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German Censorware Targets Music
If you only read one link, read Fitug's fact sheet (in English). It summarizes the situation pretty well. See Declan McCullagh's Politech for some more links.
Basically, the German recording industry is selling the idea that they should have carte blanche to block any incoming packets they see fit, at the router. As Lawrence Lessig and others have warned, the large ISPs are the weak link, subject to easy regulation. And as Fitug's paper says, only the large service providers need be forced to use this system: small providers get their feeds from the large ones, auto-censored for their pleasure.
Think for a moment about how this system will work in practice. Pirate websites, by definition, operate under the radar: they are hard to find. They are often up only briefly, or require a password to access. They aren't linked to search engines. Sharing copyrighted material is illegal is every major Western country, so these sites aren't going to list themselves on Yahoo.
But it's already been shown that censorware can't even block what's on Yahoo. That's not an exaggeration. I work with the Censorware Project, and we did a report on Bess in 1999. The software didn't just fail to block a lot of hardcore sex. It failed to block hardcoresex.com - and hundreds of other porn sites listed on Yahoo.
This new "Rights Protection System" is going to use the same technologies as existing censorware and have about the same results:
"Im Prinzip funktioniert das 'Right Protection System' also ähnlich wie das Programm Cyberpatrol..."
"So in principle, the 'Rights Protection System' will work like the program Cyber Patrol..."
Someone has to maintain this "Rights Protection System," just like someone has to maintain Cyber Patrol. What chance does it have to find even a fraction of the napster servers, hotline servers, IRC channels, and, yes, even websites where pirate MP3s are being traded?
And when a pirate site is found, the rock'n'roll will be blocked the same way existing censorware blocks sex or drugs. Let's say a directory full of copyrighted MP3s is at
http://BigUniversity.edu/users/joepirate/secret/
The RPS staffers have no way of knowing whether "joepirate" is going to have friends who share MP3s, is going to change user IDs, or is going to put his songs into some other directory. The block will be made not on the /secret/ directory. If the university is lucky, there will be a block on the /users/ directory.
But since the "filtering" takes place at the router, it is much more likely that the entire webserver will be blocked. Big University probably won't be getting many exchange students from Germany next year.
And on what basis is the country going to ask its service providers to put this extra software on their routers? According to a spokesperson for the German branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI):
"The packet forwarding process in the router is not a passive forwarding of the incoming signals. The packet is processed and manipulated by the router before it is transmitted onwards. So the [service providers] that purchase and install these routers have a heavy participatory role in the operation of the Internet."
In other words, since the hardware is already routing ("manipulating") packets from one network to another, it's really no different to add a blacklist that forbids certain URLs or IP numbers.
The executives speaking in favor of this proposal make it sound like it's going to benefit the little musician, the one struggling to make it. The IFPI points out magnanimously that it invests some of its profits in unknown artists (duh):
"Jede dritte Mark, die mit den Hits der Megastars erwirtschaftet wird, fließt heute in die Förderung junger Künstler."
"Today, every third Mark made by the megastars' hits goes toward the promotion of young artists."
Isn't that nice. But what about the "young artists" who haven't been signed with a label yet?
If I'm trying to make a name for myself by giving away my own music, and the RPS staffers spot a directory full of my MP3s, are they really going to compare each of my files' titles against their libraries? Are they going to listen to each MP3 they find? More likely, they will assume that files named "my_heart_will_go_on.mp3" and "song-001.mp3" are songs copyrighted by someone else, and not my own original work.
Simple solution: block my whole directory. Or my whole server. If there's a little collateral damage - well, less competition for their own artists.
And they won't bother to tell me about it, of course; so my music is now blocked from eighty million potential listeners - customers - and I will never know.
This doesn't help "young artists" - unless you think enslaving them to the existing labels is helping them. The IFPI chooses to ignore that giving away MP3s can help a struggling artist, not hurt.
Meanwhile, executives for the German Authors' Rights Society (GEMA) redefine arrogance. My German is rusty and Babelfish is almost no help, so bear with me. First, they count their money:
"Erfolgreiche Jahresbilanz. Zunächst aber habe ich die Ehre, Ihnen den Geschäftsbericht 1998 vorzulegen. Er dokumentiert mit seinem Gesamtertrag von DM 1,465 Mrd. und einer Verteilsumme von DM 1,263 Mrd. die wirtschaftliche Ertragskraft unserer musikalischen Verwertungsgesellschaft..."
