40Tech » Copyright

And We’re Back . . . Hopefully SOPA and PIPA Aren’t

Evan Kline — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:01:43 +0000

If you tried to visit 40Tech today, you saw that we went dark from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST. We turned out the lights, shutting off the site, to join the online protest again SOPA and PIPA. For a look at SOPA and PIPA, check out this video.

Fortunately, several legislators have withdrawn their support for these bills. We must remain vigilant, however, as the media giants have spent millions to lobby Congress, and surely aren’t finished with their attempts to protect their outdated business models.

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A Horrifying Real-Life Example of What Might Happen if SOPA Passes

Evan Kline — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

You’ve probably heard about SOPA by now. SOPA is a bill that, if passed, would allow private companies (i.e. the movie and recording industry) to obliterate sites from the Internet, merely by making an accusation. For an example of the dangers of such a law, a post by the founder of Weebly is a must-read. Weebly is a web service that allows users to create their own sites using a drag and drop interface. The service hosts millions of sites. In 2009, the site was hosting over two million sites, and all those sites almost went dark thanks to a complaint by one business.

David Rusenko tells a story about getting a call from the abuse department at GoDaddy, Weebly’s registrar, informing him that GoDaddy had removed the DNS entries for weebly.com from its system, and that the changes would become effective in 10 minutes. After pleading his case, GoDaddy reversed the changes, and the websites were spared.

What prompted this? One of the millions of sites hosted by Weebly had featured a bad review of a local business, and that business had complained to GoDaddy. Similar to how SOPA would work, GoDaddy acted upon an accusation. If Rusenko hadn’t answered his phone, that accusation, with no due process, would have taken Weebly and all of its sites offline. As Rusenko discussed in his post, the “trial and sentencing” under SOPA would work much the same way, as it is carried out by corporations who don’t care about the damage they cause for their misfires.

This fight isn’t about copyright. Unfortunately, there are are those in the anti-intellectual property crowed, who want everything for free, and are fighting SOPA on those grounds alone. They detract from the more compelling reasons for the fight. SOPA is bad, regardless of your stance on intellectual property, because of the destruction it would do to the Internet.

To help combat SOPA, visit American Censorship or Fight for the Future.

GoDaddy: A glimpse of the Internet under SOPA | david.weebly.com [via Webmaster-Source]

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Think the DMCA Is Bad? How About a Law That Starts U.S. Internet Censorship?

Evan Kline — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:15:00 +0000

We’ve written a few times before about the entertainment industry’s war against piracy, and the collateral damage that it causes. We’ve covered the U.S. government’s seizure of domains without due process, the government’s mistaken take down of 84,00 innocent sites, and attempts to push through a treaty with other nations that would, among other things, make it illegal to unlock phones. That was bad, but if a bill that is currently under consideration today is passed, things could get much worse.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is being heard today in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. Likening SOPA to the start of a slippery slope towards censorship, some have called it the “Great Firewall of America.” As an op-ed in the New York Times indicated,

The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright — a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification. The intention is not the same as China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar.

Sound scary? We’ve already seen how the government can screw up, and take sites offline. The bigger issue involves the lack of due process, and the fact that tremendous power would be handed off to private corporations under the Bill. As one site has noted, a ”copyright holder need only accuse a website of infringement, and the search engine, advertisement, and payment system would be cut off in five days. The DNS filtering would still need the involvement of the Department of Justice to get a court order, but again, there would be no need to prove anything to obtain such an order from a judge.” (IT World, SOPA sponsors deride criticisms as ‘myths’).

The DMCA is bad enough, leading providers to remove content first in response to any complaint, and ask questions later (or not at all). This sounds even worse. The sponsors of the bill are the usual bad guys, such as the Motion Picture Association of America, the Screen Actors Guild, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – don’t take our stance on this to mean that we support piracy. We don’t. Artists deserve to get paid for their work. But a bill like SOPA goes way too far, and would cause too much collateral damage. It might sound like hyperbole, but SOPA would be the first step towards Internet censorship for U.S. citizens. For tips on how to combat this, check out the website for American Censorship Day or Fight for the Future.

