Using child pornography to curb piracy

"Child pornography is great."

Johan Schluter, of the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, spoke these words at a seminar in 2007 that tried to tackle the issue of Sweden becoming a safe place for pirates to operate. Instead of arguing the case for strict Internet monitoring by making the entertainment industry the victim, an industry not many are ready to sympathize with, Schluter proposed that child porn would a make a much better case. Nobody will argue with the evils of child pornography (at least not publicly), and once you show politicians how illegal digital distribution and file-sharing is causing the proliferation of said media, it would be political suicide not to get behind Internet censorship.

This plan almost successfully shut down The Pirate Bay in 2007, when Swedish authorities placed the site on a list of alleged child pornography sites. In the time between the list's publication and its execution, the Internet revolted and raised enough rabble to get the site off the list before anything could be done about it.

Now, according to TorrentFreak, EU commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom is using the same tactic to lobby for the a directive to enact an Internet censoring system across Europe. Christian Engtrom, Pirate Party MEP, lashed out against Malmstrom in his blog, claiming that she is simply a puppet of the pro-copyright entertainment industry and using Schluter's child porn tactics to morally justify the Internet censorship that the industry needs to stop the digital distribution of their products.

He emphasizes that Malmstrom likely has the best of intentions. He agrees that child pornography is a problem that desperately need to be dealt with, but that simply blocking the websites (a system already proven to be easily circumvented and unreliable) is not a viable solution.

A website called cleanternet.org was put up to satirize what Malmstrom is proposing, producing a sarcastic video that presents the idea in a very polished, political-infographic kind of way.