Infopolicy: I live in Stockholm, Sweden. A hundred years ago, one of the largest employers in the city was a company named Stockholm Ice. Their business was as straightforward as it was necessary: help keep perishable food edible for longer by distributing cold in a portable format.

They would cut up large blocks of ice from the frozen lakes in the winter, store them on sawdust in huge barns, then cut the blocks into smaller chunks and sell them in the streets. People would buy the ice and keep it with food in special cupboards, so the food would be in cold storage.

(This is why some senior citizens still refer to refrigerators as “ice boxes“.)

COLUMN REPOST
This column has previously been published on TorrentFreak. It has been updated here to reflect recent developments.

When households in Stockholm were electrified in the first half of the last century, these distributors of cold were made obsolete. After all, what they distributed was the ability to keep food cold, and everybody could suddenly do that themselves.

This was a fairly rapid process in the cities. With the availability of the refrigerator from circa 1920, most households had their own refrigerator by the end of the 1930s. One of the city’s largest employers – distributors of cold – had been made totally obsolete by technical development.

There were many personal tragedies in this era as the icemen lost their breadwinning capacity and needed to retrain to get new jobs in a completely new field. The iceman profession had often been tough to begin with, and seeing your industry disintegrate in real-time didn’t make it any easier.

But here are a few things that didn’t happen as the ice distribution industry became obsolete:

• No refrigerator owner was sued for making their own cold and ignoring the existing corporate cold distribution chains.
• No laws were proposed that would make electricity companies liable in court if the electricity they provided was used in a way that destroyed icemen’s jobs.
• Nobody demanded a monthly refrigerator fee from refrigerator owners that would go to the Icemen’s Union.
• No lavishly expensive expert panels were held in total consensus about how necessary icemen were for the entire economy.

Rather, the distribution monopoly became obsolete, was ignored, and the economy as a whole benefited by the resulting decentralization.

We’re now seeing a repeat of this scenario, but where the distribution industry – the copyright industry – has the audacity to stand up and demand special laws and say that the economy will collapse without their unnecessary services. But we learn from history, every time, that it is good when an industry becomes obsolete. That means we have learned something important – to do things in a more efficient way. New skills and trades always appear in its wake.

The copyright industry tells us, again and again and again, that if they can’t have their obsolete distribution monopoly enshrined into law with ever-increasing penalties for ignoring it, that no culture will be produced at all. As we have seen, equally time and again, this is hogwash.

What might be true is that the copyright industry can’t produce music to the tune of one million US dollars per track. But you can’t motivate monopoly legislation based on your costs, when others are doing the same thing for much less – practically zero. There has never been as much music available as now, just because all of us love to create. It’s not something we do because of money, it’s because of who we are. We have always created, ever since we learned to put red paint on the inside of cave walls.

What about movies, then? Hundred-million productions? There are examples of garage-produced movies (and one even has beat Casablanca to become the most-seen movie of all time in its native country). But it may appear true that the argument is somewhat stronger with the blockbuster-type cinema productions.

A recent article of mine dispels this, too; blockbusters can make double  their investment back before a digital copy can even exist in the wild, so it will not be an issue. Investments will  happen.

But I’m going go out on a limb here and say, that even if it is true that movies can’t be made the same way with the Internet and our civil liberties both in existence, then maybe it’s just the natural progression of culture.

I spend quite a bit of time with teenagers through my work with the Pirate Party. One thing that strikes me is that they don’t watch movies, at least nowhere near the quantity I did when I was a teenager. Just like I threw out my TV set 15 years ago, maybe this is just the natural progression of culture. Nobody would be surprised if we moved from monologue-style culture to dialogue- and conversation-type culture at this point in history. Immersive gaming stands out as an excellent candidate to replace movies.

After all, we have previously had operettes, ballets, and concerts as the high points of culture in the past. Even radio theaters (and famous ones). Nobody is particularly concerned that those expressions have had their peak and that society has moved on to new expressions of culture. There is no inherent value in writing today’s forms of culture into law and preventing the changes we’ve always had.

Everywhere I look, I see that the copyright monopolies need to be cut down to allow society to move on from today’s stranglehold on culture and knowledge. Teenagers today typically don’t even see the problem – they take sharing in the connected world so totally for granted, that they discard any signals to the contrary as “old-world nonsense”.

And they certainly don’t ask for a refrigerator fee.

Activism: Just look at this map. I’ve never seen anything like it in terms of people all across Europe demanding their freedom of speech and being angry against backroom corporativist deals that steals their most basic civil liberties.

Today, Sweden rallies for freedom of speech, a free net, and firmly against ACTA. Late yesterday, it was announced that Poland is suspending its ratification of ACTA indefinitely. The Slovenian ambassador signing the document (which has no legal effect whatsoever) has publicly apologized and called people to rally in Ljubljana, Slovenia for their rights.

This is not Hollywood versus Silicon Valley, as oldmedia likes to frame it. This is Hollywood versus The People. For decades, they have trained us to think in black and white, in good versus evil fighting for domination of the free world. And now, they’ve gone and put themselves in the role of evil villain.

The copyright cartel thought they were battling Google.

They’re not.

They’re waging war against the people, with the help of the politicians.

And we’re not standing for it. We can’t change the copyright cartel, but we can send a clear message to the politicians that 250 million Europeans sharing and preserving contemporary culture is not a problem. It is a power base of 250 million voters  that will kick you out of office  if you dare so much as touch the net.

And there are visible cracks in the façade, especially seeing Poland falter and the copyright cartels visibly shaken from the SOPA defeat in the US, with the politicians having started to pay attention to what the Internet wants. We can win this.

Today, Sweden rallies. List of rallies below (via Christian Engström, Member of European Parliament):

• Stockholm: Sergels Torg, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Göteborg: Götaplatsen, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Malmö: Stortorget, at the Karl X Gustav statue, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Helsingborg: at the Magnus Stenbock statue, 13:00. [Facebook]
• Umeå : Apberget, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Kalmar: Giraffens Köpcentrum, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Sundsvall: Torget, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Karlstad: Stora Torget, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Borlänge: Jussi Björlings torg, 12 noon. [Facebook]

(The observant will note that less than half of these rallies are marked on the already-impressive map of European rallies. Makes me wonder what the map would look like if all rallies were included.)

Most of Europe will rally next Saturday, on February 11. That’s going to be something, too. Let’s give Europe the best of precursor to those rallies from Sweden that they could possibly get!

As of early morning on February 4, 11,000 people have committed to coming to the Stockholm rally, with another 3,500 maybes. Those are numbers that would overfill the Plattan plaza by a wide margin. I’ll be at the rally in Stockholm, Sweden, and will be taking plenty of imagery and will follow up here.

The Outcome

UPDATE AT 1500: Seeing that this story is #3 on Reddit Front Page at the moment (server is holding… holding…), I want to follow up with the outcome right here:

Rally at the Sergels Torg plaza in Stockholm, Sweden. Anna Troberg, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, speaking (at left) and maybe 1/3 of the crowd.

The turnout was like nothing I’ve seen for a February rally in Sweden. In -20°C, there were well over a thousand people protesting corporate rights over their freedom of speech; normally, you’re lucky getting 50.

Also, there was a very clear recurring theme among the Members of European Parliament speaking, MEPs from three different parties. They all told the story of how software patents had been defeated in Europe, followed by the crucial “amendment 138″ in the Telecoms Package, which aimed to shut people off en masse from the Net. Well, thanks to diligent activists and people on the inside, we managed to get as strong safeguards in place as possible against shutting people off. But the monopoly lobbyists never quit. Now they’re at it again, this time saying that if authorities can’t shut people off en masse due to that “amendment 138″, maybe they can get private corporations – the ISPs – to do it instead through third-party liability forcing certain terms of service and wiretapping. Hence, ACTA.

Fortunately, and this was a consistent message from all Members of European Parliament, we have the blueprint for defeating ACTA. We need to repeat what we did with the software patents and with the Telecoms Package. It takes hard work, it takes tons of activism, but we know exactly what to do and how to do it, and most importantly: we know that we can win.

As the rally concluded, everybody was determined to win this fight, having heard the clear message that it takes work but is perfectly doable.

UPDATE 2: There are more photos from Christian Engström, Member of European Parliament here. Free for any use (CC0 / Public Domain). Here’s one of his photos, showing the protester crowd:

Freedom of Speech – Andrew Norton: The US as an ‘idea’ is dying. The country that used to pride itself on free speech, democracy, and being ‘the last remaining superpower’, is now apparently drunk on its own power. With unchecked powers expanding at every turn, and terror laden missives booming out from government departments, the country seems to be taking a counterbalancing position from those who embraced freedom in the Arab Spring of last year, and is actively cracking down on freedoms previously embraced as a national advert.

