From Dennis Yang on Techdirt:

A Gallery Of The SOPA Blackout Protest Screens.

from the mr-smith-takes-over-the-internet dept

Needless to say, there’s a pretty big protest going on right now against SOPA, with many sites either shuttering fully or making obvious changes in support of the protests. Leading the charge are Wikipedia, Reddit and Google. Sites like SOPA STRIKE and SOPA Blackout disseminated code to allow sites to easily join the blackout, but many sites have actually decided to take the time to tailor their protests for their own sites, which is amazing to see. It is this creative energy that drives the Internet and makes it what it is (for better or worse), and it is this very energy that legislation like SOPA and PIPA threaten to extinguish.

I’ve created a gallery of SOPA blackout screencaps, but here are some of my favorite takes on the protest today:

Reddit’s blackout is probably the most complete; all URLs, including deep links, on Reddit lead to the blackout page, which is very impressive for such a largely trafficked site. For Redditor’s going through Reddit-withdrawal today, they feature a handy countdown timer on their blackout page.

Wikipedia’s blackout encompasses all of the English site, and as evidenced by @herpderpedia (who is collecting various angry Tweets about the Wikipedia blackout), it is certainly causing some frustration (and hopefully some awareness). That said, Wikipedia’s blackout is very, very, very easy to thwart (just hit the ESC key before the page fully loads), so there’s an easy escape valve for those that are in dire need of its content. In that same vein, Craigslist’s full blackout also has a release valve that gracefully loads after a few seconds.

Google promised that it would do “something,” and followed suit with a Google Doodle, essentially blacking out its logo in protest. Several sites followed suit, including Hacker News, 4chan’s /b/ (link to a SFW screenshot), and TwitPic. [continue reading…]

From arstechnica:

PIPA support collapses, with 13 new Senators opposed

Members of the Senate are rushing for the exits in the wake of the Internet’s unprecedented protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA). At least 13 members of the upper chamber announced their opposition on Wednesday. In a particularly severe blow from Hollywood, at least five of the newly-opposed Senators were previously sponsors of the Protect IP Act.

The newly-opposed Senators are skewed strongly to the Republican side of the aisle. An Ars Technica survey of Senators’ positions on PIPA turned up only two Democrats, Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who announced their opposition on Wednesday. The other 11 Senators who announced their opposition on Wednesday were all Republicans. These 13 join a handful of others, including Jerry Moran (R-KS), Rand Paul (R-KY), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Ron Wyden (D-OR), who have already announced their opposition.

Marco Rubio, a freshman Republican Senator from Florida who some consider to be a rising star, withdrew his sponsorship of the bill, citing “legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government’s power to impact the Internet.” He urged the Senate to “avoid rushing through a bill that could have many unintended consequences.”

Another co-sponsor, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) echoed that sentiment. He blamed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) for “pushing forward w/ a flawed bill that still needs much work.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), one of the chamber’s longest-serving members and another sponsor, described the Protect IP Act as “simply not ready for prime time.”

The partisan slant of the defections is surprising because copyright has not traditionally been considered a partisan issue. Before Wednesday’s protests, PIPA had 16 Republican co-sponsors and 23 Democratic ones. The bill lost a quarter of its Republican sponsors on Wednesday, while we know of only one Democrat, Ben Cardin (D-MD), who dropped his support.

Those who dropped their support were most likely bolstered by strong opposition from conservative think tanks and blogs. On Tuesday, the influential Heritage Foundation announced that it would include SOPA and PIPA as a key issue on its voter scorecard. And the popular conservative blog redstate.com, whose founder threatened to mount primary challengers to SOPA supporters last month, has been hailing Senators who come out in opposition.

Read more>>

Nice piece by Sean Malone from The Daily Caller:

Should copyright laws exist at all?

Whenever politicians get especially excited in naming a piece of legislation, it’s a pretty safe bet that the bill will do the opposite of whatever the name says.

With a bill as gratuitously titled as the “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act” (otherwise known as PIPA), you can be certain that the only “economic creativity” being protected here is that of the special interests pushing the bill.

In this case, the special interests behind PIPA, and the equally disturbing “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA), are mostly media and entertainment industry giants like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.

But contrary to the industry claims, these bills do nothing to protect artists and creators like me and actually make it harder for us to innovate and generate new works.

