Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive implemented in Sweden
Today the Swedish parliament voted for, and passed the law known as IPRED (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive), which grants private organizations police authority.
Basically, anyone who owns a copyright, me included, since this page is copyrighted, can demand and receive the personal account details behind an IP address if they suspect the person behind the IP address of copyright infringement. Name, address, phone number, social security number, all of it. And the ISPs are bound by law to hand them out. Not to a court, or to the police, but to me, the copyright holder.
This website is published under the Create Commons License, attribution license, so this is obviously not something I would ever do.
Since there is no way to accurately associate an IP address with a physical person (just think unsecured wireless routers), the idea behind this law has some dubious holes in it the size of small planetoids.
Personally, I really don’t like the idea of private organizations having police authority to snoop around my internet traffic and the ability to de-anonymize me. It’s bad enough that the government does it!
I work from home quite a bit, and such snooping would not only mean a severe breach of privacy, but could potentially constitute industrial espionage. The possibility for abuse for this new law, is simply put, frightening. Besides, we have a police force for a reason!
This trend where one civil right after the other is being thrown out the window, all in the name of crime-fighting, is leading us down a very perilous path, where the ends justify the means, whatever those means may be.
If this continues, I fear we may one day wake up in a totalitarian society. One would hope that we had learnt our lesson from the last time around. Apparently not.
Furthermore, according to the Swedish constitution; all public power stems from the people, and the parliament is the people’s primary representatives.
I Sverige finns rättigheterna angivna i vår grundlag. Där står det att all offentlig makt utgår från folket och att riksdagen är folkets främsta företrädare.
www.riksdagen.se
It is common knowledge that the clear majority of the Swedish people are, and have always been against the IPRED law. The Swedish people have debated vehemently against it in both traditional media and in the blogosphere, organized protests against it as well as collected signature lists which have been made available to the politicians.
The obvious faults of this law aside, one need not wonder whom the parliament were representing today, since it was clearly not the Swedish people, which are against this law.
I have no legal education, and can give no valid legal evaluation on the matter, but in my own humble opinion, I would consider the Swedish parliament’s acts today nothing short of a severe breach of trust. Something akin to the Swedish crime “Grov trolöshet mot huvudman”. Which in the corporate world would fetch the perpetrator a hefty prison sentence of several years.
Although I think that the parliament should be held accountable for their breach of trust, I won’t hold my breath.
The laws that not only Sweden are passing but pretty much every other country in the world are passing are infringing more and more on our human rights, especially the right to some freaking privacy. The majority of the citizens of said countries are against this sort of thing, so why oh why do the governments continue to pass such laws? Obviously, that was a rhetorical question.
More power is being given to corporations and big business with the general public left with the short end of the stick. I’m rather at a loss of what to do about it. It’s obvious that these governments wont listen to common opinion on the subject, so what does that leave us?
*shakes head*