The US likes to be known as the land of freedom and integrity; indeed the first verse of the US National Anthem – the Star Spangled Banner – ends:

O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Over the last ten years, the answer has turned into a resounding NO!

Over the last ten years there have been many laws passed ostensibly about ‘fighting terrorism’, but which boil down to naked fear. A fear from the populace that some nebulous ‘terrorist attack’ will kill them all (despite the fact you’re more than 70x more likely to be just plain ‘murdered’ and 150x more likely to die on America’s increasingly poor quality roads than be present at a terrorist attack) which has supported a government that is increasingly spineless and cowardly. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the many instances over the last few months involving the uses of the police, when it comes to the First Amendment.

There have been many well documented clashes between police and the various ‘Occupy’ camps around the country in the last few months. Police officers have on occasion responded with excessive violence and weapons that did not fit the situation. In those instances, video recordings have made it clear what has happened, and often contradicted police reports and claims. Yet, as was pointed out a few months ago, there’s usually very little in the way of repercussions when police officers break the law.

Take for instance Joe Arpaio. The self-described ‘toughest sheriff in America’ is no stranger to controversy. There have been a number of wrongful death cases which his department has lost, his central jail lost a lawsuit about unconstitutional conditions in 2008, and the verdict was reaffirmed in 2010 when he still hadn’t improved them. He was feeding inmates bad food (commonly known as ‘poisoning’) and was broadcasting video footage of in-processing after arrests to the web, prejudicing trials (otherwise known as perverting the course of justice) and because of general misconduct, his whole department had their ability to enforce Federal Immigration law stripped by the Department of Homeland Security (and I remind you, that’s the same department that has no problems with sexually abusing 6yo’s in the name of ‘security’, so you KNOW it’s bad) which was why Arizona passed SB 1070 – the ‘papers please’ law. He’s also under investigation for witness, voter and candidate intimidation, harassment of newspapers, and for ignoring serious sexual assault cases. So has he been punished in any way? No, of course not. As Sheriff, he is almost untouchable.

It seems that both police officers and politicians have an allergic reaction to video cameras being pointed at them by the public. A search on YouTube will return LOTS of videos of police officers reacting ‘badly’ to being videotaped. Often the argument put forward by the police is that people are interfering in their work by videoing them. In other states, with two-party consent for audio-recording where there’s an expectation of privacy, police officers going about their duty have arrested people for wiretapping, a felony which often carries 5-10 year prison terms just so you’re aware, recording video is ok, recording audio is the no-no. Generally when these cases are made public, some prosecutors back down, but some stick at it. Almost inevitably the courts decide that no law was broken, because there was no expectation of privacy at the time of filming.

Compounding this is that most police cars in the US have dash-cams recording both audio and video, even in those states. So while the police officer is free to record audio and video at all times, a person involved in an encounter with that same police officer can’t record their own copy, because the police officer has some expectation of privacy? It’s an amazing double-standard. (The pinnacle of such double-standards goes to the Claremore Police Department in Oklahoma, who do not consider the dash-cam recordings to be public records under the state’s Open Records Act, and amazingly, a court agreed. The Department of Public Safety, aka the State Police force, also lobbied successfully in 2005 that the state legislature exempt state patrol dash cams from that legislation.)

Thankfully MOST courts are standing behind citizens and saying clearly that recording police officers in the course of their duties is NOT wiretapping, or a felony, but is in fact a protected 1st Amendment Activity. Yet that doesn’t always stop the police. In Pennsylvania, despite rulings that it’s legal going back to 1989, police there will sometimes arrest for ‘wiretapping’, with documented cases as recently as 2007, and still no adequate recourse for the victims of officers acting outside the law.

The occupy movement has also brought another spotlight onto the First Amendment. The ability to petition the government and protest is the less well known side of it, but it’s there. However, the ability to do so has been severely curtailed in recent years, from the ‘free speech zones’ created during the Bush era (and later copied by the likes of China) to the storm-trooper raids on the Occupy camps. The arrests and intimidations of the police against media attempting to cover the camps, and the police actions against them are further attacks on the first amendment.

In fact, the US has dropped a significant number of places down the current Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, from 20th to 47th, because of this. NYPD’s Deputy Inspector Bologna, and UC Davis Police’s Lt. John Pike are now symbols on the net of excessive violence. And their punishment? Bologna has been reassigned to Staten Island, and Pike has been on ‘Administrative leave’ (with pay, which was $110,000/year in 2010).

Oakland, which also made a splash with video of a young ex-Marine getting shot in the head and then pelted with flash-bangs is already in trouble. They’ve been under court orders to improve their behavior for almost ten years now (after a gang of police officers called the Rough Riders were planting evidence, using excessive violence and falsifying police reports) and have been given a March ultimatum, or else the city will have control of its police force taken from it. It’s a step that should have been taken 5 years ago, when Oakland PD failed the original order, yet unlike any normal person that had failed a court order, they were not disciplined, but let slide for another 5 years.

Politicians are also getting in on the act. One of the more unusual stories this week was the arrest of a documentarian from a US Congress committee hearing. The hearing, on fracking, was going to be recorded by Josh Fox, (who has already produced one documentary on the topic, the Oscar Nominated Gasland) as well as credentialed ABC news reporters. The Republican chair of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Andy Harris (R-Md.), directed Capitol Police to arrest him for ‘unlawful entry’. The issue there was not so much one of ‘not wanting to be filmed’, as the cable-funded C-SPAN network was filming the hearing, but an attempt to deny Fox the ability to have his own high-quality shots for a follow-up documentary.

As far as violating the First Amendment, there can’t be a clearer example. Worse, the oath of office Rep Harris took on assuming office is as follows:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

In undertaking his actions on February 1st, Rep. Harris violated his oath of office, by actively acting against the First Amendment. So what’s the consequence of that? The same consequences as when Joe Arparo violated the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th amendments, as when Pike and Bologna attacked protesters, using chemical weapons on people exercising their 1st Amendment rights. Nothing.

The serious issue is, there’s no accountability – no respect for the law – by those whose job is to write the law or enforce it. This goes for former members of Congress who have turned into lobbyists as well, demonstrated by Chris Dodd’s blatant admission of bribery when SOPA lost its support.

One North Carolina State Rep, Larry G. Pittman, made news last week for suggesting public hanging should be brought back to increase the deterrence of murder (and he included abortionists there, making him part of the ironically named ‘pro-life movement, better characterised as anti-choice), and that appeals should be filed all at once. Given the often questionable nature of US Capital convictions, it’s rather disturbing. Especially as violations of what is deemed the country’s HIGHEST law, the Constitution, are rarely punished at all. Funnily enough, there are laws specifically to deal with it.

18 USC § 241
If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; or…
… They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both

and

18 USC § 242
Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use, attempted use, or threatened use of a dangerous weapon, explosives, or fire, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both;

Perhaps hanging, with only one appeal, would deter people from violating the country’s highest tenets, not that it will happen. Those that wield the power rarely feel the need to submit to the rules they lay on everyone else. And that’s the REAL problem. Until that problem is fixed, the Constitution is just a piece of paper.

Repression: In an inadvertent slip, the European Commission reveals that ACTA will indeed bring censorship to the Internet. As usual, they say this in the calmest soothing tone of voice.

The European Commission, which is sort of the Administration in the EU, published a rebuttal to “rumors on the net about ACTA” and tries to set the record straight. Note the two first points: “ACTA ensures people everywhere can continue to share non-pirated material and information on the web. ACTA does not restrict freedom of the internet. ACTA will not censor or shut down websites.”

There is one word on their web page that stands out and reveals so much more about the nature of ACTA:

“Non-pirated”. Everybody will be free to share “non-pirated” material. All of a sudden, there is a qualifier  to what information we are able to share on the net; this qualifier has never been there before. We have always been able to send whatever we like, and possibly answer for it afterwards.

This is very, very serious. For what it says here is that the net will only be usable for government-approved communications; the government takes itself the right to determine what the net is usable for and what it isn’t usable for. To 250 million Europeans who share culture and don’t see anything wrong with defying an immoral monopoly, this is an arrogant slap in the face, but it’s more  than that and worse  than that. Any qualifier  to what can be communicated — “non-pirated” in this case — always means “government-approved”, that only governmentally approved communications may take place.