I’ve spent my entire adult life in the media and entertainment industries — as a composer and musician, as a writer and as a video producer. Yet every year as I see more and more examples of cronyism where big media companies work with politicians to squash small producers and consumer freedoms, I grow increasingly skeptical of the very idea of “intellectual property.”

Copyright and patent protections and anti-piracy laws are always couched in language of property rights and fighting “theft.” As a libertarian working in the field of libertarian activism, it’s probably fair to say that no one believes in private property rights more than I do. But there are two big problems with this framework when applied to IP.

First, copying isn’t theft. If I steal your bicycle, the harm done to you is not that I now have a bicycle to ride, but that you don’t and all the time you took working to earn money to acquire that bicycle is gone too. But if I copy your bicycle, we both have something to ride.

In economic terms, copying increases the supply of a good that’s available to consumers whereas theft is only redistributive. That’s a big distinction conveniently glossed over by the IP laws’ supporters, who generally want you to believe that copying an MP3 and stealing a CD are the same thing.

The second major problem is that you can’t actually “own” an idea unless it stays in your head.

The minute you share an idea with anyone, it’s no longer “yours” in any meaningful sense. Ideas replicate, mutate and evolve when they’re shared from one person to the next. This is what Matt Ridley (author of “The Rational Optimist”) calls “ideas having sex,” and this is exactly what has taken human culture and material wealth out of the Stone Age and produced the amazing standards of living we all enjoy today. New ideas in art, music, science and technology — or in any other field — don’t come fully formed out of nothing; they’re incrementally built on the shoulders of previous inventors and creators.

So when you try to stop people from sharing ideas (which is exactly what SOPA and PIPA would do), you’re putting a damper on the spontaneously ordered innovation that will make our lives even better in the future.

You’re also setting up incentives for some creators to spend more time and money suing people ($31 billion a year, according to Stephan Kinsella) than they spend producing better-quality products. In this way IP law stifles creativity and keeps potential innovators chained down.

If you want an example of this, go check out “Beauty and the Beast in 3D,” which is in theaters now.

Sean W. Malone produces media for a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. and for his own company, CitizenA Media. All opinions expressed are his own.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/18/should-copyright-laws-exist-at-all/#ixzz1jrtzdYVb

Against Intellectual Property

It seems like the Internet is up in arms today, protesting SOPA and PIPA.  Wikipedia is going on a 24-hour blackout, and even WordPress here seems to have put up “censored” versions of peoples’ blogs.  I’m all for it, frankly.  Protest the heck out of this thing.  I can’t decide whether or not SOPA/PIPA is really about intellectual property issues, or whether it’s about control.  I suspect the latter, but the government seems to be touting it as a blow in favor of the former.  I thought you all might appreciate a post on intellectual property and why it might not be such a great idea, given the current goings-on.

Most all libertarians espouse a firm belief in property rights.  Libertarianism is firmly rooted in property rights, in fact.  Property rights, according to the core libertarian ideals, include tangible things, such as security of your person, your home, your land, your car, etc.  Intellectual property rights include the rights to intangible things.  According to author Stephan Kinsella, these are divided into ideas expressed as copyrights or as patents, which represent practical implementation.  So what’s wrong with protecting your ideas?  Don’t you have the right to do that?  Not every libertarian might agree on this point, but I am here today to argue against intellectual property and therefore the foundations upon which the government is trying to control portions of the Internet.

Copyright comes into effect the minute something is put onto a tangible item, such a book, movie, or script.  The copyright lasts for the duration of the author’s life, plus seventy years after his/her death.  In the case of an employer owning the copyright, it would last an additional ninety-five years.  (I have no idea why it would last longer in the latter case.)  Patents are property rights on inventions, and they will typically grant the individual who owns them a limited monopoly on manufacture, use, and sale of the item in question.  Interestingly, according to Kinsella, the patent actually only grants rights of exclusion and doesn’t actually grant the patentee the right to use the invention. Patents last twenty years from the date of the original filing.  Things such as “natural phenomena,” “laws of nature,” and “abstract ideas” may not be patented, though why people honestly need the Supreme Court to tell them this is beyond me.  Patents can be disadvantageous to trade secret holders, since a person or company that independently discovers a trade secret held by another person or company can patent it and exclude the other from using it.

