The recent enactment of the intellectual property law sometimes referred to as the “IPRED-law” based on a European Union directive had an immediate effect on the Internet traffic. Hours after the law was put into effect the traffic load on the Swedish core network netnod was cut around 30%. A couple of days later it is down to 50% of what it was before the IPRED was put into effect.
Several political factions opposed the IPRED law, here is a mock image created by the green party, the original is called Ipren and is a over the counter drug for aches and inflammation called Ipren. On the box we can also read "Unintelligence 400 mg" and "stops technical development and spreading of culture. Integrity breaking." and at the bottom "for politicians that are not rooted in reality."
The new law makes it possible for intellectual property owners to directly go to court to get who owns a certain IP at a certain time. This means that they may then prepare a law suit against the person that had the IP at the time of the copyright infringement and this has already been put into effect.
Only hours after the law was active several authors handed over a demand to the court in Solna to get who was using certain IP’s to download audio books from a server. This server has been pointed out as a main source for distributing copyrighted audio book material.
The anti-piracy lobby is clapping their hands. Personally I think that their victory will be a short one, traffic is already moving on to more secure systems such as OneSwarm or using anonymizers.
The Pirate Bay guys, recently also in court proceedings, have already set up a service where someone for about €5 can use their non-logging anonymizer in order to access material on the Internet in a fashion that makes it much more difficult for people to track.
They call the service the IPREDator. I’m pretty happy the Internet is fast again with the currently low traffic in and out of Sweden surfing is once again a rather pleasureable experience of course…
In some ways I don’t really see the great movement against it, I mean there is no human right to have access to pirated material on the Internet. I am personally much more worried about the current ongoing work to extend the copyright time to 95 years after the artists death which would once again – just like at the last extension when it was extended to 75 years – put severa open works once again under the yoke of being copyright.
Movements such as Project Gutenberg and Project Runeberg suffers because some of their works already published and allowed to be published ar suddenly not longer available because the extension of the copyright time works retroactively.
That’s madness. But we don’t see a hughe political movement against this madness…
Tags: copyright, downloading, fast internet, file sharing, infringement, intellectual property, internet, IPRED, judicial, law, low traffic, madness, netnod, pirate bay
