House of reps:Every industry should bend to Hollywood's will

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Vexcalibur
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14 Nov 2011, 6:45 am

Hollywood's New War on Software Freedom and Internet Innovation

This is the third in our series (Part 1, Part 2) breaking down the potential effects of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an outrageous and grievously misguided bill now working its way through the House of Representatives. This post discusses dangerous software censorship provisions that are new in this bill, as well as the DNS censorship provisions it inherited from the Senate's COICA and PIPA bills. Please help us fight this misguided legislation by contacting Congress today.

In this new bill, Hollywood has expanded its censorship ambitions. No longer content to just blacklist entries in the Domain Name System, this version targets software developers and distributors as well. It allows the Attorney General (doing Hollywood or trademark holders' bidding) to go after more or less anyone who provides or offers a product or service that could be used to get around DNS blacklisting orders. This language is clearly aimed at Mozilla, which took a principled stand in refusing to assist the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to censor the domain name system, but we are also concerned that it could affect the open source community, internet innovation, and software freedom more broadly:

Do you write or distribute VPN, proxy, privacy or anonymization software? You might have to build in a censorship mechanism — or find yourself in a legal fight with the United States Attorney General.
Even some of the most fundamental and widely used Internet security software, such as SSH, includes built-in proxy functionality. This kind of software is installed on hundreds of millions of computers, and is an indispensable tool for systems administration professionals, but it could easily become a target for censorship orders under the new bill.
Do you work with or distribute zone files for gTLDs? Want to keep them accurate? Too bad — Hollywood might argue that if you provide a complete (i.e., uncensored) list, you are illegally helping people bypass SOPA orders.
Want to write a client-side DNSSEC resolver that uses multiple servers until it finds a valid signed entry? Again, you could be in a fight with the U.S. Attorney General.

It would be bad enough to have these types of censorship orders targeted at software produced and distributed by a single company. But for the free and open source software community — which contributes many billions of dollars a year to the American economy — legal obligations to blacklist domains would be an utter catastrophe. Free and open source projects often operate as decentralized, voluntary, international communities. Even if ordered to by a court, these projects would struggle to find volunteers to act as censors to enforce U.S. law, because volunteers usually only perform tasks that they consider constructive. And in the case of larger projects and repositories like Mozilla, to monitor and enforce such court orders against generic functionality could potentially violate licensing obligations and would likely create acrimony, demoralizing and shrinking the communities of contributors and innovators that those projects depend upon.

Essentially any software product or service, such as many encryption programs, that is not responsive to blocking orders could be under threat. And lest you think we exaggerate for effect, recall how some of the provisions of another copyright bill have been used to chill security research.

Those are just the new provisions in SOPA. Like its companion Senate bill, PROTECT-IP, the bill also authorizes the United Sates Attorney General to wreak havoc with the Domain Name System by ordering service providers to block U.S. citizens' ability to access domain names, which will inevitably lead to competing Internet naming infrastructures and widespread security risks. As leading Internet engineers explained (commenting on an earlier version of the bill), this approach:

Quote:
[W]ill risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS), create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. In exchange for this, the bill will introduce censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties' ability to communicate.

All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but this bill will be particularly egregious in that regard because it causes entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under this bill. These problems will be enough to ensure that alternative name-lookup infrastructures will come into widespread use, outside the control of US service providers but easily used by American citizens. Errors and divergences will appear between these new services and the current global DNS, and contradictory addresses will confuse browsers and frustrate the people using them. These problems will be widespread and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

By introducing bills like this, Congress is recklessly endangering Internet innovation and security. The free/open source and Internet engineering communities need to fight back.


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visagrunt
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14 Nov 2011, 2:33 pm

I am perfectly prepared to acknowledge the argument that copyright protection legislation being introduced in both Canada and the United States goes too far, but I do not believe that it is enough to rubbish the legislation without having some alternative proposals in place.

So far as industry is concerned, internet piracy represents a huge drain on revenues. This applies to authors, performing artists, filmmakers, musicians, composers, visual artists and every person who creates original work with the intention of selling it on to those who wish to consume it.

Is there a means by which internet innovation and security can flourish while still providing compensation to artists for the work that they have created?