And this is serious for the deepest of democratic reasons: Any communications technology must be compatible with dissent.

At the same time as the government takes itself the right to determine what can be communicated and what cannot, a communications technology stops being compatible with dissent.

Now, the prudent question here would be if it isn’t true that some information has never been free to share, and that you can get prosecuted for doing so? This would be a very relevant observation.

There are many things you’re not allowed to share in terms of information. Military secrets, medical journals, libel/slander, ongoing criminal investigations, just to name a few. All of these have always been possible to share on the net, but if caught doing so, you can be hauled off to court for it. After the fact.  The postal service has always still been usable  to share this information.

And yet, the one single thing listed as impossible to share over the net is violations of the copyright monopoly. If the Commission really was referring to things that you were legally  unable to share, you’d expect military secrets to come first, followed by governmental hush-hushy documents. But no.

This is an obvious slip trying to calm people into saying that everything will be as before, but the forced factual correctness of it reveals that we are indeed talking about censorship.

Another objection here would be that the language requiring ISPs to police the net was taken out of ACTA. That is… not quite so. The specific phrase requiring that was taken out in one revision, yes. But in the same revision, the same thing was re-inserted in another place. Specifically, this text was inserted:

Desiring to promote cooperation between service providers and rights holders to address relevant infringements in the digital environment;

It looks fairly innocent, like most legal text where you don’t have the full context. To fully appreciate the impact of this text, one needs to know the background leading up to it and the negotiations. Hax writes a bit about it here (in Swedish). The gist of it is that it’s enforcement of extrajudicial censorship, plain and simple, through threats of third-party liability.

UPDATE – seeing that this story is climbing on Reddit, and now hitting frontpage, I’m inserting the fuller explanation from the summary of today’s anti-ACTA rallies:

…there was a very clear recurring theme among the Members of European Parliament speaking, MEPs from three different parties. They all told the story of how software patents had been defeated in Europe, followed by the crucial “amendment 138″ in the Telecoms Package, which aimed to shut people off en masse from the Net. Well, thanks to diligent activists and people on the inside, we managed to get as strong safeguards in place as possible against shutting people off. But the monopoly lobbyists never quit. Now they’re at it again, this time saying that if authorities can’t shut people off en masse due to that “amendment 138″, maybe they can get private corporations – the ISPs – to do it instead through third-party liability forcing certain terms of service and wiretapping, shutting people off outside due process of law at the copyright industry’s fingerpointing as well as trying for live, realtime censorship. Hence, ACTA.

(original article continues)

ACTA will bring censorship. Extrajudicial censorship. At the request of a bloody entertainment  industry. That is shameful. 

Tomorrow, Saturday February 4, large-scale rallies against ACTA take place. I will be at the rally in Stockholm, Sweden at Plattan at noon.

Corruption: In what can only be described as an all-out declaration of war with the Internet, the Swedish Supreme Court has denied the final hearing in the trial of the original The Pirate Bay operators. This means that the Appeals Court verdict stands, unless appealed to the European Court of Justice.

This case and trial was political from day one. The astounding arrogance displayed by the establishment showed that it was nothing but theater; there was never a shred of justice involved, only a hellbent desire from the entire establishment to show who’s boss once and for all.

Let’s recap:

In a country where police is constantly in short supply and cases with the derogatory label everyday violence are routinely dropped, fifty (!) police raided a server hall and took all (!) servers — over 150 of them. Many entrepreneurs went out of business. The copyright monopoly lobby gleefully commented in media with “you have to be aware who your neighbor in the server hall is, or face the consequences” in the best and worst of mafia style.

In the raid, over a dozen violations of the constitution were committed; among others, the legal counsel of The Pirate Bay gets his DNA permanently registered with the State, and a constitutionally protected publisher is shut down (though restored a few days later).

The investigation was led by an openly bribed policeman, Jim Keyzer, who was bribed with a job with Warner Brothers, one of the plaintiffs (!) for six months and then went back to the police force.

In the District Court, the corrupt judge Tomas Norström was in the same interest group as the plaintiffs – the Swedish Association For Copyright – which argues politically against the defendants. That means he was meeting the copyright monopoly lobby regularly and on a personal basis, and sharing a personal interest in a guilty verdict. He was completely nonplussed as to the later accusations of bias and corruption, and was later cleared of such charges of bias, by a person in the Appeals Court who was also a member of the same interest group. Therefore, the District Court verdict was not declared a mistrial.

In the middle of everything, the unrelated Carl Lundström is dragged in as a defendant, a person who has had absolutely nothing to do with The Pirate Bay but who happens to know the people involved and also own a lot of money. The verdict determines damages to pretty much all of Lundström’s fortune, to be paid “in solidarity” – a legal term meaning that the person with the money pays, and the defendants get to sort it out between themselves later. This was a design just to rob one person of their fortune and scare everybody away from even talking to The Pirate Bay. (Of course, it didn’t work, but it shows the arrogance.)

The negotiations in the Appeals Court are placed just days after the 2010 General Elections, instead of before as expected, because that’s “the only days that the plaintiffs were able to attend the hearings”. If placed before the elections, The Pirate Bay trial had been an election issue and received tons of attention. The Appeals Court defends this decision as “standard procedure”. Nobody is surprised.

On the negotiations in the Appeals Court, a sign in the doorway showing today’s trials showed just how misplaced the entire theater was. The screen listed trials for aggravated assault, murder, rape, armed robbery… and in the middle of it all, there was an “aiding and abetting copyright violations”.

The judge in the Appeals Court had also been a member of the Swedish Association for Copyright, but “wasn’t any longer”. The damages were raised substantially in the Appeals Court and the prison sentences lowered somewhat, but nobody really cared about the Appeals Court negotiations, as the coming Supreme Court negotiations would be where the final and interesting battle would stand.

And so today, we are notified that the final battle has been cancelled, as the case isn’t interesting enough, which is such an outright display of arrogance from the establishment that it’s mind-boggling. They didn’t even care to consult the European Court of Justice on the immunity of a middleman. So while everybody was looking the other way, this is essentially a “haha, did you really think we’d allow this?”.

This complete arrogance from the establishment, essentially saying “we don’t give a fuck about justice or freedom of speech, we can do whatever we want and get away with it, and we like to show off that ability”, is nothing less than a declaration of war with the entire internet.

Today, the monopolist lobby is showing off in Swedish oldmedia, while also threatening Internet Service Providers that don’t bend to their will. This is not just unacceptable; this is an all-out declaration of war.

At this point, we need to bring everything decentralized. DNS, networking (wi-fi meshes), file storage, everything.

See also the TPB blog and TorrentFreak on the matter.

Yes, I’m pissed.

(As a side note, the Swedish Supreme Court is leaking like a sieve. I was fairly certain this would be coming, days in advance. Yet another sign of arrogance: they didn’t even care to guard the normal secrets of process of law.)

UPDATE: Also read BrokeP’s take on this: Maintain. Hardline. Kopimi.

Repression – Thijs Markus: A recent article by Rick Falkvinge posed the question: If ACTA doesn’t change anything, why are they pushing for its passage as if their life depended on it? Well, the answer is rather hilarious: it does, actually.

While this question is obviously a rhetorical device, its answer is none the less relevant to the discussion. And here, I would like to propose an answer to said question. You see, to understand the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, we need to go a little further back in time than the 00′s. We need to go back somewhere to the late 80′s, early 90′s.

New contributor
This is a guest article from Thijs Markus, who opens on Falkvinge &Co. on Infopolicy with this article.

During this time, a new fashion came over the industries of the day: as pioneered by Nike, large corporations decided to put all their factories overseas, the company would be only its brand. Anything that could be done cheaper at the gunpoint of this or that dictatorship would henceforth be done there. This means pretty much all the dumb labor is done overseas. Thus the trademark, as intended, as a means of identifying who produced what, pretty much ended there.

Why? Well, to take Nike for example, they figured that if they could produce and bring a shoe to a store for $5, and sell it for $150, they get a whooping $145 profit margin. This profit margin could then be spent on marketing, which is why you know the Nike logo with your eyes closed. The whole idea of the operation was exactly that: by making the shoe as cheaply as possible, the largest possible margin could be spent on marketing, thus ensuring the largest possible market share.

