Public Libraries Show Why Sharing Culture Should Never Have Been Banned in the First Place

• By Rick Falkvinge
• on January 12, 2014
• https://torrentfreak.com/public-libraries-show-why-sharing-culture-should-never-have-been-banned-in-the-first-place-140112/

Opinion

You'll have a hard time finding a copyright monopoly maximalist who insists that public libraries should be banned. This would be political suicide; instead, they typically tell lies about why it's not the same thing as online sharing. Let's have a look.

A concept that’s becoming increasingly useful is “Analog Equivalent Rights.” Culture and knowledge should be just as available in the digital space, as it is in the analog space. We should enjoy exactly the same privacy rights and civil liberties online, as we do offline. The concept is completely reasonable, and nowhere near rocket science. This is a tremendously useful concept, as it makes lawmakers and others reflect on the liberties they are killing off for their children, sometimes followed by a mental shock as they realize what has been going on with their silent approval. Let’s have a look at how this applies to public libraries.
When you are challenging a copyright industry lobbyist over the concept of public libraries, and ask them if they are opposed to people having access to such culture and knowledge without paying, they are smart enough to not deride public libraries – as this would weaken their political position considerably. However, online sharing of culture and knowledge is the Analog Equivalent Right to the public libraries we’ve had for 150 years. Lobbyists will sometimes try to change the subject around this, or more commonly, lie using one of three myths. Here are those myths and lies, and why they are untrue:
Lobbyist lie: The library buys all its books. Therefore, it’s not comparable with online sharing of culture.
Fact: Laws in most countries say that for every, every, book published, the publisher must send a number of copies of that book to certain large libraries at their own cost, to be available without charge for reading by the public.
When the copyright industry complains that they “can’t possibly accept” laws that mandate them to “give away their product for free”, as they tend to put it, it’s only prudent to point out rather sternly that those laws already exist, and have done so for more than a century. The key difference with online sharing is that the analog-equivalent mechanism wouldn’t incur any cost at all to the publishers, something that would normally be seen as a good thing, both from a political and publishing perspective.
Obviously, it’s true that many if not most libraries buy additional books and additional copies of books. However, the main point here is that there are already laws on the books that say that every single book published must be supplied to a library, in order to be available to the public free of charge.
In addition, this ignores the point that the copyright industry doesn’t get to “accept” or “not accept” laws. They get to run a business in a particular legal environment or choose to not do so, and that’s where their prerogative starts and ends. On a functioning free and fair market, entrepreneurs do not and should not have any say whatsoever in what the legal environment looks like. (We still have some distance to go with regards to this point in replacing clueless and dangerous yes-men politicians.)
Lobbyist lie: The rightsholder gets paid when a book is borrowed from a library.
Fact: This is a myth on two fronts – what we would call a “double-fault” in popular sports such as Counter-Strike.
It is true that, under certain conditions and in several countries, some spare change is sent to somebody when a book is borrowed from a library. However, that somebody who receives money is not the rightsholder, nor is it some kind of compensation for a lost sale. In most European countries, it is a governmental culture grant intended to boost the amount of culture available in the local language. Therefore, and this context is crucially important, that spare change has absolutely nothing to do with the exclusive rights of the copyright monopoly. It is a unilateral cultural governmental grant that happens to be based on library statistics, as they are a convenient measure.
If a book in Swedish is borrowed from a Swedish library, then the person who made it available in Swedish gets a very small amount, provided they hit a minimum threshold and hasn’t hit a maximum threshold. Sometimes, this happens to be an author that wrote originally in Swedish, but much more often, it is somebody who translated a book into the Swedish language. Other countries have similar arrangements.
To wit: When somebody borrows Harry Potter in Swedish translation from a Swedish library, J.K. Rowling – the rightsholder – doesn’t get a single penny from that. The myth is just not true on any account.
Lobbyist lie: A library can only lend its book to one person at a time, and therefore, this limit must be artificially imposed in the digital age.
Fact: This was a physical limitation, not a conceptual one. If a library could lend its books to multiple people, it would have done so in a heartbeat long ago. To argue that this physical undesirable limitation should form a basis for limiting legislation in a new environment where the limitation doesn’t exist is worse than a logical fallacy; it makes no sense on any level.
The purpose of the public library is not and was never to “lend books”, as is asserted in this myth. It was, and is, to “make knowledge and culture available to as many people as possible at no cost to them”. What’s possible has expanded greatly with online sharing, and it is only proper that we take advantage of this fantastic potential.
The online sharing of culture and knowledge is the greatest public library ever invented, and the ability for all humankind to take part of all culture and knowledge 24/7 is arguably one of the largest steps of civilization of this century. All the technology has already been invented, all the tools have already been deployed, the ability to use it has already spread to all of humanity: nobody needs to spend a dime to make this happen. All we have to do is to lift the stupid ban on actually using it.
What we need to do is to replace the yes-men politicians who let themselves be puppeteered by an obsolete but lucrative gatekeeper industry in order to make this great leap of civilization. Often, the mere trend to replace such politicians is enough for bad policy to change on a dime.