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14 Nov 2011, 5:30 pm

That argument is based on the bogus assumption that there are not already laws and means that protect copyright holders from internet abuse. Which, specially in the US, is completely untrue.

If anything the DMCA is already more than enough protection for copyright holders. And the US government already pushes other countries into following it if they want free trade with the US.

A good balance between copyright rights and internet freedom is possible. Simply add provisions to the DMCA that allow fair use and 'bypassing' DRM if it is for fair use. Then we would have a good balance between protecting copyright and freedom.

The current bill ideas must be sent to the trash compactor on the merit that they are not necessary, copyright infrigement in the internet is already illegal and copyright holders already have more than enough means to protect them. The situation is already more on the favor of copyright holders than internet freedom. So, these law ideas are nothing short of insulting.

Quote:
compensation

The correct word you are looking for is profit.


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14 Nov 2011, 9:23 pm

visagrunt wrote:

Is there a means by which internet innovation and security can flourish while still providing compensation to artists for the work that they have created?


http://www.deanbaker.net/images/stories ... ralism.pdf

Dean Baker wrote:

Enforcement actions have involved police breaking into dorm rooms
and high school kids‟ bedrooms in search of computers allegedly used to
download copyrighted material without authorization. Police arrested a
Russian computer scientist after an academic talk in Denver for work he had
done on breaking encryption codes in Russia (where it was completely legal).
Copying devices have been banned from the market because they did not have
adequate safeguards to protect copyrighted material. In one civil prosecution,
a young mother in Minnesota was fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for
using her computer to share two dozen copyrighted songs. The Recording
Industry Association of America has even developed propaganda courses on the
evils of unauthorized reproductions (a.k.a. pirated copyrighted material).

This effort to enforce copyright is both very big government and very
wasteful. No genuine “small government conservative” would support this sort
of extraordinary intervention in the market and interference with people‟s
lives. Creative workers need to be compensated for their work, but copyright
is an inefficient mechanism for accomplishing this goal. There are alternative
mechanisms for supporting creative work, several of which are already in
existence.

The most important alternative mechanism is probably the university
system, in which faculty are expected to publish in their areas of expertise in
addition to teaching. The work supported in this way is mostly designed for
professional audiences, but a substantial body of work produced by university
faculty is intended for general audiences. In addition to universities, private
foundations support a large amount of creative work in writing, music, and the
arts more generally. In the United States, the federal government supports a
substantial amount of creative work through the National Endowment for the
Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and indirectly through
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. State and local governments also
provide limited support. Of course, in most other wealthy countries, the
government provides considerably more support for creative work.

As it stands, the amount of work supported through mechanisms other
than copyright is almost certainly less than what society would desire, which
suggests the need to expand the existing mechanisms and/or create new ones.
In the case of the United States, expanding the government‟s role is likely to
meet considerable resistance, in part because people may object to having the
government fund work they dislike and also because they may not like the idea
of the government having a big hand in determining what creative work gets
support.
It is not difficult to get around this problem. One way would be an
“artistic freedom voucher,” a refundable tax credit for a specific amount (e.g.,
$100) that individuals could contribute to whatever creative
worker/organization they choose.


The condition of getting this money
would be that the recipient individuals/organizations would not be eligible to
receive copyrights for some period of time (e.g., three years) after receiving
the money. All the work they produced would be in the public domain so that
it could be reproduced and circulated around the world.
One benefit of this structure is its low enforcement costs. Artists who
had received voucher money and then tried to violate the rules and get a
copyright would find their copyright unenforceable. Anyone would have the
right to freely reproduce the material as though the copyright did not exist.
This mechanism is not very different from the current tax deduction
for charitable organizations. As it stands, wealthy individuals can make large
charitable contributions that are subsidized by the government through the tax
deduction. If people in the top tax bracket give $10 million to their local
symphony, the government effectively subsidizes this contribution by reducing
their tax liability by $3,600,000.