"Successful Annual Balance. But first I have the honor to submit the business report for 1998. It documents total proceeds of 1.465 billion Marks and a distribution total of 1.263 billion Marks for our commercial music corporation..."
(Incidentally, Babelfish translates "unserer musikalischen Verwertungsgesellschaft" as "our musical exploitation corporation" - which may be accurate but probably isn't what was intended.)
Then, two sentences later:
"...auch die den kreativen Schöpfer bedrohenden Kräfte, die sich hinter Schlagworten wie 'arbeitsplatzschaffende Kommunikationsgesellschaft' oder 'Digitalisierung der Welt' verstecken, nicht aus den Augen verloren werden dürfen. Hier drohen uns - allerdings zu bewältigende - Gefahren. Und in der Tat, sie werden auch nicht eine Sekunde aus den Augen verloren, diese Gefahren. So wird denn die GEMA nicht müde, die globalisierungssüchtigen Verfechter absoluter Kommunikationsfreiheit und damit Verächter von Kultur und geistigem Eigentum immer wieder in die Schranken zu verweisen."
"...and we should not lose track of those powers who threaten creative people*, who hide themselves behind slogans like 'job-creating communications company' or 'digitalization of the world.' We are threatened by these dangers - which nevertheless can be overcome. Indeed, these dangers will not for one second be lost from our eyes. GEMA will never, ever tire of putting these globalization-addicted advocates of absolute freedom of communication - the depisers of culture and intellectual property - in their place."
Boy. How serious are these guys?
But of course they're serious. After all, negative billions are at stake.
Finally, consider what will happen once the German music industry, or any other, manages to install content-based blocking at the routers of the entire country.
Pirated music isn't the only illegal content in Germany. And once the software's in place, no politician will be able to resist adding one more type of content to block.
What will be the next category they enable on their nationwide blacklist? You might think sex. I'm betting it's Holocaust-denial. The denial of the Holocaust is something I've been working against for eight years (wearing one of my other "activist hats"). And for eight years I've been repeating that the most effective way to repudiate this dishonest political ideology is to expose it to the light of day.
Let people read the junk. And let them read refutations of the junk. That's the best way for people to recognize that deniers are liars: give them access to what everyone says, and let them make up their own minds.
But the German government disagrees. Unfortunately, they don't realize that the best way to convince a confused citizen that Holocaust-deniers are saying something valuable is to have the government ban it. "After all," goes the logic, "they wouldn't ban it if it weren't dangerous - and what could be more dangerous than the truth?"
Then, finally, after they make free-speech martyrs out of neo-Nazis, will come the effort to block sexual content. All of these blocking efforts - music, Holocaust-denial, sex - will work approximately as well as censorware has worked anywhere else. And will do approximately as much collateral damage.
This approach to censoring an entire country - block content at the incoming routers - has not yet been tried on a large scale in any Western country. Many Asian countries (notably excepting Japan) and most if not all fundamentalist Islam countries have adopted nationwide blocking. We'll see if this is the first step toward bringing the technology to the West.
If anyone has information about who will be creating and maintaining the blacklists used by the "Rights Protection System," please post a comment here or email me.
There are no "good" reasons for this. If anyone commits real crimes - murder, robbery, arson, whatever - then bust 'em. Otherwise, you are creating a class of political crime.
Some German folks should probably weigh in on this one, but at the risk of annoying everyone on both sides of this touchy issue I'll weigh in with my unsolicited opinions, as an Auslander (foreigner) who lived there for a number of years.
While I too disagree with Germany's approach to their Nazi, and more recently, neo-Nazi problem, one must consider the practicalities of their situation. After world war II there were still a large number of people who, privately, still supported much of what the Nazis had stood for. The allies and early German administrations felt the danger represented by this anomolous political sitiuation was simply too severe, and too immediate, to allow themselves the luxery of tolerating it in the name of free speach or expression, so yes, in effect, they did create a "political class" of criminals. It is illegal in Germany to be a Nazi, period. You can go to jail for espousing Nazism, displaying Nazi symbols, making Nazi salutes, etc. This is their solution to an intolerable problem. It is not necessarilly a good solution, and it does have a heavy price, but it is the solution they have chosen.
