Bulgarian Government Halts Torrents
March 28, 2007 |
The gathering was small change compared to Bulgaria’s complete range of torrenters. (That’s a guestimate, by the way.) Hundreds of people swarmed into Sophia, the nation’s capital on March 15th to protest the “forced closure of some of Bulgaria’s most loved BitTorrent trackers.”
The protest of the block is understandable. The cutting off of torrents is not something to be taken lightly. The peoples’ response is clear. Cold turkey is not something that’s recommended. So like caffeine hounds removed from the bean for too long, a group of poster-wielding male youth (Seriously, look at the photo in the linked story. I spot three women max out of all visible faces.) did all they could do at the time: they took to a wide open space, and began to demand their trackers back.
And they should win this fight, mainly because not all torrents consist of copyrighted material. Like I and many others have said again and again, it’s not the vehicle that’s the danger, it’s the driver. You may replace the analogy with something more logical, of course. Sometimes I run low on sense.
If the closing of torrent trackers is so easy to do, we’re curious to know why governments around the world don’t do the same. No, we’re not trying to egg them on, daring them to pull the plug. We’re simply asking why.
Surely we won’t get an answer anytime soon. There’s no reason to expect a response. But with so much happening on the Web, surely fair use rights should be protected by weighty laws that won’t wither away in the face of opposition from copyright owners. Like lawmakers have forced trackers to cease their activity, the masses should force their leaders to erect an Internet bill of rights, making it harder for those in power to close the country’s tubes to things they don’t like and refuse to understand.
Stealing isn’t right. But not everyone steals. This action by the Bulgarian government leads us to conclude that the country’s lawmakers have decided everything to do with torrents these days is bad news, and that they won’t have any of it anymore. Awfully uninformed, would you say? We would.