So here you have a company that takes in $5 shoes from third world countries, brands them, and sells them for $150. That’s pretty damn clever and profitable. However, there is one very minor loophole they overlooked in this manoeuvre. I could train a chimpanzee to take a logo and apply it on a product, and slightly more industrious primates all over the planet are doing as much. And now, some 20 years later, they begin to realize that in fact they have nothing to sell, their sole asset is the legal right to the logo they spent billions, even trillions to idolize.

Realizing that their scam is running thin, hanging only by the thread that people in fact respect their right to brand something, they swung into action the lobby apparatus to tell the rest of the world how very naughty they are when they don’t respect said right. And the result, amongst a long list of treaties-and-such, is ACTA.

Civil Liberties: Every time changes to the copyright monopoly are considered, the profits of major entertainment industry companies are at the center of the discussion. Even the people who fiercely defend the right to share information freely are going to extreme lengths to argue that this will not hurt the revenues of the copyright industry. But why are these profits even relevant? Why should we care about the profits of these companies?

It is almost apologetic. Apologetic for defending the civil rights that our ancestors fought, bled and died to give us, their children and grandchildren.

Thinking about what hurts and doesn’t hurt sales misses the point entirely. A corporation’s profits must never be at the center of policymaking, much less the center of determining what fundamental civil liberties we have as free citizens.

COLUMN REPOST
This is a repost of a column previously published on TorrentFreak, a repost made in the light of TechDirt’s excellent report on the growing entertainment industry, The Sky Is Rising. While factually interesting and well researched, the shrinkage or growth of the entertainment industry must not carry any impact on the debate on civil liberties.

You remember Blackwater Security? The wet-jobs security firm that the US military hires for jobs abroad, jobs that violate the military’s own regulations to the moon and back?

When Blackwater Security was playing Grand Theft Auto among civilians in Iraq in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, with which Iraq had nothing to do, how would you react if they had issued the following statement?

“Our profits are being hampered by the civilians’ rights. It is not fair. In all fairness, we demand that torture should be allowed preemptively to find suspects or people that we find interesting, or because it can boost our profit. Also, we demand the right to detain civilians at will and indefinitely, because we could charge Uncle Sam for that too, boosting our profits even further.”

How would you react to that?

Let’s take another scenario from Blackwater in Iraq:

“Our profits are being hampered by the rights of the people. It is not fair. Our profits are falling. In all fairness, we demand the introduction of wanton censorship, allowing us to discover and prevent people from talking about subjects we don’t like. Also, we demand to hold messengers responsible to some amount of punishment we determine if they carry sealed letters containing something we don’t like. That way, our profits could perhaps be restored to their former glory. After all, it’s only fair.”

Would this demand from Blackwater Security in Iraq perhaps seem reasonable? They’re asking for the dismantlement of rights on the same level as the right to not be tortured, not to be detained without due cause, and similar rights.

Well, this is exactly what the copyright industry is demanding. Exactly this.

The rational emotional reaction to this is an immediate desire to personally kick the living shit out of these pretentious bastards. After proper impulse control has been applied to this desire, the proper official poker-faced response – if any – is that the world owes them nothing, preferably coupled with sharp reductions in existing monopoly privileges.

If somebody had written a dystopic novel in the 1980s illustrating how some subjects had been forbidden, and if you would speak about them on the phone, a voice would pop in and say, “You have mentioned a forbidden subject. This has been noted. Please refrain from discussing forbidden subjects.” – if somebody had written this, people would have dismissed it out of hand as being too dystopic, too unrealistic. This could never possibly happen, people would have said, shaking their heads.

Try posting a link to a torrent on The Pirate Bay on your wall on Facebook and see what happens. People in the 1980s would have been horrified, people on both sides of the Iron Curtain. All in the name of protecting profits for a cartelized industry with monopoly benefits.

The job of any entrepreneur is to construct a use case and a business case that allow them to make money, given the current constraints of society and technology. They do not get to dismantle civil liberties, even if they can’t make money otherwise. That goes for Blackwater Security as well as the copyright industry as well as every other entrepreneur on the planet.

When our parents sent a letter in the mail, nobody was allowed to open it to check if it contained a copied poem, which would infringe on the copyright monopoly. When our parents sent a letter in the mail, they and they alone determined if they identified themselves as sender on the outside of the envelope, inside the envelope, or not at all. When our parents sent a letter in the mail, the mailman was never held responsible for the contents of that letter, regardless of if the contents infringed a particular copyright monopoly or were even downright illegal.

It is entirely reasonable to demand sternly that our children have the same rights as our parents and grandparents had. A particular corporation’s profitability does not factor into it.

Corruption: The ACTA awareness and debate has finally heated up. But in such a huge, convoluted and deliberately complex document, how can you determine for yourself whether it’s good or bad? It turns out that there’s a very straightforward way to tell.

The easiest way to determine the nature of ACTA comes not from the document itself, but from the behavior of the people advocating it.

Everybody involved in pushing and rushing through this agreement have insisted that it will mean no changes at all, won’t require any changes to law (or possibly minimal ones to trademark law, as in Sweden), and overall, insist that it’s no big deal.

At the same time, these players are throwing all their weight behind its passage. The key question that results stands out like a sore thumb:

If ACTA doesn’t change anything, why are they pushing for its passage as if their life depended on it?

And that contradiction, in itself, is enough to de-mask the entire ACTA and what it stands for. It was negotiated in secret by the copyright industry and other monopolists. Even now, as lawmakers come to a vote, they are not allowed to understand what the document says – for it defines many new terms, that are only understandable in terms of the negotiation protocols. But those are secret.

If the copyright industry is pushing for its life for something to pass, while pretending it’s not a change at all, and preventing lawmakers from understanding the concepts defined, what do you think it contains?

This is the industry that thinks it’s reasonable for legislators to give them the power to kill a legal competitor in a foreign country by killing their income, website, and advertising at the pointing of a finger.

This is the industry that thinks it’s reasonable that they should be legislated to the top of search results, and their free competitors downranked by law.

This is the industry that demands under threat of law – a private industry – to wiretap an entire population, just to see if they do something that industry doesn’t like, and if so, censor that population’s communications at will.

This is the industry that argues that citizens should be actively prevented from exercising their fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech and expression, if that may possibly interfere with that industry’s business.

This is the industry that thinks it’s reasonable to sue a small Karaoke manufacturer for 1.2 billion dollars. Oh, and a student for over 4 million. Oh, and a dead grandmother.

This is the industry that uses child pornography as a legal ram to pave the way for their own censorship, in ways that actually hurt children and promote child abuse.

This is the industry that planted rootkits on people’s music CDs and took complete control of their computers, millions of them – including web cameras, microphones, files on the hard drive, everything. They forced their way into people’s homes and got eyes and ears there.

This is the industry that, once you think they’ve sunk as low as morally and humanly possible, keeps coming up with new creative ways to surprise you.

If this industry wants this legislative package so incredibly badly that they’re fighting for their life to get it, while pretending it’s no big deal, all while not even telling lawmakers what it is, that should be enough for anybody to realize it’s a bag of the darkest bloody horrors. Expect it to codify the examples above. And more. Expect it to be much, much worse than SOPA.

Columns: It is said that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. In the case of the copyright industry, they have learned that they can get new monopoly benefits and rent-seeker’s benefits every time there is a new technology, if they just complain loudly enough to the legislators.

The past 100 years have seen a vast array of technical advances in broadcasting, multiplication and transmissions of culture, but equally much misguided legislators who sought to preserve the old at expense of the new, just because the old was complaining. First, let’s take a look at what the copyright industry tried to ban and outlaw, or at least receive taxpayer money in compensation for its existence:

It started around 1905, when the self-playing piano was becoming popular. Sellers of note sheet music proclaimed that this would be the end of artistry if they couldn’t make a living off of middlemen between composers and the public, so they called for a ban on the player piano. A famous letter in 1906 claims that both the gramophone and the self-playing piano will be the end of artistry, and indeed, the end of a vivid, songful humanity. People called for its ban, too.

Column repost
This column has previously been posted at TorrentFreak. It is reposted here now, with a few updates, as a memory refresher as the ACTA agreement is heating up.

In the 1920s, as broadcast radio started appearing, another copyright industry was demanding its ban because it cut into profits. Record sales fell from $75 million in 1929 to $5 million four years later – a recession many times greater than the record industry’s current troubles. (Speaking of recession, the drop in profits happened to coincide with the Great Depression.) The copyright industry sued radio stations, and collecting societies started collecting part of the station profits under a blanket “licensing” scheme. Laws were proposed that would immunize the new radio medium from the copyright industry, but they did not pass.

