Read The Case for Copyright Reform for Free Online Page B

first, then gradually tougher. Towards the end, the
penalty was death by public torture, drawn out over several days. And it wasn’t
just a few poor sods who were made into public examples.
     
    Swedish economist and historian Eli Heckscher writes in his standard
work Merkantilismen :
     
    Of course, the attempt to stop a development
supported by a violent fashion trend, carried by the [...] influential female
kin, could impossibly succeed. The policy is considered to have cost 16,000
people their lives, through executions and armed clashes, plus the yet
uncounted who were sentenced to slavery on galleys and other punishments. In
Valence, on one single occasion, 77 people were sentenced to hang, 58 to be
broken on the wheel and 631 to the galleys, one was acquitted, and none were
pardoned. But this was so far from effective, that the use of printed calico
spread through all social groups during this period, in France and elsewhere.
     
    Sixteen thousand people, almost exclusively common folks, died by
execution or in the violent clashes that surrounded the monopoly.
     
    Here’s the fascinating part:
     
    Capital punishment didn’t even make a dent in the pirating of the
fabrics. Despite the fact that most people knew somebody personally who had
been executed by public torture, the copying continued unabated at the same
level.
     
    So the question that needs asking is this:
     
    For how long will the politicians continue to listen to the copyright
industry’s demands for harsher punishments for copying, when we learn from
history that no punishment that mankind is capable of inventing has the ability
to deter people from sharing and copying things they like?
     
    To get the issue of illegal file sharing off the table, we must find
another solution. But that is no problem, because such a solution exists.
     
    Once you accept that copyright must be scaled back, a whole palette of
advantages to that scenario become apparent. Two billion human beings would
have 24/7 access to all of humanity’s collective knowledge and culture. That’s
a much larger leap for civilization than when public libraries arrived in 1850.
No public cost or new tax is involved. All the infrastructure is already in
place. The technology has been developed, and the tools are deployed. All we
have to do is lift the ban on using them.
     
    File Sharing And Fundamental Rights –
The Bottom Line
    The relationship between file sharing and fundamental rights is very
simple:
     
    • File sharing is here to stay. No matter what the Pirate Party
or anybody else will or won’t do, it is not going to change this fact. In the
long run, it will become impossible to charge money for just digital copies.
This is a piece of technological history, and there is nothing more to discuss.
     
    • So why bother? The copyright industry will not be able to stop
file sharing. The file sharers will find ways of protecting themselves through
anonymization, encryption, etc, as needed. No problems for them. But the
copyright industry will try to set examples by punishing random individuals in
a hard and disproportionate way.
     
    This is not acceptable. An even bigger problem is the general
surveillance of everybody’s private communication, and the censorship and
blocking systems that the copyright industry is proposing. For this reason, we
must take the political fight to align copyright legislation with reality.
     
    This is really all there is to it. The only way to even try to reduce
file sharing is to introduce mass surveillance of all Internet users. Even this
is not very effective, as experiences from the last decade have shown. But if
you want to fight file sharing, mass surveillance is the only way. The
copyright industry knows this.
     
    So, even those who do think that file sharing is harmful to society and
should be eradicated, have to ask the question if they are prepared to accept
the surveillance society to achieve this. Because once the surveillance