Today is the day when the Swedish government (not a april fools joke) installs the IPRED "International Property Rights Enforcement Directive", how does this new law effect the DC community.
- The movie and record industry has the legal right if evidence is found that your IP was involved in copyright infringement and present that to a court in order to get the data from your ISP to see if you where using the IP at the time.
- Now when they have analyzed the data they can send out a warning letter or a demand letter to the user of that IP-number saying that they have to pay to not get sued.
Now, why would Sweden want to go the path of the US and start with lawsuits towards their people? Well, the pressure from Hollywood is hard, if we look back to 2006 when the US threatened Sweden with sanctions if the government didn't deal with the site (see link).
Since TPB is a centralized site it is an "easy" problem to deal with, if it weren't that those guys were smart
Since Direct Connect is a series of hubs, it means taking down the whole network could present itself more difficult, but public hubs will be a target and private hubs too if the hubowners aren't careful.
So how does ADC help, well running a hub in ADCS helps, it encrypts the protocol from the ISP so it doesn't become so easy to spot but the IP is still visible, of course there are tools for that as well like DCBouncer and VPN services.
But I want to flag that pirates have become greedy in most cases by not supporting artists and that is why this witch hunt got started in the first place, because around 2000 piracy wasn't that mainstream like it is today. What I'm trying to say is, if you liked the movie you downloaded, pick up a copy that is legal, same with new artists that are trying to establish themselves.
Well back to IPRED..
IPRED1 as it is called was recently found inhuman by EU itself since it violates human rights. Now I know many of you are going "WTF?!!! how the hell could they enforce it then and have it included in the law" well, again I have to point towards the US and the pressure with TPB.
Now a new version of IPRED is being made at the EU and hopefully it gets a bit better for the effected parties, in any case these laws should consider that the ordinary people that gets slapped with a lawsuit doesn't become ruined for the rest of their lives like it could be now.
But it doesn't look that bright for developers with IPRED2 (see link).
Since software can be criminalize this can be interred as an act of war of technology, the Internet was designed for sending data from point a to b, that isn't going to change cause of some laws. Deeming software to be illegal is going backwards and I do hope that the EU thinks hard before deciding what software is legal or illegal, if they deem Direct Connect illegal IRC FTP etc should go the same way since they have similar purposes and they have been around since the start of Internet.