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TorrentFreak: 2011: Piracy Wars and Internet Censorship

by Stephan Kinsella on December 31, 2011

Nice post from TorrentFreak detailing the ratcheting up of censorship in 2011 in the name of copyright:

2011: Piracy Wars and Internet Censorship

Looking back at the past 12 months it’s fair to conclude that 2011 was the year that the entertainment industries focused on piracy-fueled Internet censorship. Domain seizures, DNS blockades, raids and arrests dominated the news, and the threat of the SOPA and PIPA bills in the US left millions of Internet users worried. Let’s see how events unfolded.

At the end of the year when new developments draw to a close, it’s time to take a look back and take stock. Below is our overview of some of the most interesting events we reported during the first half of 2011.

Take a deep breath…

January

After pressure from the entertainment industries, Google started to censor piracy-related keywords from its instant and autocomplete services. Keywords such as ‘torrent,’ ‘BitTorrent’ and ‘RapidShare’ were excluded from the start, and later in the year Google added a wide range of new terms including ‘The Pirate Bay.’

Despite these efforts the RIAA remained dissatisfied, patronizing the search engine with a could-do-much-better “Report Card” in December.

The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that entered the US during 2010 reached a new milestone in 2011 with the 100,000th person being sued for alleged copyright infringement. In January alone several prominent lawsuits were added. Anime distributor Funimation announced a lawsuit against 1337 alleged BitTorrent downloaders, and the rights holders of “The Expendables” and Paris Hilton sex tape did the same.

One alleged BitTorrent user paid a mysterious settlement of $250,000.

There was also positive news from the UK, when so-called Speculative Invoicing schemes there came to an end, at least for a few months. ACS:Law, the law firm that had terrorized untold thousands of alleged file-sharers in the UK, quit the anti-piracy business and went into bankruptcy a while later. ACS:Law’s Andrew Crossley was honored with the title of “Internet Villain” of the year and will now face the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal in early 2012.

Two lawyers who were responsible for introducing Speculative Invoicing to the UK were fined and banned from practicing for 3 months. David Gore and former partner Brian Miller of the law firm Davenport Lyons were each told to pay a £20,000 fine and interim costs of £150,000 for their professional misconduct.

Meanwhile, RapidShare and Megaupload fought back against entertainment industry propaganda.

Why We Must Stop SOPA

by Stephan Kinsella on December 30, 2011

From LewRockwell.com, regarding the hideous, evil Stop Online Piracy Act, aka SOPA. The article’s only shortcoming is its failure to identify and condemn the root cause of the steam behind SOPA: the idea of copyright, that copyright is legitimate. Once the idea of copyright is accepted as legitimate, then copying, using information–learning, emulating, remixing, competing–becomes thought of as a tort or crime. The word “piracy” is used to condemn what is a peaceful activity. This gives the state the excuse to increase the surveillance state in order to stop “crime.” The problem is not SOPA. The problem is copyright. If you accept the logic behind copyright, your only opposition to measures like SOPA is the tepid complaint that the anti-piracy measures go “too far.” You end up buying into the unprincipled, utilitarian logic of the state, where freedom of communication has to be balanced against–and sacrificed for–“security” of private property rights (copyright). The only meaningful way to oppose police state-supporting measures like SOPA is to oppose copyright, loudly and clearly.

Here’s the LRC blurbl and post:

Stop SOPA Now
The end of free speech on the internet is the dream of every tyrannical government on earth, including ours.

Why We Must Stop SOPA

End of the American Dream

Right now, there are two pieces of legislation in Congress that would change the Internet forever if they are enacted. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) would give the federal government the ability to potentially shut down millions of websites. SOPA (the version being considered in the U.S. House of Representatives) is the more dangerous of the two. It would essentially be the equivalent of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the Internet. It would give government officials unlimited power to very rapidly shut down any website that is found to “engage in, enable or facilitate” copyright infringement. That language is very broad and very vague. Many fear that it will be used to shut down any websites that even inadvertently link to “infringing material”. Can you imagine a world where there is no more Facebook, Twitter or YouTube? Sites like those would be forced to hire thousands of Internet censors to make sure that no “infringing material” is posted, and many prominent websites may simply decide that allowing users to post content is no longer profitable and is just not worth the hassle. Are you starting to get the picture? That is why we must stop SOPA. If SOPA is enacted, it could be the death of the free Internet.

