a planetary scale, for
which it is extremely important to take into account an Asian
perspective offered by the document that follows.

————

ISOC-Philippines statement on the jail sentence for The Pirate Bay
founders and the criminal charges against philosophy professor Horacio
Potel
By isoc-ph, on April 20, 2009, 2:05 am
http://isoc.ph/portal/2009/04/isoc-philippines-statement-on-pirate-bay-and-potel/

The Internet Society Philippines’ (ISOC-PH) Public Policy Principles
and activities are based upon a fundamental belief that “The Internet
is for everyone.” ISOC-PH upholds and defends core values that allow
people throughout the world to enjoy the benefits of the Internet.

Recent developments, however, demonstrate an alarming growth towards a
“license culture” on the Internet, imposed by the criminalization of
those whose culture and society advance creativity, innovation and
economic opportunity through the values of openness, sharing,
education and collaboration.

Philosophy professor Horacio Potel from Argentina is facing criminal
charges for maintaining a personal and educational website devoted to
Spanish translations of works by French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

A court in Sweden has found the four men behind “The Pirate Bay”, a
file-sharing website, guilty of breaking copyright law and were
sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

The Ability to Share is one of ISOC’s core values. The many-to-many
architecture of the Internet makes it a powerful tool for sharing,
education, and collaboration. It has enabled the global open source
community to develop and enhance many of the key components of the
Internet, such as the Domain Name System and the World-Wide Web, and
has made the vision of digital libraries a reality. To preserve these
benefits we will oppose technologies and legislation that would
inhibit the freedom to develop and use open source software or limit
the well-established concept of fair use, which is essential to
scholarship, education, and collaboration.

We will also oppose excessively restrictive governmental or private
controls on computer hardware or software, telecommunications
infrastructure, or Internet content. Such controls and restrictions
substantially diminish the social, political, and economic benefits of
the Internet.

The wire-tapping, searches and seizures, the removal of website
content and the criminal charges against professor Potel of the
University of Buenos Aires is an onslaught on human rights and
academic freedom in Argentina and on the Internet.

The police seizures of servers, the enormous bill for damages and the
jail sentence on Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl
Lundstrom and Peter Sunde is a defiance of the social and cultural
institution of file-sharing in Sweden and on the Internet.

ISOC-PH founding member and lawyer Michael Dizon writes, “Putting
greater emphasis on the development of social or community norms and
how people can actively participate in the creation of these norms may
be more advantageous in advancing creative culture than resorting to
contractual agreements. Ideally, laws (and the licenses that seek to
enforce rights based on these laws) should embody and uphold the norms
and values of a community, and not the other way around.”

As founding president of the newly rejuvenated ISOC-Philippines
Chapter, I would like to dispute some of the statements being made
regarding the Pirate Bay trials, in particular, by John Kennedy,
Chairman and CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry. Mr Kennedy says,

“This is good news for everyone, in Sweden and internationally, who is
making a living or a business from creative activity and who needs to
know their rights will protected by law.”

In keeping with the ISOC-PH mandate, I find it offensive to the
diversity of cultures on the Internet the claim that the global model
of copyright protection being imposed upon the developers and users of
the Internet is “good news for everyone.”

I also find it hard to accept the sincerity of Mr Kennedy’s statement
about “making a living or a business from creative activity.” In fact
only a handful of media corporations have effectively taken over what
used to be a very diverse field of creative activity.

Such a process of consolidation and privatization has created gross
inequality between artists and the big media corporations: relations
between artists and recording companies are replete with exploitative
contracts and bitter legal struggles for control; and royalties and
other earnings from copyright constitute only a fraction of the income
of most active professional artists.

The Pirate Bay trials and the criminal charges against professor Potel
are a threat to academic freedom and free speech, and they undermine
the Internet core value of the Ability to Share. If we envision a
future in which people in all parts of the world can use the Internet
to improve their quality of life, then freedom, and not a “license
culture”, must be obtained for professor Potel, the Pirate Bay
founders and the Internet communities of sharing.

ISOC-PH calls on all Internet citizens to demand freedom.

Fatima Lasay
President
Internet Society Philippines Chapter
http://isoc.ph/portal/

Quezon City, Philippines
April 20, 2009

Point taken, BUT…

The p2p nature of the technology infrastructure is crucial to the resilience to repression, and also, isn’t the development of technologies in this area usually p2p among designers as well?

I wonder how passive the use is; I actually doubt that:
“99.99% of the people… never remix or make any derivative work of what they put into, or get from those networks.”
is true, from the scale of movie-videos (such as “AMVs”) put to music on YouTube and similar sites; and people using commercial music in their home videos etc – I think this is actually more common than reposting commercial content unedited. I’m inclined to think having things available in copiable format tempts people to use them in creative ways, especially when the tools to use them are also readily available.

Something following from the Filipino argument – I thought it was very interesting to see this issue put in a North-South perspective. Now I think about it, that Argentine case and the recent Brazilian law aside, all the really nasty copyright stuff seems to happen in the North. Countries in Asia which I’d expect to be quite repressive (China, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong) seem to be surprisingly inactive on copyright matters, at least if measured by the amount of dodgy stuff that’s exported from or hosted there. I was recently told by an Indian student that India doesn’t have intellectual property laws except for the film industry. Not sure if it’s true, but they do produce and distribute generic versions of drugs which are patented in the North. There was a case back in January of an Indian ship exporting drugs to Brazil being seized in Holland, even though the generics on board were permitted in both India and Brazil. There’s also been a takeoff of OS/FS systems in some Southern countries (Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa have all officially embraced Linux variants, Nigeria is strongly hooked up with the One Laptop Per Child project).

Makes me wonder if there could be a redistribution of global power on this basis – parts of the South become successful based on not impeding flows of symbols, signs and data, while the North cuts off its own development through copyright rent-extraction.

I really have to ask: what the heck there is of “peer to peer” in the
Pirate Bay or in the larger file sharing community, besides the mere
**technical** protocol used to download and redistribute the files?

I’m not saying that those people are criminals, nor am I defending the
current copyright system or the corporations which abuse of it.

But I find very, very little overlap between that and P2P as in “P2P
production”, “P2P cultural exchange”, “commons-based peer production
and knowledge exchange,” and most of what is written at
http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Foundation_for_P2P_Alternatives starting
from the “our aims” box, or at
http://p2pfoundation.net/Characteristics_of_P2P

That is all stuff about being equals, about everybody being a
producer, etc…

99.99% of the people who share the overwhelming majority of the music,
video and proprietary software found at Pirate Bay, Kazaa, Emule or
whatever else is trendy these days, don’t even know that a
p2pfoundation.net website exists, don’t really care about what it
advocates, and never remix or make any derivative work of what they
put into, or get from those networks.

They are passive and pretty happy with being passive. They put or get
into the network, AS IS, what SOMEBODY ELSE produced (mostly chosing
commercial manure, mass produced by large corporations). They don’t
even really care about each other, besides sharing their IP numbers so
they can all download faster. More exactly: they may very well be all
wonderful, caring people who give every penny they earn and every
minute of their time to help other human beings, but they certainly
don’t need what happens on Pirate Bay and similar to accomplish that
goal.

So, again, I am NOT saying that the current copyright system is good
or that the users of file sharing networks are bad people. But I
remain quite baffled whenever I see what happens and is advocated on
lists like this one, or at p2pfoundation.net… called and considered
the same thing as what happens at Pirate Bay. Really.

Marco Fioretti
http://mfioretti.com