The Internet has Allowed us to Rediscover Fire

Reading of “The Internet has Allowed us to Rediscover Fire”

Khan Academy’s analysis of SOPA and PIPA.

Reddit’s Technical Examination of SOPA/PIPA

Granted that Reddit will be going down tomorrow in protest of SOPA and PIPA, I felt morally obligated to mirror this post from their blog on this site so that interesting and edifying information can be properly disseminated, which, quite appropriately, the bills will infringe on greatly.

As you have probably heard, there are two pieces of legislation currently pending that we, and others like us, believe seriously threaten the internet. I wanted to take some time to delve into the text of both of these bills, and outline their potential consequences as I am able to understand them. As you can imagine, this is a complex issue, and as a result this is going to be a complex post. I highly encourage you to set some time aside to read this thoroughly. Grab some caffeine, we are going to be here for a while.
As a disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, I'm a sysadmin. The following is not legal advice, but rather an outline and personal interpretation of critical portions of the legislation. If you own or operate a site that may be affected by this legislation, I suggest having your legal counsel look at these bills. If you're a brand new startup with little to no money for legal counsel, well, best of luck to you. The internet may no longer be a friendly place.
Note: In recent news, several legislators have suggested that they will be removing the DNS provisions from both SOPA and PROTECT IP. However, those provisions still exist in the bills today, and they are likely to still be debated. For these reasons, I'm going to include the DNS provisions in this discussion.

The Sacred Texts

Much of this post will be focusing on Title 1, Sections 101, 102, and 103 of SOPA; and Sections 2, 3, and 4 of PROTECT IP. I hope to make the impact of these bills clear, however you shouldn't just blindly trust me. Here are links to the current versions of the bills provided by Library of Congress and the Government Printing Office.

• PROTECT IP (Senate) AKA Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011
• Stop Online Piracy Act (House)

The Battlefields

One of the most important distinctions in these bills is the difference between a 'foreign site' and a 'domestic site'. The definitions try to break websites into two groups using some fairly simple language; however the results may be unexpected in several cases.

• SOPA Domestic Internet Site - A domestic site is defined as a site that corresponds to a 'domestic domain name', or if there is no domain name, a domestic IP address.¹ A domestic domain name is defined as a domain registered or assigned by a registrar or other authority that is located within the United States.² Some common examples of domestic top-level domain names are '.com', '.org', and '.us'.
• SOPA Foreign Internet Site or PROTECT IP Non-domestic domain name - A foreign site is very simply defined as a site that is not a domestic site.^{3 4} Under this definition, any site not using a domestic domain name is a foreign site.

Under these broad definitions, domestically hosted sites such as 'redd.it' and 'bit.ly' can be defined as foreign internet sites. On the other side of the coin, foreign hosted sites such as wikileaks.org and thepiratebay.org can be defined as 'domestic', since their domain names are registered through authorities located in the U.S.

The Players

• Service Provider - A service provider is defined as a service that hosts a non-authoritative DNS server.⁵ This includes ISPs, sites like OpenDNS, Google's public nameservers, and any other service providing a public DNS resolution server.
• Internet Advertising Services - A service that will serve, display, or "otherwise facilitate" an ad in return for compensation.^{6 7} This includes both services which display ads linking to sites (e.g. Google AdWords and reddit's self-serve advertising), and services which host ads on other sites (e.g. Google AdSense).
• SOPA Payment Network Provider or PROTECT IP Financial transaction provider - A service that handles payment transactions (e.g. PayPal).^{8 9}
• SOPA Internet Search Engine - The definition of a search engine in the legislation is very wordy. What it basically comes down to is a service that provides links to other sites based on a user query or selection.¹⁰ Sites like reddit certainly fall within this definition. Other sites likely to fall within this definition are live blogs, link shorteners, wikis, and blog networks.
• PROTECT IP Information Location Tool - The definition of this is not included in PROTECT IP itself, but rather referenced to language in existing copyright law.¹¹ The existing law doesn't explicitly define an 'information location tool', but instead gives some extremely broad examples.¹² It boils down to any service that displays links or 'pointers'.
• SOPA U.S. Directed Sites - A site, or portion thereof, that is used to conduct business or provide services to U.S. residents.¹³ "Service" is not explicitly defined.
• Qualifying Plaintiff - A holder of intellectual property who is harmed by the activity of a foreign infringing site.^{14 15}

