"pirates" via Kerray in Google Reader

Copyright Math: the best TED Talk you'll watch all year

2012-03-16T00:48:47Z

This may just be the best TED Talk video I've seen: listen.com/Rhapsody founder and extremely funny person (and soon-to-be debut science fiction author) Rob Reid examines the math behind the claims made by the copyright lobby and explains the mindbending awesomeness of the sums used to justify SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and the like. Here's Ars Technica's Ken Fisher discussing Reid's philosophy:

Reid’s goal was to capture and represent some of the rhetoric from that past decade and a half in a way that would fill the hall with laughter, even if some of it came at the expense of some clearly ridiculous industry arguments. “Everyone can laugh at silly infographics,” Reid opined while silently crushing the serious journalism dreams of hacks everywhere. “And who doesn't want to deface a Leave-it-to-Beaver-like Christmas scene with pirate-and-Santa graffiti?”

The brilliance of Reid’s talk is that he thoroughly skewers the content industry’s dubious appeal to quantitative reasoning. We’ve all see the headlines proclaiming huge numbers of dollars, jobs, and patents lost to piracy. The appeal to quantitative measures is supposed to undermine counterarguments by doing two things: slyly stepping into a (pretend) world of objectivity, and raising the alarm with big, scary numbers. It’s hard to look at those kinds of headlines in the same way after Reid’s elegantly hilarious skewering.

Reid’s examination of Copyright Math began when he started working on his soon-to-be published debut science fiction novel, Year Zero, which Random House is publishing in early July (we’ll be reviewing it). Year Zero tells the story of how the toxic legal byproducts of some overly litigious lawyers cause problems that make global warming seem downright cozy. Not to give it away, but could you imagine how pissed off an alien music lover might get if he was sued into bankruptcy for pirating a few lousy Rick Astley songs?

Canadian record labels to Canadian Parliament: we want to be able to control search engines, social networking, blogs, video sites, and community sites. Oh, and we want an iPod tax.

2012-02-29T16:36:46Z

Michael Geist sez, "The Canadian music industry is scheduled to appear before a Parliamentary committee today with some of the most radical demands to date that would effectively create liability for social networking sites, search engines, blogging platforms, and video sites such as Google, Facebook and Reddit. As if that were not enough, the industry is also calling for a new iPod tax, an extension in the term of copyright, a removal of protections for user generated content, parody, and satire, as well as an increase in statutory damage awards. Taken together, the Canadian music industry demands make SOPA look like minor tinkering with the law."

Canadian Music Industry Takes Aim At Google, Facebook, Reddit & Tech Startups With Bill C-11 Demands

Make little, make often: how manufacturing could work in the UK

2012-02-29T16:44:32Z

An inspiring call-to-arms from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, founder of Tinker London:

This should be a golden age for UK manufacturing. People are making things everywhere at various scales. In Hackspaces, studios, universities, at home, in their sheds. This is a nation on tinkerers after all. People are coming up with an idea using an Arduino, building a prototype, redesigning the electronics using Fritzing going to Tinkercad to build a box for the prototype. Then they will have the box made by a Makerbot, Ponoko, RazorLab, i-Materialise, Shapeways or other rapid prototyping manufacturers around the world who understand their users want to click a “upload” button and have something sent to them in the post.
That is a different kind of customer for UK manufacturing. It is a digitally-empowered one and to understand him/her, the industry has to adapt. Once that customer has a product they are happy with, they will look for funding through Kickstarter or sell their product online through Etsy or Folsky. (Most of these digital services were not developed in the UK, I hasten to add.)

Make little, Make often: ideas for the future of manufacturing in the UK (via Make)

Wikileaks releases "Global Intelligence Files" -- 5MM emails from private spook outfit Stratfor

2012-02-27T15:00:01Z

Today, Wikileaks releases its "Global Intelligence Files," a trove of more than 5,000,000 emails from Stratfor, a Texas based "global intelligence" company. The dump includes emails detailing Stratfor's work with the US government on discrediting Wikileaks itself, as well as a lot of extremely dirty geopolitical laundry.

