I have two fundamental problems with this. The first is that this ruling flies in the face of “safe harbor” concepts that most law contains (including Swedish law, as I understand it) and these men are being prosecuted for providing to what amounts to a search engine, they did not host any of this “illegal” content in the first place. It’s a short trip down a slippery slope to lawsuits against ISPs for providing the bandwidth that allowed the download to happen and against the companies that provided the software that encoded to media that made the files small enough that moving them became practical. It’s the same reason I’m against outlawing guns. Outlawing something, particularly something useful, because it can be used to cause harm is stupid. It only punishes people who want to obey the law, and has no impact whatsoever on people who would be using those tools for doing something that was already illegal. What’s next? Outlawing hatchets because you can murder someone with them? Outlawing telescopes because you can peep on someone with them? If someone wants to do those things, they will find a way to acquire the tools they need to get it done, via legal means or not.

The second problem I have with this is that the “illegalness” of the content they “provided access to” is debatable. It arguably falls under a “fair use” -like umbrella, particularly according to Swedish law. Again, that is only if I understand it correctly, but it’s totally possible I’m wrong. And the “damages” are completely imaginary, predicated on the assumption that “unauthorized downloads = lost sales”, which they don’t. The whole thing just smacks of the judge either getting paid off or buckling under political pressure.

In the end, it’s just more collateral damage as the behemoth that is old media goes through it’s death throes. Your back is broken, you no longer control distribution. You don’t get to have all the eggs in your basket anymore. Since you refuse to evolve, just fucking die already. Content is effectively free now, and no number of legal “victories” will change that. Quit treating your customers like criminals and give them a reason to pay you, and you might still survive.

For those short on time Mike Masnick has a nice condensation / discussion of Clay’s piece up at Techdirt.

To that end, there are a lot of industries that I believe should be socialized or forced to become non-profit ventures. At the very least, they need much tighter regulation. We have too much reliance on these industries as a society to allow “the market” to shape them. Examples of this are health care, insurance, banking, and communications. Our current economic situation is an example of a (hopefully) worst case scenario of what happens when these institutions are allowed to run amok. Now, the government is stepping in to “save the economy”, which in the end seems to mean rewarding the people running these industries for irresponsible behavior at the expense of the taxpayers.

As discussed today over at Techdirt , we have a chance to make some positive changes with the various “bailouts” that are happening, especially now that we’ve starting seeing just how ineffective the banking bailout from last year is proving to be. Every indication points to this bailout money ending up lining the pockets of the proven-to-be-irresponsible incumbents, with little attention paid to the long term effects of what we are doing or providing for real sustainability. Instead, we are foolishly focusing on short-term gains, perhaps ultimately doing more harm than good.

And maybe that’s part of why we are so unwilling to socialize, or partially socialize, these industries. It would be really hard. If we can’t even build an effective bailout, how can we expect to completely refactor an industry? There’s the old saw about “the American way” and “free markets” and whatnot too, but it seems like someone would be smart enough to break from that dogma. Maybe there are people in positions of power who see how that might solve some of our problems, but are too afraid to put their name on the line. Doing this well would be tremendously difficult, and we’re almost sure to get it wrong on the first try. In addition, wresting power like this from the people who currently have it would be another war in and of itself. Especially with as corrupt as the House and Senate have become. But ultimately, if we aren’t going to collapse under the weight of our own greed, something must be done to fundamentally change the system. We’ve been treating the symptoms for the last several decades. Where has that gotten us?

If these industries were under more social control, perhaps bailouts wouldn’t be necessary. Perhaps foreclosures wouldn’t be at an all time high. Maybe the economy wouldn’t be in the worst condition it has been since the 70′s (or by some measures, the Great Depression). The top 5% (1%?) also wouldn’t be quite as rich, but I bet the rest of us would be a lot better off. Is anyone going to step up and start making changes that actually change things for the better, or are we just going to keep the fiscal morphine flowing?