104 This mechanism is outlined more fully in Baker (2003).144 Dean Baker
In the case of the artistic freedom vouchers, the whole payment would
come from the government, rather than just a fraction, but the sums involved
would be much smaller. Instead of giving millions of dollars in subsidies to a
small number of individuals, the system would give a modest subsidy to
hundreds of millions of individuals. There would inevitably be some amount of
gaming and fraud, as there is with the charitable deduction, but it would likely
be limited, as the potential gains would be small relative to the opportunities
that already exist with the charitable deduction.
105

The advantage of an artistic freedom voucher system is that it
preserves individuals‟ choice in determining what creative work that they wish
to support. It separates the decision to buy material from the decision to
support a specific type of creative work. Presumably people will mostly
support the type of work they actually enjoy, but they would have the option
of supporting one type of work even if they don‟t enjoy it themselves. For
example, they might support classical music even if they listen only to rock
music. The important point is that it would be a matter of individual choice,
not a decision made by a government agency.


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visagrunt
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15 Nov 2011, 12:52 pm

Vexcalibur wrote:
That argument is based on the bogus assumption that there are not already laws and means that protect copyright holders from internet abuse. Which, specially in the US, is completely untrue.

If anything the DMCA is already more than enough protection for copyright holders. And the US government already pushes other countries into following it if they want free trade with the US.


The current legislative framework is clearly ineffective. You cannot pretend that artists--whether individual, working artists or large institutional producers--are being protected in the existing framework. There is no point in having a codex of protections if those protections are unenforcable.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that the new proposals are necessarily any better, especially when it comes to the interests of artists whose work is not mass distributed. But I do think that is is pretty shallow to address only one side of issue without even paying lip service to the idea that what is getting shared across the internet is the product of people's creative work that is not being paid for.

Quote:
A good balance between copyright rights and internet freedom is possible. Simply add provisions to the DMCA that allow fair use and 'bypassing' DRM if it is for fair use. Then we would have a good balance between protecting copyright and freedom.


First, you need a meaningful, transparent definition of fair use. Too many people improperly equate "fair use" with, "not selling it for profit." (Rest assured, I don't ascribe that sentiment to you, but I see it all too often among file sharing afficianados). This idea is wholly and completely wrong. Fair use is limited to activities like quoting from a published work in a piece of original writing, presenting a clip of a recorded work for promotion or review purposes. In other words use for which the creator would not reasonably expect the user to have paid a royalty or sought an express license.

I, for one, do not believe that it is fair use to download a film to watch it on my computer without paying for it. I can pay for a streaming video, or a rent a DVD for that purpose. I do not believe that it is fair use to make a .pdf of a book that I have not paid for in order to read it on a tablet. There are libraries for that purpose. I do not believe that it is fair use to download a photographer's pictures and use them as wallpaper on my computer without paying for them. How many avatars on this site are actually copyrighted material for which the creator has not given a license? I pulled my avatar from the default group on this site for precisely that reason, because I rely on the website to be offering licensed material.

Quote:
The current bill ideas must be sent to the trash compactor on the merit that they are not necessary, copyright infrigement in the internet is already illegal and copyright holders already have more than enough means to protect them. The situation is already more on the favor of copyright holders than internet freedom. So, these law ideas are nothing short of insulting.


And precisely what means do copyright holders have? How does a private individual identify who is engaged in file-sharing their copyrighted work? How does a private individual ensure the destruction of unlicensed copies? How does a private individual obtain compensation for unlicensed use? If you believe that the current structure has any capacity to protect copyright owners, you are living in a dream world.

What is insulting to me is that the fans of internet freedom are willing to completely disregard the interests of artists. I don't have a lot of sympathy for mass media interests--but they are a miniscule fraction of artists. Just because Avatar has been torrented more than all the independent films presented at TIFF this year, does not mean that independent film producers are not losing money to torrenting.

Quote:
Quote:
compensation

The correct word you are looking for is profit.


Perhaps in the case of major film studios. But intellectual property is an interest of all artists. The vast majority of artists do not earn a living wage from their art (that's why I'm not a working actor anymore). But they are entitled to such compensation as they can earn from the sale, distribution and use of their art.

Some artists are perfectly happy to cast their work out for all to share, use and enjoy at will. And more power to them. But at the end of the day, it's the artist who is entitled to make that choice, not every click happy internet user with The Pirate Bay bookmarked on his browser.


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15 Nov 2011, 1:16 pm

Whether congress thinks the current measures are ineffective does not give congress the right to weild unjust powers like a God.



