Conspiracy News Now: Copyright

Showing posts with label Copyright. Show all posts

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Copyright Monopoly Disintegration Inevitable As It Only Takes A Single Country

by Rick Falkvinge

The emergence of experimental legally autonomous startup zones in Honduras and other places is one of the most exciting developments in a long time, and forebodes the collapse of the copyright industry?s tyranny over culture and knowledge.

I believe in competition. I believe in experimentation to see what works best and what can be predictably repeated ? call it the scientific method applied to society, if you like. This has been a problem geopolitically, as the United States has guaranteed its global rent-seeking by bullying other countries into so-called ?free trade? agreements that are, in the best kind of newspeak, the exact opposite: they are agreements to prevent free trade in favor of incumbent monopoly holders.

But a monopoly only lasts as long as all involved countries respect it. In particular, a monopoly that touches the Internet ? one such as the copyright monopoly ? requires the cooperation of every single country connected to the Internet to live yet another day. The first country to defect from this oppressive monopoly construct will cause the floodgates of culture and knowledge to open ? imagine The Pirate Bay located in a country where it is declared 100% legal, and where it is rightly illegal to harass its enormous library.

Three geopolitical zones stand to threaten the US dominance on this rent-seeking and the monopolies we know as the copyright and patent monopolies:

We have Europe, which has strength in its civil liberties tradition and its sheer economic strength ? it is the world?s largest economic power, and so, any monopoly Europe doesn?t like just ceases to exist for all intents and purposes. Regrettably, European political leaders are perennially starstruck by anything the United States does, and won?t be challenging them any time soon, unless challenged in turn on the matter by something like the Pirate Party. (When it happens anyway, like with the ACTA defeat last year, it is due to citizen outrage ? not because of any kind of political will.)

We have China, which has a different cultural and idealistic tradition than Europe and the Americas ? Asia works on a timescale of generations and centuries, rather than one of weeks and months. There is patience to a degree unheard of in the West. The Chinese have economic clout comparable to the US and Europe, and are anything but stupid. They are copying the Intellectual Protectionism (IP) regimes of the United States, seeing how they can benefit the Chinese once China has taken the lead: protectionism works to preserve incumbence, and the Chinese understand this perfectly. So while the mechanisms may be preserved, their initial purpose may be subverted to a new geopolitical power than the one they were constructed to maintain.

Lastly, there is Latin America, which holds no love for the United States on any level after the interventionism of the past 50 years. Economically, they have half the GDP of the US or Europe, and so, they can?t compete on brute strength. However, they can compete with raw competition of the framework, and this appears to be one of the most exciting geopolitical developments in a long time.

Yesterday, it became clear that legally autonomous startup zones (plural) will be established in Honduras and other locations, with Panama and Guatemala watching the developments with great interest. A legally autonomous zone is a small location that gets to write its own experimental laws, in order to compete on a small-scale with country-level laws to find out at a laboratory scale if something works immensely better.

As many of these are planned in Latin America, and Latin America is rightly and royally sick of the copyright monopoly, I?m hopeful that one, just one, of them will ditch that monopoly concept in favor of real free trade and actual ownership rights. On an international network, it only takes one single country to declare the copyright monopoly obsolete for the entire planet to lose any and all copyright monopoly function. Now, we?ve arrived at the point where it only takes a single autonomous Internet-friendly startup zone to do so.

To illustrate, the book 1984 by George Orwell is still under copyright monopoly in the United States and Europe, but not in Australia, where it is published as public domain. This is something that is thoroughly illegal to distribute in Europe and the United States, but you can access it from there just fine, because it is legal to distribute in Australia, and Australia is connected to this thing we know as the Internet.

Now, imagine if one country ? or one autonomous zone ? desired to do this for all of humanity?s knowledge and culture, as part of free trade and free judicial competition.

