A Creative Way to Protest Against Anti-Piracy Law

Regular readers (are there any?) might be wondering what made me come back to the blog from a more than 6 months period of silence. Well, it turns out that a simple post can be of use in protesting against one of the many anti-piracy laws that the powers-that-be are trying to put in place.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone piracy when used to profit from someone else’s work, but the way most copyright cases are currently handled is just outright ridiculous, and the recent draconic crackdown on file sharing sites is a serious threat to the Internet as we know it.

OK, enough ranting, what’s this all about then? As reported by TorrentFreak, a Spanish artist and an hacktivist group devised a very clever way to protest against an anti-piracy law that when into effect today.

The Sinde law allows for the blocking of allegedly infringing sites based on reports from copyright holders, something very similar to the US SOPA bill. So Eme Navarro, who usually publishes his work under a Creative Commons license, released an “all rights reserved” track specifically for the protest. Then, with the help of the group Hackivistas, hundreds of sites are linking to this copyrighted song without permission, and Navarro is going to report all of them to the Ministry of Culture. In turn, they have to review all the requests individually and on order of arrival, so the protest should slow down the review process significantly.

What a clever DOS attack!

Why am I talking about this if I’m not Spanish or living in Spain? I should probably be more worried about SOPA Ireland at the moment…

They will also censor foreign websites, so anyone in the world can join us. We want to check what happens in every case.

And that’s where I come in. As of now, this blog is infringing on Spanish copyright law, because I’m linking to Eme Navarro’s Nobody’s Death.

Let’s see how that goes.