The Case for Copyright Reform

corrupt regimes today. We should learn something from that.

At the same time and by necessity, this free software makes the copyright monopoly unenforceable, as it creates the untappable, anonymous communication needed to guarantee our civil liberties. Mike Masnick of Techdirt recently noted that “piracy and freedom look remarkably similar”.

Perhaps Freenet’s policy expresses it the most clearly:

You cannot guarantee free speech and enforce the copyright monopoly. Therefore, any technology designed to guarantee freedom of speech must also prevent enforcement of the copyright monopoly.

The fights for basic freedom of speech and for defeat of the copyright monopoly are one and the same. Therefore, the revolutions will happen using tools that are not just outside the copyright monopoly, but actively defeat it. The revolution will not be properly licensed.

Internet Blocking And Censorship

“Child pornography is great,” the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. “It’s great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites.”

The venue was a seminar organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Stockholm on May 27, 2007, under the title “Sweden — A Safe Haven for Pirates?”. The speaker was Johan Schluter from the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, a lobby organization for the music and film industry associations, like IFPI and others.

We were three pirates in the audience: Christian Engstrom, Rick Falkvinge, and veteran Internet activist Oscar Swartz. Oscar wrote a column about the seminar in Computer Sweden just after it had happened. Rick blogged about it later, and so did Christian.

“One day we will have a giant filter that we develop in close co-operation with IFPI and MPA. We continuously monitor the child porn on the net, to show the politicians that filtering works. Child porn is an issue they understand,” Johan Schluter said with a grin, his whole being radiating pride and enthusiasm from the podium.

And seen from the perspective of IFPI and the rest of the copyright lobby, he of course had every reason to feel both proud and enthusiastic, after the success he had had with this strategy in Denmark.

Today, the file sharing site The Pirate Bay is blocked by all major Internet service providers in Denmark. The strategy explained by Mr. Schluter worked like clockwork.

Start with child porn, which everybody agrees is revolting, and find some politicians who want to appear like they are doing something. Never mind that the blocking as such is ridiculously easy to circumvent in less than 10 seconds. The purpose at this stage is only to get the politicians and the general public to accept the principle that censorship in the form of “filters” is okay. Once that principle has been established, it is easy to extend it to other areas, such as illegal file sharing. And once censorship of the Internet has been accepted in principle, they can start looking at ways to make it more technically difficult to circumvent.

In Sweden, the copyright lobby tried exactly the same tactic a couple of months after the seminar where Johan Schluter had been speaking. In July 2007, the Swedish police was planning to add The Pirate Bay to the Swedish list of alleged child pornography sites, that are blocked by most major Swedish ISPs.

The police made no attempt whatsoever to contact anybody from The Pirate Bay, which they of course should have done if they had actually found any links to illegal pictures of sexual child abuse. The plan was to just censor the site, and at the same time create a guilt-by-association link between file sharing and child porn.

In the Swedish case, the plan backfired when the updated censorship list was leaked before it was put into effect. After an uproar in the blogosphere, the Swedish police was eventually forced to back down from the claim that they had found illegal child abuse pictures, or had any other legal basis for censoring the file sharing site. Unlike in Denmark, The Pirate Bay is not censored in Sweden today.

But the copyright lobby never gives up. If they are unable to get what they want on the national level, they will try through the EU, and vice versa.

The big film and record companies want censorship of the net, and they are perfectly willing to cynically use child porn as an excuse to get it. All they needed was a politician who was prepared to do their bidding, without spending too much effort on checking facts, or reflecting on the wisdom of introducing censorship on the net.

Unfortunately they found one in the newly appointed Swedish EU commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom. In March 2010 she presented an EU directive to introduce filtering of the net, exactly along to the lines that Johan Schluter was advocating in his speech at the seminar in 2007. As drafted by the Commission, the directive would have forced member states to introduce blocking of sites alleged to contain child pornography.

Thanks to a lot of hard work from members of the European Parliament from several different political groups in the Committee for Fundamental Rights LIBE, the Commission’s attempt to force the member states to introduce mandatory blocking was averted. The European Parliament changed the directive to say that member states may, as opposed to shall, introduce Internet blocking, but if they do, they must make sure that the procedure follows at least some legal minimum standards, and that the person whose website blocked has a right to appeal.

Since the directive does not mandate Internet blocking on the EU level, but leaves it up to the member states, we can expect the copyright industry to intensify their efforts to introduce Internet blocking on the national level in the countries that don’t already have such systems in place. Although their real goal is to get the authorities to block sites like The Pirate Bay, the copyright industry will continue to use the child porn card wherever they judge it is too early to start talking about the censorship they really want.

But increasingly, they are beginning to feel that they no longer have to hide their real intentions. In the US, as this is being written in January 2012, Congress is debating a twin pair of laws called SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, Protect IP Act.

The idea behind SOPA and PIPA is to give US authorities the possibility to close down access to any website, hosted in any country in the world, if rights holders accuse it of infringing copyright, or “enabling or facilitating” copyright infringements. Just providing a link that “enables of facilitates” infringements can be enough to have a website shut down, or to have US credit card companies block all payments to the owner of the site. The decision will be taken by a US court, without hearing the accused party. In order to avoid being held liable themselves, Internet service providers and social platforms will have to start policing their clients and shut them off at the mere suspicion that they are doing anything that rights holders might object to.

With SOPA and PIPA, the copyright lobby is no longer using the pretext of child abuse pictures. Both laws are quite explicitly devoted to blocking sites on the net to protect holders of intellectual property rights.

Similar measures for Internet blocking are being proposed in Europe as well. UK academic Monica Horten at Iptegrity.com writes in January 2012:

The European Commission could ask ISPs to block content, and ask payment providers to withhold money on demand from rights-holders, following a policy announcement released today. The much-awaited announcement sets out EU official policy on the Internet and e-commerce. It follows a review of the E-commerce directive by the Commission.

The E-commerce directive to date has been the protector of the open Internet, notably the mere conduit