The future looks immensely bright, and there is no copyright monopoly there at all. It only takes one single jurisdiction to topple the entire oppressive construct worldwide.
_
Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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Thursday, February 7, 2013

A Victory for Colombia: Constitutional Court Strikes Down Draconian Copyright Expansion Bill

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Good news hails from Colombia today, where the Constitutional Court has struck down a sweeping copyright enforcement law because Congress had fast tracked the bill and overstepped various legislative procedures. The Court also ruled on the constitutionality of the law itself, over provisions on the retransmission of TV content and signals over the Internet as well as its language on technological protection measures (TPMs, also known as DRM). The law, nicknamed Ley Lleras 2, was passed to implement copyright enforcement obligations from the Colombia-US free trade agreement. Colombians and civil society groups, however, have been arguing that this law violates the right of education and culture because it would dramatically restrict access to knowledge online.

The law would have set forth copyright regulations that went even beyond the requirements of their trade agreement with the US and had many negative consequences for Internet users' rights to free expression and privacy. Ley Lleras 2 would have banned the circumvention of digital handcuffs that restrict copying and other uses of works, and also prohibit the creation and distribution of tools to circumvent TPMs, even if the end use is legal. While the Colombia-US FTA only requires punishment for "willful" criminal infringers, the new Colombian Copyright law is defined in a way that could even put someone in jail for a minimum of 4 years for burning a CD of music for their friend. In addition, it would have expanded copyright protection terms from 50 years to 70 years after first publication, and added further restrictions on broadcast content and its signals, even if the content itself was not subject to copyright protection.

It is very welcome news that Ley Lleras 2 has been repealed. It was a law that was poorly crafted, based upon a trade agreement with defective policies, and enacted by throwing democratic rulemaking processes out the window. Unfortunately, we expect another flawed copyright law to come down based upon Colombia's trade obligations with the US. We stand with Fundación Karisma, RedPaTodos, American University's Info Justice, ONG Derechos Digitales, and other digital rights organizations around the world to ensure another malformed copyright policies does not become law and threaten Colombians' digital rights again.

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Friday, February 24, 2012

UK Now Seizing Music Blogs (With American Domains) Over Copyright Claims

by Mike Masnick

Last year, we wrote about how the UK was following in the footsteps of the US's Homeland Security/ICE domain seizures. As we noted, the process there is even less rigorous than in the US -- often without a court being involved at all. Law enforcement just had to ask, and Nominet would take down the domain. Still, we hadn't heard about any specific domains that were seized -- and we hadn't heard of any non-Nominet (which handle .co.uk domains) being subject to UK claims.

Until now.

Dajaz1 -- who, of course, had its own issues with bogus domain seizures -- has a story up about how the site rnbxclusive.com appears to have been seized via UK law enforcement, who put up a splash page even more ridiculous (though with fewer eagles) than the ICE splash page:

The site, like many music blogs, did post various videos and commentary about new music. Perhaps some were infringing, but you'd think that there would be a trial first. This takedown is apparently happening via SOCA, the Serious Organized Crime Agency in the UK -- who, amusingly, puts a copyright symbol on their takedown splash page. There are all sorts of issues to be raised here.