"[Is it] possible for us to get some of that 'leak-focused' gravy train? This is an obvious fear sale, so that's a good thing. And we have something to offer that the IT security companies don't, mainly our focus on counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred and Stick know better than anyone on the planet... Could we develop some ideas and procedures on the idea of ´leak-focused' network security that focuses on preventing one's own employees from leaking sensitive information... In fact, I'm not so sure this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution."
Like WikiLeaks’ diplomatic cables, much of the significance of the emails will be revealed over the coming weeks, as our coalition and the public search through them and discover connections. Readers will find that whereas large numbers of Stratfor's subscribers and clients work in the US military and intelligence agencies, Stratfor gave a complimentary membership to the controversial Pakistan general Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service, who, according to US diplomatic cables, planned an IED attack on international forces in Afghanistan in 2006. Readers will discover Stratfor's internal email classification system that codes correspondence according to categories such as 'alpha', 'tactical' and 'secure'. The correspondence also contains code names for people of particular interest such as 'Izzies' (members of Hezbollah), or 'Adogg' (Mahmoud Ahmedinejad).
Stratfor did secret deals with dozens of media organisations and journalists – from Reuters to the Kiev Post. The list of Stratfor’s "Confederation Partners", whom Stratfor internally referred to as its "Confed Fuck House" are included in the release. While it is acceptable for journalists to swap information or be paid by other media organisations, because Stratfor is a private intelligence organisation that services governments and private clients these relationships are corrupt or corrupting.
WikiLeaks has also obtained Stratfor's list of informants and, in many cases, records of its payoffs, including $1,200 a month paid to the informant "Geronimo" , handled by Stratfor's Former State Department agent Fred Burton.

The Global Intelligence Files - List of Releases

The Global Intelligence Files (Press release)

Cash-strapped UK local authorities spent £0.5B on CCTV in 4 years

2012-02-24T10:20:03Z

"The Price of Privacy: How local authorities spent £515m on CCTV in four years" is a new report from Britain's Big Brother Watch, and it documents how the skyrocketing expansion of Britain's police and local government surveillance has resulted in over 4,000 fewer patrolling police officers, less privacy, and no appreciable reduction in crime.

CCTV has been viewed by those controlling expenditure as a cheap alternative to conventional policing, with no demonstrable equivalent success in reducing crime.
The efficiency of CCTV varies hugely across the country, with cameras regularly not working or turned off, footage being deleted before it can be used and pictures of insufficient quality for court purposes.
Local authorities have spent an unprecedented amount of money to make the United Kingdom the most watched nation of people anywhere in the world. That amount of spending on CCTV is steadily increasing, with funds being diverted from conventional policing budgets to pay for the new technology.
CCTV serves as a costly placebo for many local authorities designed to appease neighbourhoods suffering from anti-social behaviour problems.
As the number of CCTV cameras increases, so does the potential number of people being watched and the number of council officers watching – with worrying implications for personal privacy and data security.
The lack of enforceable regulation means that more intrusive use of CCTV – for example, in public toilets, schools or with audio recording capability – can only be challenged in the courts by way of judicial review.

The Price of Privacy: How local authorities spent £515m on CCTV in four years

Microsoft, Google and Netflix want to add DRM-hooks to W3C HTML5 standard

2012-02-23T08:32:07Z

A proposed anti-copying extension for the WC3's standard for HTML5 has been submitted by representatives of Google, Microsoft and Netflix. The authors take pains to note that this isn't "DRM" -- because it doesn't attempt to hide keys and other secrets from the user -- but in a mailing list post, they later admitted that this could be "addressed" by running the browser inside a proprietary hardware system that hid everything from the user.

Other WC3 members -- including another prominent Googler, Ian Hickson -- have called for the withdrawal of the proposal. Hickson called it "unethical." I agree, and would add "disingenuous," too, since the proposal disclaims DRM while clearly being intended to form a critical part of a DRM system.

