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Internet freedoms restrained - SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/CETA/PrECISE-related updates
IainB:
It sometimes seems as though quite a lot of the issues affecting Internet freedoms tend to be largely ignored or "under-reported" by the MSM (MainStream Media), so that we interested parties (Internet users) actually only find out about things at the last minute.
Now why might that be?
[/sarc]
Thank goodness for a relatively independent and diverse blogosphere to keep us informed (and I do not incluse MSM reports hidden behind paywalls in that) when the MSM either cannot or will not do so.
Relevant post from Falkvinge on Infopolicy:
Berlusconi Convicted: What We Learn From Political Media Contamination, though I think the word "Contamination" might have really been intended as "Collusion" or "Corruption"(as per the URL).
Just the text copied below sans embedded links/images.)
by Rick Falkvinge
Diversity: Against all odds, former Italian prime minister Berlusconi was recently sentenced to one year in prison. This followed a long process where an Italian referendum had to be held to revoke his legal immunity, in order to indict him in the first place. We can learn a lot about the dangers of politically controlled media from how Berlusconi tried to defeat this referendum.
Silvio Berlusconi was sentenced to one year in prison for “notable tax evasion”, and prohibited from holding public office for five years. Experts say that this means that the 76-year-old’s political career is effectively over.
However, this case has been dragging on for a long time, and started out as a seemingly hopeless case since Berlusconi enjoyed legal immunity for acts committed during his prime ministry. To repeal this immunity, a referendum was required in Italy – a population-wide referendum just to allow the former prime minister – one man – to even stand trial.
To understand the complexity of this situation, three pieces of data are vital:
First, the functional illiteracy in Italy is 43% (yes, forty-three per cent). This means that almost half of the population can’t read an average-complexity newspaper article, or this blog post, and understand its content and use its information in their daily lives.
Second, referendums in Italy need two things to pass and take judicial effect. Out of the voting people, over 50% of the valid votes cast must be “yes” votes – simple enough; there must be a majority in favor of the referendum. But the second thing required is that the voter turnout must also be over 50%. This means that there are two mutually exclusive strategies for defeating an Italian referendum – either campaign heavily for a “no” vote, or not campaign at all in shooting for a voter turnout less than the required half.
Third, Silvio Berlusconi owns a controlling interest in six of the seven television networks in Italy.
Now, putting these three facts together, we observe that people in Italy do not get their daily news from newspapers (in fact, almost half of them are unable to do so), but from television and friends. We also observe that the programming on television is practically completely controlled by the single man in Italy who has anything to lose from the referendum passing.
So what happened?
The referendum wasn’t mentioned once on the televised news in six out of seven television networks. It was dismissed as “not newsworthy”, in all simplicity.
But the referendum passed anyway, reaching the required 50-percent voter turnout by and large thanks to the alternate newsflows of the net, which Silvio Berlusconi didn’t grow up with and which he hasn’t cared to understand. And so, Berlusconi was indicted. He stepped down from the prime ministry on practically the same day, and was sentenced to jail a few days ago, on October 26.
This story illustrates in a very straightforward way how media ownership, and the interest of the media owners, influences news valuation.
To put it bluntly, there is simply no such thing as “independent media” or “neutral media”. Ownership interests prevail; blood is thicker than water. Even public service channels choose to report from values in the middle lane. That’s not neutral; that’s in the middle lane.
Therefore, a plurality in reporting remains paramount – in order to hold elected leaders accountable, we need many reporters with many competing interests.
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Tinman57:
I find something (ok...better make it many things) about that story extremely disturbing. Is it just me? :huh:-40hz (November 02, 2012, 03:34 PM)
--- End quote ---
Something VERY disturbing indeed. There's NO coochie worth that much money. NONE!!!
Besides that, give me a woman with experience any day. I want one that KNOWS what to do, not one that I have to train. ;>
IainB:
It sometimes seems as though quite a lot of the issues affecting Internet freedoms tend to be largely ignored or "under-reported" by the MSM (MainStream Media), so that we interested parties (Internet users) actually only find out about things at the last minute.
Now why might that be?
...
-IainB (November 02, 2012, 06:52 PM)
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I didn't try to answer my own question, but I have just read where Rick Falkvinge answers it for me - and very cogently, it seems: Why SOPA-supporting news networks don't mention SOPA.
He starts with an arguably valid assumption, which he then substantiates, that there are relatively high levels of functional illiteracy in some populations, and gives the estimate of being (typically) 50% in the industrialized parts of the world, but Italy being higher - about %57% (i.e., only 43% functionally literate). He then goes on to suggest that that functional illiteracy was taken advantage of.
He writes of the Berlusconi fiasco: (my emphasis)
On these six [Italian] television networks, the referendum was simply not mentioned. Not once. Deemed not newsworthy.
At the end of the day, this enraged the Italian people enough to bump voter turnout over 50% anyway, and the referendum passed. Very shortly thereafter, having had his immunity revoked, Berlusconi stepped down.