In the 1930s, silent movies were phased out by movies with audio tracks. Every theater had previously employed an orchestra that played music to accompany the silent movies, and now, these were out of a job. It is quite conceivable that this is the single worst technology development for professional performers. Their unions demanded guaranteed income for these performers in varying propositions.

In the 1940s, the movie industry complained that the television would be the death of movies, as movie industry profits dropped from $120 million to $31 million in five years. Famous quote: “Why pay to go see a movie when you can see it at home for free?”

In the 1950s, the movie industry complained loudly about cable television, and this time complained how unfair it was that their free content was unable to compete with paid!

In 1972, the copyright industry tried to ban the photocopier. This push was from book publishers and magazine publishers alike. “The day may not be far off when no one need purchase books.”

The 1970s saw the advent of the cassette tape, which is when the copyright industry really went all-out in proclaiming their entitlement. Ads saying “Home taping is killing music!” were everywhere. The band Dead Kennedys famously responded by subtly changing the message in adding “…industry profits”, and “We left this side [of their tape] blank, so you can help.”

The 1970s also saw another significant shift, where DJs and loudspeakers started taking the place of live dance music. Unions and the copyright industry went ballistic over this, and suggested a “disco fee” that would be charged at locations playing disco (recorded) music, to be collected by private organizations under governmental mandate and redistributed to live bands. This produces hearty laughter today, but that laughter stops sharp with the realization that the disco fee was actually introduced, and still exists.

The 1980s is a special chapter with the advent of video cassette recorders. The copyright industry’s famous quote when testifying before the US Congress – where the film lobby’s highest representative Jack Valenti said that “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone” – is the stuff of legend today. Still, it bears reminding that the so-called Betamax case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and that the VCR was as near as could be from being killed by the copyright industry: The Betamax team won the case by 5-4 in votes.

Also in the late 1980s, we saw the complete flop of the Digital Audio Tape (DAT). A lot of this can be ascribed to the fact that the copyright industry had been allowed to put its politics into the design: the cassette, although technically superior to the analog Compact Cassette, was so deliberately unusable for copying music that people rejected it flat outright. This is an example of a technology that the copyright industry succeeded in killing, even though I doubt it was intentional: they just got their wishes as to how it should work to not disrupt the status quo.

In 1994, Fraunhofer Institute published a prototype implementation of its digital coding technique that would revolutionize digital audio. It allowed CD-quality audio to take one-tenth of the disk space, which was very valuable in this time, when a typical hard drive would be just a couple of gigabytes. Technically known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, it was quickly shortened to “MP3” in everyday speak. The copyright industry screamed again, calling it a technology that only can be used for criminal activity. The first successful MP3 player, the Diamond Rio, saw the light in 1998. It had 32 megabytes of memory. Despite good sales, the copyright industry sued its maker, Diamond Multimedia, into oblivion: while the lawsuit was struck down, the company did not recover from the burden of defending. The monopoly middlemen tried aggressively to have MP3 players banned, but lost.

The century ended with the copyright middlemen pushing through a new law in the United States called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which would have killed the Internet and social media by introducing intermediary liability – essentially killing social technologies in their cradle. Only with much effort did the technology industry manage to stave off disaster by introducing so-called “safe harbors” that immunizes the technical companies from liability on the condition that they throw the free speech of the end-users to the wolves on request. The internet and social media survived the copyright industry’s onslaught by a very narrow escape that still left it significantly harmed and slowed.

Right after the turn of the century, the use of Digital Video Recorders was called “stealing” as it allowed for skipping of commercials (as if nobody did that before).

In 2003, the copyright industry tried to have its say in the design of HDTV with a so-called “broadcast flag” that would make it illegal to manufacture devices that could copy movies so flagged. In the USA, the FCC miraculously granted this request, but was struck down in bolts of lightning by courts who said they had way overstepped their mandate.

Finally, in 2006, the broadcasting industry sued (and lost against) the cloud-based DVR, trying to ban it, as with everything else.

What we have here is a century of deceit, and a century revealing the internal culture inherent in the copyright industry. Every time something new appears, the copyright industry has learned to cry and throw tantrums like a spoiled brat, and succeeds practically every time to get legislators to channel taxpayer money their way or restrict competing industries. And every time the copyright industry succeeds in doing so, this behavior is further reinforced.

It is far past due that the copyright industry is stripped of its nobility benefits, every part of its governmental weekly allowance, and gets kicked out of its comfy chair to get a damn job and learn to compete on a free and honest market.

See also A History of the Copyright Monopoly.

Updated: Added Cable TV, cloud DVRs, photocopier; inserted links and references.

Europe: This just in: the European Parliament’s rapporteur of the ACTA agreement, an agreement which is about as bad as SOPA and creates seriously repressive legislation – that rapporteur has just quit in disgust over how the whole process has been designed to keep citizens and lawmakers in the dark.

From the website of La Quadrature, which quotes and translates Numérama interviewing Kader Arif, former rapporteur for ACTA:

”I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.”

“As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens’ legitimate demands.”

“Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications.”

“This agreement might have major consequences on citizens’ lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this mascarade.”

I’ve never seen words this strong from a Member of European Parliament before. He’s essentially saying that parliament was deliberately kept in the dark – this description comes very close to describing a coup d’état.

Next Steps

It is important to know that today’s signing of the ACTA agreement by the EU member states accounts for absolutely nothing. It is for show. A ceremony. Theater. The legally binding action happens in votes in parliaments; the national parliaments across Europe, and notably the European Parliament. That’s the final line of defense, and that’s where we must win.

The vote in European Parliament is estimated to happen somewhere around June 10. On the road there, it needs to pass through three or four subcommittees of the European Parliament. I expect similar mechanisms to happen in the national parliaments.

Expect lies.

The Polish minister of digitization, Michal Boni, was lying through his teeth yesterday, saying that Poland “had no option” but to sign the agreement, and that Poland would submit “an addendum clarifying Poland’s conditions”. These are blatant lies. He also claimed that all other EU countries had already signed it, which as another blatant lie.

First, if no vote in parliament was needed, you can be damn sure it wouldn’t be held in the first place. If parliament says no, any parliament, then no it is. And the Members of Parliament push exactly the button they want to – there is no “must push yes”. Nobody holds a gun to their head.

Second, there are no addendums or appendixes which may appease the public. The ACTA text is closed. There is no more adding to it. What remains is a yes or a no to the text exactly as it is written.

Make Noise

This is where we come in. We must take everything we learned from defeating SOPA and apply it to national parliaments in Europe in general, and the European Parliament in particular.

Activism on the streets. Flood them with phone calls and emails. (Do not overload their servers, though: that will be seen as borderline terrorism and just make them more determined that more Internet control is the right thing to do.) Citizens of Poland have been exemplary here in taking to the streets.

SOPA is dead, and nobody in the US legislature wants to touch copyright monopoly issues. If we win ACTA – and we know that we can – then that may be the beginning of the end for the copyright industry and its attempts to kill our freedom of speech. Yes, really.

Copyright Monopoly: In a shock ruling in the UK this Tuesday, a photo was found to be in violation of the copyright monopoly of another photographer. There’s only one hitch with this ruling: the infringing copy was not a copy at all, but another original with a similar composition.

This verdict throws the entire copyright monopoly concept overboard; it has always been a monopoly on outright copying of a work. Here, for the first time, something that is not a copy is found to be in violation of the copying monopoly. The judge determined that the compositions were similar enough for the second photographer to be in violation of the copyright monopoly of the first one.

Deem for yourself – here are the two images side by side (from the public court verdict):

Yes, the images are arguably similar. But there is absolutely no merit whatsoever to the claim that one would be a copy of the other, thus violating the copyright monopoly. What the judge has done here is to set a precedent that states that the monopoly does not just cover the creative work, but extends to a general creative idea, which completely shatters the traditional notion that the copyright monopoly only covers a specific expression of an idea, and never the idea itself.

So what’s the big deal, then? In this case, they sought to recreate the image and took a similar one. Why is that not a violation of the copyright monopoly?

Because that’s exactly how you do it if you don’t want to pay a license fee on the original terms. You create a similar work yourself, entirely by yourself, and compete. It’s the whole damned idea.

This precedent in the United Kingdom just sent the copyright monopoly completely overboard. It has now ventured into patent monopoly territory, where you can be sued for creating something all by yourself even if you’ve never heard of a previous similar invention. This has serious chilling effects on creativity.