But this is exactly the kind of bill that the establishment media has been waiting for. It would give them back control. SOPA is being heavily promoted by big media corporations. If they are able to shut down free speech on the Internet, then suddenly everyone would be forced to rely on them for news and entertainment once again.

That is why SOPA and PIPA must be stopped. A recent editorial in the New York Times described how these new laws would work….

The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright – a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification. The intention is not the same as China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar.

Everyone would be deathly scared of allowing anything to be posted on their websites in such an environment. Free speech on the Internet would be a thing of the past.

Read more>>

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How Frustration with Marconi’s Patents Led to One of the World’s First Hackers

by Stephan Kinsella on December 28, 2011

From NewScientist: Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz. Explains how, “A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi’s wireless telegraph”. This was “Nevil Maskelyne, a mustachioed 39-year-old British music hall magician,” whose “ambitions were frustrated by Marconi’s broad patents, leaving him embittered towards the Italian” Marconi.

[h/t Brian Martinez]

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Great Overview of the Problems with SOPA by Cory Doctorow

by Stephan Kinsella on December 25, 2011

Sci-fi author Cory Doctorow has a great summary of the problems with the hideous, evil Stop Online Piracy Act, aka SOPA, in a column on Publisher’s Weekly:

Copyrights vs. Human Rights
By Cory Doctorow
Dec 02, 2011

December 10 is Human Rights Day, as designated by the U.N. General Assembly and observed all over the world. In honor of the occasion, I want to address the human rights implications associated with something central to all of us in the publishing industry: copyright policy.

For human rights, 2011 has been a tumultuous year. It is the year of the Arab Spring and the “Occupy” movements. It’s also been a year of atrocities

and shameful exercices of power, from Tahrir Square, Syria, and Libya to UC Davis, Berkeley, and the Brooklyn Bridge. It is also the year that saw the introduction of SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act), a bill recently introduced by representatives Lamar Smith (R-Tex.); John Conyers (D-Mich.); Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.); and Howard Berman (D-Calif.).

SOPA has the support of the American Association of Publishers, along with many of its member companies, including my own publishers. And despite an outpouring of public opposition, the bill is being fast-tracked to pass before Christmas. For a Congress that can’t seem to come together to pass anything, passage of SOPA seems entirely possible. The list of those invited to testify at the bill’s recent hearing comprised, almost entirely, supporters, mostly representatives from the so-called “creative industries,” like the Motion Picture Association of America.

SOPA’s opponents, however, call the bill “the worst Internet law in American legislative history,” and it has drawn condemnation from human rights organizations across the U.S. and around the world.

If the fights of 2011 have shown us anything, it’s that the Internet and the quest for human rights are inextricably linked. The Internet is where human rights fights are rescued from obscurity and brought to the world’s attention—whether Ustreams of Occupy protestors being forcibly evicted, Lt. John Pike’s pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis, or YouTube footage of Tahrir Square or the Syrian protests. Yet even as America’s leaders chastise their foreign counterparts for censoring the Internet, with SOPA they are laying the groundwork for an expansive, copyright-based regime of domestic censorship.

Censorship

What’s wrong with SOPA? For starters, SOPA would create a new standard for “intermediary liability,” in other words, liability borne by companies and entities that are in the chain between someone accused of violating copyright and the audiences, such as Web hosts, payment processors, and operators of technical infrastructure, like the Domain Name System. Under SOPA, these intermediaries could be ordered to censor or block access to, and funding for, any site accused of copyright infringement, without due process, without a jury or the right to rebut accusations.

