Top EU Court Says There’s No Right To Online Anonymity, Because Copyright Is More Important

General_Effort@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 751 points –
Top EU Court Says There’s No Right To Online Anonymity, Because Copyright Is More Important
techdirt.com

The key problem is that copyright infringement by a private individual is regarded by the court as something so serious that it negates the right to privacy. It’s a sign of the twisted values that copyright has succeeded on imposing on many legal systems. It equates the mere copying of a digital file with serious crimes that merit a prison sentence, an evident absurdity.

This is a good example of how copyright’s continuing obsession with ownership and control of digital material is warping the entire legal system in the EU. What was supposed to be simply a fair way of rewarding creators has resulted in a monstrous system of routine government surveillance carried out on hundreds of millions of innocent people just in case they copy a digital file.

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Do you want corps just stealing every new idea and product, cloning it, and muscling out the original inventor without paying them a dime? Because abolishing copyright entirely would be an excellent way to do that.

That already happens. People who research normally do it under a wage and the invention goes to the company paying the wage. If not, a small inventor doesn't have the financial means and the lawyers to fight a big company copying their idea. The small person is never defended.

Property rights are the only thing that protects the poor from the rich. Sure.

Copyright is the only thing protecting us from getting absolutely fucked even harder by the rich than we already are, yes.

How does that work? By definition, a rich person owns a lot of property. Therefore, laws that give more power to property owners favor the rich. Copyright is a type of property.

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