The Powers

Most of the power in these bills is granted to the office of the Attorney General. The Attorney General can obtain a court order to take action^{16 17} against a foreign infringing site, or portions thereof, as defined by the following.
SOPA¹⁸

1. The site is U.S. directed.
2. The owner or operator of the site is "committing or facilitating the commission [my emphasis] of criminal violations punishable under section 2318, 2319, 2319A, 2319B, or 2320, or chapter 90, of title 18, United States Code." Those sections primarily deal with copyright infringement and counterfeit products.
3. The site would be subject to seizure if it were instead a domestic site.

PROTECT IP¹⁹

1. The site is used "primarily as a means for engaging in, enabling, or facilitating the activities" of copyright infringement or counterfeit products; or
2. The site is designed by its operator "as a means for engaging in, enabling, or facilitating the activities" of copyright infringement or counterfeit products.

If this criteria is met, the office of the Attorney General can then serve this court order to entities in the U.S., requiring them to take specific actions against the site. The following are the actions which must be taken upon receiving the order from the Attorney General's office:

• Require U.S. sites and search engines to remove all links to the foreign site.^{20 21}
• Require U.S. advertising services to no longer serve ads linking to the site, or display ads (e.g. AdSense) on the foreign site.^{22 23}
• Require U.S. payment networks to cease any transactions between the foreign site and U.S. customers.^{24 25}
• Require U.S. service providers to block customer access to the foreign site (DNS blacklisting).²⁶²⁷

"No Duty to Monitor"

SOPA
The requirements of ad networks²² and payment networks²⁴ include a 'no duty to monitor' paragraph. This paragraph indicates that the networks are in compliance with the requirements if they take the actions described on the date that the order is served. It should be noted that 'search engines' have no such paragraph. This would mean that search engines can be required to continually monitor and prevent new instances of links to foreign sites. Coming from the point-of-view of the drafter of the legislation, this makes perfect sense. Requiring a site to scrub all the links to a foreign site is a useless effort if the links will simply pop up again the next day.

Actions which can be taken by qualified plaintiffs

The Attorney General doesn't get all of the fun. Qualifying plaintiffs can also send notice^{28 30} to advertising services and payment networks requiring them to cease interaction with a foreign infringing site.^{29 31}

The Devil in the Details

Domestic vs Foreign

The concept of 'domestic' versus 'foreign' on the internet is complex. For example, reddit's primary servers are located in Virginia, however we have domain names through foreign registrars (redd.it, reddit.co.uk). The site is hosted via a third-party content-delivery network (Akamai). This means that if you connect to reddit from a foreign country, you are likely connecting to an Akamai server not located in the U.S. This legislation naively ignores this complexity, and simply labels a site 'foreign' or 'domestic' based solely on the domain name.
The legislators sponsoring these bills have indicated that they are only targeted at truly foreign sites. However, the language is so loose and ignorant of what is truly a foreign site that there is a huge amount of room to argue what is actually "foreign".

Facilitation of criminal violations

The potential for abuse in this language is painfully obvious. "Facilitation" can often be argued as simply teaching or demonstrating how to do something. Under this definition, a site could be targeted for something as simple as describing how to rip a Blu-Ray. This language also makes it clear that the legislation is not solely targeting sites "dedicated to theft".

The Fallout

Why this is going to harm user-driven sites like reddit

Up to this point, reddit and sites like it have been required to remove specific copyrighted content if presented with a properly filled out DMCA takedown request. The notices are required to indicate exactly what pages the content is on, and to prove that they are indeed the owners of the content. Even then, this process is often abused.
SOPA and PROTECT IP contain no provisions to actually remove copyrighted content, but rather focus on the censorship of links to entire domains.
If the Attorney General served reddit with an order to remove links to a domain, we would be required to scrub every post and comment on the site containing the domain and censor the links out, even if the specific link contained no infringing content. We would also need to implement a system to automatically censor the domain from any future posts or comments. This places a measurable burden upon the site's technical infrastructure. It also damages one of the most important tenets of reddit, and the internet as a whole – free and open discussion about whatever the fuck you want.

