[LINK] The Copyright Lobby Absolutely Loves Child Pornography

[Kim Holburn]

Falkvinge again:

http://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-lobby-absolutely-loves-child-pornography-110709/
> The Copyright Lobby Absolutely Loves Child Pornography

> "Child pornography is great," the man said enthusiastically. "Politicians do not understand file sharing, but they understand child  pornography, and they want to filter that to score points with the public. Once we get them to filter child pornography, we can get them to extend the block to file sharing."
> 
> The date was May 27, 2007, and the man was Johan Schlüter, head of the Danish Anti-Piracy Group (Antipiratgruppen). He was speaking in front of an audience from which the press had been banned; it was assumed to be copyright industry insiders only. It wasn't. Christian Engström, who's now a Member of the European Parliament, Oscar Swartz, and I were also there.
> 
> "My friends," Schlüter said. "We must filter the Internet to win over online file sharing. But politicians don't understand that file sharing is bad, and this is a problem for us. Therefore, we must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that's something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet."
> 
> "We are developing a child pornography filter in cooperation with the IFPI and the MPA so we can show politicians that filtering works," he said. "Child pornography is an issue they understand." Schlüter grinned broadly.
> 
> I couldn't believe my ears as I heard this the first time. But the strategy has been set into motion worldwide.


> Schlüter's plan worked like clockwork. Denmark was the first country to censor AllOfMP3.com, the (fully legal) Russian music store, and is now censoring The Pirate Bay off the internet. The copyright industry is succeeding in creating a fragmented Internet.
> 
> This is why you see the copyright lobby bring up child pornography again and again and again. They are using it as a battering ram for censoring any culture outside of their own distribution channels. You can Google the term together with any copyright lobby organization and see them continuously coming back to it.
> 
> In Sweden, the copyright industry lobbyist Per Strömbäck has publicly admitted it being one of his best arguments. Try Googling for the Swedish word for child pornography on the lobby site and see if you get any hits in any articles (over 40).
> 
> The reasoning is simple and straightforward. Once you have established that someone who is in a position to censor other people's communication has a responsibility to do so, the floodgates open and those middlemen can be politically charged with filtering anything that somebody objects to being distributed.
> 
> It is not hard to see why the copyright lobby is pursuing this avenue so ferociously.
> 
> It doesn't really matter that filters at the DNS level are ridiculously easy to circumvent. The idea is to create a political environment where censorship of undesirable information is seen as something natural and positive. Once that principle has been established, the next step is to force a switch to more efficient censorship filters at the IP or even the content level.
> 
> News reached us this week that Internet Service Providers in the United States have now entered an agreement with the copyright lobby to police the net. This arrangement, it turns out, also stems from the copyright industry's love of child pornography.


-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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