Expression & Censorship

Steal This Film II

Copyright never was what it used to be and the struggle to define the purpose and limits over the protection of intellectual property (or indeed the idea of intellectual property) continues daily.

One example of the ongoing debate is an op-ed in the Swedish paper Expressen a group of Swedish politicians called for the legalization of file sharing. One of the politicians was a police officer. But this is more an example of the exception than the rule.

The real attempt to draw the lines that may limit copyright occur every day and are defined in the way in which we all collectively use our technology. The act of file sharing by an individual is, in of itself, an unimportant act. Taken collectively file sharing is a massive active form of resistance and a re-interpretation of the the general consciousness of justice, right, wrong & morality.

Another important position is taken by those who actively comment and interpret the acts of all those involved in the re-definition of copyright. An important contribution to this is the film Steal this Film II. It features scholars such as Yochai Benkler, Felix Stalder, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Howard Rheingold and portrays file sharing and the copyright debate as a historical development in the urge to regulate the spread of information.

Over at the Industrial IT Group blog Jonny has written a very good analysis of the importance of the film. Watch the movie, read the analysis and get involved in the most interesting re-defition of law in our time. 


Posted on by mklang

YouTube & Crime

The media in Sweden is (understandably) full about reports of the school shootings in Finland.* This is to be expected. But what surprises me is the focus on the fact that the perpetrator had made a video and posted it on YouTube.

The focus of Swedish media on the YouTube connection shows a fundamental lack of understanding about the use of technology today. The surprise should not be that a young disturbed man planning a school massacre places a video on YouTube but we should be surprised if the young man had not done so. The YouTube suicide note must be as predictable as death & taxes.

Despite this, the media calls in “experts” and asks them to explain what kind of anti-social cesspit YouTube is. They ask about the responsibility of YouTube, they ask why the events predicted in the film could not be stopped. They want to know how to prevent children from accessing YouTube to watch movies such as these and whether or not the films online are creating copycats.

Basically people do not seem to understand the YouTube culture. Firstly it is not a sub-culture. YouTube is a massive collection of sub-cultures. Secondly, YouTube is the logical result of camera and communications technology. It collects everything from death to porn (and death with porn), from toddlers to seniors, from party to study. Basically every type of activity that can be recorded on film is to be found there.

And the audience has seen it all. Here are some examples of search results:

  • School violence 1770 videos
  • Going postal 193 videos
  • Weapons 126 000 videos
  • Death 584 000 videos

And the audience has seen it all before.

So even if the audience had seen a young troubled Finn posing with a gun, shooting in the forest and making threats against the society around him – what was the audience supposed to do? Nobody runs out of a movie theater to get a cop because a murder is about to be committed. We just sit back, munch our popcorn and wait for the ending to come.  The difference with YouTube is that the people watching can comment on the film and others can comment on the comments of others.

YouTube cannot be blamed for the site just as the audience cannot be blamed for not acting against the rantings of yet another gun-toting youth. The outrage should not be against the communications technology of the day but against the ability of disturbed people to be able to legally carry lethal weapons. For lets face it, if he had been armed with a knife, a hammer or a big stick – none of us would ever have heard of the Jokela high school in Tusby, Finland.

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*The school shooting in Finland was another tragedy of the type we have almost come to expect on a regular basis. Probably the most shocking thing for Scandinavians is that this is the kind of thing that happens “only in America”. There is obviously no basis for this belief it’s just something everyone “knows” and therefore the shock is greater when our established knowledge is irrefutably challenged. No matter where things like this happen they are tragedies and the world should mourn the loss of life and innocence.

Posted on by mklang

Wikipedia & Defamation

The Wikipedia Foundation was being sued by three French nationals for invasion of privacy and defamation after a wikipedia page identified them as being gay activists. The French judge Emmanuel Binoche dismissed the case, stating that wikipedia was not responsible for information introduced onto its Web site and stated that web site hosts are not legally bound to monitor information stored on their websites.