In an era where browsers are increasingly the system of choice for compromising users' security and privacy, it is nothing short of madness to contemplate adding extensions to HTML standards that contemplate designing devices and software to deliberately hide their workings from users, and to prevent users from seeing what they're doing and changing that behavior if it isn't in their interests.

Writing on Ars Technica, Ryan Paul gives a good blow-by-blow look at the way that this extension is being treated in the W3C:

Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan warned that the pressure to provide DRM in browsers might lead to a situation where major browser vendors and content providers attempt to push forward a suboptimal solution without considering the implications for other major stakeholders.
Some of the discussion surrounding the Encrypted Media proposal seem to validate his concerns. Mozilla's Chris Pearce commented on the issue in a message on the W3C HTML mailing list and asked for additional details to shed light on whether the intended content protection scheme could be supported in an open source application.
"Can you highlight how robust content protection can be implemented in an open source webrowser?" he asked. "How do you guard against an open source web browser simply being patched to write the frames/samples to disk to enable (presumably illegal) redistribution of the protected content?"
Netflix's Mark Watson responded to the message and acknowledged that strong copy protection can't be implemented in an open source Web browser. He deflected the issue by saying that copy protection mechanisms can be implemented in hardware, and that such hardware can be used by open source browsers.

"Unethical" HTML video copy protection proposal draws criticism from W3C reps (Thanks, Rob!)

Target's creepy data-mining program predicts your future shopping changes, disguises this fact from you

2012-02-19T14:17:59Z

In the New York Times, Charles Duhigg takes a creepy look at how Target mines its customer data to predict major life-changes, like pregnancy, so that they can send coupons that guide customers into thinking of Target as the go-to place for all their prenatal and child-rearing needs. The researcher quoted (who was later silenced by his employer) describes the measures the company takes to keep the wily pregosaurs from figuring out that they're being tracked and categorized, tricking them into thinking that the flood of prenatal coupons in the post were just a coincidence. It's grounded in some neuroscience research and the theory is that if you can be guided or coerced into forming automatic "shopping habits" that involve Target, you'll buy things there literally without thinking about it.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.
In the past, that knowledge had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only cleaning supplies at Target, and there were only so many psychological buttons the company could push. But now that she is pregnant, everything is up for grabs. In addition to triggering Jenny’s habits to buy more cleaning products, they can also start including offers for an array of products, some more obvious than others, that a woman at her stage of pregnancy might need.
Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company’s cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they were ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his paygrade. Eventually his paygrade went up.
At which point someone asked an important question: How are women going to react when they figure out how much Target knows?
“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

How Companies Learn Your Secrets (via JWZ)

Oh my God, entertainment industry people are still pitching for SOPA

2012-02-17T19:38:31Z

You'd think that the proponents of SOPA^[1] would give up that legislative dead parrot's ghost. But they're still doing the rounds on radio and in print, claiming that millions of Americans were 'duped' into opposing their harmless little internet censorship law.

The fresh (!) talking points go like this: Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing and others 'lied' to the public about what SOPA was in the crucial final moments, 'abused our power' by going dark for a day, and thereby tricked legislators and the public into turning on a much-needed new law.

What rot.

First, the facts of SOPA's sloppy definitions, domain takedown provisions and weakening of safe harbor protections are are very well-known; this renewed insistence that everyone misunderstood them is gaslighting performance art. SOPA was an indiscriminate lashing-out at everything the entertainment industry hates, from unrepentant criminals to the technology that turns their castles into sand.

Second, the claim that blanking our websites was an 'abuse' says much about how corporate lobbyists view free expression: as something to be regulated like a rent or privilege. We went dark to make clear to our readers what could happen to websites affected by SOPA and PIPA: darkness.

Finally, SOPA could never have stemmed copyright infringement or anything else that it claimed to address. The only possible outcome was social harm, and the industry would have been back at the congressional trough soon enough.

