piracy hysteria in the EU

today the eu meps vote on the Telecom Packet bill thing - this is a barking mad set of measures to increase regulatory controls over what can and cannot be done on the Internet. Aside from the usual waste of time and money this involves, it is symptomatic of the government agencies wishes to be "seen to be doing something" rather than "actually being effective" about things. As has been commented elsewhere,
if there was any evidence that a musician had actually gone broke because of online music distribution, one might have more sympathy, but when one is bombarded with unskippable advert for unscrupulous agencies that support profiteering music and film companies, every time one lawfully buys a cd, dvd, or goes to the cinema, one is hardly likely to be sympathetic to these scum.

breach of copyright is not theft. repeat after me. Unless you can prove a loss (either of an item you had before, and don't have now, or of possible revenue) then copying
may constitute a crime, but it is not theft in the sense of the English language common understanding of the word. P2P is not piracy. P2P users might be software engineers using bit-torrent to send out new versions of Linux or other commercially viable products (even Cisco IOS:) or they might be ~attoo or iPlayer or other legitimate users of P2P for media distribution.

use of anonymization and encryption are not terrorism. I might just want privacy. just like I do when i want to do banking on line. or whistle-blowing.

It is not up to a government agency to decide when an activity constitutes illegality by looking at my content to do so. but that is not the main issue - the problem here is that the governments here want to legitimize the routine spying on my activities by commercial agencies to protect them against possible (rare) commercial losses.

pretty soon now I will have to disguise all of my network activities as tax returns (and MPs expense claims) so that there is enough cover traffic from accidental government data privacy breaches to cover my legitimate private communication:)