Whether they were right or wrong in this assessment is an interesting discussion of its own. Nevertheless, their reasons for this policy were very obvious, very good, and very, very compelling. One of the aforementioned "heavy prices" Germany is paying today IMHO is an expression of pent up, suppressed speach in the form of neo-Nazism. Another is the much more insidious (and possibly more dangerous) tendency for institutions in Germany to engage in large scale, draconian censorship which other democratic nations would be reluctant to consider (the USA being a possible exception) for reasons which, while much less compelling than the Nazi issue, appear to them to be nevertheless "good."
This isn't a justification, merely a commentary on the state of things as I see them. Again, while I disagree with their choice to use censorship to address the Nazi issue (far better to allow your opponent to make an ass of themself and then ridicule them publicly than to suppress their right to express themself), I think one must be a little understanding as to why the felt compelled to do so. This empathy should not, however, be extended to include the modern day abuses of this power which some institutions in Germany appear to now take for granted as their "right."
If Germany is indeed a mature, "grown up" democracy (to borrow a phrase from the press), then they really should reevaluate the role censorship is playing in their society.
On the other hand, so should we here in the USA, as you imply and as numerous stories here on slashdot and elsewhere have made abundantly clear, time and time again.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
That's why the more likely (and scary) approach would be to block entire servers. A router could easily block packets from/to a specific IP address, it would simply drop them, no added overhead. The client web browser would just think that the server doesn't exist, because it isn't returning any of its packets.
Of course, what would make more sense is to impliment this as firewalls, not routers. You would have to replace all ISP's gateways with transparent filtering firewalls/proxies, which could selectively block URLs at any level, with much less of a performance hit. However, this still has the problems of bad filtering.
All in all, this is a bad idea, no matter how it is implimented.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Won't this also block packets destined for another country which happen to get routed through Germany? Germany will only get routed around if the retries happen to get routed along a different path, else the block gets exported to wherever the recipient happens to be.
Half-baked idea...
First, if you have any illegal .mp3's - that is, any mp3s of copyrighted songs by artists you don't already own the CDs for - delete them from your system, especially if the same computer is your webserver. Just trust me on this...
Second, go find a site put up by an independent artist that offers some full songs or clips for download. Grab them, then politely ask the band if you can mirror them on your own site.
Third, if you get the OK, offer them for download. Hell, devote a small section of your site to independent bands. Offer links to their sites and the mp3s. Encourage visitors to at least follow the links, maybe buy a CD or two.
Fourth...when organizations like RIAA, CRIA, the German organization, and the like bitch and whine about "stolen music" and "artists' rights", bring up your own site, with music by indies which is perfectly legal to download, supporting indies' rights to promote themselves. And if blocking systems like the "Rights Protection System" are implemented anywhere, you and the bands can legitimately say their exposure is being blocked by big labels. Large companies do not like having a public image of squashing the little guy for their own profit, even if it's true.
This won't eliminate the issue of copyright violations of music by label artists, but you'll have retaken the moral high ground by having a working example of what we've been pointing to as a useful aspect of MP3 the whole time, along with backing up your own music collection.
Remember - do not offer any music for download that you don't have permission to mirror! I don't know how many bands would have issues with having the music they offer for download mirrored. Some, certainly. Still, it's worth a shot, as it would prove that the mp3 form of distribution can legally work to build exposure for an artist, or at least get some of their music out and about. It's also a good chance to tweak the attack lawyers and execs who try to make .mp3 look like crack cocaine.
DISCLAIMER: I haven't done the above...yet. I've become a bit more aware of digital distribution, copyright, fair use, and control issues. I may do the above soon, if this doesn't end up alongside the other 5000 ideas I come up with and forget about every day. It's certainly an attractive cause, though...especially after the visit by CRIA goons to my school...
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Now, beyond that. There are a lot of legitimate MP3's out on the market. Is it right to block those just because there is also pirating going on. I mean, that's like the police trying to shut down your local mall to prevent more shoplifting.
