File Sharing Is A Recognized Religion In Sweden
I kid you not! From the Hollywood Reporter:
Sweden has recognized file sharing as a religion, granting official church status to the country’s Missionary Church of Kopimism, which boasts some 3,000 members.
It might sound like an early April Fool’s joke but Kopimism has been around in Sweden since 2010, when it was founded by members of the Young Pirates, the youth movement of Sweden’s controversial Pirate Party.
The Kopimi (pronounced “copy me”) movement has tried twice before to get official recognition, but had been rejected. The Swedish government finally recognized the Church of Kopimism after if formalized its mode of prayer and meditation.
According to the group’s website, Kopimism sees information as holy and copying and file sharing as a sacred acts akin to prayer. The website has been unavailable since it broke the news of its religious status. A message urged those interested in joining to “come back in a couple of…
The Pirate Bay: ‘The Battle of Internets is About to Begin’
Ernesto writes on TorrentFreak:
Talks on implementing a Europe-wide firewall to censor and block ‘illicit’ websites has caused concern among many Internet users in recent weeks, and today one of the targeted sites has joined the discussion. Quoting one of Churchill’s most famous speeches, The Pirate Bay team is rallying the public to defend the free Internet and end the threat posed by the entertainment industries’ copyright lobby.
In February, a secret meeting of the European Union’s Law Enforcement Work Party (LEWP) resulted in a worrying proposal.
To deal with illicit sites on the Internet, the group suggested the adoption of a China-like firewall to block websites deemed ‘inappropriate’. The controversial proposal immediately met resistance from various sides, including ISPs who would be tasked with maintaining the blocklist. The copyright lobby on the other hand welcomes the initiative which they’ve been suggesting for years.
One of the sites that has a fair share of experience…
Low-Budget Movie Companies Using BitTorrent Lawsuits As Business Strategy
David Kravets writes in Wired:
On March 7, Camelot Distribution Group, an obscure film company in Los Angeles, unveiled its latest and potentially most profitable release: a federal lawsuit against BitTorrent users who allegedly downloaded the company’s 2010 B-movie revenge flick Nude Nuns With Big Guns between January and March of this year. The single lawsuit targets 5,865 downloaders, making it theoretically worth as much as $879,750,000 — more money than the U.S. box-office gross for Avatar.
At the moment, the targets of the litigation are unknown, even to Camelot. The mass lawsuit lists the internet IP addresses of the downloaders (.pdf), and asks a federal judge to order ISPs around the country to dig into their records for each customer’s name.
It’s the first step in a process that could lead to each defendant getting a personalized letter in the mail from Camelot’s attorneys suggesting they settle the case, lest they wind up named in a public lawsuit…
Public USB Drives In The Walls Of NYC
Dead Drops is a project in which USB flash drives are installed on the streets of New York City for anonymous file-sharing by strangers. Thus far, five USBs are hidden around the city. Find them to add or take whatever files you wish.
‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. I am ‘injecting’ USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in NYC) to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop contains a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is still in progress, to be continued here and in more cities.
Police Raid The Headquarters Of PRQ, Webhost Of Pirate Bay And Wikileaks
Police in several European countries are coordinating a fight against a certain “radical conception of freedom,” embodied by Wikileaks and Pirate Bay. Rogue euronerds beware, French paper-of-record Le Monde writes:
The Swedish police raided the premises of the host PRQ in Solna, Sweden. This “host activist” advocates a radical conception of freedom of expression, including the servers hosting the download site The Pirate Bay or sites advocating pedophilia. It is also the host of Wikileaks, the site specializes in the publication of confidential documents made public this summer tens of thousands of reports of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
According to preliminary information from Swedish media, the search was linked to a download illegal files, as part of an investigation by Belgian police launched two years ago.
Other raids have taken place in other Swedish cities and in other countries including the Netherlands and Hungary. No arrest has been performed in PEQ, contrary to a…
Filesharing “Bully” Lawyer Faces Disciplinary Hearing
A British lawyer’s firm sent thousands of letters demanding £500 ($800) damage payments over filesharing, based on IP addresses obtained from ISPs. But now England’s Solicitors Regulation Authority is referring that lawyer to a disciplinary tribunal after hearing strong complaints from a consumer watchdog group. Which? Magazine had received testimonials from more than 20 different people who insisted they hadn’t actually shared any files, and were being wrongly accused. (”It appears few if any of the recipients have subsequently been successfully prosecuted over the claims…”)
Today the consumer group which publishes the magazine applauded the news of the disciplinary tribunal, “because we’ve received so many complaints from consumers who believe they been treated appallingly by this law firm.” The filesharing could’ve occurred over unsecure wireless connections, the group argues, and they added that the lawyer’s behavior was “both aggressive and bullying.”
Pan Sonic’s Mika Vainio Interview
Via Technoccult:
Klint Finley: I guess I’ll start with, just to get it out of the way, the announcement has been put out that Pan Sonic has split up, so was this an amicable split?
Mika Vainio: Well, let’s say that we don’t have any plans to start again, but maybe we do one day. It’s still open, but I don’t think, at least for a couple years, we will not do it.
So are you willing to talk anymore about the reasons behind the split or do you want to leave it at that?
Yeah, why not. There has been no argument or bad spirit or anything like that. It’s just that after, we’ve been doing this for over 15 years, it’s time to stop and concentrate on our own solo things. [...]
The record business has been going through a lot of transitions lately through music piracy through the Internet and there’s also…
