02-24-2011, 16:00 UTC-5 last updated
Add of quotes from the french 'Césars 2012' ceremony
by Bernard Rosset
In nowadays society, it is a daily statement that democracy, despite being a political system without caveat, is one of the best ones to choose in order to ensure fundamental liberties to its citizens, as long as they keep their government following their wish.
Internet is not more than a network which gathers different kinds of machines, which in turns connects people to each other whatever their place is. The network has no other aim than delivering information. It can't be claimed that Internet is a good or a bad place, it is neutral in its very nature. For that liberty heaven to remain safe, we as internauts shall protect it from any attempt to control, restrict or filter it, whatever the means or the justification are.
A network can be simply defined by a positive description of its very nature: delivering. For the Internet case, you talk about information, encoded in binary electrical signals.
The network neutrality is more convenient to define through a negative definition: delivering and nothing else! Whatever the information is about, delivering exclusively implies mving information between two places, without any mechanisms such as inspecting/modifying/deleting this information.
Defending the network neutrality started long ago, far ahead of the current piracy concern.
In the early ages of the Internet, people wondered about the leftovers of the ARPANET, making the United States of America controlling directly theoritically indepedant institutions governing the worlwide Internet.
This stranglehold on the ICANN (including the IANA), the IETF and some of the generic top-level domains (gTLD, such as .com you probably heard about during the MegaUpload shutdown event, as well as .net, .org, etc.) was already making people defending their freedom ver the Internet gnashing their teeths. This debate, even if only gathering experienced users of the Internet (compared to the standard users which number was quite limited), was already vivid.
This current concern about piracy allows highlighting the neutrality problems. Sadly not without pain.
Back to our subject: why should you as a daily user of the Internet being concerned about that network neutrality?
Since the Internet is still a young network, since it has been used in a significant way for not more than twenty years, the simplest example to understand what is at stake is to transpose this question on another network, better known from far: let us compare e-mail and postal mail.
You wouldn't like that your mailman to be able to read your mail before giving it to you. You would probably complain about the violation of your privacy, and you would be right to defend your rights.
What if someone was able to legally read your e-mails before putting it inside your e-mail box? In a more general concern what if this people was able to read every bit of Internet traffic in or out of your computer?
Now what if your mailman was even more powerful and was able to take action on your mail, based on multiple criteria, such as (but not an exhaustive list):
Mail content?
Name or address of sender/receiver?
Transposed on the Internet case (you would rather talk about the Web for a majority of users):
IP packets content
IP address of sender/receiver
Internet principles are nothing new. It is a network like others, transmitting information directly following its dematerialization brought by the use of computers.
However, since this network is relatively young, defense of your privacy and our rights is not part of your first reflexes, even if it was your daily concern. This naïvety is an opportunity for people who already understood what is at stake, for their very best and our worst future.
Mass computers is one thing among others: an enhanced photocopier.
At first, there was a need of keeping data safe from hardware failures, copying started by replicating data on other media: that is called backup.
Since it is simple and free to transfer data on other media, why not making other copies? If I write an article or a report, and I then want to send/tranfer it to several other people. No problem so far.
What if now I am listening to one of my favourite songs or I am watching my very favorite movie of all times. I am still physically able to copy them from one medium to another, to make other people as happy as I am. But suddenly I can't. Why do rules have to change?
Uh... the copyright thing.
When you tell me about the defense of the copyright, I totally agree woth you, and I say even more: authors are in danger, you need to protect them. Between you and me, this concern has existed for ages, it has nothing to deal with computers.
The whining reasons you are told, whoever you are and wherever you live, is the following:
Bad pirates copy culture-related content
Since this work is protected by copyright, pirates are counterfeiting
Since this work is copied and shared, it means some money taken from authors
To defend authors against bad pirates, you need to stalk them and severely punish them
Here is the basic reasons behind every measure destroying freedom all over the world, in particular 
/ 
ACTA, / SOPA, / PIPA, & 
Hadopi
Let us analyse those statements step by step:
Bad pirates copy culture-related content
Culture, like education, require information sharing (in its most basic meaning).
If you go to the theater, you probably have been influenced by something. There are of course official advertisement campaigns, but nothing has more impact than you social circles advice to promote cultural work (I personnally became fan of the famous french singer Jean-Jacques Goldman by steal... borrowing my brother CD). Who never were told going to watch a movie or some musical event by this insistent friend before liking it aswell?
These video or audio tapes, CD, DVD, harddisks & USB keys which are exchanged between people are only media. Sharing cultural stuff has always existed and their copy was not born with computers.
There is one thing true however: computers and computer networks (including Internet) made information sharing far more easier. At first glance, nothing wrong in that.
Since this work is protected by copyright, pirates are counterfeiting
When you talk about protected cultural work, you talk about copyright.
Do you really know what is the meaning of it and what it was intended for? The answer is simple: Defending authors against editors. In the beginning, it was invented to protect writers against powerful printers.
When yo utranspose that in the nowadays world, the copyright has been extended and protects an enlarged range of cultural stuff, including music (musicians/singers agains producers) and video (movie directors against producers).
The very meaning of the copyright is to ensure that people who created something are being well rewarded for it against powerful companies which they signed a contract with to help distributing and promoting their work.
I will reference thos companies as 'majors' in the following.
Let us get back to the reasons we are analysing.
When you are told about the copyright here, it is not to protect authors against editors but editors against consumers.
Thus, editors invoke copyrights to save their earnings. What a strange switch of meaning...
/ The ThePirateBay website reminds you that Hollywood was built on escaping areas where copyright was protecting ideas, in order to use them in movies.
Theorytically, Hollywood should not has existed ever if the (vague) idea of intellectual property was not bypassed.