Trademarks differ from the two forms of IP mentioned above in that they use a symbol, word, or phrase to identify the company.  For example, the “half-eaten fruit,” as my husband calls it, has become a well-known symbol for Apple computers.  Trademark basically prevents rival companies from copying identifying symbols of another company and attempting to pass it off as their own.  A good example of trademark infringement might be seen at the cheap Asian markets I like to frequent, where guys and gals can buy any number of knockoff designer items that range from ridiculous to excellent in quality.  Though they weren’t made by Louis Vuitton or Chanel, they do a pretty darn good job of looking the part, but they weren’t manufactured by the actual company.

In any case, intellectual property rests on the notion that not only does the creator own the idea, but they also own the tangible forms of the idea.  Kinsella provides a novel as an example.  The author holds the copyright to the novel and everything contained in every printing of the book.  (Hence the word “copyright.”)  That means that even if another person buys a copy of the book, they don’t own the novel – the pattern of words – contained therein, and they have no right to copy any part of that book using their own computer, pen, paper, etc.

There are a lot of ways that libertarians could choose to look at intellectual property.  The first is from the perspective of natural rights.  Simply put, a person subscribing to this system would believe that because a person owns his body and the instruments used to create the idea, that the idea is his.  He/She would be entitled to own their own creations.  That seems reasonable enough.

The utilitarian ideal sets forth the supposition that it creates more wealth or utility to have IP laws.  More creative, artistic endeavors lead to more wealth.  It also states that if there are no copyright laws, there are fewer profits reaped, and therefore it is beneficial to have IP laws.  Utilitarians will usually hold that restricting an individual’s complete freedom to do with his property has he wants is justifiable because of the wealth created by preventing him from exercising his will.

Kinsella argues that this is faulty reasoning.  One could redistribute part of group A’s wealth to group B and argue that the net wealth increases, though this would not actually be the case.  The amount of wealth is the same, but it is merely being stolen from group A and given to group B.  Nothing about this transaction implies the creation of greater wealth.  Kinsella further argues that the goal of law of not wealth maximization but rather justice – “giving each man his due.”  That means that wealth generation does not give a moral pass to limitation of personal rights.

The most important thing to consider, though, from a utilitarian standpoint, is whether or not IP actually provides a net increase in wealth.  Are patents and copyrights really necessary to foster innovation and creativity?  Do the immense costs of implementing IP law outweigh the comparatively marginal cost of innovation?  Is is possible that companies would have a greater incentive to innovate without twenty years’ reliance on patents?  What if companies had to constantly continue improving their products in order to stay on top of the market?  Would consumers lose out in such a situation?

Economically speaking, it has never been proven that IP laws result in net gains in wealth.  What we do know for certain is that companies and individuals seeking copyrights, patents, and trademarks must spend an awful lot of money employing lawyers to navigate the often murky waters of IP law.  Could this money not ultimately be put to better use in R&D.  In any case, it is unsound to argue that increasing wealth is a legitimate reason for depriving others of their rights.

If you look at Rand’s take on natural rights, she essentially cosigns on the idea that certain philosophical and scientific discoveries cannot be copyrighted, since certain truths have always existed, even if people don’t realize it.  She argues that only things created by the individual in question could fall under IP law.  Of course, if you take this down to its minutiae, nobody creates matter; they just manipulate it according to their will and skill.  Kinsella also presents an interesting conundrum whereby a scientist discovers a scientific theory or principle that was previously unknown to mankind.  This individual would not be rewarded for his/her creative thinking and intellectual ideas, but the engineer who uses that law to create a new invention would be.  Hmm.  Doesn’t it seem a bit silly to reward Beyonce for writing “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” but not reward Einstein the theory of relativity?

At the end of it all, we also come to the conclusion that IP laws are essentially monopoly grants.  My husband made the point to me that IP laws protect the “little guy” from big competition, but I argue the opposite.  In fact, IP laws create barriers to entering the competitive market.  For example, if a young entrepreneur/inventor comes up with an idea, it would be relatively simple for big business to copy it.  Big businesses know this and do it.  The fact of the matter is that they can claim that they invented it first, and they have the resources to drain the inventor in an IP suit.  This effectively eliminates the competition, for the big business in question doesn’t even have to win the case; they merely have to wait until the little guy runs out of cash to fight the legal battle.

You can continue by pointing out that a big business could steal the idea once the idea has been presented to them by an inventor.  Kinsella has argued that this can be solved with non-disclosure agreements.  I am not a lawyer, but I can see how the same issue might come into play, at this point: if the entrepreneur sues the big company, the company is able to win by playing the waiting game.  I would certainly welcome further thoughts and comments on this end of the subject, since I haven’t come up with what I would consider to be a final and useful answer on this matter.

