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Geographic Screening
In February, after two months of operation, the Canadian Net company iCraveTV.com shut down after being sued by the Motion Picture Association of America, the same freedom-loving folks who had a Norwegian teenager thrown in jail a few months ago for distributing DVD decryption codes.
iCraveTV's business -- legal in Canada but not in the United States -- was the redistribution of live broadcast television programming over its Web site. The MPAA sued iCraveTV in federal court because U.S. copyright laws proscribe redistribution of TV programming without first obtaining permission from the programs' owners. The MPAA suit, similar to those being filed all over the country by music industry representatives, claimed that computer users in the U.S. could circumvent iCraveTV's simple access barriers to non-Canadians.
If the company hadn't halted operations instantly, it might have been liable for hundreds of millions in damages under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, passed quietly 16 months ago and signed quickly by President Clinton. The DMCA is turning out to be the most potent weapon ever against the free spread of cultural artifacts like movies and music.
What was particularly significant though, was less the MPAA's lawsuit than iCrave's response. iCrave didn't argue the legal merits of the suit, according to Denise Caruso, writing in Monday's New York Times . Instead, the company responded by filing a series of patent claims for what it says is a new technology that could significantly affect the copyright skirmishes breaking out all over the Internet. The companies and organizations claim that they are only seeking to halt the theft and piracy of cultural properties like music and movies. Whatever their intentions, their actions threaten to permanently alter the nature of the Net itself, until now the freest culture in the information spectrum.
The company says it has developed what it calls a technological protection mechanism that locates where its customers are, permitting the site to bar anyone from viewing protected programming outside Canada. The company refused to disclose any of the technical details of this program, but Icrave President and co-founder William Craig said this new "enhanced geographic screening technology" would soon be necessary to make the Net appealing and safe for copyright holders.
"Collectively, the Internet has to evolve and adapt," Craig told the Times. "So what we're trying to do is create 'country-area-networks'where you can have a computer just serve a certain territory."
If this kind of software works and spreads, it presents a laundry list of ugly implications for the Net. This intentionally fragmented model of entertainment and content distribution -- think movie theaters, video chains and cable TV -- would transform the Net into the exact business model that has made so much money for the the entertainment industry, which is estimated to have earned more than $75 billion in revenues in l999.
Ironically, government interventions have had little effect on the free-wheeling nature and growth of the Net, but it's taken global corporations just a few short months to raise more disturbing legal, copyright and patent issues about cyberspace than had been raised in the preceding generation.
The DMCA of l998, which was passed after intense lobbying by entertainment industries (Disney, AOL/Time-Warner), has as its centerpiece an anti-circumvention provision, a new kind of liability aimed directly at information software, and which clamps down even on activities previously permitted by "fair use" provisions.
In copyright terms, "fair use" describes conditions under which someone can legally use or excerpt a copyrighted work. These might include referring to a copyrighted work but not quoting from it, using a small enough portion of a copyright work that it's considered "fair," or copying work you own.
But under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, it is now illegal to violate copyright protection technology for any reason at all. Under the law, anyone who makes, sells or uses a device -- software, hardware, or a computer -- that makes copyright circumvention possible is engaging in a criminal act. This is the reason downloading free music and sharing Napster sites had been curtailed on college campuses in recent weeks. Schools are receiving warning letters from the RIAA (the music industry association) threatening legal action under the DMCA that would hold them liable for any and all copyright infringements if they don't take steps to eliminate the transmission of copyrighted material on networks they control.
It was the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA that resulted in the arrest of 16-year-old Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager who had allegedly published code allowing the circumvention of the encryption found in DVDs, even though he wasn't intending to make illegal copies. He simply wanted to watch a movie which he owned legally but couldn't watch on his Linux laptop. Thus he was prosecuted not for pirating digital content, but rather for publishing and distributing the code that made it possible for him to view the film contained on a disk he already owned. That's an escalation of the culture wars, to say the least.
And it's not the last. "I think we want to nail them to the wall now," Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association, told reporters when the iCraveTV.com suit was filed.
The fact is, there is hardly a person reading this who isn't a criminal under the provisions of the DMCA, including me.
There are plenty of disturbing elements to the recent assaults by the movie and music industries on the cultural infrastructure of the Net, but the elimination of any kind of "fair use" -- any circumstance at all in which the making of a copy might be considered legal -- is a huge legal victory for the corporations seeking to dominate cyberspace by breaking the Net and Web into marketing territories.
