German Censorware Targets Music

Blocking software can work on any category of material. Here in the States we try to block sex. But in Germany, they're going to use censorware to go after MP3s. Its "Rights Protection System" is rumored to already be in testing - and the rights that get protected are those of Mariah Carey and her label, needless to say, not yours or mine. What does this mean for our German readers, and others? More thoughts below...

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.

Comments

Blocking URLs at the router is impossible

[Robin Hood]

Unless I'm very much mistaken, what's suggested here is impossible. I don't read German well enough to actually read the real article, so I would appreciate it if a German-speaking person corrected me here. But as I understand this, they are suggesting blocking URL's at the router level since the routers "are already manipulating the packets".

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.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:

It is about suppressing competition, not copying

[FreeUser]

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.

Lots of rhetoric, no substance

[FreeUser]

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.

Re:Your Translation

[warpeightbot]

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.

No, Jamie is right. Censorship is a slippery slope; once you start down it, everything is vulnerable. The Germans are particularly sensitive about the topic.

The Jews have a saying, which, for personal and private reasons, I share.

Never Again.

One doesn't squash Holocaust-deniers, or Marxists, or pedophiles, or any idea, no matter how revolting. One holds it out for the world to see... and ridicule and spit upon and point and laugh and use as an object lesson for your kids when they're old enough to handle it. This is why my mother has not one, but two, copies of Mein Kampf (one in the original German). These ideas, and the havoc they're capable of wreaking on the entire world, should not be forgotten.

To hide them, pretend they do not exist, suppress them, not teach our children how to handle them, is unhealthy, dysfunctional, and a recipe for disaster. There will always be Bad Men out there, with terrible weapons and evil intent, and it is up to us, and our children as they grow, and their children's children, to always be ready to deal with them with dispatch.... and without sinking to their level. We must learn our history, and the lessons it contains... or we are doomed to repeat it.

The Germans want to censor. What really doesn't matter, we must do what we can to stop them, simply on principle.... because censorship leads to thoughtcrime, and everyone who has ever read 1984 knows where that leads.

--
It Means Us, Too
-- Afterword to 1984

Re:Your Translation

[Hard_Code]

"And I think we in German have a greater knowledge of our faults in the past than other countries of their faults."

That may very well be true. Our high school history books don't tell us, but the Germen Eugenics program and ghastly experimentation was based on the model provided by the mass sterilization of criminals, native americans, blacks, and the mentall ill in America in the 1910s - 1930s, which they very much admired. Yup, that's right, the good old USA.

Long before the Germans we ourselves had a large Eugenics program, were measuring distinctive racial facial features and sterilizing people. The Germans were quite impressed and took back this knowledge and greatly expanded on it. They were very proud of beating the USA as the leader in Eugenics (from what I have read). They based their profiling and "cleansing" of Jews on our profiling and "cleansing" of Native Americans.

I believe Himmler kept a picture of a Native American in his office to remind him of the United States' successful campaign. I also think one of Germans in the Nuremburg trial said something to the effect of "Why are you prosecuting us? You taught us this."

Positive side-effect

[FalseConsciousness]

If, as you point out, it will protect me from MP3's of Mariah Carey, it can't be all bad ...