However, all things considered, at the end of the day, the cross-licensing and defensive patenting that is rampant in business today effectively amounts to serious barriers to entry for potentially budding companies.  It has come to the point that, because businesses are so happy to suit for infringements on their IP, that other businesses will actually file “defensive patents” to keep the lawsuits at bay.  Nobody really profits from this except lawyers and government – the lawyers because they are garnering outlandish fees and the government because it is revenue that doesn’t come from taxation.

Let’s take a look at the situation with SOPA/PIPA.  The government has created this intellectual property legislation to prevent people from downloading music, movies, etc. for free on the Internet.  It would effectively give the government the ability to shut down unwanted sites that allow pirating.  There are several points to make about why this legislation is misguided.

The first is that it will not solve the problem.  Firefox is already talking about making a SOPA-proof platform.  Basically, the software developers will write into the code a way to avoid SOPA software detection.  It will contact the website via an offshore server – in Europe, Asia, Australia, or wherever – and users will automatically be redirected to that website.

The second problem is that this act is essentially propping up an outdated business model.  The entertainment industry has been lobbying hard for Washington to do something about all this pirating.  What the industry doesn’t seem to realize is that the people who pirate files online also tend to buy more of these same music or movie files than those who don’t pirate the files.  Another flaw in this thinking is assuming that those who pirated, say, a movie file would have bought the movie, were it not for pirating.  This is hardly a foregone conclusion.  When the entertainment industry argues that they are losing money, they are making an assumption that may not, in fact, be true.  I have some friends who rip movies and shows, and let me tell you, I haven’t run out and bought a single one of those TV shows or movies.  Not a one.  Why?  Simple.  They weren’t entertaining, and I wouldn’t pay money for them.  Does it really make sense, from a free market standpoint, to prop up entertainers, music, and shows that suck?

The final issue that is quite interesting is the potential of this act to create a black market for Internet rips.  Look at the drug war and the black market for drugs in America today.  Making drugs illegal has done nothing more than lead to extremely high prices for black market drugs, which in turn leads to massive drug-related violence, both in the US and south of the border.  I’m not saying that violence would be the ultimate result in this case, but it certainly has the potential to increase profits for purveyors of the desired good – that is, free music, movies, books, etc.

One last point that I might make is that, for the music industry, most of the profits are made on tours, anyway.  Most of it is made from things like merchandise sales.  Besides that, for struggling artists and those looking to enter the marketplace, free downloads are a great way to get their music heard.  I will honestly admit that if I hear something I genuinely enjoy, I don’t mind paying for it.  I want to see my favorite artists succeed.

Ultimately, I see SOPA/PIPA has yet more government regulation that we don’t need.  It will harass the people who least deserve it, and will fail to meet its supposed goals.  Besides that, I just can’t get behind intellectual property, at least not 100%.  You be the judge, but speaking for myself, I believe that we stand to benefit the most from a free exchange of ideas, and it would pain me to see the Internet falling under government control.  I love the Internet if for no other reason than there is a vast amount of information and ideas available right at my fingertips, and that is something that is truly incredible about this point in history.  I would hate to see the government attempting to turn back the clock on so great an innovation.

If you are interested in reading and hearing more from Stephan Kinsella on intellectual property law, check out these links:

How to Slow Economic Progress
SOPA, Piracy, Censorship, and the End of the Internet? – Freedomain Radio w/ Stephan Kinsella
The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide
The Fight Against Intellectual Property
Against Intellectual Property (PDF)

From The Pirate Bay:

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations – it’s all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition. We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe – but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world – because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

… by endorsing federal law and policy that takes works already in the public domain and subjects them anew to copyright restrictions…. This is the real piracy.

Update: see also Supreme Court Says Congress May Re-Copyright Public Domain Works.

From a Mike Masnick Techdirt post:

Supreme Court Chooses SOPA/PIPA Protest Day To Give A Giant Middle Finger To The Public Domain

from the ridiculous dept

We’ve been talking about the Golan case, and its possible impact on culture, for years. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s the third in a line of cases, starting with the Eldred case, to challenge aspects of copyright law as violating the First Amendment. The key point in the case was questioning whether or not the US could take works out of the public domain and put them under copyright. The US had argued it needed to do this under a trade agreement to make other countries respect our copyrights. Of course, for those who were making use of those public domain works, it sure seemed like a way to unfairly lock up works that belonged to the public. It was difficult to see how retroactively taking works out of the public domain could fit into the traditional contours of copyright law… but today, on the day of the big SOPA/PIPA protests…that’s exactly what happened (pdf).

