A digital guantanamo
Today we have a great guest post from Damien Mulley. — Ben
The Internet has brought us amazing new freedoms over the past few years and when people have been touched by these freedoms the world has become a better place. While we are bombarded in the press by financial meltdowns and job losses a sinister force is at work to shut down these freedoms.
It’s begun with eircom honouring requests from the record industry by blocking access to websites such as the pirate bay but it’s not going to stop there. Other sites will soon be blocked and more and more of these sites will have less and less to do with piracy and ripping off billionaire record labels. Soon if opinions aren’t liked, these sites will get blocked.
A digital guantanamo has been created with all these sites being locked away along with our freedom to surf on the rare chance that an act of copyright infringement could happen. Like many locked away in orange boiler suits in cages, now our freedoms are doing the same thing. We are not criminals, we are not pirates, we are not threats to security, yet we are being treated as such.
The message that the industry machine is pumping out to us is that it’s for our own good, they are the judge of our potential behaviour and without trial they are saying we can’t be trusted. They are doing it because they say in our future we will download music and hurt their profits but pirates are clever people.
They’ll be the first people to come up with a way around these systems. Before they killed napster, they had gnutella and then limewire and now bittorrent. As long as one clever person is annoyed by the record industry and their attacks on freedoms, there’s going to be piracy.
Blocking websites is futile. The record companies will only beat piracy if they shut down the Internet and it appears this is their way of doing it, one website at a time. We are not the pirates, we are people that enjoy the fact that we were allowed to make up our own minds on where to go on the Internet. Blocking where we can go on the Internet is the new book burning and we’re opposed to it.
— Damien Mulley
