Piracy or Privacy Breaches: Which is Worse?
A New Zealand law professor asks which is worse, internet piracy or the privacy breaches of social networks and Google. He compares the MegaUpload alleged copyright violations to the practices of Google and Facebook and concludes the social network privacy intrusions are worse:
The law in both instances determined who gets to profit from the use of information and who does not and in both cases corporate power was able to trump the rights of individuals.
...Google is subject to an array of privacy and other laws. However, with the exception of fair trading laws in the United States, privacy laws globally are considerably weaker that the regimes that protect the rights of intellectual property owners.
[More..]
In related news, Bram van der Kolk, was finally released from jail yesterday. In an interview, he says he's going to continue to fight extradition and believes he will win. ""We have a very strong case, I'm very confident."
Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato were granted bail on January 26. Batato has yet to be released. The holdup has been finding acceptable (to authorities) places to live while on electronic monitoring.
And is anyone surprised that file-sharing hasn't decreased since the Megaupload takedown? The activity just moved off-shore, to places like Europe and sites like Putlocker.
Deepfield Networks analyzed the change by looking at the six companies that provide the storage facilities for 80 percent of all the file-sharing traffic on the 'net. (There are hundreds of search-and-index sites for both legal and illegal downloads, but most of the files themselves are housed on disk in data centers run by six major co-location and hosting service companies.
With the shift toward Putlocker, NovaMov and MediaFire, far more of those files are being shared across greater distances than before, because the big three download providers store their data primarily in Europe.
PC Magazine has more.
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