If iCrave succeeds in developing, patenting and distributing technology that permits geographic screening, the Net could become a Balkanized culture, with access restricted by technologically and legally enforced roadblocks, and by geographical restrictions to content and access. The Net and its protocols were designed to be free, and this freedom has resulted in one of the greatest creative, technological and cultural outpourings in human history. For a handful of greedy corporations to turn the Net into a digital Wal-Mart is unthinkable. It is also, for the first time, not a completely impossible notion.
I have to agree... and I live in the US.
This used to be such a great country, up until about 1930. Then, THEY took over. I'm not sure if it had anything to do with the great depression or the "big crash" of 1929 or not, but that's about when everything started going to hell. Giant mega-corporations were in control of everything in the form of monopolies; US Steel, Standard Oil; Carnegie and Westinghouse and Rockefeller and a very few others. William Randolph Hearst managed to rile up so many people about marijuana that he got it illegalized rather easily. This is pretty common knowledge, but what isn't common knowledge is why. Hemp had been very very prized up to that point for its incredibly useful nature; there are World War I posters that proclaim "Hemp for victory!" to encourage people to grow hemp for fibers (rope, clothing, paper) and biomass to make fuel out of. Then Hearst came along and decided hemp was threatening his timber industry, so it had to go. THE single most useful plant on earth, and one asshole manages to destroy it in the minds of the idiot sheep of America just by spreading lies about it that nobody ever bothered to verify. It had nothing to do with its drug properties as he claimed; it had everything to do with his greed. It all goes to show that he who controls the media (Hearst was the newspaper baron at that time, controlling almost all media outlets) controls what is perceived by the sheep out there as "reality." And that's exactly what 99.999% of the population of the US is..... sheep who never do any research for themselves, preferring to let "someone else" do it so they have more time to sit on their asses watching TV and eating microwaved meals that are about as nutritious as molten wax. We as a country have lost our way and our sovreignty and our very souls to Big Business.
And this is just another prime example of the pure evil that are corporations these days. In fact, it's about the third one I've seen just this week... and it's only Wednesday. We average about one major violation of ethics, morality, law, or just plain old common courtesy per day in this country, and every time who's doing it? The RIAA. The MPAA. The CIA. The NSA. The WTO. The World Bank. The UN. One arm of the government or another. China (both in mainland China and Tibet). Everywhere you look, it's the same; mayhem and chaos propagated by the Elite Few against people without any possibility of being able to defend themselves physically, financially, spiritually, or emotionally. It's always the easy targets that get hit too; 16 year olds in Europe, small start-ups in Canada, some guy named Coolio who may or may not have been the Coolio, etc. As far as all these gluttonous companies are concerned, they take priority over us, our property, our money, our lives, our very existence... and it's just a matter of time before there's an upwelling, a rebellion, against them and their totalitarian crap.
Picture the US before it was the US. Mid-1700's. England still ruled the land with harsh, unjust taxes and imperial apathy; as long as the raw materials and other goods kept flowing from the west side of the Atlantic to the east side, England didn't care what it had to do to maintain the status quo. And what happened? People got tired of it. Sick to death of it. Back then, people weren't sheep; they were hardened veterans of life, bruised by years of labor to benefit someone they'd never even met. Bitter, resentful people. Even the landowners, the businessmen, hated England as much as the laborers. And they, being the hardened capable people that they were, did something about it, didn't they? The American Revolution was the result, and this country was wrested from England's greedy claws bit by bit until finally they couldn't hold on anymore. And here we are, 200+ years later, in exactly the same position, but under a slightly different bootheel.
What to do, what to do... Are we hardened enough to do whatever it takes to rid ourselves of the blight of corporatism in this country? Are we capable of a long protracted fight against all that is evil? After all, We the People outnumber Them, the Leashholders by about, ohhh, a million to one... the only way we can lose is by never bothering to fight. Admittedly, the way the system is set up now means that just about the only means at our disposal that would be effective are illegal by one definition or another, but... but dammit, I'm sick of being a part of a country.. nay, a species... that screws its own over just for a little more cash. I'm sick of human suffering being ignored (or even caused) by the governments of this planet. I'm sick of Big Money being the driving force behind the perpetuation of damn near everything that is wrong with the human race (organized religions being the other half of that particular equation), and I'm especially sick of feeling powerless to do anything about it. Because I, the individual, am powerless. You, the individual, whoever you are, are equally powerless. But in a more global, unified sense, just who are we?
