Sunday, October 14, 2012; 10:25:56 AM Eastern
AT&T will turn its customers in
- This in TorrentFreak about AT&T and other ISPs turning their customers over to the RIAA and MPAA for accessing certain sites while using their service.
- It's obvious to anyone with any appreciation of 20th century history that this is a first step which will have the ISPs cooperating with other multinational corporations to control what we do online.
- Oh it's just the Internet, not freedom. But these days how much freedom can you enjoy without Internet access?
- This question came up in my first year at Harvard, when the RIAA convinced the provost to suspend several students who they believed were sharing music with other students. They cut the students off from Internet access for a year. In 2003, this was considered too onerous, that it was equivalent to expelling them from school. We changed our mind, a good result. Now in 2012, those same students are fully adult, in the workforce, and suspending their Internet access is like expelling them from life itself.
- You think it will stop with music and film piracy? Heh.
- First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
- Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet.
- See also: Violate copyright? No Facebook for you!