This is no laughing matter, Pirate Duo
We recently mentioned here that the European Parliament had approved the amendments presented by Malcom Harbour that opened the door to internet control and broke the neutral character of the network. Today we find in
The Inquirer
(via
Fírgoa
) an article signed by Juan Ranchal in which he explains that the Senate and the House of Representatives of the government of the United States “[…]have decided to withdraw funds from educational organizations that, according to the entertainment industry, have not done enough to hand over the names and IPs of students accused of downloading illegal files.”
The thing is very strong! (the summer heat prevents us from finding a less vague and vulgar qualifier). We were especially struck by the issue of filtering tools against P2P networks that schools and universities must install to avoid the withdrawal of funds: “The software to be installed called “
University Toolkit
”, is a Trojan horse in every way that would reveal the entirety of the traffic of the school’s network where it was installed and would allow external control of it.” To make matters worse, the program is based on
It also turns out that the law “is based on the investigation of “piracy” carried out by the
RIAA
and
MPAA
and that concluded, no less, that 44% of the film industry’s losses were due to illegal downloads by university students.
Despite the
manifest falsehood of the study
, this has been taken into account for the elaboration of the law, thanks to the huge amount of money that these associations have put into financing political campaigns.“
We see how in this case intellectual property is used in a deceitful way to make cuts in individual freedoms (blatantly resorting to economic blackmail) in an area as politically and intellectually “sensitive” as the University… definitely, we are going badly.