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Netflix, Starz Battle Ends with Netflix Down Disney and Sony Content on February 28, 2012

Bobby Travis — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:27:56 +0000

Recently, Netflix angered a large amount of its US subscriber-base by announcing changes to its pricing model. It used to be that, if you wanted to do the Neflix videos-by-mail thing and stream content as well, it would only cost you an extra couple of bucks per month. Now (as of two days ago, in fact), if you want both, you need to pay double — $7.99 for each service. While the Netflix move may be understandable, and part of a potentially larger plan to phase out physical delivery altogether, the customer backlash was also unsurprising — and significant.

To make matters worse for Netflix, on the very day that the new pricing came into effect, Starz, the distributor of Sony and Disney content decided not to renew their contract with Netflix. This is probably going to hurt Netflix customer relationships even more, but believe it or not, it happened as a result of Netflix attempting to preserve their pricing model, and, presumably, to keep their customers from imploding.

Netflix has been doing well, business-wise, of late. They opened up content streaming in Canada — which I use all the time, even though we don’t get the coolest content up this way — and they have plans for world internet-streaming domination that could be very viable. Unfortunately, their content and entire business is dependent on their relationship with content license owners. Starz Entertainment apparently insisted that Netflix put their content behind an additional pay-wall, making customers pay more to access it. Netflix offered them in excess of $300 million per year for the content, but that wasn’t good enough for Big Media, who initially asked for more than 10 times what Netflix paid them in 2008, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In a press release, Starz cited the usual spiel regarding “protecting the premium nature” of their brand and “preserving the appropriate pricing” of their “exclusive and valuable content.” The bottom line here, however, is that Starz holds all of the cards here. Disney and Sony content is good content. It is sought after. In a statement to Business Insider, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings maintains that it only marks 8% of their overall audience views, and that the content would have likely gone down to 5-6% of domestic views by Q1 2012 anyway, but as we all know, it takes less than 8% of pissed off people who perceive that they’ve lost something they felt they paid for to make 80%-sized noise about it.

One also has to wonder if other Big Media groups will follow Starz lead. To many of them, Netflix is likely more of an experiment that they tolerate to see if it will pay out big in the long run. Now that the dollars are coming in, naturally, they are going to want a bigger cut — one that makes them feel more like they are returning to their original business model that made them a money hand over fist — you know, before the advent of broadband and the explosion of extremely easy content piracy.

Speaking of piracy… it has been proven that consumers, by and large, are willing to pay a subscription price for content. If they weren’t, Netflix would never work; neither would Hulu Plus, Rdio, Sirius, pay-to-play MMORPGs, or any of the other premium-based multimedia providers out there. However, those prices need to be reflective of the general feel of pricing online — pricing that Apple was the baseline for with iTunes and apps taking over the online world as we know it. That is to say, the pricing needs to be low-ish. If all of the major license holders start clamouring “premium subscriptions for our content or else,” Netflix and their sizeable customer base will be threatened. When a media consuming customer base is threatened, they jump ship — and they have a tendency to land in a submarine that stealths its way into a dialect punctuated with “yo ho ho’s” and the occasional “Aaargh!” Not to beat the pirate metaphor to death or anything…

So what do you think of Starz demands for a Netflix pay-wall for their content? What about their decision to pull out? Should Netflix have given in?

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U.S. Government “Accidentally” Seizes and Shuts Down 84,000 Websites

Evan Kline — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 02:00:26 +0000

Two months ago, we wrote about the U.S. Department of Justice’s largely unilateral seizure of domain names of commercial websites that were engaged in counterfeiting. We’ve now seen the danger of that process, with the government pulling a major “whoopsie” and mistakenly shutting down a large number of perfectly innocent sites, as the government went after child pornography sites.

