Originally from: Slate.com

The Internet’s Intolerable Acts

You should be very afraid of a pair of bills that threaten Internet freedom.

The United States of America was forged in resistance to collective reprisals—the punishment of many for the acts of few. In 1774, following the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passed a series of laws—including the mandated closure of the port of Boston—meant to penalize the people of Massachusetts. These abuses of power, labeled the “Intolerable Acts,” catalyzed the American Revolution by making plain the oppression of the British crown.

More than 300 years later, the U.S. Congress is considering bills that would lead to collective reprisals against online communities. The Senate’s PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House are supposed to address copyright infringement and counterfeiting. In reality, they are so technically impractical that they do little to address these problems. They would, however, undermine participatory democracy and human rights, which is why these bills have garnered near-universal condemnation from both human rights groups and technologists.

The interconnected nature of the Internet fostered the growth of online communities such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. These sites host our humdrum daily interactions and serve as a public soapbox for our political voice. Both the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA would create a national firewall by censoring the domain names of websites accused of hosting infringing copyrighted materials. This legislation would enable law enforcement to take down the entire tumblr.com domain due to something posted on a single blog. Yes, an entire, largely innocent online community could be punished for the actions of a tiny minority.

If you think this scenario is unlikely, consider what happened to Mooo.com earlier this year. Back in February, the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security seized 10 domains during a child-porn crackdown called “Operation Protect Our Children.” Along with this group of offenders, 84,000 more entirely innocent sites were tagged with the following accusatory splash page: “Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution." Their only crime was guilt by association: They were all using the Mooo.com domain.

SOPA would go even further, creating a system of private regulation to shut down websites that are accused of not doing enough to prevent infringement. Keep in mind that these shutdowns would happen before a site owner could defend himself in court—SOPA could punish sites without even establishing whether they are guilty of the charges brought against them.

In January 2010, Hillary Clinton launched the State Department’s Internet Freedom initiative, stumping for open access to information worldwide. Though Secretary Clinton has said that “there is no contradiction between intellectual property rights protection and enforcement of expression on the Internet,” PROTECT IP and SOPA create mutually exclusive trajectories for these two priorities. These bills are driven by technologically naive thinking that it’s possible to censor information without affecting freedom of speech. SOPA even goes so far as to make the key circumvention tools used by human rights advocates and democracy organizers throughout the Middle East illegal. While we’re certain that SOPA’s authors did not mean to craft a bill tailor-made to support the future Qaddafis and Mubaraks of the world, that is precisely what they’ve done.

Rather than blocking online copyright infringement, legislation like SOPA and Protect IP would instigate a data obfuscation arms race, making legitimate law enforcement efforts all the more difficult. If the United States decides that copyright infringement must be stopped at any cost, the required censorship regime will depend on ever more invasive practices, such as monitoring users’ personal Web traffic. This counterproductive cat-and-mouse game of censorship and circumvention would drive savvy scofflaws to darknets while increasing surveillance of less technically proficient Internet users.

Given that the Intolerable Acts sparked a revolution, it should be no surprise that this proposed legislation has generated a massive outcry in the United States. However, this attempt to unilaterally censor the Internet has spurred worldwide opposition, with several dozen international organizations signing a letter stating that “[t]hrough SOPA, the United States is attempting to dominate a shared global resource.” Last month, the European Parliament adopted a resolution underscoring “the need to protect the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names.”

As participants in the Internet community, we must defend against collective reprisals that undermine our rights to access, privacy, and freedom of expression online. SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act are fundamentally incompatible with a free society and with the founding principles of the United States. This truth should be self-evident: Human rights should never be subjugated to copyright.

I'm attending the Patents, Copyrights and Knowledge Governance Conference today over at the Carnegie Institute. It's full of hyper-knowledgeable people, though the discussions might be a bit dry to the uninitiated. Gavin Baker is live blogging during the panels.

I've been deeply concerned about the increasing amount of digital rights management (DRM) and other content controls that are finding their way into the services and applications that we all use. This recent xkcd comic sort of sums it all up:

The RIAA has been taking a lot of people to court -- basically, harassing folks in an attempt to curb file-sharing. The $220,000 verdict against Jammy Thomas got a lot of news (and probably worried a lot of folks). However, on appeal (i.e., after a new court not cherry-picked by the RIAA to try the case looked things over), the RIAA lost... again. ZDnet covered the verdict.

At its heart, the verdict reaffirms that simply making a copyrighted work available is not the same as actually distributing the work. In other words, copyright holders actually have to show harm before they can sue the pants off of people. More importantly, it lends yet more weight to the notion that our copyright laws are woefully out of date and that the RIAA has systematically overstepped the legal bounds of its authority under existing copyright law.

Fundamentally, there will need to be a reassessment of copyright and a rebalancing of the rights of copyright holders and the benefits of copyright to the general public. As Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution clearly states:

"The Congress shall have power to...promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

The goal is the promotion of the progress of science and the arts -- not to enrich copyright holders. Clearly, we've strayed from that core mission and Congress should reaffirm its commitment to the original function of copyright.

Well, here's the first case of confirmed massive so-called "digital rights management" problems with Windows Vista -- Apple is now telling its customers not to upgrade to Vista because it doesn't work well with iTunes. So if you buy a new PC computer today -- you may not have access to your completely legal iTunes media. As I've said before, if you can control content on the end-users' devices, Network Neutrality really doesn't matter.

This is just the first of what will most certainly be widespread DRM problems -- since the Operating System is deciding for users what media they can and cannot consume. For Apple (which has huge resources as well as direct partnerships with Windows), the solution is to create patches so that their media will be exempted from Vista's draconian DRM. But what about for everyone else? Here's the list of just some of the Windows DRM problems straight from Apple's website, including things like
refusing to play legally bought media and turning your iPod into a really expensive doorstop if you follow the Windows "Safely Remove Hardware" instructions (I kid you not!):

* iTunes Store purchases may not play when upgrading to Windows Vista from Windows 2000 or XP.
* iPod models with the "Enable Disk Use" option turned off may be unable to update or restore iPod software, and make changes to iPod settings.
* iPod models configured to Auto Sync and have the "Enable Disk Use" option turned off may require being ejected and reconnected to resync.
* Ejecting an iPod from the Windows System Tray using the "Safely Remove Hardware" feature may corrupt your iPod.
* Cover Flow animation may be slower than expected.
* Contacts and calendars will not sync with iPod.

My good friend Victor Pickard and I are thinking about writing some of this up in a new paper we're going to be working on, "Feudalizing the Internet: Enclosures and Erasures from Digital Rights Management to the Digital Divide." Stay tuned for more as we trace the Windows Vista DRM debacle.