And yet, post-defeat, here they are on radio stations and TV spots and op-eds across the nation. This lingering of the January fog shows just how certain they were these laws would pass. They thought they'd nailed it, and they just can't give it up.

The important lesson to draw from this is that they don't know why it fell apart.

Would you hold still, please, sir?

The claim that SOPA and PIPA contained no censorship provisions is brow-furrowingly odd. As originally written, the laws explicitly targeted domestic websites, making it even easier to get them taken down than is already the case. Safe harbor provisions in copyright law were superceded, further incenting service providers to kill on demand. Moreover, SOPA provided for courts to interfere directly with the domain name system.

Some of these provisions were changed only after public objections, a superficial fix to an awful law that still contained all the legal frameworks and implied enforcement costs that it was designed to impose.

When proponents of the law call its critics liars, remember why they're so defensive about it. It's because those criticisms were true, even on the proponents' own terms, until the law's passage was in doubt. To the end, it accurately represented the entertainment industry's desired state of affairs.

Because of SOPA/PIPA's vague definitions, for example, even .com and .net sites like Boing Boing could be subject to court order, as we look like search engines if you squint at us just right. We wouldn't have to be the targets of a SOPA claim.

Just today, we've been snarled up in a dispute between hi-fi component distributors fighting over the licensing rights to market a particular foreign brand. One asked us to remove a link to the other. If these laws had passed, they could simply SOPA up the other guys, and the first we'd hear about it is a judge ordering us to remove posts about them from our "search engine."

SOPA was a feast of potential SLAPP tools to indirectly burden websites with. Just as music labels and Hollywood can't figure out why SOPA failed to pass, they can't see how useful it would have been to everyday cranks, bullies and shakedown artists.

Hollywood's so fixated on influencing Washington through campaign contributions and lobbying, it can't imagine that political movement occurs naturally, without being stoked by cash. Listening to spokespeople talk, the very idea of unpaid-for influence seems unfair to them.

A specific example: on Wednesday, Taylor Hackford of the Director's Guild of America spoke to NPR. His dudgeon over everyone's lies was standard fare. But he also cast his organization as little guys silenced by the might of the tech industry. The guild sees itself as the victim of political rough play. But the truth is that the guild spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on lobbying. It projects anger at others' advantages because it cannot grasp why graft fails.

Hollywood, let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

Was SOPA's defeat a last-minute upset? Like the 'overnight' success of a band after 10,000 hours of toil, the truth is more complex. Its dangers were immediately clear to many, and the outcry built over the course of months. The participation of big guns, which only committed to joining the blackout after many smaller sites had already done so, was the culmination of a genuine netroots campaign.

And yet the public—with more than 10 million petitioners before blackout day—are, in Hackford's view, "dupes". That's what these guys think of you. They loathe you and underestimate you and have no clue at all about why you do what you do.

You should admit your situation

The strangest new development in pro-SOPA argumentation is to remind us that they don't need SOPA to shut down U.S. websites, because they can already do that by other means. It's the most tone-deaf rhetorical talking point yet: "why would be need SOPA to consor you when we already can?"

And censorship is certainly what results. Just yesterday, the U.S. Secret Service, with the help of tech industry lickspittle GoDaddy, confiscated the domain of JotForm, a popular web form service. A single customer was accused of using it abusively. As a result, content was removed from thousands of legal websites, apparently without a court order.

"I told them we are a Web service with hundreds of thousands of users, so this is a matter of urgency, and we are ready to cooperate fully," the site's founder, Aytekin Tank, said in a thread on Hacker News. "I was ready to shutdown any form they request and provide any information we have about the user. Unfortunately, she told me she needs to look at the case which she can do in a few days. I called her many times again to check about the case, but she seems to be getting irritated with me."

SOPA wouldn't have created this kind of bungling censorship, but it would have made it more readily available to the America's most spiteful and shameless litigants.

What's a real shame is that the music and film industry's main strategy is to demand laws that protect them from change. They're the world's most committed investors in new art and new culture, and they've already been shown by companies like Apple and Amazon how to master the new media. But faced with the prospect of selling their products on terms customers get to define, they'd rather screw themselves.