Are we starting to see parallels to the SOPA blackout yet?
Conclusion
If you control what other people know, if you control the village newswell, then you control the entire village. The Catholic Church was in this privileged position before the printing press (which is also why they demanded harsher and harsher penalties — up to and including the death penalty — for unauthorized copying of knowledge in their time).
The one thing that can threaten TV news networks is the Internet and the ability for people to communicate directly, bypassing the judgment of the now-famous 1% to determine what knowledge befits the masses. We learn from history that all such power is always used to maintain and strengthen itself first. So, SOPA basically kills that ability of the everyday person to bypass the 1%.
Therefore, it is in the economic and political interest of today’s newswells to kill a strategic threat to their privileged position, and to act just like Berlusconi did in Italy: to actively not bring the topic up onto people’s radar.
In other words, Corporate United States is just as corrupt as Berlusconi’s Italy was, and is acting just like the Catholic Church did when they tried to kill the printing press.
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Worth reading the whole post.
Renegade:
I didn't try to answer my own question, but I have just read where Rick Falkvinge answers it for me - and very cogently, it seems: Why SOPA-supporting news networks don't mention SOPA.
-IainB (November 04, 2012, 02:48 AM)
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Excellent read.
Falkvinge is just one badass site with non-stop, blow your mind, amazing stuff.
(Off-topic - @Iain - I said in another thread that you probably wouldn't like David Icke, but if you like Falkvinge, you'll probably like some of what Icke has to say as a lot of the underlying premises line up.)
IainB:
Another "I thought this was ajoke until I read it" moment:
Anti-Piracy Group Threatens To Sue ISPs Over TV Show ‘Piracy’
enigmax, November 2, 2012
CIAPC, the anti-piracy group that has successfully forced ISPs in Finland to block The Pirate Bay, has threatened to sue the ISPs themselves over alleged TV show piracy. Local ISPs such as Elisa and TeliaSonera offer cloud services where their customers can store TV shows for later viewing over the Internet. CIAPC says the services fall outside the scope of private copying “fair use” and therefore require a license to operate legally. The ISPs are ignoring demands to shut down the services and now face legal action.
For decades TV companies lived in the moment, transmitting TV shows at a certain time and date and expecting their customers to adapt to their predetermined schedules. Be around when the show airs, be around for the repeat, or miss it forever, the business model used to dictate.
Technologies such as VHS and more recently home hard disc recorders went some way to bridging the accessibility gap but these days customers increasingly want everything “on demand”, at a time and place of their choosing, not one dictated by a TV company.
To fill this gap in the market, some ISPs such as Elisa and TeliaSonera in Finland are offering their subscribers personal cloud storage. As a TV show is aired it is recorded to the customer’s cloud account, ready to be watched over the Internet at a more convenient time.
The ISPs and their subscribers appear to be happy with the convenience of the services but perhaps unsurprisingly they are now coming under attack from rightsholders.
CIAPC, the anti-piracy group that successfully forced ISPs such as Elisa, TeliaSonera and DNA (around 80% of the Finnish Internet market) to block The Pirate Bay, insists these services are illegal and should be shut down.
“Storage services for TV shows are currently offered by around twenty companies, including major Internet service providers such as Elisa and TeliaSonera,” CIAPC explain. “None of the companies have licenses for the services. This is significant, because the issue concerns around 100 million euros worth of commercial services.”
CIAPC say they wrote to the companies advising them that their services breach copyright law and ordering them to be shut down, but thus far the warnings have gone unheeded. So this week CIAPC reiterated their threats that if the services remain operational, legal action will follow.
“None of the service providers has complied with the requirement of the ban. It appears that a legal solution needs to be considered,” says CIAPC managing director Antti Kotilainen.
The timing of the threats appears to be linked to an announcement last week that the operators of TVkaista, a company offering similar services, had been charged for illegally offering the content of several TV companies without permission.
TVkaista’s CEO and technical director are accused of copyright and intellectual property offenses plus aggravated fraud. The company’s legal adviser is charged with criminal copyright offenses and copyright fraud.
The accused all protest their innocence. They insist that their service is legal under current law which grants their customers a fair use exception for private copying of TV shows for personal use.
The service offered by TVkaista is, however, slightly different to that being offered by Elisa and TeliaSonera. TVkaista records all programs and stores them for a few weeks whether customers ask for them or not. The other services only record TV shows on demand.
CIAPC say that the Copyright Act only permits users to save content such as TV shows, movies and music locally within the home, and these cloud services don’t fit that description.
None of the ISPs are expected to give in without a fight.
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And @Renegade, yes, I do see that a lot of what David Icke says makes sense. This "ISP Piracy" nonsense is an example of what he was on about - Fascism. The rightsholders seem to want to have us all in a straightjacket where we get force-fed exactly what they want to feed us, when they want to, and we will have to pay them for the privilege every time.
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