First and foremost, as mentioned, this is the first time we've heard of a foreign country seizing a .com -- which the US DOJ/DHS appear to claim as their own jurisdiction. While perhaps this was done in concert with US law enforcement, it seems pretty questionable that the US would allow what they insist are "domestic" domains to be seized by foreign countries. Think of the precedent that sets for... say... Iran. The operators of the site appear to have been in the UK, so that may be the reasoning behind this, but it still raises significant jurisdictional questions about just who can seize a .com. Second, the big red warning at the top is insane. Merely downloading music wouldn't be a criminal offense with a possibility of 10 years imprisonment. While I'm not as familiar with the differences between civil and criminal infringement when it comes to UK copyright law, I believe it's not that different than the US, where merely downloading is going to be civil, not criminal. A quick review of UK law suggests that it can only be a criminal issue if it's done at commercial scale, and doesn't seem to apply at all to personal downloads. In fact, the UK explicitly fought the idea of expanding criminal sanctions to file sharing. So, SOCA is basically lying. Next, the splash page claims that the music was "stolen" from artists. While the copies may be infringing, it's doubtful that the music was literally stolen. The scare tactic of displaying your IP address and pretending that this suggests they're coming after any visitor to the site. This is, again, insane. The RIAA tried this years ago when it got the Grokster site and it was just as silly then as it is now. Merely visiting a site is not breaking the law, and splashing your IP address next to a message suggesting visitors are about to be put in jail is insane hyperbole. Further, claiming that SOCA has the ability to "monitor" you is also an exaggeration. While it may be able to monitor certain transactions, it seems to be implying that it's watching your every move. Claiming that "young, emerging artists may have had their careers damaged" because of this site is pretty silly. Most young, emerging artists are actively leaking their works to such sites so they can emerge. They know that obscurity is a much bigger threat than piracy ever was or will be. Saying that downloading music means you have (absolutley) "damaged the future of the music industry" is again insane hyperbole. The music industry has continued to grow pretty consistently over the past decade. It's just one segment -- the direct sales of music -- that has stumbled, and that was the part that rarely pays artists very much anyway.
This whole thing is pretty crazy, and I'm surprised such blatant censorship by UK law enforcement of a "US" domain hasn't received more attention yet.

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Friday, February 10, 2012

The SOPA Wake-Up Call to Abolish Copyright

by Stephan Kinsella

I?ve blogged quite a bit lately about SOPA and PIPA and the recent Internet blackouts and other protests against these bills, which threaten free speech and the open Internet (Mike Masnick et al. at Techdirt have also been great on exposing and analyzing SOPA).

As Jeffrey Tucker noted recently, the protests against SOPA started not with conservatives or even ?libertarians,? but with civil libertarians of the ?left,? as well as Silicon Valley tech types. Of course, some libertarians have been opposed to SOPA (and copyright) from the beginning ? the more-radical and anti-state libertarians, in particular Austro-libertarians and left-libertarians.

Aside from the anti-state libertarians, however, most of the protests against SOPA concede that copyright is good, intellectual property is important and piracy is bad?but then they bemoan that SOPA ?goes too far.?

For example, consider this article in PC Magazine, providing the response of 11 PC Mag staffers asked for their take on SOPA. The response to SOPA was universally negative, but most of them first prefaced their opposition to SOPA by genuflecting to copyright and recognizing that IP piracy ?is, of course, a real problem.? For example:
?Yes, theft of intellectual property is wrong, but it shouldn?t be protected at the cost of free speech and an open Internet??SOPA is a perfect case of a disproportionate reaction to a real problem. Lawless websites full of pirated content are a real problem, but breaking the Internet isn?t the solution??This proposed legislation is akin to having libraries monitored, or even shut down, because there is a chance that a book may contain a piece of plagiarized work??IP is a precious thing. For example, every writer on PC Mag has had their work pirated at one time or another. However, this legislation goes? too far?There is definitely a need for content owners like movie studios and music labels to protect their content from piracy, but the proposed legislation isn?t the answer.?This is the type of response that almost all the SOPA opponents have taken, such as Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, which said that

???rogue foreign sites that pirate American intellectual property or sell counterfeit goods pose significant problems for our economy,? but PIPA and SOPA ?are not the right solution to this problem, because of the collateral damage they would cause to the Internet.??

This type of argument is extremely common. Depressingly common.

And not only do most opponents of SOPA accept the basic legitimacy of copyright, they also accept the RIAA/MPAA propaganda about ?piracy? imposing billions of dollars of ?cost? to the economy every year ? even though there is no evidence of this.

The problem is that copyright obviously infringes free speech and other individual rights. This is no surprise, given its origins as a tool of censorship. As the Supreme Court recognized in its most-recent copyright decision, Golan v. Holder (the case authorizing Congress to re-copyright public domain works), ?Concerning the First Amendment, we recognized that some restriction on expression is the inherent and intended effect of every grant of copyright.?

It is widely recognized that copyright (and even patent) restricts freedom of speech and expression. By assuming that copyright is legitimate ? as the courts do ? and that the First Amendment protects freedom of expression, a balance must always be found between freedom and censorship. And this is the dilemma most people find themselves in when they start with the premise that we must protect intellectual property rights, but we can?t ?go too far? because otherwise we would harm free speech (and the open Internet) ?too much.?

