Re:Copyright Trolls Order Wordpress To Hand Over Critics’ IP...
by AnthonyMouse on Friday March 08, 2013 @05:14PM
(#5346082)
>Being able to communicate to large numbers of people while remaining anonymous was something that was just not that practical before the internet.
Come on now. That's only because for the average person being able to communicate to large numbers of people at all was something that was just not that practical before the internet. And to the extent you could communicate, it wasn't that hard to do it anonymously: Sit down in a public phone booth to make your phone calls. Write a letter to the editor under a pseudonym or write letters to as many people as you like and drop them into a public mailbox. Post a message on a bulletin board at the local library while nobody is watching. Provide a recording for broadcast to a journalist with a reputation for protecting sources.
The novelty is being able to trace the source of a communication through the corporate intermediary that carries it and back to the actual speaker. And even that is a lot of hand wavy hocus pocus that makes poor assumptions about the relationship between paying for an internet connection and being the one responsible for what gets sent through it.
Come on now. That's only because for the average person being able to communicate to large numbers of people at all was something that was just not that practical before the internet. And to the extent you could communicate, it wasn't that hard to do it anonymously: Sit down in a public phone booth to make your phone calls. Write a letter to the editor under a pseudonym or write letters to as many people as you like and drop them into a public mailbox. Post a message on a bulletin board at the local library while nobody is watching. Provide a recording for broadcast to a journalist with a reputation for protecting sources.
The novelty is being able to trace the source of a communication through the corporate intermediary that carries it and back to the actual speaker. And even that is a lot of hand wavy hocus pocus that makes poor assumptions about the relationship between paying for an internet connection and being the one responsible for what gets sent through it.