Why this doesn't actually stop piracy

This legislation is aimed at requiring private U.S. entities to enforce restrictions against foreign sites but does nothing against the infringement itself. All of the enforcement actions can and will be worked around by sites focused on copyright infringement. U.S. citizens will still be able to use foreign DNS servers, new advertising and payment networks will pop up overseas, and "infringing sites" will still be linked to by other foreign sites and search engines. In fact, tools used to circumvent these form of internet restrictions are being funded by the U.S. State department to offer citizens under "repressive regimes" uncensored access to the internet. When the dust settles, piracy will still exist, and the internet in the U.S. will have entered the realm of federal regulation and censorship.

Why this is ripe for abuse

The vague and technology-ignorant language in this pending legislation opens a huge number of doors for different interpretations. When you take this broad language and use it to grant powers to both the Attorney General and plaintiffs like the MPAA and RIAA, you create a system that is begging to be abused. Given the history of abuse of laws like the DMCA, it has become obvious that institutions like the RIAA can and will stretch laws to the breaking point, often while suffering no repercussions.
To prevent a repeat in history of the abuse of internet copyright law, any new legislation must be drafted with the following:
1. Airtight, technically sound definitions.
2. Heavy input from the technology sector. Complex technology legislation should not be drafted by someone who barely has a working knowledge of the internet.
3. Checks and balances ensuring that due-process can be invoked before, during, and after any action is taken.
4. Clear repercussions for entities utilizing the legislation in an abusive manner.

Why this is going to hurt startups and tech innovation

One of the big reasons why a company is able to go from a few computers in a garage to a multi-billion dollar company is due to the open nature of the internet. The barrier to entry on creating a new site or product is very low. Adding legislation that regulates this open platform will seriously hamper future business.
Entrepreneurs will need to invest in legal counsel to ensure they can properly respond to a PROTECT IP or SOPA order. New sites and products will need to invest precious development time to build-in censorship utilities so that they can remove links to foreign sites. New advertising networks will need to calculate the new risk of displaying ads for or on foreign websites. Sites will also be heavily discouraged from using non-US domain names due to the broad language in the bills on how they may be defined.
Adding regulation to one of the few growing sectors in the U.S. will result in a "chilling effect" and will push individuals and business to start ventures elsewhere. Threatening this existing ecosystem for the purpose of making it slightly harder to pirate movies is a very dangerous tradeoff.

In Conclusion

It is my strong belief that both PROTECT IP and SOPA:

1. Will not stop the piracy they are targeting
2. Contain language that is highly ambiguous and extremely broad making them ripe for abuse, and
3. Introduce regulation and enforce censorship on what should be a free and open internet.

Peace

SOPA and The Great Internet Blackouts

When it was brought to the attention of the Reddit community in mid-November, SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, drew immense criticism from all sectors of the internet, which might be the understatement of the year. A mass online movement to protest the bill was born, and legions of people contacted their Senators and Representatives to urge them to vote down the bill. SOPA will be discussed before Congress when it returns from its Winter Recess come the end of January.

In essence, the bill attempts to address the problem of media piracy by giving corporations more power to seek legal action against web sites they accuse of copyright infringement. Such legal actions might include blacklisting sites that link to shared copyrighted content, starving sites off the necessary advertising money they need to survive, imprisoning content-sharers for up to five years, barring search engines from displaying certain links and erecting a DNS firewall around the United States preventing access to copyrighted content in servers located in other countries.

Reflecting the “smart-mob” nature of the web, internet users revolted against the multitude of corporations that supported the bill. Domain name company GoDaddy, which voiced its support of the bill in December, faced a mass exodus of users as people boycotted the service. The company lost 37,000 users as a result of the boycott and saw its web ranking plunge when megasites Reddit and Wikipedia migrated off their namespaces.

On December 13^th, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales proposed a Wikipedia “blackout” in protest of the bill, temporarily taking the site offline to send a penetrating message to legislators and the internet community. He addressed editors, “Do not underestimate our power - in my opinion, they are terrified of a public uprising about this, and we are uniquely positioned to start that”. As of January, Google, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter have put consideration into joining Wikipedia in its symbolic strike. Reddit confirmed a blackout on January 18^th and other sites have started discussion in coordinating blackouts.

