[lugg]

That's exactly my point though.

It's not the same category, but it IS a competing service playing on an unfair playing field.

Leveling the playing field for people playing the same game is all fine and dandy, but it completely fucks over disruptive innovations challenging the status quo in a different category.

How about this one, people watch less TV than they did ten years ago, a lot of that time is now spent using Facebook, what happens when Facebook isn't throttled but Netflix and the rest in their category are?

This isn't net neutrality in the slightest.

[j2ko4r]

> It's not the same category, but it IS a competing service playing on an unfair playing field.

It really isn't. Netflix isn't a protocol, and if you're using torrents as a drop in replacement for Netflix you're breaking copyright law in any case. You can't argue that you use torrents as a competing service without implying you're breaking the law.

[lugg]

That's kind of irrelevant. I was simply using torrents as an example.

The problem with the category thing is that it makes your passtime more important than my passtime. And suddenly the passtime that pays the most is going to get preferential treatment.

This hurts innovation and companies that want to disrupt current services with a different verticle.

Category based throttling sounds like a good idea but it simply is not neutral and will fail us.

[lagadu]

That's not illegal in all European countries though so it's potentially a valid argument.

[WilliamDhalgren]

copyright law is in fact harmonized on EU level, by the EU copyright directive. Not that it could be substantially different already by Berne convention on a global level.

[lagadu]

Curiously enough, Switzerland is one of the two european countries where making a copy of a copyrighted work for private use is not illegal.

[WilliamDhalgren]

hmm, wiki mentiones that private copies are actually usually allowed in the EU, with the exception of the UK, and a regular reason given for blank media levies many countries have. But that's rather different from online distribution of one's copies.

I think they have some notion of "commercial scale" filesharing to prosecute things like pirate bay, not sure how that works legally. But that too is a different matter, as they don't even share any copies of anything, just metadata, and lately not even that, but merely links.

The real question is whether any of this has any relevance for "pirated" media streaming or downloading being actually legal; not tolerated or thought too minor to warrant the privacy violation of revealing the person behind the IP or any loophole like that, but actually legal.

Honestly, I'd love to hear more about this.

[Flimm]

Switzerland is not a member of the EU.