Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by and David Moon Patrick Ruffini David Segal Page B
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record label. Conversely, SOPA and PIPA would require ISPs to block traffic from certain known IP addresses, such as 194.71.107.50, the address of ThePirateBay.se, and outlaw the tools that get around this block.
At the same time that anti-circumvention laws have threatened networks and other core technologies, laws upping the ante on intermediary liability have instantiated a regime of petty censorship and placed privacy under attack. Under current DMCA notice-and-takedown rules, it is already trivial to silence one’s political enemies or people with whom you simply disagree. Examples of takedown abuse include:
Police departments whose officers are recorded committing illegal acts claiming copyright on and demanding takedown of the videos of these acts
Diebold using takedown notices to suppress a memo detailing its complicity in selling flawed voting machines
“The Church of Scientology using takedown to attack opponents publishing secret church documents.”
Takedown notices are the measure of first resort for rich and powerful people and companies who are threatened by online disclosures of corruption and misdeeds. Moreover, there are almost never penalties for abusing the takedown process.
In perhaps the ultimate abuse of intermediary liability, Viacom, in a lawsuit against Google, argued that YouTube was complicit in acts of infringement because it allowed its users to mark videos as “private.” Private videos couldn’t be checked by Viacom’s copyright-enforcement bots, and Viacom wanted the privacy flag banned. Under Viacom’s legal theory—supported by all the major studios, broadcasters, publishers, and record labels—online services should not allow users to share files privately, or, at the very least, must allow entertainment corporations access to all private files to make sure they aren’t copyrighted.
This is like requiring everyone to open up their kids’ birthday parties to enforcers from Warner Music to ensure that no royalty-free performances of “Happy Birthday” are taking place. It’s like putting mandatory spy-eye webcams into every big-screen TV to ensure that it’s not being used to run a bootleg cinema. It’s like a law that says that each of the big six publishers should get a key to every office in the land to ensure that no one is photocopying their books on the sly. This is beyond dumb. It’s felony stupidity.
It’s not as though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates—copying, transmission, display, performance—are technological activities. So when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright also has to change, and it is rarely pretty.
When movies were invented, Thomas Edison, who held key film-related patents, claimed the right to authorize the production of films, tightly controllinghow many movies could be made each year and what subjects these movies could address. The filmmakers of the day hated this, and they flew west to California to escape the long arm of Edison’s legal enforcers in New Jersey. William Fox, Adolphe Zukor, and Carl Laemmle, of Fox Studios, Famous Players, and Universal, respectively, founded the great early studios because they believed that their right to expression trumped Edison’s proprietary rights.
Today’s big five movie studios are rightly proud of their maverick history. But they and the entertainment industry as a whole keep saying that their demands are the existential minimum. “Give us a kill switch for the Internet, the power to monitor and censor, the power to control all your devices, and the right to remake general purpose networks and devices as tools of control and spying, or we will die.”
If we have to choose between that vision of copyright and a world where more people can create and more audiences can be served, where our devices are our honest servants and don’t betray us, and where
At the same time that anti-circumvention laws have threatened networks and other core technologies, laws upping the ante on intermediary liability have instantiated a regime of petty censorship and placed privacy under attack. Under current DMCA notice-and-takedown rules, it is already trivial to silence one’s political enemies or people with whom you simply disagree. Examples of takedown abuse include:
Police departments whose officers are recorded committing illegal acts claiming copyright on and demanding takedown of the videos of these acts
Diebold using takedown notices to suppress a memo detailing its complicity in selling flawed voting machines
“The Church of Scientology using takedown to attack opponents publishing secret church documents.”
Takedown notices are the measure of first resort for rich and powerful people and companies who are threatened by online disclosures of corruption and misdeeds. Moreover, there are almost never penalties for abusing the takedown process.
In perhaps the ultimate abuse of intermediary liability, Viacom, in a lawsuit against Google, argued that YouTube was complicit in acts of infringement because it allowed its users to mark videos as “private.” Private videos couldn’t be checked by Viacom’s copyright-enforcement bots, and Viacom wanted the privacy flag banned. Under Viacom’s legal theory—supported by all the major studios, broadcasters, publishers, and record labels—online services should not allow users to share files privately, or, at the very least, must allow entertainment corporations access to all private files to make sure they aren’t copyrighted.
This is like requiring everyone to open up their kids’ birthday parties to enforcers from Warner Music to ensure that no royalty-free performances of “Happy Birthday” are taking place. It’s like putting mandatory spy-eye webcams into every big-screen TV to ensure that it’s not being used to run a bootleg cinema. It’s like a law that says that each of the big six publishers should get a key to every office in the land to ensure that no one is photocopying their books on the sly. This is beyond dumb. It’s felony stupidity.
It’s not as though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates—copying, transmission, display, performance—are technological activities. So when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright also has to change, and it is rarely pretty.
When movies were invented, Thomas Edison, who held key film-related patents, claimed the right to authorize the production of films, tightly controllinghow many movies could be made each year and what subjects these movies could address. The filmmakers of the day hated this, and they flew west to California to escape the long arm of Edison’s legal enforcers in New Jersey. William Fox, Adolphe Zukor, and Carl Laemmle, of Fox Studios, Famous Players, and Universal, respectively, founded the great early studios because they believed that their right to expression trumped Edison’s proprietary rights.
Today’s big five movie studios are rightly proud of their maverick history. But they and the entertainment industry as a whole keep saying that their demands are the existential minimum. “Give us a kill switch for the Internet, the power to monitor and censor, the power to control all your devices, and the right to remake general purpose networks and devices as tools of control and spying, or we will die.”
If we have to choose between that vision of copyright and a world where more people can create and more audiences can be served, where our devices are our honest servants and don’t betray us, and where
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