Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Accessorize those criminals!

Strange things are afoot.

I awoke today to the news that my local Pirate Party has been subjected to legal threats. The conditions are simple: stop providing bandwidth to the Pirate Bay, or face the legal consequences.

Which provides any number of legal conundrums. For one thing: since when is it illegal to provide bandwidth? For another: who makes the call as to which things are illegal to provide bandwidth to? For yet another: if providing bandwidth is a crime, then what other things are criminal as well?

Is it time to, perhaps, investigate the postal service for their distribution of illegal goods? Or the municipal services who provides maintenance for the road systems?

The legal  basis for their threat is the crime of being an accessory to an accessory to an accessory to the one actually committing the crime. Which is vague indeed. And opens up for many an interesting lives of crime.

You know, the easy thing to do might just be to reform the actually existing copyright framework. Make communication a little less criminal and a little more communicative.

Communication is hard as it is. No need to make it harder than it should be.

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