From Wired:

Swedish internet traffic has plummeted as a new anti-piracy law has come into force.

Under the new law, internet service providers (ISPs) have to hand over the IP addresses of customers that a court determines may be engaging in illegal activity such as file sharing. The information will be passed onto the copyright owner of the content the court believes has been “stolen”.

Although there has been no official statement from Sweden’s ISPs, the law seems to have had an immediate impact on the number people surfing the web in the country.

According to Computer Sweden, internet traffic in the country was down 30 per cent lower yesterday afternoon than at the same time the day before.

Internet use took a similar plunge three years ago after a raid on the Stockholm offices of the notorious file-sharing website Pirate Bay. The founders of the site were charged early last year by a Swedish prosecutor with conspiracy to break copyright law and related offences, and the verdict is due on April 17.

The new law seems likely to provoke a rash of legal action. On the day the law came into force, five audiobook publishers went to court to try to determine the identity of someone they claim has 2,000 audio books stored on a server.

Kjell Bohlund, chairman of the Swedish Publishers’ Association said that the illegal sharing of audiobooks has increased in the last year prompting legal measures. “It has hit writers, publishers, and Internet book retailers financially, and there is a longer-term risk that publication will decline”, he said in a statement.

The next big case is currently being prepared by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a body representing the music industry, and will target people who share music illegally.

The Swedish Pirate Party, which has been gaining increasing support since its foundation on January 1, 2006, has responded to the law by urging its members to stop encrypting their wi-fi networks. This means that it would be impossible to sentence an individual for file sharing as everyone will be using an open and anonymous network. Police in Sweden have raised concerns that this could proliferate the spread of materials like child pornography.

The move by the Swedish Government follows similar legislation in Belgium and France. The UK music industry had been championing a “three strikes and you’re out” policy, whereby customers would be cut off if they ignored warnings to stop sharing files, but EU officials voted against this plan in September.

— By Akira The Don on Saturday, April 4th, 2009

The US has completely withdrawn from the Human Rights Council.

Makes sense. Seems to be a bit silly being on any “‘Uman Rights Counil” when you spend so much time torturing people on boats and such like.

In other news, the people I get my Internet off are into some dark shit.

Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett has attacked the principle of net neutrality, whereby internet service providers do not interfere with or degrade the speed at which content is delivered from websites to consumers, branding it as “b****cks”.

Berkett’s cable operator ranks as the second largest internet service provider in the UK with approximately 3.6m customers.

In an interview with the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine, Berkett said that “this net neutrality thing is a load of b****cks”, and revealed that Virgin is already in talks with unnamed content providers about paying to have their content delivered faster than others.

Feeding into the debate between internet service providers and the BBC over iPlayer, Berkett even warned that public service broadcasters who choose not to pay for faster access to Virgin’s subscriber base would end up in “bus lanes”, effectively having their content delivered to consumers at a lower speed.

Elsewhere, I am still weirded out by this Obama thing. I’m kind of expecting for him to be outed as a trannie or something, though all that business with the pound makes me think something weird is gonna pop off regarding his wife.

Maybe I’m just a paranoid dude.

Elsewhere in Hilarityville, that dude they’ve been torturing for five years who’s just decided to say it was him who did 911 has appeared in court, where he told the judge he had been “looking to be martyr from long time.”

“The government case,” the article notes, “is largely designed to obtain death sentences against them”, which, as Ioz notes, is a bit like punishing a bank robber by giving him keys to the vault.

New video later! Whoo!

— Monday, June 9th, 2008