Think about it. This is the Information Age. The entire WORLD runs on the machines that we invent, set up, operate, maintain, repair, and control. Do you think there are any chairmen of the board, or vice presidents of marketing, or deputy directors in the FBI, who know *anything* about computers, networking, the net, etc? Could your boss, even, go into a PIX firewall and re-enable port 80 so that The Roads Can Roll? Who here remembers Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"?
The more laws there are, especially laws that protect big business at the expense of the workers that (after all) support these businesses with the sweat of their brows and their proverbial strong backs, the less free we are as a people... not just America, but everywhere. And the longer we allow it to go on, the longer we're going to keep getting screwed by people like Jack Valenti (who is just a man, after all). I mean, why shouldn't we just go on letting the government put plutonium in us just to see what it does (read about it!)? Why shouldn't we let them do things like using human subjects as unwitting guinea pigs (read about it!)? Why shouldn't we.
Something has to be done... and fast, before they have obedience microchips implanted in our brains or something and we all become Financial Borg, helpless to do anything but service the collective... err, I mean, the powerholders of the world, our masters but for a little disobedience. It would be worth it just to get rid of all these insipid little animated banner ads on Slashdot and elsewhere, just sitting there sucking up my CPU and bandwidth for no reason (since I never look at them and probably nobody else on earth does now, either)...
I'll just sit here quietly now and wait for the Trilateral Commission's Black Ops Squad to come and pick me up.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Sorry, but I think this Loss-of-Freedom spiel is getting old. Yeah, this sort of thing could "balkanize" the Internet; I admit the possibility. However, in cases such as the iCraveTV suit, some sort of geographical restrictions are necessary.
The "Enter your Canadian Area Code:" prompt at iCraveTV's website was a joke. Any US retard with 5 minutes on his hands could get around this protection, and while a lot of us may like it that way, it's breaking laws. Canada may allow rebroadcasting, but the US does not.
Clearly this is going to be an issue that comes up more and more frequently in the future: How do national laws apply to an international network? There are already some precedents made, but it's obvious that we're not finished by a long shot. Until we see an international set of laws regarding internet content and liabilities, I think geographical restrictions may be the way to go.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
iCraveTV was sued in both Canadian and US courts, however it is debateable as to whether the US court has jurisdition. It could be argued that the breach of copyright occurred in the US. If iCraveTV has no exposure in the US market (no offices, US arm of the business), the courts decisions are pretty much unenforceable.
This is an aspect of US courts I have never understood - they are willing to award court decisions against foreign companies that have no chance of ever being enforced. I know of a British outdoor activities organisation that was sued in a Californian court for negligence (they 'damaged' an American tourist.) They didn't bother defending the case and the plaintiff was awarded damages of several million dollars which she has no hope of ever collecting. Why didn't the judge just say 'hey if you want to collect, sue them in an English court.'? This mentality extend even to Congress, I have a friend who was 'summoned' to testify before Congress (the German bank he works for is doing something that upsets the US government.) He told them to piss off. Still, he gets a bit nervous everytime his passport gets swiped when he lands at JFK...
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Incorrect. Think of it this way...
The main routers and backbones and pipes that connect one country to another are very controlled (like China's incoming connections). This allows them to block/filter net access at its weakest point -- the few incoming connections. But anyway, all one would have to do to figure out what country you're in is do a traceroute from you to them. If it gets routed through one of these well-known and well-controlled (sprint, mci, bbn, uunet, etc) routers, then you know what country the other end is in. Some of these main routers even have LOC records in their DNS, meaning the exact latitude and longitude of the machine is available to anyone. But remember; it isn't the geographic location of the client machine that concerns them; it's what country it's in... and while an exact location would be almost impossible to determine, a route to that machine is always available. Unless it was spoofed, of course. :-)
So TCP/IP isn't really the issue; DNS is.
Hey; maybe I could patent this method of... nah. I'd sooner die than become One Of THEM...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
While it's all nice for Katz to blame Canada (and not a company located inside it) for inventing "geographic screening", he obviously has ignored the fact that the United States has been doing so for much longer. Whenever I try to download high encryption software I have to sign my life away saying that I live in the US or Canada. Even after that, most sites will even do a reverse lookup on my ip address just to be sure. This seems to be worse "geographic screening" than iCraveTV.com did (valid postal code needed), yet he never hints about it durring his rant of the day...