1. SOPA and PIPA were the House and Senate versions of the law, respectively.

Record industry lobby attains chutzpah singularity

2012-02-16T21:48:58Z

IFPI, the international recording industry lobby, has gone on the offensive to save ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an unprecedented international copyright agreement negotiated in secret (so secret that even Congress and the European Parliament weren't allowed to see it). In recent weeks, popular protests against ACTA have grown, and many nations are pulling back from ACTA.

IFPI doesn't like this. In fact, it says that popular demonstrations calling for substantive treaty negotiations to take place in the open "silence the democratic process."

In this statement, IFPI is using the term "democratic process" in a highly technical, specialized manner, citing a little-understood definition: "a process undertaken by corporate lobbyists and unelected bureaucrats without public oversight or transparency."

Another specialized vocab use that's interesting is the word "silencing," which, again, is used in the rare technical sense of "marching in the streets in thousands-strong throngs asking lawmakers to oversee and publicly debate international agreements."

Over the past two weeks, we have seen coordinated attacks on democratic institutions such as the European Parliament and national governments over ACTA. The signatories to this letter and their members stand against such attempts to silence the democratic process. Instead, we call for a calm and reasoned assessment of the facts rather than the misinformation circulating.

IFPI & Other Lobbyists Tell Parliament That ACTA Protests Silence The Democratic Process

Over 100 NGOs ask WIPO to postpone secretive South Africa meeting

2012-02-09T21:55:41Z

Over 100 NGOs have asked the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization to postpone a summit in South Africa on the grounds that notice of the meeting was not published, the agenda has been set without any transparency, and the speakers all favor a single, narrow view on copyright and patents.

In a letter to the WIPO director general Francis Gurry, more than 100 international NGOs expressed their concern over co-organising the summit in partnership with US, France and Japan which are known for advocating TRIPS plus agendas in developing countries in the interests of their own industries and priorities. For instance these countries are proponents of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a plurilateral treaty that is widely criticized for its secret negotiating process and the detrimental impact on public interest issues such as access to medicines, freedom of expression over the internet and access to knowledge.
To make matters worse the Summit is being sponsored by the private sector in particular the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP), Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Company etc., that clearly have a strong stake in a pro-IP protection and enforcement agenda. The involvement of the private sector also raises issues of conflict of interests.
Besides, the NGOs said, the summit lacks a development and public interest dimension. The summit concept paper suggests a programme that undermines the spirit of Development Agenda. It is premised on the notion that heightened IP protection and enforcement will deliver development and protect public interest. This distorted approach has no historical or empirical basis and has been clearly rejected by the Development Agenda process. Important development issues such as the different levels of development, the importance of flexibilities (e.g. LDC transition periods, exceptions and limitations e.g. parallel importation, compulsory licensing,) in meeting developmental objectives, examining and addressing the impact of IP on critical public interests issues such as access to affordable medicines, and access to knowledge, appear to be disregarded.

Over 100 international NGOs ask WIPO to postpone forthcoming IP Summit in South Africa

French court rules that it's illegally anticompetitive for Google to provide free maps API

2012-02-02T09:16:27Z

A French court has ruled that Google's free Google Maps application API is anti-competitive and has ordered the company to pay €500,000 to Bottin Cartographes, a for-pay map company, as well as a €15,000 fine. Bottin Cartographes argued that Google was only planning to give away the service for free until all the competitors had been driven out of business and then they would start charging. This seems implausible to me, and contrary to Google's business model (give away services, make money from mining the use of those services). Google says it will appeal.

"This is the end of a two-year battle, a decision without precedent," said the lawyer for Bottin Cartographes, Jean-David Scemmama.
"We proved the illegality of (Google's) strategy to remove its competitors... the court recognised the unfair and abusive character of the methods used and allocated Bottin Cartographes all it claimed. This is the first time Google has been convicted for its Google Maps application," he said.