Such orders would emanate from the State Department, which would be vested with new power to demand Web sites be delisted from domain name servers, the millions of servers that translate human readable addresses (like www.thepiratebay.org) into machine-readable numerical ones like 194.71.107.15). It could also demand that payment processors cut off access to funds for these sites and demand that advertisers and ad brokers sever ties with the accused. And finally, these addresses would be added to a new national “firewall”—similar to the ones used in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China—a filter that would censor the Internet and prevent American citizens from accessing files that no court has found to be unlawful.

But SOPA doesn’t just arrogate these unconstitutional powers for government—it hands them over to entertainment giants. Through a misleadingly named “market-based” system, SOPA would allow private entities to produce enemies lists of sites that offend them, and to give these lists to DNS providers, ISPs, payment processors, and ad brokers, who would then be required to remove the accused sites within five days. It also encourages payment processors to engage in self-censorship, by pre-emptively severing ties with firms they believe are likely to cause a complaint, before any such complaint is received.

As bad as this is, it gets worse: SOPA would also expand the definition of copyright infringement to include hosting a single link to a site that is alleged to contain infringing material. Thus, if an author’s blog, or a book discussion group, attracts a single post that contains a single link that goes to a site that someone accuses of copyright infringement, that site becomes one with the alleged infringer, and faces all the same sanctions—without any proof required, or due process.

Infographic: What is the Stop Online Piracy Act, and why should I care?

by Stephan Kinsella on December 25, 2011

Great infographic explaining the hideous, evil Stop Online Piracy Act, aka SOPA, linked in a post at The Sociable.

h/t Denise Howell @ TWiL 146.

Other charts and graphics at Intellectual Property Charts, Graphs, Graphics, Diagrams.

Behind SOPA: What It Means for Business and Innovation

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Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics: Audio and Slides

by Stephan Kinsella on December 25, 2011

Updated: KOL172 | “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics: Lecture 1: History and Law” (Mises Academy, 2011)

From my Libertarian Standard post:

In late 2010 I taught my first Mises Academy course, “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics.” (Discussed on the Mises Blog in Study with Kinsella Online; Lecture 1.) I reprised the course in Spring 2011: “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics.” (Discussed in Rethinking IP; and on the Mises Blog in Study with Kinsella Online and in Rethinking Intellectual Property: Kinsella’s Mises Academy Online Course. See also “Rethinking IP,” Mises Daily (Feb. 10, 2011).)

This was a 6-week course, which provided an overview of current intellectual property law and the history and origins of IP. (In Teaching an Online Mises Academy Course, I offer my reflections on teaching the Rethinking IP class the first time.) Here is some feedback provided by past students of this course:

Capital Account: Jeffrey Tucker on how the Government is throwing us back into the Stone Age

by Stephan Kinsella on December 23, 2011

Jeff Tucker talks about SOPA on Russia Today’s Capital Account. Around 21:45 he is asked about whether there should be at least a modicum of intellectual property. “No,” is his crystal clear answer. Great interview.

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Daft Idea Of The Week: Giving People Copyright In Their Faces

by Stephan Kinsella on December 23, 2011

from Glyn Moody at Techdirt: Daft Idea Of The Week: Giving People Copyright In Their Faces. Yet another in a long line in the attempt to expand IP to new areas. Others, as I note in Types of Intellectual Property, include:

Bartenders Looking For Greater Intellectual Property Protection For Drinks
Agitation to add IP laws for fashion designs
the proposal by Hank Barry (in a recent appearance on TWiL), former CEO for Napster and now an IP lawyer, who wants to reform copyright law by adding “a right of community in works of authorship.” As he writes: “So, should an author whose work has generated substantial amounts of money as the object or locus for a community have a right to benefit from those economics, even if the economics are one step removed from the sale of a copy of the work?”

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GoDaddy Faces boycott over SOPA support

by Stephan Kinsella on December 23, 2011

GoDaddy Faces boycott over SOPA support

Update: under pressure, GoDaddy drops its support for SOPA!

See also Masnick, Breaking: GoDaddy Drops SOPA Support.

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Fun with SOPA Acronyms

by Stephan Kinsella on December 22, 2011

Regarding the evil Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, one guy suggests it stands for the Silence Opposition Permanently Act.