Obviously, there is a conflict between copyright and censorship and government control of ideas on the one hand, and freedom of expression and the open Internet on the other. This is being increasingly recognized. Leo Laporte recognized this in a recent episode of This Week in Tech. You have to choose: the Internet or copyright, he observed (opposed to technocrat Nilay Patel).

In the aftermath of the SOPA battle, we have people finally asking important questions. The Washington Times questions copyright abuse in its opposition to the Golan decision. The Daily Caller questions copyright?s legitimacy. Mark McKenna at Slate, in ?Don?t Stop at SOPA,? asks: ?SOPA and PIPA are (almost) dead. Now can we talk about the law that already exists?? Glyn Moody at Techdirt asks the important question: ?OK, So SOPA and PIPA Are Both on Hold: Where Do We Go From Here??

And what is the answer? Some people are hinting at it, or directly suggesting it: Abolish copyright. As Rick Falkvinge observes in ?It Is Time to Stop Pretending to Endorse the Copyright Monopoly?:

??the copyright industry is actually right that these ridiculous laws are needed to sustain the copyright monopoly. General-purpose networked computers, free and anonymous speech and sustained civil liberties make it impossible to maintain this distribution monopoly of digitizable information. As technical progress can?t be legislated against, basic civil liberties would have to go to maintain the crumbling monopoly. And these are the laws we?re seeing on the table.
?There comes a tipping point when somebody says that this entire system of cultural monopolies is absurd. A tipping point where the part before the ?but? is unceremoniously and collectively dropped, the part that didn?t count, anyway. A tipping point in which everybody just stops pretending to support it. I think it is time to create that point on the history line.?

Falkvinge here recognizes that if you support copyright, you should support SOPA. And conversely, if you oppose SOPA, you should oppose copyright. Copyright is the problem, people.

We are at a moment in history when people who have absorbed the idea of copyright, but who are not ideologically committed to it, have seen that it conflicts with more deeply held values: freedom of expression, commerce, digital life, the Internet. They are seeking a framework, a way to coherently express what they sense is wrong with escalated copyright enforcement. We need to let them know: The problem is copyright itself. If you have copyright, of course you want to enforce it. All the problems we see are merely symptoms of the copyright mentality.

We must press our fleeting advantage to let our halfhearted allies know that their intuitions are right: Censorship and SOPA and state control of private property and SOPA are wrong. And this means copyright, which is the engine behind all these things, is wrong, and must fall, or at least be radically scaled back, not strengthened.

The argument against patent and copyright is not a socialist or liberal one. It is, in fact, rooted in respect for private property rights, capitalism, the free market and competition. A coherent understanding of private property and free markets reveals that copyright is an anti-competitive grant of state power for purpose of censorship or favoritism that can only seek to undermine private property rights and empower the police state ? as we are seeing now.

I remind our anti-SOPA brethren that the battle is far from over. They opposed SOPA and PIPA, but where were they when the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has led to so much persecution and harm to the Internet, was enacted? Where were they in 2008 when George Bush signed the PRO-IP Act, which was instrumental in the FBI raids in New Zealand on the Megauploads principals, a day after the alleged SOPA blackout protest victories?

And what about the Golan decision, released the day of the SOPA blackouts, authorizing Congress to re-copyright works long in the public domain? What about the one-year federal prison sentence handed down to a man for uploading a copy of the Wolverine movie? What about the British student faced with extradition to the U.S. for having the wrong links on his website?

Where were they when President Obama signed ACTA (unconstitutionally, without Senate ratification), a global Internet treaty even worse in some ways than SOPA? Right now, nations are negotiating in secret the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), an ?agreement that the entertainment industry is betting on to get SOPA-like laws introduced around the globe.?

In other words, the dangers of SOPA are already here. This is because of copyright.