I wonder what Bottin Cartographes will do when OpenStreetMaps finishes producing high-quality, free, public domain maps of France that can be used to create APIs of the same scope and utility?

France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition (via Engadget)

Software piracy is vital to preservation

2012-01-27T14:09:00Z

A PC World editorial by Benj Edwards recounts the history of "copy protection*" for software, and discusses how the cracks-scene, which busted open these software locks, is the only reason the legacy of old software is available today. There's a trite story about the persistence of paper and the ephemerality of bits, which goes something like this: "We can still read ancient manuscripts, but we can't read Letraset Ready, Set, Go! files from the 1980s." This is only true in a very limited sense: if you can crack the copy-protection on R,S,G! you can run it perfectly well in a little Mac emulator on a modern computer, with lots of headroom to spare (the laptop I'm typing this on being approximately ten bazillion times more powerful than the last machine I used R,S,G! on). The business of software preservation and data longevity is a lot simpler than the story would have you believe** (assuming you don't care about breaking the law to bust open copy protection and to get old copies of Mac System 6.x to run things on).

It may seem counterintuitive, but piracy has actually saved more software than it has destroyed. Already, pirates have spared tens of thousands of programs from extinction, proving themselves the unintentional stewards of our digital culture.
Software pirates promote data survival through ubiquity and media independence. Like an ant that works as part of a larger system it doesn’t understand, the selfish action of each digital pirate, when taken in aggregate, has created a vast web of redundant data that ensures many digital works will live on...
For a sample slice of what’s at stake when it comes to vanishing software, let’s take a look at the video game industry. The Web’s largest computer and video game database, MobyGames, holds records of about 60,000 games at present. Roughly 23,000 of those titles were originally released on computer systems that used floppy disks or cassette tapes as their primary storage or distribution medium.
23,000 games! If game publishers and copyright law had their way, almost all of those games would be wiped from the face of the earth by media decay over the next 10 years. Many would already be lost.

The article is long and thoughtful, and covers a lot of ground. I highly recommend it.

Why History Needs Software Piracy (Thanks, Rainman!)

* The term "copy-protection" is pretty misleading. Speaking as a former systems administrator, the way I "protect" my stuff was by making copies -- that is, backups. True, these are encrypted, but they're encrypted to a key that I posses.

** There's a separate question about media preservation, because old floppies and Zip carts and such are basically shit. But that's OK, since a modern hard drive can store pretty much all the floppies you ever handled without breaking a sweat. If you have (or had) the presence of mind to move all your data from floppies to your HDD, and if you keep your HDD backed up, you are pretty well-preserved. Much better-preserved than your hardcopy book library, which can't be backed up offsite without a photocopier, an army of interns and a lot of time, bother, and shipping containers.

Lies, damned lies, and piracy statistics

2012-01-22T19:04:26Z

Julian Sanchez is on fire in this Ars Technica article on the funny accountancy and outright lies that underlie the harms-from-piracy stats cited in policy debates about Internet censorship and surveillance proposals like SOPA and PIPA:

As a rough analogy, since antipiracy crusaders are fond of equating filesharing with shoplifting: suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts. A lawmaker might, without for one instant doubting that shoplifting is a bad thing, question whether this is really the optimal use of federal law enforcement resources. The CEO indignantly points out that shoplifting kills one million adorable towheaded orphans each year. The proof is right here in this study by the Wal-Mart Institute for Anti-Shoplifting Studies. The study sources this dramatic claim to a newspaper article, which quotes the CEO of Wal-Mart asserting (on the basis of private data you can't see) that shoplifting kills hundreds of orphans annually. And as a footnote explains, it seemed prudent to round up to a million. I wish this were just a joke, but as readers of my previous post will recognize, that's literally about the level of evidence we're dealing with here.
In short, piracy is certainly one problem in a world filled with problems. But politicians and journalists seem to have been persuaded to take it largely on faith that it's a uniquely dire and pressing problem that demands dramatic remedies with little time for deliberation. On the data available so far, though, reports of the death of the industry seem much exaggerated.

SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy

The President's challenge: What more does government want — or deserve — from the tech world?

2012-01-24T06:16:19Z

There's an old joke. Heavy rains start and a neighbour pulls up in his truck. "Hey Bob, I'm leaving for high ground. Want a lift?" Bob says, "No, I'm putting my faith in God." Well, waters rise and pretty soon the bottom floor of his house is under water. Bob looks out the second story window as a boat comes by and offers him a lift. "No, I'm putting my faith in God." The rain intensifies and floodwaters rise and Bob's forced onto the roof. A helicopter comes, lowers a line, and Bob yells "No, I'm putting my faith in God."

Well, Bob drowns. He goes to Heaven and finally gets to meet God. "God, what was that about? I prayed and put my faith in you, and I drowned!"

God says, "I sent you a truck, a boat, and a helicopter! What the hell more did you want from me?"

As SOPA looked shakier, the President handed a challenge to the technical community:

"Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue Web sites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists and rights holders," reads Saturday's statement. "We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge."

All I can think is: we gave you the Internet. We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi--hell, you can even get online while you're on an AIRPLANE. What the hell more do you want from us?

Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we've sent you. Don't wait for the time machine, because we're never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer's convenience with contempt.

Republished with permission from O'Reilly Radar

Undercover UK cops infiltrated environmental groups, seduced women in the groups, fathered children with them, abandoned them

2012-01-21T10:39:54Z

Undercover police agents in the UK infiltrated environmental groups, had sex with their members, struck up long-term relationships with women in these groups, fathered children with these women, and then abandoned the children.

Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring, the Guardian can reveal.
In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers – whom they have not seen in decades – were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children's mothers for many years.

Good thing the police were there, though. Who knows what kind of unethical behaviour an environmentalist might be getting up to.

Undercover police had children with activists

Senators behind PIPA are a bunch of copyright infringers

2012-01-19T17:08:25Z

Vice's Jamie Lee Curtis Taete continues to investigate the copyright shenanigans that SOPA and PIPA's authors get up to (see the saga of how SOPA author Lamar Smith (R-TX) ripped off the photo on the front page of his website).

Now Taete is digging into PIPA supporters, having a quick look at their Twitter profile photos and websites, and yup, the Senators backing PIPA are a bunch of depraved pirates.

This is a screencap of PIPA co-sponsor Roy Blunt's Twitter page from a couple of days ago. The background image is by photographer Walter Rowland. I spoke to his wife Linny, and she told me: "Wow, I'm so surprised to see that someone would do this. Especially a senator! It's even more of a violation because I'm actually in the photo so it's as if I'm supporting his beliefs. Yes, that's one of my husband's photos who is actually a semi-professional photographer, and no, they weren't given permission." Roy has since changed the background on his Twitter in an attempt to cover his tracks.

Other offenders: Claire McCaskill (D-MO) (who ineptly swapped out her infringing Twitter profile image for another infringing image -- nice one!); Dennis Ross (R-FL) (technically a SOPA supporter, as he's in the House), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

PIPA Supporters Violate Copyright Laws, Too

Big Content's moneymen speak out: We expect our politicians to stay bought, dammit

2012-01-19T21:33:34Z

Markos of DailyKos tears into Democrats who lack the fortitude and intellectual honesty to oppose SOPA, and continue to back it because they fear losing the campaign funding that comes from Hollywood. PNH sez, "Markos highlights a couple of paragraphs from a Politico story assessing the landscape following the SOPA/PIPA protests:"

Leo Hindery, a major Democratic donor whose New York media private equity firm owns cable channels, said Obama might have reason to worry about his entertainment industry fundraising base. “[The bill] is an issue that has no business being decided politically – by anybody on one side or the other – and the fact that it might be becoming a political issue is unfair to the content producers,” said Hindery, who’s contributed more than $3 million to Democratic candidates and groups.
"An issue that has no business being decided politically." I can't recall seeing a purer expression of the idea that certain decisions ought to simply be reserved for whoever shows up with the largest bag of cash. Not that the world is like this, but that it's right and just that it should be like this.
It's very illuminating to hear people like this speak frankly.