Since this work is copied and shared, it means some money taken from authors
Let us start with refreshing our minds about our current world:
In the music or movies field, producers are huge and very powerful. So powerful that the authors' share of the earning coming from the sales of their work is ridiculous.
I do not tell you about the most famous artists but I am focusing on the biggest part composed of less known ones.
For example, / on the 99 cents price of a song on iTunes, authors only earn 10 cents. 90% is the percentage of earning intermediates take, even when they do not create anything.
Now, I would like to focus on the sidestepped problem of cultural work earnings consequently of their free sharing.
First, the lack of earnings looks like an overflow of it.
/ 2010 statistics on theater frequentation by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) shows a continuing profit from box-office increasing over the past few years. The report even start by mentioning a bold font 'for all films'.
A Mediamétrie (a famous french statistics institution) press release from September, 2011 even deals with stating about a frqentation record of french theaters in 2010 & first semester of 2011.
What strikes me most is while stating file sharing kills cultural work, these industries state their earnings have never been this high...
Pirates pay even more on the average than other consumers!
Quoting the conclusion (page 81, "Quelques conclusions" 1/3) of a Hadopi report published on 23rd, January 2011 (translated by my own means): "75% of Internet users spend on average 36 euros a month on cultural products (mail-order sales included). Internet users admitting outlaw behaviors spend more on the average. Major brakes to legal consumption theu indicate are price and choice."
During the opening of the french 'Césars 2012' ceremony, its President Guillaume Canet told that 'despite downloads of cultural products, nothing is as good as watching a movie with others in a theater'.
A bit later, Antoines de Caunes, Master of Ceremonies, remembered that '2011 was a fastuous year for the french movies industry' with 215,6 millions of tickets sold which is a new record, breaking the old one from 1966 (45 years old!)
Then comes the following paralogism:
'Some shared cultural work is not bought
Some bought cultural work generates earnings
Some shared cultural work does not create earnings'
is a great example of sophism/trickery.
The first reason is that since sharing is easy and (more and more) quicker, you have access to plenty of cultureal products as never before! If you stop free file sharing, you are getting people back to their pre-Internet state: there won't be a sudden million more of theater ticket sales each day. 1 file copied from a friend can not be systematically replaced by the purchase of a piece of music if file sharing is made impossible.
You should rather be glad that culture is shared: for people, information sharing is always good and for a company, it means advertisement without charge, like the phenomenon called buzz. What do you complain about?
This is the second reason I would invoke: I was talking about sharing stimulating culture earnings sooner. What if file sharing had not a direct impact on rise of culture consumption?
What remains of these reasons about any lack of income? Those reasons spreaded to every medium listening, looking like a brainwash, thanks to our television?
Take your time to fully understand what has been said so far, it is a huge part of the process. Let alone, that facing the fact that your beliefs may be wrong is never an easy task...
To defend authors against bad pirates, you need to stalk them and severely punish them
I do not even know what to say here. You are considering punishing something you would have a hard time demonstrating it is bad in court.
Wait. There was a keyword there. Court.
When a problem is hard to face in court, you would be tempted to bypass the court. It is a common (but wrong) reflex as people, organization or state: that is why executive leads should never has the power to bypass justice.
That is where the problem lies: more than having questionable reasons, all solutions which were proposed so far have in common the flaw of removing justice decisions from courts.
The ACTA simply gives executive and justice powers to private companies in order to allow them to ensure their 'rights' are not violated.
Majors may force Internet providers to monitor (filter) their customers and transmit information about them when majors find it necessary.
If Internet providers do not cooperate, thos majors may decide on sanctions on their own.
Talking about sanctions, none of them are clearly defined, allowing majors to decide thm on their own (for the first time they would prove themselves being creative). You already hear on some places about prison, to be compared to fines (not always huge ones) decided by justice in the case of financial illegal operations or scandals.
The law being international, it is beyond national ones, it as at the same level as states Constitution. States won't be able to protect their citizen anymore, even if the law is finally found to be unfair.
Finally, the law creates an 'ACTA Comity' which will be in charge of making amendments to it. The french association 'la Quadrature du Net' pictures that point with signing a blank cheque...
Briefly: The reasons are questionable, the proposed solutions destroy freedom and give powers to private lobbys. Those who like global conspiracy should be hysterical!
Let us finally get interested in the way used to make these law pass:
Politics are usually lost on the computer-related subject, they need some time to decide on which laws are made for the greater good
The laws are strangely calling for a hurry to make them pass as soon as possible, using pressure to avoid the necessary time to make a good decision (why is that hurry necessary? Majors are far from running out of cash and their income are continuously increased...)
Finally, these laws pass without anyone knowing and media come afterwards to let people now (were your aware of the ACTA before it has been voted by a huge set of country?)
The authors' rights are a real and a huge concern. However it has always been the case, it would be pretentious to make Internet users responsible for it.
As an Internet user and a citizen like billion others, I really wish to protect all those artists who make culture vivid and make them being able to live a life of it.
Wrong problem leads to erroneous solutions: those we are told about are obviously not the right ones, these are still to be invented.
Some ideas start to appear however, for example by changing the current economic model of the culture industry : it would be nice if it was time for the oligopoly of the big producers to reach an end.
There are some laws to create, ones would protect small companies against huge ones in the cultural sectors. Why are they currently facing certain death?
It would be nice if artists could decide what their earnings should be to make intermediates make less profit on their work, it is an interesting reflexion... maybe reducing/getting rid of intermediates between authors and consumers!
Meanwhil, corrupted laws that try to be passed are a danger. What is at stake is the future of the Internet: fighting for your liberty over the Internet has reached a milestone.