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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.
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...