In the written ruling Binoche writes: “Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature”

This position is in line with the accepted approach to ISP liability. Gavin Sutter has written extensively on this topic see for example Gavin Sutter (2003) FE/HE Institutions and Liability for Third Party Provided Content.

(via Slashdot)

Posted on by mklang

Another idiotic regulatory attempt

The latest idiotic proposed legislation comes from Italy. The proposal is that all blogs and websites need to be registered (and taxed).

Beppe Grillo writes

Ricardo Franco Levi, Prodi’s right hand man , undersecretary to the President of the Council, has written the text to put a stopper in the mouth of the Internet. The draft law was approved by the Council of Ministers on 12 October. No Minister dissociated themselves from it. On gagging information, very quietly, these are all in agreement.
The Levi-Prodi law lays out that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money.

Oh my God, Lets start with the easy stuff.

First, How will they intend to police this law. The law can apply to all Italian sites. What is an Italian site? Is it:

  1. a site with an Italian domain
  2. a site on a server in Italy
  3. a site in Italian

Second, what happens when the site is based in several locations with data pulled from several sources? Do they get a tax reduction?

Third, what is a website? Can you define it legally? Is there a difference between the site, server and domain? What about:

  1. A facebook profile
  2. A blog on blogger
  3. An advert on ebay
  4. A wikipedia page
  5. A flickr profile

These may be unique individual websites – but they can also be seen as part of a larger domain.
Fourth, what about free speech rights? Basically an unregistered website would be in violation of the law but would/should the reaction be to close down the site? What happens if a newspaper does not register can they be closed down?

Fifth, administration. How much money and resource can be used to police a law such as this? Can the revenue it brings in even begin to cover the investigative resources required? No of course not. Imaging attempting to chase every Italian blog. How do you know when they are Italian?

Proposals to regulate the Internet come at regular intervals. Often they are barely thought through and will collapse before they even reach the enactment stage. Some laws on Internet regulation have been enacted but are then thankfully forgotten by those who should enforce them.

In the end proposals such as these show that regulators seem to lack even a basic understanding of the technology which most of us use. They also lack a fundamental modern historical approach to regulation. It is really a case of being condemned to repeat the past since we cannot remember it. All the earlier crappy failed attempts to regulate the Internet have failed but since the people proposing regulation have no memory of this we are doomed to see the same mistakes repeated again and again.

At best this provides a form of light relief and humor.

(via BoingBoing)

Posted on by mklang

Free Software, Social Innovation

As a part of the STACS-project the Free Software Foundation Europe and M6-IT are organizing an event at The Hub in London.

The idea is to invite NGO’s to a show and tell session on the way in which Free Software functions. The idea is that the organizations will see the advantage of Free Software and bring it into their organizations and influence other organizations.

From the website:

We understand that not everyone will be able to cover the costs of visiting the event and we are willing to contribute towards travel and accommodation costs. We invite you to fill out an application by the 19th of October 2007 at the latest. The selected attendees will be contacted by the 22nd of October.
Venue

The Hub is an incubator for social innovation. It’s a place for people to meet, learn and connect with each other to make things happen. The Hub in London is located on 5 Torrens Street which is conveniantly close to the tube station Angel on the Underground Northern Line.

Schedule: Friday 2nd November
09.00 Free Software as a Social Innovation
10.30 Coffee/tea break
11.00 Empowering NGOs with Free Software
12.30 Lunch
14.00 Hands-on experience with Free Software
16.00 Coffee/tea break
16.30 Hands-on continued..
18.00 Social event and dinner

The number of participants is limited and the last date to apply is on the 19th October. For more information and applications go here.

Posted on by mklang

Regulating Violence

Is the regulation of violence in video/computer games censorship? Or is it a question of protecting the innocent? Naturally paternalism in all forms includes a “pappa knows best” attitude however there are cases of censorship/control/paternalism which we can accept and other forms which we tend to react against.