The ruling is ridiculously depressing. The Justices basically just keep repeating the mantra they first set forth in Eldred, that as long as Congress says it’s okay — and that the “fair use” and the “idea/expression” dichotomy remain — all is just dandy. They also claim that since the very first copyright law took works from the public domain and gave them copyright protection, clearly there’s nothing wrong with removing works from the public domain. This decision reinforces why the Eldred decision was a complete disaster, and just keeps getting worse. The Eldred ruling basically ignored the fact that copyright had changed entirely in a way that went against the First Amendment… by retroactively granting copyright extension. Now that ruling is being used to take works out of the public domain as well.

First, as with Eldred (and the second case in the trilogy, the Kahle case), I believe that the Court is greatly mistaken in its analysis of copyright law. First it claims that there’s little fight between copyright and the First Amendment because the two things were put in place at about the same time. That’s a specious argument for a variety of reasons. First, the original copyright law was significantly limited in a way that it was unlikely to really come into conflict with the First Amendment. It was limited to just a few specific areas, and for a very short period of time. It’s only now that (1) copyright law has been totally flipped to make just about everything you create covered by copyright, (2) the law has been massively expanded in time and (3) changes in technology make us all create tons of “copyrighted” material all the time — things have changed an entirely. It’s hard to see how the Court can reasonably argue that the traditional contours of copyright law have not changed… but that’s exactly what it does. Stunningly, the majority decision here, written by Justice Ginsburg, seems to suggest that there’s no First Amendment issue here, because if people want to make use of the works that were previously, but are no longer, in the public domain, they can just buy those rights:

But Congress has not put petitioners in this bind. The question here, as in Eldred, is whether would-be users must pay for their desired use of the author’s expression, or else limit their exploitation to “fair use” of that work. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf could once be performed free of charge; after §514 the right to perform it must be obtained in the marketplace.

It’s a really frustrating decision, because it appears to lack any recognition of just how much copyright law has changed and expanded. It seems to lack — as it did in Eldred — any sense of how overreaching copyright law is, in fact, stifling free expression everyday. It’s a tone deaf response to what’s actually happening.

The dissent, by Justice Breyer (with support from Alito), seems to actually understand this. The rest of the Justices (excluding Kagan, who recused herself due to her role in the case prior to joining the court) just don’t seem to want to bother to understand. The dissent, however, kicks off with a quote from Thomas Macaulay’s famous speech on the problems of copyright, noting that copyright is, by definition, “a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers.” They then note that the decision to remove works from the public domain fails to uphold the basic premise of copyright law:

The statute before us, however, does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work. By definition, it bestows monetary rewards only on owners of old works — works that have already been created and already are in the American public domain. At the same time, the statute inhibits the dissemination of those works, foreign works published abroad after 1923, of which there are many millions, including films, works of art, innumerable photographs, and, of course, books–books that (in the absence of the statute) would assume their rightful places in computer-accessible databases, spreading knowledge throughout the world.

Breyer — who has always had a much stronger grasp on copyright than his colleagues — notes that the whole point of copyright law is to encourage new works, and that the Founders themselves recognized that “monopoly is a two-edged sword, that must be wielded carefully. Breyer quotes the early words of James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, that copyright should be granted, but only “in certain cases…. with caution and guarded with strictness agst abuse” and solely such that it acts as “compensation for a benefit actually gained to the community… which the owner might otherwise withhold from public use.”

How taking works out of the public domain accomplishes that goal mystifies Breyer (and me and many others).

Separately, he notes that Congress and the Court have both made it clear in the past that copyright is for the benefit of the public, and not solely to grant rights to authors. The granting of monopolies to authors is the method by which the public might benefit, but not the purpose of copyright law. Retroactively seizing works out of the public domain does not benefit the public. And thus, is unconstitutional. Except… to the six justices who chose not to understand copyright law.

That the Supreme Court released this on the same day of widespread protests against overreaching copyright law is a bit of unfortunate irony. The truth is that Congress is the one who could fix this by actually fixing copyright law and making it clear that the Court’s interpretation was wrong. But, instead, because Hollywood pays the bills, they only make copyright law worse. While it’s easy to blame this ruling on the Supreme Court, it really implicates Congress. And, thus, it’s actually depressingly fitting that this ruling came out today.