Hollywood bought its politicians, and it expects them to stay bought (Thanks, PNH)

Where the funny piracy numbers used to justify SOPA/PIPA spring from

2012-01-20T02:40:23Z

Writing for Cato At Liberty, Ars Technica alum Julian Sanchez has a timely redux of the research he did on how the made-up piracy numbers quoted during debates about SOPA and PIPA come from, and how little relation they bear to reality. It seems like every discussion of SOPA/PIPA includes a phrase like "Everyone agrees that piracy is huge problem," but in fact, the "huge problem" they're agreeing on has been inflated to farcical proportions through the most transparent financial funny business.

Siwek takes an estimate of $6.1 billion in piracy losses to the U.S. movie industry, and through the magic of multipliers gets us to a more impressive sounding $20.5 billion. That original $6.1 billion figure, by the way, was produced by a study commissioned from LEK Consulting by the Motion Picture Association of America. Since even the GAO was unable to get at the underlying research or evaluate its methodology, it’s impossible to know how reliable that figure is, but given that MPAA has already had to admit significant errors in the numbers LEK generated, I’d take it with a grain of salt.
Believe it or not, though, it’s actually even worse than that. SOPA, recall, does not actually shut down foreign sites. It only requires (ineffective) blocking of foreign “rogue sites” for U.S. Internet users. It doesn’t do anything to prevent users in (say) China from downloading illicit content on a Chinese site. If we’re interested in the magnitude of the piracy harm that SOPA is aimed at addressing, then, the only relevant number is the loss attributable specifically to Internet piracy by U.S. users.
Again, we don’t have the full LEK study, but one of Siwek’s early papers does conveniently reproduce some of LEK’s PowerPoint slides, which attempt to break the data down a bit. Of the total $6.1 billion in annual losses LEK estimated to MPAA studios, the amount attributable to online piracy by users in the United States was $446 million—which, by coincidence, is roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

How Copyright Industries Con Congress (via Making Light)

An abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today

2012-01-19T10:00:15Z

As Xeni wrote on Tuesday, the MPAA isn't pleased about sites like this one going dark to protest SOPA and PIPA. Former Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America called it "an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today."

Well, he should know.

After all, he is the CEO of the organization responsible for inserting those unskippable FBI warnings (which are highly prejudiced and factually incorrect, advising, for example, that DVDs can't be rented, even though the law says they can) before every commercial DVD. He's the CEO of the organization that inserts those insulting PSAs in front of every movie chiding those of us who buy our DVDs because someone else decided to download the same movie for free.

And he's the CEO of the organization responsible for the section of the DMCA that makes it illegal to build a DVD player that can skip these mandatory, partisan, commercially advantageous messages.

So he knows a thing or two about "abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today."

(Image: Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick)

Lamar Smith: if you oppose SOPA, you don't matter

2012-01-07T18:00:14Z

Rep Lamar Smith, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the principal instigator of the Internet-killing, freedom-hating, pro-censorship Stop Online Piracy Act, has dismissed the bill's enormous, widespread opposition. Smith claims that the million emails sent to Congress in one day, the phone calls received on the Hill at the rate of one per second, and the opposition from scholars, artists, lawyers, civil rights groups, big companies, little companies, librarians, and the engineers who created the Internet are all irrelevant, representing a "vocal minority" who are not "able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet."

We've done exactly what he's claimed we haven't -- as have numerous other parties, including famed Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who also cited specific language in the bill. Ditto with former DHS Assistant Secretary, Stewart Baker, who also cited language from the bill about how SOPA will cause significant security problems for the internet.

Rep. Lamar Smith Decides Lying About, Insulting And Dismissing Opposition To SOPA Is A Winning Strategy (via Beth Pratt)