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RSSThe Electronic Frontier Foundation has now stepped into the case, arguing that if the studios get their way, people will no longer be able to browse the Web in relative anonymity.
In the lawsuit, companies including Columbia, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros., accuse the site's operators of inducing users to download pirated movies and TV shows. Last month, a federal magistrate ordered the site to turn over server log data that presumably reveal the IP addresses of visitors.
The site operators say they don't specifically amass or retain such information, other than to the extent it's temporarily available in the company computers' RAM. That detail has led to a legal fight over whether material in RAM is "stored" -- a prerequisite to obtaining the data in a civil lawsuit, according to the EFF.
While the battle might turn on a technicality, EFF says the stakes couldn't be higher. In court papers filed late last week, the EFF argues that long-established First Amendment safeguards that guarantee people the right to speak anonymously "mean little in the online world if a discovery rule can make it impossible for services to implement privacy practices that support online anonymity."
Many search engines and Web companies collect and store users' IP addresses as a matter of course, but when companies have chosen not to do so, courts shouldn't cavalierly direct them to find ways to gather the information so it can be revealed.
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One may look upon the upcoming legal actions between Viacom and YouTube, which is a case in point.
For people to commit copyright infringements, they have to download IP Protected stuff though. If the industry would make it easier to consume TV shows Online etc, with easy payment methods in place, I strongly believe the masses would prefer legal consumption.
What is still missing there is the opportunity to annotate and add your own thoughts to things, before you share them. This is exactly what eBlizz has come up with. eBlizz is a SmartClient sitting on your device, that will allow you to build a “view� of previously disparate content objects, drawn from the internet, without downloading it. Thus you can build a view including local and online content and share this through your Social Network (another feature) with your friends.
There are no copyright infringements here, as the content only is available in a view from the source and might have to be paid for to consume. But it drives new viewers to the source and is thus a great tool for Media and Content businesses to spread the consumption of their content further.
eBlizz is presently entering a Beta Phase and sign-ups are welcomed on www.eblizz.com
The fact of the matter is that the court can seal the record and protect the privacy of the persons who visited the site. But if those persons then further downloaded and distributed illegal content, then they should similarly be culpable.
The argument of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, if taken to the extreme, would protect online predators and pedofiles each time they violated the law with their online communications.
As our digital world expands, it's time to stop blurring the lines between what constitutes legal and illegal activity and uphold the law and existing property rights. This litigation and discovery should proceed unencumbered.