You say: "You don't have a "right" to view mp3s, especially ripped off mp3s". That's only half right. The law doesn't give you the right to view (listen) to ripped off MP3s. I have every right in the world to listen to the interview with some celebrity that CNN just put on there site for download that I want to hear. I have every right to go to MP3.com and download the latest songs from these new artists. I have every right to go to an established artists page and download the MP3 that they are giving away in the months before they release their CD. And you can not take that right away (or make sure that I only do the things within my rights) with software.
kwsNI
The issue is, are we attacking someone's "property"? Are digital recordings property? There is, I personally believe, a massive paradigm shift (ugh) happening, wherein the very definition of "property" is changing in people's minds. Perhaps, a generation down the line (or two) people will look back and be amazed that anyone seriously embraced the concept of "intellectual property".
As has been pointed out, by Stallman et al, "intellectual property" differs from real property in that my use of an idea (or a digital recording, or a piece of software) does not necessarily preclude your simultaneous use of the idea, song, etc. An idea, once released, is not a scarce resource -- and so it does not fit the "property" model.
Should people be able to make money off of their creative pursuits? I certainly believe so. Should the model for making money be some kludged, ad-hoc, and unwieldy attempt to cut-and-past laws for physical property into virtual space? Not at all. I don't know how an artist can make money on the Net -- but the current method is not a long-term viable one, no matter how many people turn blue screaming "Property violation! Property violation!"
I contend that "intellectual property" has always had this tension implicit in it. Now the Internet has made it impossible to gloss over them.
As a historical parallel, consider the modern corporation. Prior to the rise of the corporation, anyone running a business was held personally and completely responsible for it. Say you ran a shipping company whose ship went down. Action could be brought against not just the holdings of the company, but against your personal wealth -- and the wealth of any investors in the company.
This scared off investors -- the only sin recognized in early 21st century America -- and so, our history books tell us, this was a Bad Thing. In response, things like the limited liability partnership and the modern corporation were put into place, so the vast engine of commericialism could be unleashed.
Don't you think back then that people who had succeeded with the old model, in the old circumstances, cried "foul!" and screamed that people were taking away their rights to recoup lost investments. Of course they did. SO what? The social understanding of liability was changed becasuse it was recognized that the old model was limiting and out-moded.
Sort of like the situation we find ourselves in today, regarding "intellectual property".
Open Standards. Open Source. Open Minds. The Revolution will be Intercast!
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
You've mistranslated the German.
It should read "we should not lose track of those powers who threaten creative people", not "those creators of threatening powers"
I really think you're being knee-jerk about the Holocaust. I don't see the connection at all. It's just some pompous corporate posturing by some guys who would rather protect the market share they inherited than risk innovation.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
If I've got this right, this shows an abysmal lack of understanding of how routing actually works. See, IP packets have an "envelope" and a payload (the content). The envelope contains the source and destination addresses and ports ("From: 123.45.678.90:12345, To: 234.87.53.309:80"). It also contains some information destined to be used at the other end, such as whether the packet was fragmented along the way and which fragment # this one contains so that the original information can be reconstructed at the receiving end.
The "payload" of the packet is the content; what's inside the envelope. This is where all the data is put, including the HTTP "GET" requests. When you fetch a web page, your browser sends something like the following inside an IP packet:
HTTP/1.1 GET http://slashdot.org/
(There's more to it; read RFC 2616 to learn all about the HTTP/1.1 protocol). The point is that this is *inside* the packet. How are you going to tell which packets contain HTTP GET requests, huh? Look inside every packet? Sorry, buddy, not gonna do it. That would slow down ping times by at least a factor of ten: instead of 100-200ms, you'd have ping times of one or two seconds. For every communication.
Or maybe you just look inside packets with a destination port of 80? Yeah, that'd work, right? Nope -- web servers can run on any port. You'd immediately see lots of web servers hanging off port 8080, 8088, or even weird port numbers, serving up MP3's with unfiltered impunity.
There are a lot more reasons (which I won't go into) as to why this thing won't work as suggested. Thought exercise: where are the blocking lists going to live? And how will they be updated? Turn in a 500-1000 word essay to my desk by Monday for extra credit. :-)
Not to say that SOME kind of required-filtering law may be passed in Germany, but this isn't going to be it. If this gets passed, it will either (a) be utterly useless, or (b) slow down ALL Internet usage in Germany so much that the law would get repealed in record time as the German legislation realizes that it just cut its entire country off from the Internet.
