January 18, 2012
Recently there have been several law proposals to "protect copyright owners" against online piracy. This proposed laws threaten the existence of the Internet as we know it, making, for example, that is publishers responsibility to verify if some site that they links to is copyright infringment free. Linking to for example Google, would mean that sixhat.net would be responsible to ensure that no copyright infringement appeared in google.com from that moment on. These laws would in reality remove all power from the internet (The Link) and therefore we would be confined to isolated boxes. These laws also aim to allow censorship of contents via DNS hijacking and could make entire websites disappear with the complaint of an angry customer, or rival company, as the process would just require a simple take down notice.
SOPA, PIPA and OPEN are being discussed in the US but if approved they will affect business globally as they will give control to US administration to effectively censor all internet.
In Portugal the Law Proposal PL118 aims to impose a tax on storage capacity of devices to compensate for authors losses to piracy. This tax means than more than 50% of the retail value of an Hard Drive goes to taxes. The claim is that this tax would then pay for creators for their losses. This law doesn't take into account the Moore's law of storage devices, making it impossible to buy an Hard Drive in a few years. It is also a blantant case of double taxing as after the levy is applied VAT is still due.
Also the Portuguese Authors Society doesn't accept to represent authors with the Creative Commons or other copyleft licenses and charges creators to register their work with the society.
Under the "fight piracy" banner, PL118 is really imposing a levy on all business that need some sort of data storage, be it legit or not. We'll all pay for a suposed industry crisis that no one can prove and no one can correlate with piracy and with that are creating an unfair and costly punishment on industries that rely on digital storage of infromation..
For all this and more, sixhat.net joined the January 18th global Blackout and all website content will be unavailable for 24h. Please help stopping these stupid laws. Freedom is being attacked as never before.