Tollorin
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15 Nov 2011, 8:48 pm

visagrunt wrote:
I am perfectly prepared to acknowledge the argument that copyright protection legislation being introduced in both Canada and the United States goes too far, but I do not believe that it is enough to rubbish the legislation without having some alternative proposals in place.

So far as industry is concerned, internet piracy represents a huge drain on revenues. This applies to authors, performing artists, filmmakers, musicians, composers, visual artists and every person who creates original work with the intention of selling it on to those who wish to consume it.

Is there a means by which internet innovation and security can flourish while still providing compensation to artists for the work that they have created?

So, you prefer a potential dictatorship that the existence of some privacy!? From your part I'm disapointed. :(

Should I private myself from great aninme like Futur Boy Conan and Dennou Coil because distributors and the equivalent of "mainstream" in anime fandom don't care about it?

Should I private myself of Earthbound because the music industry lawyers have become crazy and wouldn't allow a game with many Beattles reference? Shpuld I private myself from Mother 3 too?

Should french quebecers anime fan who don't understand english private themself from anime because of a distribution system ill conceived for such a minority?

Should I private myself of culture because I hardly have money?

Should the peoples in third-world country private themselves of watching series and movies at all?


The money "lost" by piracy is blow up way out of proportions; it's not like peoples have that much money to begin with... One thing such law will allow is more power to Hollywood majors to screw up even more the "concurence"; aka low budgets independent productions. They will be more in control that ever; allowing them to make money with a endless serie of Twilight and Transformer quality movies and continying packing money while crushing any attempt by the creators to make creative and intelligent works. It certainly will allow the govnerment to censor things they don't want to see, or morality guardian groups claiming to close a web site that don't follow their insane sensibilitie. Censorship that could have repercusion on webcomics, while they're is finally something that is menacing the Marvel/DCcomics monopoly.
And beside all that, the artists will still starve. What? Don't tell me you expect those greedy fools to offer more money to artists! They considered as expendable; more likelly if they're is more money it woul allow the studios PDG to buy themself more private jets.

Piracy really, is the lesser evil in this case. It would be less important too if there was a real international online distribution system financed by publicity. And of course, in the case of Hollywood movies and Video Games; reducing production costs.


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16 Nov 2011, 10:37 pm

Vexcalibur wrote:
Hollywood's New War on Software Freedom and Internet Innovation

This is the third in our series (Part 1, Part 2) breaking down the potential effects of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an outrageous and grievously misguided bill now working its way through the House of Representatives. This post discusses dangerous software censorship provisions that are new in this bill, as well as the DNS censorship provisions it inherited from the Senate's COICA and PIPA bills. Please help us fight this misguided legislation by contacting Congress today.

In this new bill, Hollywood has expanded its censorship ambitions. No longer content to just blacklist entries in the Domain Name System, this version targets software developers and distributors as well. It allows the Attorney General (doing Hollywood or trademark holders' bidding) to go after more or less anyone who provides or offers a product or service that could be used to get around DNS blacklisting orders. This language is clearly aimed at Mozilla, which took a principled stand in refusing to assist the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to censor the domain name system, but we are also concerned that it could affect the open source community, internet innovation, and software freedom more broadly:

Do you write or distribute VPN, proxy, privacy or anonymization software? You might have to build in a censorship mechanism — or find yourself in a legal fight with the United States Attorney General.
Even some of the most fundamental and widely used Internet security software, such as SSH, includes built-in proxy functionality. This kind of software is installed on hundreds of millions of computers, and is an indispensable tool for systems administration professionals, but it could easily become a target for censorship orders under the new bill.
Do you work with or distribute zone files for gTLDs? Want to keep them accurate? Too bad — Hollywood might argue that if you provide a complete (i.e., uncensored) list, you are illegally helping people bypass SOPA orders.
Want to write a client-side DNSSEC resolver that uses multiple servers until it finds a valid signed entry? Again, you could be in a fight with the U.S. Attorney General.

It would be bad enough to have these types of censorship orders targeted at software produced and distributed by a single company. But for the free and open source software community — which contributes many billions of dollars a year to the American economy — legal obligations to blacklist domains would be an utter catastrophe. Free and open source projects often operate as decentralized, voluntary, international communities. Even if ordered to by a court, these projects would struggle to find volunteers to act as censors to enforce U.S. law, because volunteers usually only perform tasks that they consider constructive. And in the case of larger projects and repositories like Mozilla, to monitor and enforce such court orders against generic functionality could potentially violate licensing obligations and would likely create acrimony, demoralizing and shrinking the communities of contributors and innovators that those projects depend upon.