Fantastic article by Chris Rawson, on TUAW:

TUAW on SOPA and PIPA: What they are and why we’re against them

by Chris Rawson Jan 18th 2012 at 9:00AM

By now, news about two bills making their way through the US legislative approval process, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), has spread like wildfire across the Internet, along with widespread criticism of both bills.

As part of that criticism, if you’re reading this on January 18, 2012 and you try to click on either of those links above, you may notice that neither of them work as expected. That’s because Wikipedia, one of the most-trafficked and most well-known sites on the Internet, has pledged to “go dark” for 24 hours in protest against both bills. If you hit Google for information on the two bills that same day, you’ll likely find that the Internet’s most popular website is also protesting the provisions in these controversial bills.

We briefly considered following suit and taking TUAW offline during the same period, but we decided that it would be better to take the opportunity to educate our readers on the implications of these two bills, and why we think they’re ill-advised.

SOPA is the US House of Representatives’ version of a bill intended to “promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.” PIPA is a broadly similar bill working its way through the US Senate, with the full title “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act.” Depending on how libertarian your mindset is, this type of phrasing either sounds perfectly innocuous or like the stamping of marching boots right outside your front window.

The intent of both bills is to crack down on illegal sharing of copyrighted media content, colloquially known as “piracy,” especially of films and music. Not coincidentally, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are the biggest supporters of both SOPA and PIPA; the MPAA in particular has issued a somewhat melodramatic response to the criticism of these bills.

PC World had a good overview of SOPA as far back as November — things move slowly in the US legislature — and Kirby Ferguson from the “Everything is a Remix” web series produced a short video, embedded below, which outlines the US Senate’s similar PROTECT-IP Act, criticizing it as a lashing out against the fundamental freedom Internet users have enjoyed since day one.

[continue reading…]

Today is a huge day, as Jeff Tucker noted in Tucker on the SOPA Protests: Blackout Wednesday: The Time Has Come. In an incredibly effective uprising against SOPA and PIPA by the tech savvy, the left, and libertarians, culminating in today’s widespread SOPA website blackouts/protests by tech and web giants, and many others, SOPA/PIPA has been at least slowed down. Mike Masnick lays out An Updated Analysis: Why SOPA & PIPA Are A Bad Idea, Dangerous & Unnecessary. And as he notes, some Congresscritters are now removing their names from PIPA and SOPA, including, Reps. Lee Terry and Ben Quayle from SOPA, and Sens. Marco Rubio, John Cornyn, John Boozman, Orrin Hatch, and Roy Blunt from PIPA. Other Congresscritters came out against it too [Update: see latest list here]. They are running scared. And many companies that were pro-SOPA or ambivalent, have shifted in a more anti-SOPA direction, like GoDaddy (when threatened by bad PR and customer outrage with possibly losing hundreds of thousands of domains) and Microsoft. Even the Obama Administration is shifting somewhat against SOPA.

Some sites are anti-SOPA but are not going dark, for well-articulated reasons. For example, TechDirt explains that its going dark would not do much good and they are instead focusing on providing anti-SOPA information, which makes perfect sense given the great anti-SOPA coverage and information they’ve been providing;¹ TUAW takes a similar approach; and AntiWar.com says it opposes SOPA but does not want to stop shining its light on the war issue.² The heroic EFF did not go dark but has tons of anti-SOPA information emblazoned on its home page, like Techdirt.  But many other sites are going dark, posting banners, etc. Following is just a smattering of them, with the big guys first:

• Wikipedia;
• Reddit;
• Google (blacked out its logo and urges we stop piracy, not liberty);
• Wired.com (with very creative redacting of words);
• Mozilla and Firefox;
• Greenpeace.org (which, like Campaign for Liberty, has a very cool blackout page);
• Mashable;
• Campaign for Liberty;
• Sites I’m affiliated with: C4SIF, StephanKinsella.com, and The Libertarian Standard;
• Mises.org;
• C4SS (Center for a Stateless Society–I’m an advisor);
• WendyMcElroy.com;
• iFeminists.com;
• QuestionCopyright;
• BoingBoing;
• Minecraft.net, whose splash page says “PIPA & SOPA? HOW ABOUT NOPA!”
• UK PC gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun;
• and many others.

Some have replaced their picture on Facebook with an anti-SOPA slogan, such as Jeff Tucker.