I consider this verdict to be another nail in the copyright monopoly’s coffin. This is just insane, and – importantly – perceived as insane by all creators alike, who are now riddled with fear, uncertainty and doubt when taking a simple photograph and editing it. With this in the back, they can be sued for doing their daily work just like they always have been shooting images and editing them. This doesn’t go for just the United Kingdom, but all of the European Union, as any EU court is setting precedents across the entire European Union.

As a side note, it can be seriously questioned how much creative work is involved in graying out London on a rainy day. Or how much work at all, actually. I should know – I just made a third replica for this article to prove a point. It took me about 90 seconds.

Via Amateur Photographer, Pop Photo.

Update: See also Slashdot, which broke the news 22 minutes after this article.

Update 2: See also BoingBoing, where Cory Doctorow calls this “an apocalyptically bad ruling, and an utter disaster in the making”.

Заголовки @ru: Европейские Зеленые приняли позицию Пиратов по поводу монополии на авторское право, в связи с чем я получил ряд вопросов от предпринимателей, лоббистов индустрии авторского право и либертарианцев про то, почему мы хотим запретить DRM – Digital Restrictions Management. Это хороший вопрос и он заслуживает хорошего ответа.
В первую очередь, DRM – вид мошенничества, который отнимает у граждан их законные права. Монополия авторского права переполнена исключениями, которые разрешают копирование во многих ситуациях; DRM на это не обращает внимания, а определяет и соблюдает набор ограничений, которые намного превосходят ограничения, определенные законом. Так что, для начала, запрет DRM можно рассматривать как способ защиты прав потребителя.
Читать всю колонку на TorrentFreak (англ.).

Infopolicy – Anonymous: For the rich West and North, the copyright and patent monopolies are a moral nuisance and an impediment to progress, argues this anonymous guest contributor. For the third world, however, the practices are neocolonial and a matter of sovereignty and life and death. These reasons are often much stronger than the right to create.

There are many reasons for those of us in the first world to oppose the current “intellectual propety” regime:

• Some of us see it as trying to legislate water to run uphill
• Some of us appreciate the remix culture
• Some of us see it as blocking specific projects
• Some of us believe it’s morally iffy to create an artificial scarcity.
• Some of us simply don’t appreciate the way the system was constructed, on broken promises and overstated figures.

However, what you hear a lot, is the assumption – from others, mostly, that it’s all about not wanting to pay for a movie. Yes, go ahead and shake your head.

It may sound rude, but there’s a huge situation where that can be the logical driving force: the third world. There, the elaborate Pirate Wheel values are not necessarily as important as simple economic realpolitik.

First, for most third-world nations, the monopoly business is a simple net export situation. First-world content is broadly imported, but by and large, nobody is queuing in Los Angeles or Paris for the latest cinema hits from Cameroon, the new patented medicine developed in Tajikistan, or the top 40 music of Zimbabwe. A simple statistical analysis shows they get far less out of the monopoly industries than they pay out to the first world. By quitting the game, they can immediately staunch a flow of hard currency, and improve the balance of trade.

Second, these nations often desperately crave modernization. However, wherever they look, the path to the future goes via foreign monopolies. Want high-yielding, modern seeds for your farms? Sorry, patented, so you’ll pay a premium price and likely be forbidden from saving the resultant harvest for replanting. Need software to bring your business and government operations into the 21st century? Sure, if you’ll pay three times the per-capita income for a copy, and support contract, and forget about distributing it to each office that needs it. Those restrictions go away the moment the monopolies do – the guy running off copies on a street corner, or the local farmer who started with patent seeds, and the plant cranking out generic HIV medications, don’t care what you do with the product once you buy it.

There’s also a softer reason such reforms would appeal to the third world: a lack of entrenched interests. The first world’s monopoly beneficiaries are a small, but disproportionately influential group. In the third world, you might have a few poor local affiliates, backed only by the shadows of distant foreign firms. Abolishing monopolies doesn’t just make economic sense, it’s a strike for your nation’s sovereignty and uncorruptability by outsiders!

In a way, the current intellectual property system bears a surprising resemblance to manufacturing regulations placed on colonial states by their distant masters. It was an obvious system – by preventing the development of manufacturing in the colony, they can both line the profits of the home country, and prevent the colony from developing a free-standing economy of their own.

The second half of the 20th century was a period of great release for the third world, as it threw off formal colonial shackles. I see no reason the first half of the 21st century shouldn’t be the time period they cut that last cord to the old exploitation model.

Activism – Travis McCrea: The US media industries along with their cronies in the United States Federal Government are no longer fighting with the weight of law against the process of sharing culture… they are using fear based tactics that have no legal grounds and are designed entirely to scare filesharers and other “Cyberlockers” into submitting to their will.

This is NOT the time for us to give into the fear-based tactics of the United States. It just so happens the United States DOESN’T rule the rest of the world, and we do not have to stand by as our governments sell their souls to protect the interest of the school yard bully. Maybe it was because I was raised in the United States, and I don’t know what you are taught, but I was always taught to stand up for yourself to the bullies. We must not let them believe (wrongly) that their tactics have any impact on us. Fuck those guys. What’s worse, the websites like FileSonic and the other websites that are now limiting how their services can be used… they are telling the industry and governments “hey, it doesn’t matter if you act within the law or not, as long as you can be scary about it, we will bend to your will”.

FileSonic and the other websites who are backing down are stabbing their customers and the movement in the back. They are putting the fundamental freedoms that we get to enjoy both online and offline in jeapordy by allowing fear, instead of actual law, guide their judgements. When the industries go to the FBI or Congress or the President and say “Hey, let’s take down Falkvinge.net for inspiring people to share culture and the embrace freedom” when the question of legality comes up, the response can now be “it doesn’t matter if it’s legal or not… by forcibly taking down Falkvinge we will scare other websites into shutting down too… and Falkvinge will be forced into an expensive legal battle if he wants his site to remain open”.

I know that there is a trend in my posts to talk about terrorism, I use it as a way to relate the battle we are fighting now into terms that more average people can understand. This time, however, the battle is against terrorism. The United States Federal Government is acting against the interests of it’s own people and the world, their actions are to adjust policy abroad by using these scary “Shock and Awe” tactics against those that oppose them.  It’s not just me who believes this, TUEBL and TorMovies has made me “pen pals” with a few people within the movie industry and publishing industry, and one of the executives that I have been talking to had this to say about Megaupload:

 It’s funny, because Megaupload give rightsholders the ability to remove files infringing their copyright directly – I don’t think it’s about how a site is run, but the scale of it. However, questions regarding the extent to which this tool was effective have been around for a while (reiterated in thisSlashgear article): even though they provided this tool, the number of files shared on Megaupload was staggering, and I don’t really think it’s right that the onus should be on the rightsowner to find all their files and have them removed. I think the Mega song was probably the last straw, despite what they say about the investigation having gone on for two years and the raid being planned weeks ago.

I hope my quoting her will not impact our ability to keep an open dialogue because her industry insights are a valuable asset to me and while she believes in copyright, and the enforcement of copyright, she always keeps the conversation friendly. As you can see, even executives within the media industries (not music in this case) believe that this was an act of power, not law.

Today is not the day that we should be retreating, today is the day that we march (at least metaphorically) on the evil media industry. We should be opening MORE cyberlockers, we should be opening MORE torrent sites, we should be sharing MORE content. Not less. We cannot let them win and as Rick stated on TorrentFreak it’s time we go on the offensive. He was speaking in a legal sense, but I am speaking in an activist sense.

First, go after companies that stab us in the back. I cannot legally encourage a DDoS or any tactic, but FileSonic needs to be taken down. It needs to be clear that while we will not take a “your either with us or against us stance” we will take a “if you try to throw us under a bus… we are going to take you with us” stance. We need to stop spending money on the content industry. Most of the people reading this blog are the people who put the most money into the media industry. We watch movies at theatres, we buy the CD, we buy the bands merchandise, we put money into the industry. We must STOP.

Are you a cyberlocker who want’s to do the right thing but you have other responsibilities and do not want to take the legal risk? Contact info@tormovies.org or me@travismccrea.com and I would be willing to take ownership and full legal responsibility for your website. I would operate it in a way that is respectful to the way that you had run the site, and it allows you to not screw over your users.

This is now a war on culture (and I don’t mean Christmas), we must place economic sanctions (by not permitting their sites to operate, and by boycotting products) on those profiting from the abuse of the internet. We must strike and make as much non-violent damage we can to their industry as possible. I sound like a vigilante crazy guy? Good. Am I mad bro? Damn right I am mad… you should be too. Am I letting my emotions dictate my words and actions? No. I am just fighting for justice and the law. I am fighting for what is MORALLY right and I will never give up moral law for an unjust national law.