And some are saying the Firefox add-on “DeSopa” as “DNS Evasion to Stop Oppressive Policy in America.”

This is reminiscent of attempt to find alternative names for IP, such as “Intellectual Pooperty,” “Intellectual Poverty,” “Imaginary Property,” “Innovation Privileges,” “Intellectual Prohibition,” etc. And one guy, Adrian Johns, recently referred to the IP lawyers and other vested IP interests as the “Intellectual-Property Defense Industry.”

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SOPA, Piracy, Censorship and the End of the Internet? Kinsella and Stefan Molyneux on Freedomain Radio

by Stephan Kinsella on December 22, 2011

Update: See more posts on Internet freedom.

Stefan Molyneux interviewed me yesterday for his Freedomain Radio program about the evil Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. We discussed the First Amendment violations of and other problems with SOPA.

Podcast at KOL127.

p.s. it’s cool to turn the “snowflakes” feature in Youtube on.

[TLS]

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Comedian Louis C.K. Makes $1 Million Selling DRM Free Video via PayPal on his own website

by Stephan Kinsella on December 22, 2011

Louis CK’s “experiment” has gotten lots of attention.¹ It’s a good rebuttal to people who insist that without copyright you will be “unable to sell” books, music, movies, etc. What they mean to say is that you face more competition if you can’t use the state to stop your competitors, so it’s more difficult to sell. But it’s not impossible to sell.

Louis C.K. explains on his site that he made about $1M in just 12 days, by offering to sell his latest comedy show, DRM free, for $5 (I bought a copy too):

Another statement from Louis C.K. (December 21, 2011)

hi. So it’s been about 12 days since the thing started and yesterday we hit the crazy number. One million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Really too much money. I’ve never had a million dollars all of a sudden. and since we’re all sharing this experience and since it’s really your money, I wanted to let you know what I’m doing with it. People are paying attention to what’s going on with this thing. So I guess I want to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes.So I’m breaking the million into four pieces.the first 250k is going to pay back what the special cost to produce and the website to build. [continue reading…]

See my previous post Wake up, media moguls: Louis C.K. no-DRM video makes $200K; also Mike Masnick’s posts Louis CK’s ‘Experiment’ Brings In 110k Sales, $550k Gross, Over $200k Net… In Four Days; Louis CK: Connecting With Fans & Giving Them A Reason To Buy By Being Polite, Awesome & Human. Update: see also Masnick’s post Louis CK: Over $1 Million In Sales In Just 12 Days For DRM-Free Download. [↩]

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Artist Resale Royalties: Do They Help or Hurt?

by Stephan Kinsella on December 22, 2011

from Freakonomics:

Artist Resale Royalties: Do They Help or Hurt?

Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman
12/22/2011 | 12:04 pm

In America, it’s sometime said, all big trends start in California. That’s true for great things like hot tubs, the iPod, and Pinkberry. It’s also true for bad things, like tax revolts, Pinkberry, and . . . artist resale royalties.

Artist resale royalties? In a previous post, we explained how California’s law guaranteeing artists 5 percent of the profits from any later sale of their artwork has some unintended consequences. The California law helps the tiny fraction of artists fortunate enough to have their work appreciate significantly in value. But it does nothing for the 99% of artists whose work has little enduring commercial value. Not only does it not help them, it probably hurts them.

How? Because if buyers know that they have to pay the artist a share of any profits from later sales, they are likely to pay less in the initial transaction.

SOPA is unconstitutional

by Stephan Kinsella on December 21, 2011

According to legal scholars, like Laurence Tribe, and Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post, the evil Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, violates the First Amendment by imposing prior restraint, chilling free speech, etc. Every Congresscritter who votes for this blatantly unconstitutional law is violating his obligation to uphold the Constitution and should be impeached.

And a good argument could be made that copyright itself violates the First Amendment.

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2011: Piracy Wars and Internet Censorship

January

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Why We Must Stop SOPA

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Another statement from Louis C.K. (December 21, 2011)

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Artist Resale Royalties: Do They Help or Hurt?

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