The problem is that all the people opposing SOPA undercut their opposition by acknowledging the importance of copyright and IP by condemning piracy. It is admirable that they are taking the ride side of the chasm caused by their cognitive dissonance, but dissonance it is. If you support copyright, you oppose piracy, and you support the state?s existence and its attempts to enforce these ?property rights.? You cannot have both copyright and Internet freedom/freedom of speech.

The threat here to property rights, to individual rights, to Internet freedom and freedom of speech and expression and the press comes from copyright itself. We must strike at the root. SOPA is just a symptom of the disease. The disease is copyright.

Everyone is trying to treat the symptom ? enforcement efforts like SOPA ? with halfhearted treatments like labeling the response ?disproportionate? or going ?too far.? This is like trying to treat a brain tumor by taking Tylenol ? sorry, acetaminophen ? in response to the headaches caused by the tumor. All opponents of SOPA and censorship, all denizens of the Web and proponents of freedom, must oppose copyright itself (and patent too). Those libertarians and others who oppose SOPA and who are for copyright reform, but who are not for copyright abolition, should realize that a modest, fair, efficient, ?reasonable? or ?sensible? copyright system is completely impossible.

Since the dawn of copyright, its scope, length, penalties and enforcement have only increased, because of the relentless pressure by special interest factions like Disney, the RIAA, the MPAA, and other content providers and entrenched interests. As we can see with the pressure to adopt SOPA, PIPA, PRO-IP, DMCA, Berne, WIPO, TRIPS, COICA, Sonny Bono/Mickey Mouse Copyright Term Extension Act, ACTA, TPP and other measures (see ?The Mountain of IP Legislation?), the Big Content interests are relentless and will not stop pressuring Congress and other legislatures to expand the war on information sharing and the Internet.

Even if we had a less-noxious copyright system ? say, one with 10-year terms and less draconian penalties and enforcement ? it would soon metastasize into what we have now, just as it has done (originally 14 years, now it is over 100). So a modest, ?reasonable? copyright system is really off the table.

The question that SOPA opponents have to ask themselves is would you rather have today?s copyright system, with its draconian terms and penalties and continual pressure to expand and internationalize it, or no copyright at all? Only one of these choices is compatible with opposition to SOPA and to censorship. The only way to stop SOPA-type provisions and to maintain Internet freedom is to get rid of today?s copyright system.

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In fact, it's very simple : If you want to keep 'your' 'intellectual property'
to yourself : DON'T TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT !
The instant you release it, it's out of your control, just like it should be ! As a Dane, I must tell you about a specific case :
Lars Ulrich of Metallica has PUBLICLY admitted to having spent
several million dollars on COCAINE ! : Yet, he calls his fans, who sometimes publish the 'lyrics' of Metallica-songs on the internets, for
'thieves' .. Jesus H Fucking Buddha, Lars ..
YOU should be rotting on a 3. strike and your out' sentence in Cahlifohrniah !!

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Monday, July 4, 2011

Copyright Laws Now Working to Destroy 3D Printer Industry: Paramount Files Cease and Desist Against 3D Printer 'Pirate'

by Enigmax, TorrentFreak

Movie studio Paramount are adept at sending out cease and desist notices, having engaged in the activity for many years. However, while the vast majority are related to solely digital activities such as the unauthorized distribution of movies and TV shows, a recent takedown notice has a very interesting ?real-world? twist ? the recreation of a physical object from digital data. [...]

On June 8th Blatt announced on theRPF.com movie prop fansite that he was recreating the distinctive cube-shaped items from the Stephen Spielberg movie ?Super 8?. On June 9th he uploaded the files to Shapeways.

By June 10th, Blatt had received unwelcome contact from Hollywood lawyers and all his posts on theRPF were quickly edited out.

?Paramount Pictures? lawyers sent me a cease and desist letter on Friday for a model I uploaded on Thursday night, and told me to take it down,? Blatt explained.

?It was a replica white funky cube shaped object from their new movie. I complied. I don?t want to sit in a courtroom for the rest of the year. I am no longer offering these for sale, and am complying with Paramount?s demands.?

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Er... No.