Copyright Monopoly: Whenever I argue that the copyright monopoly isn’t necessary to incentivize culture production, I hear the counterargument that multi-million-euro movie productions would never happen in case there wasn’t a guaranteed return on investment.

The image for this article is a still image from Return of the King published in 2003, the third installment of The Lord of the Rings, which I’ll use as a concrete example. But first, let’s examine the counterargument above in more detail.

I frequently hear that this-and-that would not happen if there wasn’t a guaranteed return on investment. While most people seem in agreement that music would be played, books would be written, and art would be made without the copyright monopoly, because that creativity happens for other reasons than pure money, the objections usually gravitate towards the subject of blockbuster movies, and how a guaranteed return on investment is necessary for those to be produced in the first place.

Let’s look at that statement.

First, it’s a contradiction in terms. By definition, an investment is the acceptance of a risk for a possible return which is larger than the initial investment; there is no such thing as a right to profit off of any endeavor.

Second, so what? Culture has always been fluent in its forms of expression. A hundred years ago, folk songs and concerts with classical music were the two predominant expressions of culture. A hundred years before still, it was ballets and operettes in French and Italian. Nobody even gives a shrug that ballets isn’t the predominant expression of culture today, and so, we should expect feature films to peak and fade, too: to give way for something else and better. Gaming and immersive culture, perhaps.

But let’s look at the underlying assumption again, that nothing would be produced if the copyright monopoly was reduced to allow file sharing. Let’s assume that everything could spread freely as soon as it was digitized, and that this would result in no more revenue for a certain blockbuster movie once it was shared in the wild (which is a completely false assumption, but one that the copyright monopoly maximalists argue, and so, let’s stick with it for the sake of argument).

This means, that after the opening weekend of a blockbuster, it would yield no more revenue under this (false) assumption. So then, let’s look at hard numbers to examine that argument. We have the numbers for Return of the King, which is frequently used as an example in the debate, right here.

The movie Return of the King cost 94 million US dollars to make. On opening weekend, it grossed 199 million. That’s over a 100% return on investment before a digital copy could be fileshared in the wild.

Now, there are a number of assumptions with this number, like how the gross is distributed and much more. But overall, it shows how ridiculous the argument is that there would never be a return on investment if the copyright monopoly was sensiblized to allow noncommercial copying.

The next wave of that argument is that all movies don’t reach the 100-percent level of return on investment during opening weekend. That is true, of course. Some reach more, some less, some go at a loss. So how much return would be needed, and how much risk is acceptable, to still make investments happen?

In order to answer this question, we don’t look at the Hollywood studios, but at other investors: the… well, investors. Wall Street. A ten-percent return over a year is a considered a good investment that easily attracts hundreds of millions of euros (or dollars). And frequently enough, those investments… just tank. Just like movies do. But you practically never, ever, see the hundred-percent return on investment on Wall Street financial derivatives that you can make on just opening weekend for a movie production.

In summary, the argument that nobody would invest in the production of multimillion blockbuster feature movies if filesharing was allowed is incoherent hogwash on multiple levels, proved so by the industry’s own numbers.

TRANSLATIONS AVAILABLE
This article has been deemed reference material by the swarm, which has translated it into other languages. Translations available: Spanish.

Personal: Today, on the 21st of January, it is 40 years since I was born in 1972. Therefore, I am taking the liberty of taking a day off from activism and celebrating this event with my close and dear friends and colleagues.

Of course, given the current escalation of insanities from authorities and the copyright monopoly lobby alike, it can feel a little frustrating to take a day off right now. It is at times like those that I remember the wise words of our first Member of European Parliament, Christian Engström:

If you feel you need some time off from activism, that’s the right thing to do. There is no reason to fear that the world will run out of evil while you’re away.

Some people have asked me what it feels like feeling 40, if I’m getting into some sort of expected crisis. On the contrary! Six years ago, on founding the Swedish Pirate Party, I discovered how much more fun it is to speak your exact mind and make a mess out of the status quo at the same time, and I have forty years left of all this fun to stir things up! All the fun I’ll have!

For the forces of evil certainly aren’t resting on their laurels. 2012 is going to be a really messy year on the front of civil liberties, calling for a lot of action and activism. There is too much evil happening to even try to list the bad stuff off the top of my head. Lots of work to do here.

But not today.

Today, I take a day off and celebrate like there’s no tomorrow.

But, alas, there is. See you on that tomorrow. I might be a little tired. Comes with age, you know.

Process of Law – Zacqary Adam Green: Oh boy, another police state bill enters the US Congress! The Enemy Expatriation Act will allow citizens to be stripped of their nationality for “supporting hostilities” against the US. Conviction, of course, wouldn’t be necessary.

The Enemy Expatriation Act is a short amendment to USC 8 §1481, the law which spells out criteria for the revocation of US citizenship. Already listed are naturalization in or serving in the armed forces of another country, formally renouncing US citizenship, or being convicted of treason against the US. These are, arguably, perfectly understandable. But the EEA adds this new reason to revoke citizenship:

[E]ngaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.…For purposes of this section, the term ‘hostilities’ means any conflict subject to the laws of war.

One would think that would constitute treason, and thus such a section wouldn’t be necessary. But look at paragraph 7 of §1481, which describes treason:

(7) committing any act of treason against, or attempting by force to overthrow, or bearing arms against, the United States, violating or conspiring to violate any of the provisions of section 2383 of title 18, or willfully performing any act in violation of section 2385 of title 18, or violating section 2384 of title 18 by engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, if and when he is convicted thereof by a court martial or by a court of competent jurisdiction. [Emphasis mine]

There’s your problem. Under the current law, one has to be convicted of treason in order to be stripped of citizenship. This new section, added by the EEA, requires no such thing.

Now, the premise of the bill on its own gives me pause: does giving five bucks to Wikileaks count as “materially supporting hostilities”, or is that not a “conflict subject to the laws of war” yet? That’s ambiguous, though; the complete lack of a due process requirement — in contrast to the already-existing section regarding treason — is something else entirely.

The possibility of having one’s citizenship revoked without a trial is bad enough, but in concert with the recently-passed 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, it’s terrifying. The latest NDAA, of course, requires anyone accused of “terrorism” to be indefinitely detained by the executive branch of the government. In response to public outrage, an amendment was added which made US citizens exempt to this requirement (which doesn’t make them exempt to the possibility, but in practice, perhaps the law will be enforced in such a way). If, under the EEA, someone is stripped of their citizenship without a trial, then there is no longer any semantic ambiguity to keep them safe from the NDAA’s indefinite detention.

There seems to be an accelerating trend of dangerously broad-worded bills being proposed in the US Congress: the 2012 NDAA, SOPA/PIPA, and now this. Legislators are playing fast and loose with their constituents’ civil liberties, seemingly oblivious to the consequences. This is not a deliberate power-grab by a government gearing up to repress its population; this is gross negligence on the part of elected officials. It is not okay to accidentally endanger the people’s rights and liberties. The supporters of this absurd bill cannot be trusted with power.

Infopolicy: Yesterday’s blackout was an interesting experience. But before I say anything else, let me yay Mike Masnick of Techdirt who has been the hero through this whole ordeal.

Masnick blew the whistle early on these laws on Techdirt and spared no energy in diving down into details and what they meant. He has been absolutely key for safeguarding free speech this time around. Hat off and tons of respect.

Ben Huh notes that where the rallying words of the 1960s were Peace and Love, those of today are Openness and Free Speech. I think that’s an acute observation – perhaps because I’ve made the exact same observation in my view of political cycles, that every 40 years, a new generation reconquers democracy (and is always abhorred by the old guard of its time).

As I have had time to reflect on today’s events (seeing there’s no Reddit to absorb my attention of the day), I become more and more convinced that this is not really aimed at the end-users, but at all the mid-level businesses which are on the verge of replacing the Disneys and TimeWarners as kings of the hill. As I wrote yesterday (an article which never showed, of course, because of the blackout):

The SOPA/PIPA laws are exactly what would be needed to recentralize control over communications, simply by threatening all the mid-level players susceptible to litigation into submission. We would lose the entire midlayer of players and be stuck with Disneyesque entertainment giants at the top, and the activists untouchable by law who run their own encrypted, invisible, untraceable infrastructure at the other end.

