Sharing Knowledge and Culture Is The Natural State

Just as some misguided people react with hostility to the fact that the copyright monopoly is not a birthright, they can react with hostility and demand a response to how sharing is “justified”. This, too, is misguided.

One example could be seen in the Reddit thread about The Pirate Bay being the world’s most efficient public library. For a while, the top comment was “whatever helps you justify it” (as in, “invent whatever excuse you like to try justifying the sharing of culture”). This is a misguided expression based on the false premise that sharing knowledge and culture needs to be justified.

It is completely the other way around.

Humankind and civilization have advanced due to and because of people sharing knowledge and culture, and humankind has never advanced when culture and knowledge have been locked up and contained. Sharing knowledge, information, and culture is also a good deed on an individual-to-individual basis. Whenever the ability to share and partake in knowledge and culture has been prevented, such as the burning of the library at Alexandria, it has always been regarded as a disaster for humanity in the history books.

And yet, some people believe that sharing – whether over The Pirate Bay, direct handover, or whatever other mechanism – needs to be justified.

It is true that the copyright monopoly has come at odds with the natural behavior of sharing and the right to share. But to enforce this monopoly, much more vital ideas in society – such as the postal secret – must be sacrificed, not to mention our cultural heritage. That is neither just nor reasonable, so that is what needs justification. It’s not just the copyright monopoly law itself that needs to be justified, but also individual compliance with the unjust monopoly law, on a case-by-case basis.

When somebody angrily asks you how you can share this and that knowledge “without permission”, state it as it is, that they are misguided, and ask how they could possibly justifyrequiring permission to share knowledge and culture. That goes counter to all of humanity’s history. Also, make sure to make a point that sharing never requires any kind of justification. (The current copyright monopoly laws are not enough of a justification, obviously, as they are unjust and completely out of touch with people’s actual and natural behavior.)

Sharing knowledge and culture is the natural state.

Therefore, any restrictions on sharing require very careful and strict justification.

Via: "Falkvinge"

SOPA Is Back! … As A Ransomware Virus

SOPA Ransomware

After historic Internet protests in January the SOPA anti-piracy bill was defeated. However, several reports have pointed to a rather unfortunate SOPA comeback. Not in Congress, but as a nasty cryptovirus that locks up people’s computers and accuses them of distributing copyright infringing files. Infected users can get their data back after a payment of $200 – at least, that’s what the virus makers promise.

This week ‘the bill’ was resurrected by a virus maker, who has been warning users of infected computers that their IP-address is on a blacklist after it was discovered distributing illegal content.

As a result, the SOPA virus holds all files on the host computer ransom.

“Your computer is locked!” the splash screen above warns, adding:

If you see a warning.txt or warning screen, it means your IP address was included in S.O.P.A. Black List. One or more of the following items were made from your PC:

1. Downloading or distributing audio or video files protected by Copyright Law.
2. Downloading or distributing illegal content (child porn, phishing software, etc.)
3. Downloading or distributing Software protected by Copyright Law.

As a result of these infringements based on Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261) your PC and files are now blocked.

The SOPA virus is so-called ransomware, meaning that it holds computers hostage and only promises to free data after victims hand over cash. In the U.S. and Canada people are instructed to pay with a MoneyPak prepaid voucher, and in other parts of the world they can use Western Union.

Those who don’t pay within three days are in trouble, the virus maker warns.

“WARNING!!!: If you don’t pay the fine within 72 HOURS at the amount of 200 USD, all your computer data will be erased.”

People who are affected should of course ignore all the above. Searching online for “Stop Online Piracy Automatic Protection System Removal”” is a better option, there are plenty of ways to defeat the resurrected SOPA and get your data back.

Via: "TorrentFreak"

American ISPs To Launch Massive Copyright Spying Scheme On July 12

By Stephen C. Webster 
Thursday, March 15, 2012 11:14 EDT 
Courtesy Of "The Raw Story"

If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider (ISP) has been watching, and they’re coming for you.

Specifically, they’re coming for you on Thursday, July 12.

That’s the date when the nation’s largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users’ bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials.

Word of the start date has been largely kept secret since ISPs announced their plans last June. The deal was brokered by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and coordinated by the Obama Administration. The same groups have weighed in heavily on controversial Internet policiesaround the world, with similar facilitation by the Obama’s Administration’s State Department.

The July 12 date was revealed by the RIAA’s CEO and top lobbyist, Cary Sherman, during a publishers’ conference on Wednesday in New York, according to technology publication CNet.

The content industries calls this scheme a “graduated response” plan, which will see Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and others spying on users’ Internet activities and watching for potential copyright infringement. Users who are “caught” infringing on a creator’s protected work can then be interrupted with a notice that piracy is forbidden by law and carries penalties of up to $150,000 per infringement, requiring the user to click through saying they understand the consequences before bandwidth is restored, and they could still be subject to copyright infringement lawsuits.

Participating ISPs have a range of options for dealing with customers who continue to pirate media, at that point: They can require that an alleged repeat offender undergo an educational course before their service is restored. They can utilize multiple warnings, restrict access to only certain major websites like Google, Facebook or a list of the top 200 sites going, reduce someone’s bandwidth to practically nothing and even share information on repeat offenders with competing ISPs, effectively creating a sort of Internet blacklist — although publicly, none of the network operators have agreed to “terminate” a customer’s service.

It is because of those reasons that the content industries believe this program achieves much more than what might have been possible in the realm of public policy, and the ISPs appear to agree. The voluntary scheme will be paid for mostly by the content industries, which will share some costs with the ISPs.

Not everyone sees it as a positive: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, argued that the “graduated response” scheme lacks transparency, and that copyright holders could wield the network operators like a blunt instrument in cases where their claims may not be entirely valid — which is the biggest problem with statutes codified by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They also pressed for assurances that claim reviews will be conducted by a neutral party, and suggested that users should be given some form of due process before their bandwidth is turned down or cut off entirely.

The EFF also took issue with the system of protest the program puts in place, which only gives users six predetermined “defenses” against a copyright claim. “And even the six enumerated defenses are incomplete,” they complained. “For example, the ‘public domain’ defense applies only if the work was created before 1923 — even though works created after 1923 can enter the public domain in a variety of ways.”

A legislative effort that would have achieved some, but not all, of these ends was utterly destroyed by the Internet’s first ever mass work stoppage late last year, which saw thousands of popular websites go dark in protest. (Disclosure: The Raw Story participated in that protest.)

It’s not yet clear how the tech world will react to the ISPs siding with the content industries to do what the government simply could not.

Stephen C. Webster

Stephen C. Webster is the senior editor of Raw Story, and is based out of Austin, Texas. He previously worked as the associate editor of The Lone Star Iconoclast in Crawford, Texas, where he covered state politics and the peace movement’s resurgence at the start of the Iraq war. Webster has also contributed to publications such as True/Slant, Austin Monthly, The Dallas Business Journal, The Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Weekly, The News Connection and others. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenCWebster.

The Copyright Industry: A Century Of Deceit

By RICK FALKVINGE 
Courtesy Of "Falkvinge"

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.

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!” wereeverywhere. 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, andsuggested 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: RICK FALKVINGE

Rick is the founder of the first Pirate Party and is a political evangelist, traveling around Europe and the world to talk and write about ideas of a sensible information policy. He has a tech entrepreneur background.