SOPA puts the United States in peril as President Obama will likely alienate the media industry if he signs the bill into law, and conversely, alienate tech and internet startups. The mainstream media has skirted the issue notably while the tech industry has loudly and radically protested the measure. Time will tell whether this controversial measure will be the boon to innovation its creators espouse it to be.

SOPA and Six Ways the Internet can Save Civilization

Just a reading of an essay concerning what we lose if SOPA passes: everything.

A Sincere and Honest Demand for Copyright Reform

Dear Representatives Speier, Pelosi and Senators Feinstein and Boxer

Who do you stand with? The ludicrous idea of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP reaching actual discussion within Washington has given citizens rationale to question the authenticity of our elected officials. Do you serve to protect the rights of American citizens or the sanctity of the profits of corporations? SOPA is treasonous, evil and the single greatest affront to American freedom since the institution of slavery.

In discussion of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which would have criminalized displaying “indecent” material to minors, Judge Steward Dalzell wrote “As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion”. The Supreme Court affirmed the decision in Reno v. ACLU, acknowledging that government-based filtering of content was contradictory to the First Amendment.

We have entered the twilight weeks of 2011, and SOPA and its cousin PROTECT-IP have garnered massive outcry from 95% of Internet users. Under the terms of the bill, “rouge sites”, web sites located on servers in other nations with more hospitable copyright laws, will be blocked from access in the United States. This will be accomplished through a method called DNS filtering; the very same censorship tool utilized by authoritarian states such as China, Syria and Iran. SOPA effectively erects the Western equivalent of China’s Great Firewall.

Since the advent of mass use of the Internet, public discussion has been sorely needed to reform archaic copyright laws that restrict the intellectual freedom of content producers everywhere. The rise of user-generated content hosted on media-sharing sites like YouTube, Flickr and Bandcamp has created a new form of art based on modifying existing work. Derivative works, such as covers, remixes, image macros and mods are the pieces of this amateur movement. An example of such memetic art that has received widespread media attention is the infamous “Pepper Spray Cop”, in which Lt. Pike’s nonchalant visage is Photoshopped into famous works of art. In the spirit of the hackers of the 1980s; media like “Pepper Spray Cop” is released for free online under open licenses like Creative Commons. Blocking such media on the grounds of copyright infringement is proof positive that traditional copyright is incompatible with the freedom of the Internet age.

Furthermore, the Internet has revolutionized content sharing and communication through startups like Facebook and Twitter. Private entities will be forced to censor and redact copyright infringing links and content at the brutish command of both bill’s parameters. The practice of downloading an amusing picture to one’s hard drive to share on one’s Facebook page would cease to exist. As a result, private communication between individuals becomes heavily monitored. Our privacy is invaded not out a tenuous concern for national security, but out of concern for the profits of media companies like VEVO, Sony and Warner Media Group. For these corporations, it becomes clear which half of “Intellectual Property” takes greater precedence.

My sincere and honest demands are threefold and are listed below.

1. Kill PROTECT-IP and SOPA in their respective branches when the time to vote on their passage comes around.

2. Reaffirm the government’s role to protect the interests of individual citizens rather than the corporations that have destroyed democracy and freedom through their insatiable greed.

3. Enact active discussion to reform the restrictive copyright law that has restricted the freedom of derivative artists everywhere.

I am certain that PROTECT-IP and SOPA will die in Congress, however, the mere fact that such an act was even brought into consideration necessitates a critique of our current copyright laws and the extent the government should be involving itself with corporations. The Internet has been a boon to free-speech everywhere, I thus implore you to side with the citizenry of the United States and protect the integrity of online communications and the hope that the web’s decentralization will pave way for a more participatory culture.

Thank you

           Kevin Wong

A Sincere and Honest Demand for Copyright Reform by Kevin Wong is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You are free to remix, redistribute and modify this work as you see fit under the conditions that the license remains the same.

DRM? OMG! WTF? BBQ! *REVISITED*

One of the older blog posts from the 2008 era of this site was humorously titled DRM? OMG! WTF? BBQ!. It derided the usage of DRM restrictions because of the inconvenient hassle that it provides for consumers, sometimes encouraging them to illegally download software to circumvent DRM. This blog post is the second installment in the REVISITED series.