(If you have not heard of the laws, they essentially allow the copyright industry to turn off entire websites at the pointing of a finger. All sites with user-generated content would be targeted, specifically including Facebook, Twitter, every article with a comment field, etc.)

For us to win this war, those free-infrastructure activists must ascend to the top of the information distribution chain.

This is about the players just barely still on the top who are kicking away the ladder for those in the middle, and forcing the activists on the bottom to build a new and improved infrastructure, one that is impervious to censorship attempts (and therefore also to the copyright monopoly as a whole). Ironically, even if the lobby does win this particular fight, it will therefore eventually be their downfall.

For more background, you should also look at this 14-minute TED talk describing how the copyright industry is trying to kill copying and sharing, period, turning time back to the time where we all were television couch potatoes. This doesn’t seem like a revelation, but the talk shows how profound it is, how sharing has always been possible (not to mention legal) and the copyright industry is now trying to kill it by essentially killing due process as a concept. I wish all legislators would take a quarter out of their time to see and absorb this.

But with that said, what really struck me from yesterday’s blackout was something else.

Blacking out was really hard.

We’re become so good at keeping things online that deliberately taking them temporarily offline was really hard to do, because nobody has done it before on that scale. Our profession keeps things going, operational, up. That’s what we’re good at. And when we’re trying to take them down deliberately, it turns out we’ve been so good at constructing a system to keep it up that it stays up anyway, so we have to sabotage a safeguard to keep it down. And another. And another.

As I installed the first pieces of go-dark code on Falkvinge on Infopolicy, they didn’t work. Did not. As this was at twenty to midnight, there was no time for deeper soul-searching, so I went to WordPress’s plugin directory and searched for “SOPA”. About a gazillion blackout plugins turned up. On my fifth attempt, I found one that worked and did what it needed to do — not just black out the site temporarily, but also tell search engines just that so that they don’t think that this site has permanently turned into a single “go away” page.

Technically, this is done through HTTP codes. (HTTP is the language spoken between your web browser and my web server.) When you fetch an ordinary web page, the web server tags it with the number 200, meaning “OK”. What I also had to do was to change this number to 503 for the day, meaning “Temporarily Broken”, so that Google would know that the page reading “Down just for today” to human visitors also had a tag saying “This is a temporary outage, do not take as actual content” to Google coming to index my site. Otherwise, all my articles would disappear from Google, which would be a very undesirable side effect.

That worked. It was now half past midnight and I was getting frustrated with being past the go-dark point and still being readable. It worked. For a short while.

After just a few minutes of sending this dark “temporary outage” page, CloudFlare – which is a distributed cache taking the brutal loads off of my server when I’m on Reddit’s, Digg’s and Slashdot’s front pages at the same time – had noticed I was sending these “temporary outage” codes with every page shown to my visitors. So CloudFlare reverted my outage from a visitors’ perspective, displaying the site as it looked before I went dark, with a little friendly notice “Hi! Unfortunately, this web server appears to have a temporary outage. Here’s what it looked like just before that outage happened.”

GAH! MOTHER OF ODIN! MY OWN SITE WON’T LET ME GO DARK!

After some 45 minutes, I had disabled pretty much every piece of cache, every piece of safeguard, every piece of watchdog, every piece of performance-enhancing layer on top of my blog, including CloudFlare. And only then, when it was naked, raw and completely un-enhanced, un-guarded, back-to-prototype-stage level, did the blackout work.

That was a very interesting experience, teaching me that we’re so good at building infrastructure for sharing and communicating that it’s almost impossible to take down, even when we try to do it ourselves.

Infopolicy: Today, Wednesday January 18, the world protests against proposed censorship laws in the United States. It is a protest of unprecedented scale, ranging from Google to Wikipedia to Reddit to image hosting sites to thousands and thousands of individual blogs.

The Pirate Party was founded on the principles that politicians don’t understand technology and the net, and the only way to force them to care is to threaten their jobs over not caring. That has gone fairly well so far. In the meantime, the copyright monopoly lobby is racing ahead with slashing down civil liberties, using technically apathetic politicians as tools. For while the politicians do not care, understand, nor care to understand, the copyright monopoly lobby understands perfectly.

I think Dan Gillmor is spot on when he says that the copyright industry understands exactly what is at stake, as I have argued for five years in my Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties keynote. The problem is the politicians who don’t take the time to do their job and see the full picture. Gillmor words the real motivations of the copyright industry like this:

“The internet threatens our longstanding control of information and communications, and that is simply unacceptable. Therefore, it is essential to curb the utility of the internet for everyone else.”

I think that’s right on the money. In dual senses.

The SOPA/PIPA laws are exactly what would be needed to recentralize control over communications, simply by threatening all the mid-level players susceptible to litigation into submission. We would lose the entire midlayer of players and be stuck with Disneyesque entertainment giants at the top, and the activists untouchable by law who run their own encrypted, invisible, untraceable infrastructure at the other end.

(If you have not heard of the laws, they essentially allow the copyright industry to turn off entire websites at the pointing of a finger. All sites with user-generated content would be targeted, specifically including Facebook, Twitter, every article with a comment field, etc.)

For us to win this war, those free-infrastructure activists must ascend to the top of the information distribution chain.

This is about the players just barely still on the top who are kicking away the ladder for those in the middle, and forcing the activists on the bottom to build a new and improved infrastructure, one that is impervious to censorship attempts (and therefore also to the copyright monopoly as a whole). Ironically, even if the lobby does win this particular fight, it will therefore eventually be their downfall.

But for the politicians, wouldn’t you rather have these entrepreneurial brilliant minds contributing to the economy right away, instead of spending their time the next ten years in building a resilient, decentralized infrastructure to circumvent censorship – a censorship that you allowed – that was created to preserve privileges of an obsolete industry against the next generation of industries?

This article will not be readable on falkvinge.net on January 18, the day of worldwide protest. It will be readable over RSS, and from January 19 onward (European time).

(On January 21, I turn 40.)

Repression: News reached me this morning that authorities in the United States has decided to harass yet another of my colleagues. Australian activist Asher Wolf’s communications have been subpoenaed by a ridiculously entitled local police force in Boston.

In any normal part of the world, the police force in a city would swiftly conclude that their jurisdiction does not extend to another country on the other side of the planet. But no. Not United States authorities.

Asher Wolf has become one of the key activists across the world in coordinating news and information relating to breaking the old information hegemony. Perhaps it is therefore she is being targeted. The Boston police force demands to see her communications history and is demanding it from a company on US soil, Twitter.

This is the fourth valued colleague of mine that is being harassed extrajudicially and rightslessly. You’ve all heard of the previous three, I don’t have to name them.

I’m so damn tired, so utterly drainingly fatigued, of seeing this holier-than-thou attitude. Pretending the United States to be a shining beacon of freedom and due process, and yet, authorities there stand above not just their own law, but every other law on the planet, in the same instant it’s more convenient that way. The near-term examples are too legion to list.

(Not that a lot of other countries are much better. But they don’t pretend to be, either.)

Citizens of the United States, you know that I have many friends and colleagues in your country that I value dearly and hold in the highest respect, but your administration is a relentless psychopath. And your administration is acting in your name when it behaves like this against the world. Against my friends. Against my colleagues. Against me.

This has to end. It’s time for the United States dollar to collapse, already, to put an end to this arrogance.

So what’s our countermove?

Like I said, pretty much every friend and colleague I have with a United States passport agrees with the values I’m fighting for — the right to privacy, the transparency of government, the right to due process, the right to the same civil liberties online as our parents had offline. It’s not rocket science.

What the authorities are demanding in this case are communications logs. Logs that did not exist in the offline safeguarding of civil liberties. That’s the weak spot, right there. If there are no logs, the violence advantage of authorities cannot translate to the critical information advantage.

So, in my mind, we must make sure that the infrastructure does not keep logs of any kind when it comes to communications. Where telecoms companies – essentially the old national telephone monopolies – insist on keeping logs, we need to replace them with our own infrastructure. We know we can do that already.

We need to ask Twitter and the like to not have any logs. At all. And keep asking. Keep asking, and/or move to a different infrastructure for critical communications.

And above all, we need to explain to reporters that with communications logging and data retention, which politicians worldwide are trying to mandate, those reporters have neither the right nor the possibility to protect their sources anymore. That’s a right that should not be surrendered this lightly.

After all, Asher Wolf is a reporter and a journalist in the truest sense of the world, and a police force on the other side of the planet just asked for her sources. If that doesn’t ring alarm bells all over reporters’ heads, what will?