Essentially any software product or service, such as many encryption programs, that is not responsive to blocking orders could be under threat. And lest you think we exaggerate for effect, recall how some of the provisions of another copyright bill have been used to chill security research.

Those are just the new provisions in SOPA. Like its companion Senate bill, PROTECT-IP, the bill also authorizes the United Sates Attorney General to wreak havoc with the Domain Name System by ordering service providers to block U.S. citizens' ability to access domain names, which will inevitably lead to competing Internet naming infrastructures and widespread security risks. As leading Internet engineers explained (commenting on an earlier version of the bill), this approach:
Quote:
[W]ill risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS), create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. In exchange for this, the bill will introduce censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties' ability to communicate.

All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but this bill will be particularly egregious in that regard because it causes entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under this bill. These problems will be enough to ensure that alternative name-lookup infrastructures will come into widespread use, outside the control of US service providers but easily used by American citizens. Errors and divergences will appear between these new services and the current global DNS, and contradictory addresses will confuse browsers and frustrate the people using them. These problems will be widespread and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

By introducing bills like this, Congress is recklessly endangering Internet innovation and security. The free/open source and Internet engineering communities need to fight back.
I completely agree with you on the merits of the act. It is just an attempt to stop the free flow of information to cater to special interest groups' greed.

I never thought intellectual property made sense in the first place: See here for something close to my desired alternative. Even James Watt had to modify his steam engine to get around the patent on the crankshaft because of intellectual property!


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Vexcalibur
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16 Nov 2011, 11:36 pm

A petition: http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_intern ... 07&v=11169

One of the worst aspects of these genial censorship laws is that unlike China or Iran web censorship, these will have a global impact.


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16 Nov 2011, 11:57 pm

[img][800:2900]http://americancensorship.org/images/SOPAinfographic.png[/img]


WP.net and any other forum site will have to switch to moderated discussion (Requiring posts to be approved in advance). Else there will always be the possibility that a user would , somehow do something that may potentially infringe someone else's copyright and let WP.net get blocked without a court order.

You don't think people break copyright here? Ok, guess what? Articles tend to be copyrighted stuff. If you paste a small part of an article, even with a link, all that is needed is for the online newspaper's owner to be a Dick and start trying to shut down sites that do that to him.

Or how about the easiest DDOS in the book after the bills pass? Let us say one of those a-holes that think Asperger's syndrome is a fake excuse will decide to shut down WP.net, all they will need is post a few links to copyrighted content. Awesome.

So, forums become forced to police content. Discussions will become slower and exchange will become seriously impaired. Thanks Hollywoord.


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17 Nov 2011, 1:44 am

Vexcalibur wrote:
WP.net and any other forum site will have to switch to moderated discussion (Requiring posts to be approved in advance). Else there will always be the possibility that a user would , somehow do something that may potentially infringe someone else's copyright and let WP.net get blocked without a court order.

It's already too late. :( With years a lot of links have been posted, including links to websites with pirated contents, and checking everything would be a impossibly huge task; and that's not counting that even things that seem legit could be considered a "rogue site" for some ridiculous reasons.


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17 Nov 2011, 1:50 am

If it gets signed into law, I guarentee that it will end up in the court system and will either end up being repealed or thrown out by the US Supreme Court.



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17 Nov 2011, 8:45 am

Inuyasha wrote:
If it gets signed into law, I guarentee that it will end up in the court system and will either end up being repealed or thrown out by the US Supreme Court.


We have a rock solid "guarentee." That's good enough for me. Let's get some sleep.



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17 Nov 2011, 1:05 pm

Gedrene wrote:
Whether congress thinks the current measures are ineffective does not give congress the right to weild unjust powers like a God.


Actually, I think if you read the Constitution you will find that Congress has--within its jurisdiction--every right to legislate as it sees fit.

If you can demonstrate that the legislation is unconstitutional, by all means do so. But there is absolutely nothing unjust about a freely elected legislature enacting law within its competence.


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