DRM refers to to the variety of access control technologies developed by software corporations intended to stem piracy. It has been highly controversial since its invention. Organizations like the Free Software Foundation state that such software restricts the use of material beyond the limits of existing copyright laws. Consumers have disparaged it because of the wondrous hassle that it imposes upon them. In 2010, DRM control has begun to die out from mainstream distributors like iTunes. Which presents major progress for digital freedom.

DRM is Repulsive and Ineffectual

At the 2009 Game Developer’s Conference, World of Goo developer Kyle Gabler impugned DRM in games. Noting that not one DRM system has been successful at deterring piracy, he found that such restriction was an unnecessary expense. This is true. The 2008 Will Wright game SPORE, despite years of hype, received criticism and controversy for its painful DRM process. SPORE limited its users to licenses on only five computers and forced them to go through a lengthy authentication process. The user-average score on Amazon dipped to lows of 1.5 stars, with users acrimoniously chastising its frustrating DRM. Despite the trouble made with SPORE’s DRM, a cracked version was uploaded to BitTorrent just days later. SPORE quickly rose to become the most pirated game of 2008.

The SPORE dilemma is a prime example of how DRM is ineffective at deterring piracy and destructive to reception. SPORE’s frustrating authentication process likely deterred many gamers from legally purchasing the game, opting instead for the pirated, DRM-free version. EA Games attempt to prevent piracy and maximize profit backfired, thereby making piracy more attractive and lowering legal sales. Former Maxis developer Chris Harris stated that the DRM choice was a “screw-up and a totally avoidable disaster”.

The SPORE dilemma objectively establishes DRM’s negative effect on reception and sales, oftentimes making piracy even more attractive. No DRM systems have been completely successful in preventing cracks from circulating through the internet and bypassing frustrating authentication processes is easily done through systems like BitTorrent. Integrating DRM systems into software is an expensive process, and a usually unsuccessful one. According to Gabler, it is more cost-effective to ignore DRM altogether and release games without protection.

Over the past few years, DRM has proven itself to be an unpredictable and expensive technology to use on software. Despite the high cost of implementing it, it is rarely successful. Thus, software developers should start omitting it to cut costs. Piracy is near-inevitable, go onto isohunt.com and you’ll find dozens of cracks for a wide range of software. DRM will likely destroy itself out of its own expense and inefficiency as companies like 2D Boy begin to release products without it. 

DRM? OMG! WTF? BBQ!

I am sure that almost everyone who reads this has at some time purchased music from an online store, such as iTunes. Those who have bought their music from iTunes might have noticed a “lock” appearing on the song’s file. This “lock” is called “Digital Rights Management,” or DRM. DRM is meant to protect the intellectual rights of the artists who created the music and made it available for download. While this is beneficial for the artists, those who purchase the music may find it very restrictive and annoying.

Within geeky technology communities, you may find open-source hippies protesting against DRM because of its restrictiveness, and with good reason. DRM turns media into more a hassle than a pleasure. Take for example, DRM prevents you from backing up your music files in case of a computer disaster, because it only permits you to have the file on a licensed machine. Thus, the only way you can recover your music when disaster strikes is to download the files again or burn your tracks onto CDs.

Such restriction raises the issue of music piracy through Peer-to-Peer networks like Limewire (Gnutella) and BitTorrent. While I understand that many people illegally download music because the idea of free music seems so attractive, I know that some people pirate music because restrictive DRM prevents them from being able to do anything creative using music files, (i.e. video slideshows) Now, DRM prevents people from using downloaded music in derivative works. Thus, the only way to use music for your own works is to rip songs from physical CDs or to purchase them from obscure music vendors such as Rhapsody or Windows Media Store. The great difficulty that DRM places on these people pushes them toward illegally (and mayhaps immorally) downloading music. This in itself is unethical, because it both restricts people from making such art as slideshows and ironically pushes people toward stealing music.

While it is understandable to why music sellers would support DRM, it significantly lessens the pleasure derived from digital music. The DVD you purchased won't play on your player, you will need to buy extra licenses to play your music on your computer and you will have to buy two copies of the same game to play it on different computers. In addition, copy protection does little to prevent piracy, a quick Google search yields thousands of ways to immorally distribute media. Take for example, serial number generators are created within days of a game's release, movies are “acquired” before they are released in theaters and it isn't unusual to find people with ridiculously large music libraries. Considering the things that DRM pushes users to do, it can be said rationally that DRM is actually bad for the music industry.