We are currently living in a historical moment which will define and shape digital rights and information freedom on the internet for generations to come. It’s one of those rare moments where the issue is black and white and where the two opposing camps can be identified without over-simplifying the issue. On one side, there are those fighting for the information revolution’s culture of sharing, co-operation and the public commons. On the other side is a powerful, industry cartel who would stomp out the commons to salvage proprietary information that they can buy and own.
It’s for this reason that the global free and open source software community has been paying close attention to specific battles which could have significant ramifications within this overall conflict. Right now, one of those battles involves a website operated in Sweden called The Pirate Bay. The website’s founders (Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm & Carl Lundström) have recently been found guilty of criminally providing “assistance to copyright infringement.” They were sentenced to one year in prison and have been fined $3.62 million USD. Their website, like hundreds of thousands of other websites, provides a search interface for files available using the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol, designed by Bram Cohen of San Francisco, California in 2001.
The trial against The Pirate Bay has highlighted a number of important issues related to digital freedom. It has shined a light on the corruption between corporate lobbyists and the judicial systems that decide the public’s fate — just after the trial ended, the defense found out that the judge, Tomas Norström, is a board member for a Swedish association which has lobbied for stronger copyright laws and also belongs to a couple other copyright-oriented organizations. The defense has filed a request for a new trial based on the judge’s conflict of interest.
The Pirate Bay is also demonstrating the power of distributed political action by launching a DDo$ (Distributed Denial of Dollars) campaign to pay the fine from their trial, a play on words based upon a widely-known attack which can bring down websites (Distributed Denial of Service).
The trial also exposed the implications of current legislative debates within the EU about an ISP’s obligation to either delete or keep traffic logs which can associate a user with their actions online. In this case, the Swedish ISP, Bahnhof, opted to support user privacy by declaring that they won’t keep logs about what users are doing online … data which would be necessary to know which users have downloaded information owned by a corporation.
One of the world’s largest free software conferences, the FISL gathering in Brazil, has invited Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay to participate in this year’s panels and debates.
The Pirate Bay case is particularly relevant to an ongoing debate in Brazil about the Internet Law Project — nicknamed ‘AI-5 Digital’. The nickname references a set of laws called the Institutional Acts which were created during the dictatorship in Brazil, with each of the acts destroying more and more civil liberties in Brazil until almost the entire government was gutted, leaving only the military despots in power. The last of these acts, AI-5, severely restricted civil liberties in Brazil and established complete media censorship.
On May 14, a public forum was held in front of the São Paulo Legislative Assembly, with over 300 people speaking and demanding that the Internet Law Project be blocked by the government. The group of citizens included artists, university professors, politicians, free software programmers & activists, internet users and the high-profile Senator Eduardo Suplicy from the Workers Party. Another forum is being called in the south of Brazil at the Rio Grande do Sul Legislative Assembly on May 25th.
Meanwhile, back in Europe, the French National Assembly, ignoring a vote by the European Parliament, this week (05/13) passed a draft law that would automatically disconnect a customer’s internet service, for up to one year, after they receive three warnings about illegally downloading privately-owned or copyrighted information or software, without due process that would allow internet users to challenge the claim that their behavior was illegal. Furthermore, users would have to continue paying the internet bills even though they would not be able to get online and they would be placed on a blacklist, preventing them from obtaining service from a different ISP.
A similar law passed in Sweden led to an incredible decline in internet traffic, confirming that restrictive laws like these naturally result in a decrease in the free flow of information.
The international free software movement has decisively placed themselves in opposition to laws which restrict information freedom by prioritizing intellectual property and the ownership of information by corporations over the civil right to information and software. In part, this is because free software activists believe that the “information commons” is far more legitimate than a corporation’s claim that they “own” an algorithm, or some piece of knowledge. Free software activists believe that proprietary software and privately-owned knowledge is a severe detriment to information-based societies. John Sullivan of the Free Software Foundation has argued that attacks against websites like The Pirate Bay is a step towards the criminalization of legitimate sharing, even citing cases where school teachers have believed that students who were sharing copies of GNU/Linux with each other were breaking the law.
Why free software activists should work to oppose these cases is best explained in a position paper entitled “The War on Sharing: Why the FSF Cares About RIAA Lawsuits“:
[T]hese lawsuits represent a concerted attempt to rewrite copyright law in a way that threatens to undermine the ultimate goals of the free software movement. Second, a vocal minority in the entertainment industry uses these lawsuits as warrants to justify DRM technology and other measures to monitor and control the flow of information over the internet. Third, if unopposed, these lawsuits create a culture in which people are afraid to share, presuming sharing to be theft.
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