As we previously discussed, the seizure process is one-sided, with a judge reviewing a Justice Department affidavit, with no input from the accused sites. Worse, the prior affidavit was based at least partially on information from the Motion Picture Association of America.

This time, the government goofed. The domain mooo.com, part of the DNS provider FreeDNS, was shut down in the process. Sites registered through mooo.com displayed a banner ad suggesting that the sites were engaged in child pornography. How many sites were affected? Try 84,000. It took a day and a half for the seizure to be reversed, and another three days for all the inflammatory banners to disappear.

Is anybody worried about the unilateral seizure of domain now? Or is this a price worth paying in the fight against child pornography?

U.S. Anti-Child Pornography Operation Accidentally Shuts Down 84,000 Sites [Huffington Post]

Man smacking head image from striatic.

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How the U.S. Government Was Able to Seize BitTorrent Domains Without Due Process

Evan Kline — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 02:00:50 +0000

By now, you’ve heard how the United States Department of Justice seized the domain names of several commercial websites that were accused of engaging in counterfeiting. Among these were some file sharing sites. If the seizure shocks your idea of fair play, you’re not alone. How exactly did the U.S. government seize these domain names, without giving the site owners a chance to defend themselves?

Ars Technica has a fascinating article detailing the seizures. In short, the government filed an affidavit to support the seizure request. In that affidavit, the government trotted out data and statistics it had received from those in the movie and music business. As Ars Technica reported,

[Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Special Agent Andrew] Aeynolds doesn’t attempt to hide his obvious reliance on the content industries; his affidavit is littered with comments like, “according to the MPAA…” and “based on my participation in the investigation and my discussion with MPAA representatives…” In the end, ICE got its way; a US Magistrate Judge signed off on the seizure order, and the domain names rapgodfathers.com, torrent-finder.com, rmx4u.com, dajaz1.com, and onsmash.com were seized and redirected to an ICE warning image.

Even more disturbing, the seizures do not appear to be part of any criminal case. If they were, then perhaps an argument could be made that the seizures were similar to a seizure of physical property as part of a criminal investigation. As Ars Techicna noted, though,

the case was closed after the order was executed. In searching the federal courts, we can find no evidence that these five sites are actually being prosecuted. The domains were simply seized, and while it did happen with a court order, the sites were not given any chance to respond and none appears to be forthcoming.

Wow. Don’t confuse my feelings on theft of an author’s work. It stinks. If we want content creators to keep producing content, we need to find a way to make sure that they get paid. Freeloaders are only shooting themselves in the foot in the long run.

But is this really how we want our government to go about doing business? Should our government be able to seize a domain name, without giving a site owner a chance to defend himself?

Shame on you, freeloaders. But even more so, shame on our government officials. You’ve stained the reputation of the United States, and conveyed to the world, rightly or wrongly, that our leaders whore themselves out to an industry willing to pay enough money.

Now that I’ve effectively insulted those on both sides of the argument, let me know in the comments if I’m missing the boat here. Where do you fall in this debate?

Undue process: how Uncle Sam seized BitTorrent domain names [Ars Technica]

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Netflix Streaming Comes to Canada (Mostly)

Bobby Travis — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 02:00:55 +0000

After a (very) long wait, Netflix has finally opened up in Canada. Well, mostly, anyway. For starters, the Canadian arm of the service is streaming only, no delivery, so that that immediately cuts down the amount of possible content available to Canadians. That was just the first content cut, however… Canadian usage rights for entertainment content have always been an added difficulty with any mainstream media service, and Netflix proves to be no different. Even though the service has finally found its way to Canada, when Hulu, Pandora, and even YouTube content is still restricted, the selection of movies and television episodes have been met with groans of disappointment by many.

It’s not all bad — Netflix loads what it does have fast, and with great quality — but for those hoping to watch as many of the newer/popular TV shows and movies that unlimited for $7.99 per month will get them, Netflix Canada will be found wanting. It’s still one step closer to killing off your cable bill, though.

