China and the MPA

This week, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) joined China and the music industry, all simultaneously making doomed efforts to stick their fingers in the digital dike. The Net has destroyed the very idea of censorship, but it looks like there are going to be some casualties before that reality sets in.

A riddle: What do China and the Motion Picture Association have in common? The answer this week: arrogance. Plus stupidity.

Both are about to learn the hard way what American educators, religious leaders, law enforcement officials - even politicians - are just beginning to figure out: The Net isn't censorable. Neither is the software that runs programs, links Web sites, plays, movies and music, stores or transmits information and ideas.

The Net is an unyielding trade-off. If you want to do business or sell things on it, you sacrifice monopoly and control, and use technology to offer choice and options. If you don't, you're heading backwards.

Both the Chinese government and the MPA have learned little from recent technological history, following in the bovine steps of the music industry, which alienated a generation of liberated music lovers by huffing and puffing but failing to slow or stop the spread of digital music technology.

Institutions both governmental and corporate that feel threatened by the Net and the Web, are developing a pattern. Rather than embrace innovative and empowering new technologies to offer consumers and citizens choice and freedom, they seek out a handful of targets to use as warnings, examples of the nasty fate that will befall transgressors.

If any approach is doomed to fail in this era, it's that one. Too bad some people will have to pay along the way, sacrifices on the altar of corporate or governmental obliviousness.

For all the media hype about technology, pornography and e-commerce, one of the most striking but still largely unrecognized legacies of the Net has been the death blow it's dealt to the very idea of censorship. One industry and institution after another - music, the law, medicine, Wall Street, academe, the media- is coming to terms with this new reality, voluntarily or otherwise.

For hundreds of years, censorship has been the primary tool by which government, monarchies, educational and religious institutions and, lately, powerful corporations, have asserted political, cultural and economic dominance. They're going to have to learn to live without it.

This week, police in Norway raided the home of Jon Johansen, a teenager, at the request of the Motion Picture Association, which has joined in the global effort to suppress certain software - in this case DVD viewing code -- deemed responsible for copyright violations and intellectual property theft (last week, the recording industry went after Mp3.com). Last month, the DVD Copyright Control Association sued 72 hackers and Web site authors for posting - or even linking to software (DeCSS) that unlocks the system for preventing illegal copying of video discs.

Johansen's arrest got widespread media coverage in America, unusual for a foreign-based copyright case. Perhaps one reason is that companies like Disney, owner of ABC News, which covered the story yesterday on television and radio, have a decidedly vested interested in publicizing the notion that music, movies and culture in general belong to private corporations, not code-writing geeks and nerds. Hackers (usually crackers) have often been singled out in this way - paraded before hordes of reporters and hauled off dramatically to jail. The authorities know they haven't got a prayer of rounding up all the alleged wrongdoers, but they can make so much noise they might fool people into thinking otherwise.

The arrest came at almost the same moment China announced restrictions on its burgeoning Net chat rooms and e-mail accounts. Ocurring continents apart, the two incidents seemed oddly connected.

The MPA - along with the music industry, one of the world's largest cartels outside of Columbia -- has claimed in several legal actions that the kind of DVD-viewing software Johansen allegedly used was developed outside of the industry's monopoly, and is thus illegal. The organization particularly wants to suppress so-called reverse engineering and the public posting and sharing of DVD codes.

Governments like China are attempting a different kind of information control, an equally doomed effort to stick their fingers in the digital dike.

On Wednesday, the agency that oversees China's Internet users [http://slashdot.org/article.pl'sid=00/01/26/1254221&mode=thread] issued severe new regulations intended to control the release of "state secrets" and other unauthorized information over the Internet, one of the broadest efforts yet by a government to do what is inherently impossible: control online speech.

The Chinese government is in a classic technological quagmire, almost the same one facing the movie industry. Does it want to grow and prosper in a techno-driven, linked global economy or not? Embracing and deploying innovative new technology is essential to investment and development in the 21st Century. That puts increasing pressure on undemocratic governments, who quite correctly dread the spread of computing, e-mail and chat rooms, and on corporations, who fear the loss of profitable monopolies.

China has nearly nine million Internet users, significantly up from two million a year ago, according to a survey by the government's China Internet Information Center. But many Chinese believe the figure is dramatically higher. One computer analyst working from Hong Kong wrote earlier this year that China may actually have more than 35 million e-mail accounts. As for the world's code-sharing DVD nerds, nobody knows how many there are - but it's believed to number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

Despite Johansen's show arrest, and the imprisonment of a handful of Chinese political dissidents speaking out online, both groups are beyond conventional policing. But that doesn't mean a lot of people won't pay by being persecuted, jailed or worse before the futility of the censorship effort becomes clear.

This week's regulations in China were announced by the aptly-named State Secrecy Bureau, a murky agency which seems to be taking over efforts to control the Net and to identify and arrest users who post "illegal" information on the Web.

Does this seem vastly different from the way corporate interests around the world (for more on the issues surrounding the Johansen incident, see http://www.eff.org/ ) are seeking to curb the dissemination of software and intellectual property online? Maybe it isn't. Both corporations and government, since they can't monitor all of the many millions of offenders online, are singling out targets of opportunity. They believe they're sending miscreants a message, but instead, they appear to be alienating and enraging the next generation of consumers as well as prodding geeks and nerds to continue to develop software as a political and cultural tool.

The powerful reality is that there aren't enough cops and lawyers on the planet, not even in China, to monitor all the chat rooms and the millions of e-mail accounts. There sure aren't enough to police the distribution of open source and other code like the one that runs DVD's.

