On the 28th of February, in a move similar to that taken against the Pirate, the High Court ordered six broadband suppliers including BskyB, BT and Virgin Media to block access to three major file sharing sites: Kickass Torrents, H33T and Fenopy.
This is just the latest of many heavy-handed actions taken in the war against internet piracy. Recent months have seen major crackdowns in the US and the UK, such as the aforementioned attack on the Pirate Bay, which was effective for all of a few days before operations were up and running again, as well as the regular and repeated flaunting of fair use laws by major businesses against online content users.
More recently was the legal campaign lead by the US Department of Justice against pioneer and digital rights activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in January. His crime: downloading over 4 million articles off the JStor database for mass redistribution, for which he was facing a potential 35 year prison sentence and a million dollar fine, despite the fact that JStor refused to press charges against him.
What is particularly worrying about this recent turn of events is the ease and willingness with which the takedown was initiated. The process is becoming more streamlined. The continued resort to increasingly draconian measures against copyright infringement is setting a dangerous precedent and threatens to undermine the neutrality of the internet and opens the way for standardising extreme violations of privacy.
I could go on for hours about the damage inflicted by excessive Intellectual Property laws, both copyright and patent, such as the WTO’s Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), that curtails access to live-saving drugs and redistributes wealth from the developing world to the developed world in the form of patent rents, or the infamous Micky Mouse Effect, whereby, due to major lobbying interests, the time limit on copyright is continuously pushed back till long after the creator is in their cold grave, or the insidious practice of Patent Trolling– think you get the idea.
Those calling for stronger IP laws and harsher punishment, such as the British Phonographic Association (BPI) and other such chief beneficiaries in the entertainment, software and pharmaceutical industries, often make the claim that these measures are needed to ensure that the talent of artist like Justin Beiber, One Direction or whatever schlocky corporate prolefeed they deem to be hip and happening with the kids these days.
But then who can blame them? The recent advances in computer technology have made the production and distribution of media and information infinitely easier than ever before. Their old business model, based on scarcity and enforceable monopolies, is no longer applicable, and like any bourgeois faction in decline they resort to the coercive power of the state to enforce their position.
Yet despite this many artists and entertainers question the dogmatism of the Copyright Lobby, such as Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry and countless independent artists who depend on the open access culture of the internet that is under attack. In the words of internet rapper and Copyleft activist Dan Bull “talent isn’t rare/it doesn’t need protection/any claim to the contrary is pure condescension”.
But the issues and intricacies of IP law also have a deep impact on students, on a more parochial level beyond generally screwing us all over. No, this isn’t about the love the student body has for pirated media. Instead I am talking about something far more fundamental: the diffusion and access to information.
In this day and age we the potential access to near limitless sources of information; the entirety of human knowledge is at our disposal. Yet current copyright laws place considerable, arbitrary restrictions on what we can and cannot easily access. More than one online documentary that was on my reading list has been taken down. Course convenors are forbidden from uploading more than one chapter from copyrighted books, even if those books are out of print. The library is often underequipped to provide enough copies of those books for all those on the courses, especially on the high demand courses. Often students have to purchase the books themselves, adding an additional financial burden to the cost of university living.
“It’s time we ended this farce” said one source in the University Faculty. “It’s become far easier to access information now…it should be made available to students”.
Ordinarily, I would finish this sort of an article by calling for us to start questioning the system, but it seems self-evident to me that the current system is already broken. The time for asking if we should change the system has long passed; instead we should ask why has it not yet been changed?