Insurance Companies Are Destroying People's Lives And Cops Are Being Paid To Help Do It

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190817/20355742807/insurance-companies-are-destroying-peoples-lives-cops-are-being-paid-to-help-do-it.shtml

Tim Cushing

Insurance claims result in investigations. This much is a given. Sometimes it involves both insurance companies and law enforcement agencies, depending on what's being investigated. But in many cases, insurance companies are doing the investigative work for law enforcement agencies and pushing prosecutors towards bringing fraud charges against claimants just trying to be compensated for valuables damaged or lost.
The combined power of these two forces is enough to obliterate lives and livelihoods. Kendall Taggart's report for Buzzfeed is a long, horrifying read. It details the close relationship between insurance companies and cops -- one that extends so far as companies paying cops, prosecutors, and expert witnesses to turn valid insurance claims into insurance fraud charges.

A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that Erie, State Farm, Farmers, and other giant home and auto insurers around the country have co-opted law enforcement to intimidate and prosecute their own customers — tactics that can help companies boost their profits and avoid paying claims.
Insurance companies provide financial incentives to scores of police departments, prosecutors, and other public agencies to encourage them to focus on insurance fraud, a crime that has traditionally not been a priority for local law enforcement. In some cases, insurance giants even cover the salaries of dedicated prosecutors, detectives, and investigators whose caseloads consist primarily of referrals from those same companies.
The result is that dozens of premium-paying customers across the United States have faced jail for doing nothing more than filing insurance claims for damages to their property.

In one particularly horrendous case, State Farm destroyed a man's construction business. A 2006 hailstorm in Indiana resulted in 50,000 claims being filed with the insurer. State Farm wasn't happy with the uptick in business, which resulted in hundreds of complaints being filed against the insurer with the state's Department of Insurance.
From all appearances, the insurer decided to scapegoat Joe Radcliff, a contractor who was very busy performing hail damage inspections. Two years after the hailstorm, police arrested Radcliff, telling him he was being charged with 14 felonies.
The insurance company accused Radcliff of deliberately damaging shingles and siding, presumably in hopes of being hired to repair the damage once the insurance check came in. After losing almost all of his customers over the bad press, Radcliff found out State Farm was behind the criminal investigation. The railroading began in earnest one year prior to his arrest, shortly after he spoke to a TV reporter about State Farm's foot-dragging.
State Farm went after Radcliff's customers to try to build its case… but not by asking them if they'd noticed any possible criminal activity. No, State Farm TOLD them they had observed criminal activity and that it would fuck them up too if they refused to help put the contractor away.

State Farm tried to pressure at least four of those homeowners into accusing Radcliff of fraud — telling three of them it would pay for the repairs only if they filed police reports alleging that it was the contractor who had damaged the roofs. In another case, State Farm reversed its own determination that a homeowner’s roof was damaged in the storm after it learned Radcliff was involved, locating new experts who now claimed the contractor had vandalized the property.

The company couldn't get any of Radcliff's customers to testify against him. So it took the info it did have to the state's insurance industry/law enforcement liaison. And it left out everything customers said that refuted the allegations State Farm was making against Radcliff. It took Radcliff until 2013 to clear his name. All charges were dropped when it became apparent State Farm had deliberately withheld exonerative information.
But the damage was done. A business destroyed by a much larger business that didn't want to do the thing it's actually in the business of doing: selling insurance and paying out claims.
It's not so much that insurance companies work with law enforcement during investigations. That's to be expected. But there needs to be a clear line dividing the two and there isn't. The surreptitious purchase of witness testimonies and the direct funding of fraud investigators is only part of the problem. Various government bodies are mixing public and private entities, allowing them to intermingle freely, much like the attendees of the annual insurance fraud conferences they hold.
The public may pay the salaries of public servants, but when it comes to insurance fraud, insurance companies are paying the salaries of investigators and prosecutors.

Insurance company officials make up the majority of [Pennsylvania's Insurance Fraud Prevention Authority] board, which last year doled out $14 million in targeted grants to fund the work of roughly 100 prosecutors, investigators, and support staffers across the state dedicated exclusively to rooting out insurance fraud.
Those law enforcement officials collected $5.6 million in restitution from people accused of insurance fraud in 2018, money that went back to the insurance companies. According to the IFPA’s annual report, the most commonly investigated cases don’t involve sophisticated organized crime rings, but individual policyholders ages 18 to 34 with no prior criminal record.

The incentives are skewed in favor of everyone but the premium payers. Paying customers are being dragged to court, arraigned on charges, and otherwise made miserable simply because they asked for what's owed to them. Rather than just being blown off by shitty customer services reps, they're having their lives ruined by companies that withhold exculpatory evidence and law enforcement personnel who are only too happy to carry their courtroom water for them.