I'm sure there are some factual errors in the above, as I whipped it out with virtually no research whatsoever. But the technical details of how routing works are pretty much as described. For the full story about IP and how it works, read RFC 791. For more about HTTP version 1.1, see the link several paragraphs above.
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The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
The old-guard recording industry, for all its rhetoric to the contrary, is far more concerned with crushing the emerging competition they are feeling from sites such as mp3.com, than they are with preventing unauthorized copying of music.
The RIAA, and its foreign equivelents, are confronted with the unpleasant situation in which artists are refusing to sign contracts giving the recording companies 99.9% of the profits from CD sales and instead are selling (or giving away) their music on-line in exchange for 50% (!!!) of the CD sales proceeds, or simply greater exposure of their work.
Worse still, artists are actually defecting from the recording industry, discovering that they can make better money selling 1000 CDs and taking home $5/CD, than they do by selling 90,000 CDs and only keeping $0.05 per CD.
This, the old-guard recording companies simply can't abide. Their strategy is, of course, under the guise of fighting unauthorized copying, to use the clout of a dysfunctional legal system and the long arm of government law enforcement to destroy the emerging paradigm shift in its infancy and protect their defacto monopoly.
Germany has for a long time been actively censoring right wing and neo-nazi hate groups, with obvious and very, very good reason. The unfortuante side effect of this is that they are in some respects much further down the slippery slope of censorship than many other countries, so much os that such draconian measures as these are not only thinkable, but remarkably reasonable sounding to the powers-that-be. Other examples include the indictment of compuserve execs for their customers use of the internet to access foreign porn sites, the xs4all political web censorship fiasco, and so on.
Of course, warez kiddies will still be swapping their musing using ssh tunneled ftp, new protocols, or even old protocols encapsulated or stealthed to get around the packet blocking. The only thing that will be killed will be legitimate, competing businesses such as mp3.com, not children swapping warez and illegally copied music.
This, as far as the old-guard recording industry is concerned, is a perfectly acceptable solution.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Please cite examples of "cracking" copy-protected software to release it under the "GPL"
Although your post has the ring of flaimbait, I will assume you are just woefully misinformed about both the mp3 community (where both legal and, unfortunately, a great deal of illegal copying does occur) and open source software, and are lashing out at offenses you perceive which in fact are either not as pervasive as you think, or completely non-existent (to my knowledge no program has been "cracked" and subsequently distribued under the GPL as open source software).
As a counter example, I will use myself. My situation is by no means unique to slashdot or the net as a whole, indeed, if you search prior archives for mp3 related discussions, you will hear many others voicing the exact same scenerio.
All of my mp3's are legal. Yes, that's right, every last one of them.
90% of them are ripped from my own CD collection.
Another 5% are authorized downlaods from mp3.com and elsewhere, by artists who are trying to get exposure. On occasion I buy the CD, either to support the artist or to have available in places I can't listen to mp3's (e.g. my airplane, or a friend's car), although I am by no means obligated to do so.
Even those that I have downloaded which are "unauthorized copies", as defined by the RIAA, are not illegal! How can I make this bold claim? Because I already own the vinyl record, or the cassette tape, or some other medium (8 track in one particulary archaic case, CDs in others). I have already paid for the right to store the music in whatever medium I wish, including mp3 format on my hard drive. This has been decided in court decision after court decision. Whether I hook up my friend's turn table and arduously rip the record to cd or mp3 format (I have done this for some rare Hungarian pop music form the mid 1980s), or download the exact same song from someone who has already done the work using napstre, makes no difference. Indeed, I can even pay a third party, commercial enterprise, to convert the data from one medium and format to another, perfectly legally. This right, as well, has been sustained in numerious court rulings, the recording industries protestations notwithstanding. I own a right to the music, as evidenced by the physical record in my possession, and am entitled to be able to listen to it with the tools at my disposal and to store it in whatever form I wish, be it mp3 or binary code tatooed on my left bicep. This, too, has been decided more than once in a court of law.
In other words:
I. Do. Have. Every. Right. To. My. Property. Which. I. Have. Paid. Good. Hard. Cash. For.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If, as you point out, it will protect me from MP3's of Mariah Carey, it can't be all bad ...