As the World Wide Web was invented in 1989 and web browsers started to appear in the next decade, a new technology of information exchange was introduced to humanity. It gave people access to text resources, films, music that others have uploaded to the Internet, it allowed file exchange or sending of private messages to friends or colleagues. But as copyright holders joined the Internet, the problems have started. It is obvious that businessmen who possess copyrighted material would want to make more profit, especially in such a popular place, so copyright rules started to seize the freedom of the Internet.
In my opinion, copyright rules that exist today have failed to be fair a long time ago. I would like to point out that the ones that make copyright rules tend to protect only large companies - copyright owners, but never mention how fair those rules would be for everybody else. So, copyright rules are now oriented towards making even more profit for the ones who already makes a great deal of money. I absolutely agree with the Swedish Pirate Party members and authors of this book that copyright rules that we have now must be rethought and reconstructed. The use of private message exchange is now at risk as never. Governments and officials are on the side of the large companies and one day they may stop thinking of human privacy in favor of companies. In addition, making messages non-private would even attract governments as they will have a possibility to track criminal activity. I also agree that companies prefer to enlarge their copyright and other capitalist importance even if they do not have a foundation for such actions. And because of that consumers’ rights to use or copy works are becoming even more miserable.
It would be nice to say that we need to fight with the breaking of human moral rights and make copyright rules more sensible. But I do not think that the idea would gain much support. After I have noticed the increase of copyright rules' importance on the internet in 2019, I started to present facts to the people I used to talk to and listen to their opinion. Unfortunately, most of them agreed with the copyright statements preventing individuals from using content and consumers from sharing it without permission of the owner. I do not blame people, but I think that they have already lost their freedom on the Internet because of the copyright owners and their bad intentions. Companies are not stupid, they study their consumers. And they make everything possible to extract profit and to keep doing the same for a long time. So all their steps are careful, sometimes left unnoticed, but in the longer perspective, their actions bring total destruction to human freedom on the Internet. For example, they study how much people earn and how much people are ready to spend on services. If YouTube would have proposed its premium subscription back in 2010, people would not have accepted it. But with the years, YouTube started to increase the number of advertisements and enforced more and more copyright restrictions so that now it is impossible to watch a video without terrible 30 seconds of ads, download anything from YouTube or use copyrighted materials without spending money first. All other services have also caught up with this trend, some of them are making money out of literally rubbish. The internet becomes a big playground for the capitalists and a jail for any individual endeavor. Therefore I am very pessimistic about any changes in copyright rules for now. I think people have to rethink their usage of the internet, and it will come after some time when people will get tired to pay so much for nothing. People must understand that copyright rules are not rights of justice and equity. They lead us astray and will continue to do so.
Used materials:
(The book itself) http://falkvinge.net/wp-content/uploads/large/The%20Case%20For%20Copyright%20Reform%20(2012)%20Engstrom-Falkvinge.pdf
Christopher McFadden. (July 03, 2020). “YouTube's History and Its Impact on the Internet”. Interesting Engineering website. (Access date: 27.02.2022). https://interestingengineering.com/youtubes-history-and-its-impact-on-the-internet
“Copyright Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States”. Association of Research Libraries. (Access date: 27.02.2022). https://www.arl.org/copyright-timeline/
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