What he did is fabricate a prop from a movie and sell it.

3D printing and all printing is safe, just don't copy someone else's stuff and try to sell it.

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Leaked: UK copyright lobby holds closed-door meetings with gov't to discuss national Web-censorship regime

Cory Doctorow

A group of UK copyright lobbyists held confidential, closed-door meetings with Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries to discuss a plan to allow industry groups to censor the Internet in the UK. The proposal has leaked, and it reveals a plan to establish "expert bodies" that would decide which websites British people were allowed to see, to be approved by a judge using a "streamlined" procedure. The procedure will allow for "swift" blocking in order to shut down streaming of live events.

Public interest groups like the Open Rights Group asked to attend the meeting, but were shut out, presaging a regulatory process that's likely to be a lopsided, industry-centric affair that doesn't consider the public. The process is characterised as "voluntary," but the proposal makes reference to the Digital Economy Act, which allows for mandatory web-blocking (thanks to the action of LibDem Lords who submitted a proposal written by a record industry lobbyist as an amendment to the DEA).

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Sunday, June 26, 2011

People Realizing New Anti-Streaming Criminal Copyright Bill Could Mean Jail Time For Lip Synchers

by Mike Masnick, Techdirt

We recently wrote about the horrible bill introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons to extend criminal copyright law to include "public performances" as being potentially criminal. As we explained at the time, current copyright law is split into civil and criminal parts, with most violations being civil in nature. But this new bill -- unfortunately recommended by White House Copyright Czar Victoria Espinel -- would extend the criminal provisions to include "public performances." Supporters claim that the lack of a "public performances" provision in criminal copyright law was a "loophole" or an oversight. But that's incorrect. There are good reasons why public performances aren't covered by criminal copyright law, in that it rarely makes sense to consider them criminal issues.

Yet, because the entertainment industry is freaking out about sites that embed and stream infringing content, and want law enforcement to put people in jail over it, rather than filing civil lawsuits, this move was made to extend criminal copyright law. However, the idea and the suggestion were done with very little thought towards what this really means in an internet age, when almost everything you do online could be considered "a public performance." We already pointed to one possibility: that people embedding YouTube videos could face five years in jail. Now, others are pointing out that it could also put kids who lip sync to popular songs, and post the resulting videos on YouTube, in jail as well.

Now, of course, all of the supporters of this bill insist that's just crazy talk. After all, this bill is not intended for that purpose at all. It's solely intended to go after "criminals" who are doing these things for profit:

The new law will not target ?individuals or families streaming movies at home,? said a statement from Klobuchar. She said the bill will instead target ?criminals that are intentionally streaming thousands of dollars in stolen digital content and profiting from it.?

That's nice to say, and I'm sure she means it. But this shows a massive misunderstanding of how the internet works. After all, plenty of people doing these kinds of videos may put some ads around them, and plenty of them get to be really, really big. And, as we've seen with ICE's domain seizures, they consider any use of advertising, even if it makes a pittance, to be "profiting from infringement." These days, everything has ads on it, and it's easy for anyone to sign up for a simple ad account and make a few bucks here and there for your activities online.

And that's the problem. While I'm sure no one supporting this bill thinks it'll be used in this manner, and I'm sure law enforcement has no interest or intention to go after lip-syncing teens, we've all seen how laws like this get stretched and used to bring people up on charges, when no other law applies. Remember the Lori Drew case? That involved the feds stretching a "computer hacking" law to claim she "hacked" MySpace by creating a fake account on the service, allowing them to charge her with a felony. Similarly, we've seen officials charge people with wiretapping for merely wearing a helmet cam while riding a motorcycle.

The point is that when law enforcement wants to charge someone with a felony where there's no obvious match, they'll often stretch laws like this to find something they can use. And this extension of criminal copyright law to include a "public performance" seems ripe for misuse. If Klobuchar and the others are serious about this, they should go back to the drawing board and rewrite the bill so it's not nearly so broad and won't open up so many potential unintended consequences.

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Monday, July 4, 2011

Sunday, June 26, 2011