The forms of Internet censorship (more here) displayed by states such as China and Saudi Arabia are usually criticized as forms of censorship unacceptable in democratic societies while they themselves argue the need to protect their cultures and citizens against the corrupting influences online. It is, it may seem, a question of perspectives.

Then what of the regulation of violent computer games? Are computer games supposed to be seen as forms of speech to be protected? Or are we on a dangerous slippery slope when we start excluding forms of speech? The New York Times has an article showing that the US courts tend to find laws against computer game unconstitutional.

Considering the US approach to Free Expression this is not surprising. The European approach – in particular the French, German and Scandinavian models could not be as clear cut in this question. This only means that the US is against censorship and feels the cost of this decision is worth it, while many other jurisdictions feel that the damage caused by this extreme acceptance of free expression may cause discomfort and hardship to individuals and groups beyond the eventual benefits of the speech.

The ever eloquent Judge Posner is quoted in the article:

“Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low,” he wrote. “It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.”

The problem is that there is often great value (moral rather than economic) in quixotic pursuits and the practice of subjecting people to hardships in order to prepare them for eventual future hardships is really only useful in military training and never a satisfactory way of raising children.

Posted on by mklang

Free Expression & T-shirts

Did you know that you could be arrested for wearing a t-shirt with an inappropriate text on it? No I am not talking arrested for indecency or for bad taste. Several people in the United States and the United Kingdom have been arrested for wearing t-shirts with political messages on them. In July last year I presented several examples of this on this blog.

In 2004 Nicole and Jeff Rank were removed from the event at the West Virginia Capitol in handcuffs after revealing T-shirts with President Bush’s name crossed out on the front. Nicole Rank’s shirt had the words “Love America, Hate Bush” on the back and Jeff Rank’s read “Regime change starts at home”

The good news is that the couple settled their lawsuit against the federal government for $80,000, the American Civil Liberties Union announced Thursday (via ABC news).

It’s good to hear that the even if protesters are arrested the right to freedom of expression is still a valued and protected right. However, the threat of being arrested is not something that most people want to experience and therefore freedom of expression is diminished even when people are compensated later.

Posted on by mklang

Secret Numbers

Have you been following the recent blog craze on the topic of Digg and the HD DVD key? Basically the Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.

Naturally this just made things more exciting and the number now appears on over 50 000 websites, as a set of colors, a poem and at least one t-shirt!

Many of the blogs reporting this news have been in anguish over the fact that numbers should not be copyrightable but this is acutally missing the point. Fred von Lohmann (EFF) clarifies the situation in a neatly written post:

Is the key copyrightable? It doesn’t matter. The AACS-LA takedown letter is not claiming that the key is copyrightable, but rather that it is (or is a component of) a circumvention technology. The DMCA does not require that a circumvention technology be, itself, copyrightable to enjoy protection.

Posted on by mklang

War blogs silenced

Wired News reports that In a directive (dated 19th April) US troops have been ordered not to blog without first clearing each post with a superior officer. There is also a discussion going on at the Wired Blog Danger Room.

Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.

The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

It’s hardly a surprising move. It’s doubtful whether blogs were revealing security information (US troops should be better trained in this case) but on several occasions information on blogs and films of YouTube (for example Iraqi kids run for water) have caused embarrassing situations which hardly have improved anyone’s opinions of the war.

Posted on by mklang

A howto for the Fascist Dictator

Naomi Wolf has written a provocative article entitled Fascist America, 10 Easy Steps in the Guardian Online.

  1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
  2. Create a gulag
  3. Develop a thug caste
  4. Set up an internal surveillance system
  5. Harass citizens’ groups
  6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
  7. Target key individuals
  8. Control the press
  9. Dissent equals treason
  10. Suspend the rule of law

Her motivations show that the ten easy steps are easily fulfilled by the US administration. It is also interesting that all this is done in the name of freedom and democracy. In other words in order to rescue freedom and democracy we must remove your freedoms and suspend the participatory democracy. This is doublespeak and spin at its best.

Shocking.

Posted on by mklang