Netflix launches in Canada with limited selection [Vancouver Sun]

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Retaliatory Attack Takes Down MPAA Site. Whose Side Are You On?

Evan Kline — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 01:00:07 +0000

Earlier this month, a company in India claimed that it had been hired by the movie industry to launch cyber attacks on sites that hosted torrents to pirated movies. The company, Aiplex Software, promised denial of service attacks on those sites that ignored infringement notices (the company has since backed off of these claims).

It didn’t take long for Aiplex to end up with egg on its face. A loose group of internet community users, known as “Anonymous,” responded with denial of service attacks against the websites of Aiplex, the RIAA, and the MPAA. The attacks started Friday, and went into Saturday. Even today, the sites were slow to respond, although it is unclear whether that was due to attacks, or due to traffic generated from news of the attacks.

These attacks raise some bigger questions. Should legitimate trade groups engage in rogue behavior, like denial of service attacks? Do the ends justify the means?

And will the attacks by Anonymous do more harm than good? While most of us aren’t thrilled with DRM and copy protection, could attacks like these lead to even greater government involvement in the war on piracy? With the way that the entertainment industry has bought our government, at least here in the U.S., it isn’t hard to envision attacks like this making things worse.

Of course, the biggest question of all might be whether attacking a few sites that nobody visits really even matters in the long run.

What do you think? Who is in the wrong here?

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America Tries to Force DRM Upon the Rest of the World

Evan Kline — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 01:00:43 +0000

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a treaty being negotiated among several countries in secret, in order to bring copyright rules to the world. According to Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who focuses on tech and intellectual property law, leaks from the the most recent round of ACTA negotiations show that the U.S. is pushing for “digital lock” rules that go beyond what even U.S. courts have allowed. Digital lock rules are rules that prohibit such practices as unlocking a cell phone, and removing restrictions that might prevent you from viewing a DVD bought overseas.

Photo by Noah Hall.

The scary part about this treaty is that we’re only learning about the specifics of it through leaks, yet it will influence copyright law greatly throughout the world. While some treaties certainly require secrecy, a treaty like this reeks of our government doing the bidding of corporate interests (specifically, Hollywood and the recording industry). Do you trust government and corporate American to do the right thing behind closed doors?

ACTA Text Leaks: U.S. Concedes on Secondary Liability, Wants To Go Beyond DMCA on Digital Locks [Michael Geist]

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Some Good, Some Bad in FCC Ruling that Allows Hollywood to Mess With Your Gear

Evan Kline — Fri, 21 May 2010 01:00:58 +0000

We don’t often cover news stories here at 40Tech, but this one bears mentioning. A recent FCC decision [PDF file from FCC site] now allows the movie industry to disable analog outputs on your equipment in certain situations. Say what? Yes, you heard that right- in some cases, a content provider can reach in and mess with your gear.

This started back in 2003, and an FCC ruling concerning Selectable Output Control (SoC). SoC is what the MPAA wants to use to close the analog hole, by disabling outputs that don’t support HDCP. Previously, such conduct was prohibited.

Under the FCC ruling, a movie that has never been released on DVD or Blu-ray can be restricted for 90 days, by using SoC to disable the analog outputs on your gear. As some have pointed out, this isn’t all bad, because the content in question would be content that isn’t currently available, so those with analog gear won’t be missing anything that is currently available.

What is the practical effect of this? It really has three ramifications, two of which are bad. First, owners of older equipment without HDMI ports might be unable to get some of this new content. Second, all owners will be unable to make backups of this new type of purchased content, as the analog hole will be closed (some articles solely discuss streaming or on demand content, but it is hard to imagine that the industry won’t try to sell you movies, too, leaving you at their mercy to save it on their system). Third, if you have a newer television, you may get access to new content.

Is this a good thing? Does the ability to get new releases, earlier, offset the control the movie industry will be able to exert over your gear?

Photo by RocketRaccoon