Ultimately, such regulations are utterly doomed, as are efforts to restrict source codes for DVD players or the transmission of music and information online.

But before China and the MPA learn this inevitable lesson, an indeterminate number of victims will be snared and made examples of. As futile and sometimes tragic as these persecutions are, these people will pay the price for the growing freedom everyone else is enjoying.

Comments

don't forget australia

[DjReagan]

Australia too has started actively attempting to censor the internet this month. The Online Services Amendment to the Broadcast Services Act came into efect on Jan 1.

So far, the Australian Broadcasting Authority has issue a couple of "Takedown Notices" to certain websites hosting prohibited content. Each of those sites was back up again running from an offshore host server within hours.

Electronic Frontiers Australia has more details..
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You got it wrong this time

[arivanov]

Both are about to learn the hard way what American educators, religious leaders, law enforcement officials - even politicians - are just beginning to figure out: The Net isn't censorable. Neither is the software that runs programs, links Web sites, plays, movies and music, stores or transmits information and ideas.

I wish you to be right. But I think you are wrong. Neither the politicians, nor the leaders had the resources behind them MPAA has. They had to push questionable laws and usually they failed (Australia being a noteable exemption). The difference in this case is:

The law (MCPA) has already been pushed and quite a few previous laws exist.

These people do not need to finance a media campaign to promote their cause. And they can promote it at no extra expense. As I said in one of the previous threads on the topic they can lie as much as they wish and there is nobody to oppose them with an equivalent amount of firepower. Quoting myself from a previous thread:

• A LIE REPEATED ONE HUNDRED TIMES BECOMES THE ULTIMATE TRUTH.

  Gobels

  Repeat after me: "encrypted DVD cannot be copied" - exempt from the presentation of MPAA for the preliminary injuction in New York. The transcript is at:2600.com - one of the sites hit with injunction. The quote is located in the very beginning.

  Presenting it here once again for sake of paranoia (who knows what will they try to injunct next time, the truth maybe):

  MR. GOLD: Now, before plaintiffs were willing to make DVDs available, they decided that they had to have an encryption technology so that the content and their copyright interest in the content could be protected, something that would scramble the picture and scramble the sound. And that system was created, and it is called CSS, which stands for content scrambling system. And you can't watch a movie unless you have an authorized DVD player, and the authorized DVD player has the computer key to the program. So with a DVD and an authorized player, the authorized player will unscramble the picture and the sound and you can watch your movie. But you can't copy it. The CSS technology prevents that.

Yeah, right, not like I can copy the entire DVD bit by bit encrypted, make a 100000 copies and sell them...

And as you see the judge accepted this argument wholehartedly and put the entire weight of the US law system behind it. Though the argument is a lie. One that has been repeated 100 times so far and shall be repeated until Gobels holds true.

There has not been a single case when such firepower and finances have been used to make the net silent. And the chances of bringing the Net silent in this case are too high.

You also miscalculate for the fact that all those who failed before are likely to join the crusade seeing MPAA to score points aginst the net as a whole. The Net against all who want to put it under control... Well, I will make no guesses here. I doubt that the net will win so we can all go to O'Raily and by ourselfs a coopy of DataBase Nation to educate ourselves on how shall we live further on. Or a copy of 1984 for that matter.

P.S. I hope I am wrong as well... But...

Dangerous Sentiments

[Robert Wilde]

One opinion that seems to be widespread both on slashdot and among the "cyber-liberterian" community is that the Net isn't censorable or history is on or side. Sentiments along the lines of, "everything will work out, so I don't need to do anything except mirror DeCSS until I get a letter from the MPAA."

The Net not censorable? This is not the case!

Consider two stories recently from slashdot: universities around the country banning the use of Napster, and one university banning access to the webpage dialpad.com. It is only a matter of time before governments and others start seriously toying with the idea of various technical solutions to prohibit access to pornography, copyrighted materials, source code deemed illegal, whatever.

The most dangerous way to approach this threat is to assume everything will be okay. Every one who reads slashdot that lives in Norway should be writing dead-tree mail to complain about the treatment of Jon Johansen, everyone in the US should be writing congress and the press to point out that the MPAA is using the DMCA to usurp fair use rights in spite of the intent of Congress. If you live in Australia you should be writing letters every month ccomplaining about the net censorship law, if you live in Arizona you need to write your representative to complain about the propsed legislation to prohibit students from using their net access for non-educational activites.

The net hasn't "destroyed the very idea of censorship." The last thing we can afford to do is assume this. Those who value the current freedom of the net and the current freedom to code should be writing one letter at least every month to a politican or newspaper.

A message to Mr. Katz

[Munky_v2]

Last month, the DVD Copyright Control Association sued 72 hackers and Web site authors for posting - or even linking to software (DeCSS) that unlocks the system for preventing illegal copying of video discs.

This is not what CSS does, it scrambles the content from being viewed by anything but a registered player capable of returning authentication tokens back to the hardware. The wording Jon uses here implies that Jon Johansen is a Cracker that wanted to start a piracy business selling ripped DVDs. This is not the case, Mr. Johansens thoughts were somerthing like this: "I like Linux...I like DVDs...too bad I can't watch DVDs on Linux...OH! Wait. I will just reverse engineer the CSS system and make a player for Linux. HEY I DID IT. I had better tell the world." That had not intention of ripping DVDs. Please remember that the courts are going to be listening to what we say, and if we stray off and say that de_css is for ripping DVDs, were going to lose this case.


Munky_v2
"Warning: you are logged into reality as root..."