Falkvinge: Private Communications or Mass Corporate Surveillance, Pick One

In his most recent column for Torrent Freak, Richard Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, argues that we have a simple choice before us. We can opt for retaining some semblance of private correspondence and communication that is outside the scope of government and corporate surveillance, or we can acquiesce to the demands of the entertainment industry.  Excerpt:

There is no way to enforce the copyright monopoly without reading all the private communications in transit – mass eavesdropping and mass surveillance. There is no magic way to just wiretap the violations and ignore the rest; the act of finding which communications may violate the copyright monopoly requires that you sort all correspondence into legal and illegal. The act of sorting requires observation; you cannot determine if something is legal or illegal without looking at it. At that point, the postal secret and the privacy of correspondence have been broken . . .

So we’re at a crossroads where we as a society must determine which is more important – the right to communicate in private at all, or the obsolete distribution and manufacturing monopoly of an entertainment industry. These two are completely mutually exclusive and cannot coexist. This is, and has been, the problem since the cassette tape.