(BTW here’s a list of companies purportedly supporting SOPA.)

These protests are getting widespread attention, e.g. in the Washington Post (listing its five favorites), Salon and Slate.

Update: see A Gallery Of The SOPA Blackout Protest Screens

1. What We’re Doing On This PIPA/SOPA Day Of Protest: Keeping You Involved. [↩]
2. SOPA, and Why We’re Not Blacked Out. [↩]

Great post by Jeff Tucker at Laissez Faire Today (and, yes, C4SIF has joined the blackout, see Down Against SOPA: WordPress anti-SOPA plugin):

Blackout Wednesday: The Time Has Come

Jeffrey Tucker · January 17, 2012

Wikipedia, that ever-evolving monument to human collaboration in the cause of global enlightenment, goes completely black tomorrow, Wednesday, Jan. 18. The blackout is a choice, and a brilliant one, made by founder Jimmy Wales in consultation with the whole Wikipedia community. It is a protest, a statement, a symbolic warning to the world of what… read more

I just added this plugin to C4sif.org and stephankinsella.com. It will give an anti-SOPA splash page to visitors for specified upcoming days. Others are doing it, like Reddit and Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s heroic action:

English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout

To: English Wikipedia Readers and Community
From: Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director
Date: January 16, 2012

Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECTIP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.

This will be the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a decision that wasn’t lightly made. Here’s how it’s been described by the three Wikipedia administrators who formally facilitated the community’s discussion. From the public statement, signed by User:NuclearWarfare, User:Risker and User:Billinghurst:

It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.

Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a “blackout” of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.

On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States. The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. We also noted that roughly 55% of those supporting a blackout preferred that it be a global one, with many pointing to concerns about similar legislation in other nations.

In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That’s a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them.

But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

The decision to shut down the English Wikipedia wasn’t made by me; it was made by editors, through a consensus decision-making process. But I support it.

Like Kat and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation Board, I have increasingly begun to think of Wikipedia’s public voice, and the goodwill people have for Wikipedia, as a resource that wants to be used for the benefit of the public. Readers trust Wikipedia because they know that despite its faults, Wikipedia’s heart is in the right place. It’s not aiming to monetize their eyeballs or make them believe some particular thing, or sell them a product. Wikipedia has no hidden agenda: it just wants to be helpful.

That’s less true of other sites. Most are commercially motivated: their purpose is to make money. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a desire to make the world a better place—many do!—but it does mean that their positions and actions need to be understood in the context of conflicting interests.

My hope is that when Wikipedia shuts down on January 18, people will understand that we’re doing it for our readers. We support everyone’s right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression. We think everyone should have access to educational material on a wide range of subjects, even if they can’t pay for it. We believe in a free and open Internet where information can be shared without impediment. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA—and PIPA, and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States—don’t advance the interests of the general public. You can read a very good list of reasons to oppose SOPA and PIPA here, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Why is this a global action, rather than US-only? And why now, if some American legislators appear to be in tactical retreat on SOPA?

The reality is that we don’t think SOPA is going away, and PIPA is still quite active. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation seeking to regulate the Internet in other ways while hurting our online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone.

  Make your voice heard!

On January 18, we hope you’ll agree with us, and will do what you can to make your own voice heard.

Sue Gardner,
Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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Great post from Whiskey and Gunpowder:

SOPA Dead On Arrival

Amid significant pressure from tens of thousands of Internet users and major Web behemoths like Google, Facebook and Reddit, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is, in its current form, dead on arrival:

“Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s a lot less to worry about.

“The first sign that the bills’ prospects were dwindling came Friday, when SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy.

“The legislation ran into an even more significant problem yesterday when the White House announced its opposition to the bills. Though the administration’s chief technology officials acknowledged the problem of online privacy, the White House statement presented a fairly detailed critique of the measures and concluded, ‘We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.’ It added that any proposed legislation ‘must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet.’

“Though the administration did issue a formal veto threat, the White House’s opposition signaled the end of these bills, at least in their current form.

“A few hours later, Congress shelved SOPA, putting off action on the bill indefinitely.

“Sourced from Washington Monthly via The Daily Sheeple“

Sponsored primarily by purported free speech advocates that include Democrats and Republicans alike, the SOPA would have fundamentally transformed the Internet as we know it today. As Daisy Luther writes at Inalienably Yours, the bill was nothing short of a direct attack against the First Amendment and the right to free speech:

“On closer inspection, the legalese in the bill has the potential to eviscerate free speech…and like NDAA, without proof…only with suspicion of ‘wrongdoing.’ It’s all about copyright infringement. If you tick off the powers that be, and you’ve quoted someone, somewhere, saying something, you may have infringed on their copyright. As a defendant, you are not even present at the legal proceeding, allowing ‘them’ to shut you down until you prove yourself innocent.

“How do they shut you down? Search engines are required to remove you from their listings. Internet service providers can be ordered to block access to your site. Advertising networks and payment providers can also be forced to cease doing business with you. This continues until you are proven INNOCENT. Wait — I thought it was innocent until proven guilty…oh…that was ‘before’ the NDAA.

“Source: ‘The Internet: The Last Bastion of Free Speech’”

While this bill of goods was being sold to the American public as a way to reduce online piracy originating on foreign shores, in essence, the legislation would have made it possible for any organization (with the financial assets and access to attorneys to do so) to target websites (foreign or domestic) using excerpts, quotes and videos without express permission of the authors or producers of such content. Furthermore, any website linking to suspected copyrighted content would be guilty by association for facilitating the infringement.

By linking to and excerpting Daisy’s article above, for example, this particular website — and anyone who republishes this article, excerpts it or pulls a link from it — could be shut down on the service provider level until such time they prove their innocence. (*Note to DHS, et al.: Daisy has given us permission to reprint her article or portions of it, and the excerpt from Washington Monthly has been reprinted under fair use to advance understanding of this political and Constitutional issue.*)

The scariest part of the legislation, as Daisy points out above, is that due process would have been eliminated (just like in the NDAA), forcing Internet providers, search engines and ad networks to simply shut down a website(s) based on just the complainant’s accusations, leaving those website owners who were shut down to deal with the fallout with costly legal expenses and lengthy court battles.

You may recall that in 2010, the government shut down 73,000 websites in exactly this manner. Though the owners of the majority of the targeted sites were not technically infringing copyrights, some were linking to other sites that did, making them accessories.

Even more alarming is the ability, under legislation such as SOPA, of the government to control the flow of information across major Internet providers. Articles or videos criticizing political figures or policies could easily be targeted, as they were in October of this year, when the government moved to shut down rogue publishers of critical content .

As I’ve said before: “Make no mistake, this is a thinly veiled attack not on pirates (because laws for this kind of activity already exist, whether on the Internet or offline), but alternative news media and controversial online communities. When there existed only three ‘news’ channels and a handful of influential print newspapers, the message could be easily controlled and repeated to the masses. With the advent of alternative media in the last decade, those who would rule us no longer have the ability to control the message. And this scares them.”

What it boils down to is that SOPA was an attempt to put the power of information back in the hands of an elite few who are rapidly losing the ability to control what the masses are reading, hearing and seeing. Alternative news and “extremist” information were the targets (and still are).

While we applaud President Obama (yes, we agree with him on this move) for formally issuing a veto threat, we remain skeptical of his motivations. This being an election year, the last thing the President needs to be dealing with along with the economic crisis and tensions in the Middle East is the protests of millions of voters who would have undoubtedly taken to the streets when access to their favorite web sites like YouTube, Google, Facebook and Twitter was shut down because of alleged SOPA violations.

Moreover, we aren’t one bit convinced that this veto was done in the interests of free expression, as the administration may claim. In November, the president issued a similar veto threat about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows for the detention of American citizens determined to be threats to national security and public safety on the domestic (U.S.) battlefront. He flip-flopped on the issue just a couple of weeks later, and signed the bill into law over New Year’s weekend to complete silence from the mainstream media.

It is our view that SOPA, in one form or another, will return with a vengeance.

Regards,

Mac Slavo

SHTFPlan

Someone forwarded to me this speech by Manuel Barkhau, presented May 23, 2010 at the SIGINT 2010 Chaos Computer Club [CCC]. It’s in German so I can’t follow it, but it appears to be a criticism of natural law defenses of intellectual property, based on work by me and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Update: I contacted the Barkhau on facebook, and he said:

there is no English version, but the talk is based mostly on the argumentation ethics of Hoppe, followed by some examples to illustrate how wide ranging it is, including abortion, draft and of course your arguments against intellectual property.

Since this is a laymen audience as far as philosophy is concerned, I also spend some time on the difference between positive and natural rights and the purpose of rights as rules to avoid conflict.

The associated website is http://imaginäreseigentum.de/