Copyright inherently encourages art for the lowest common denominator

Copyright helps works with questionable artistic merit, like "Honey Boo Boo" and "Keeping up with Kardarisans". These works get great financial and market success. Why?

Many works of music, film, literature are expensive to make. But most costs are non-marginal costs, that is costs involved in creation of the first copy of the work, the master. There are marginal costs, costs in distribution and manufacturing. However, in the digital world most would agree that they declined significantly, but they've never been all that significant in the first place. (Copyright proponents will say, perhaps with inherent truth, the cost of creating the work has not gone down. The so called non-marginal costs, these may have not gone down in the digital age.)

Recouping your investment in a system of copyright requires selling copies or access of this created work. Because the margins of returns on copies are so high, there is an incentive to sell as much of possible of the work. Success in the market is strongly tied to how many copies (DVDs, CDs, downloads, movie tickets, eyeballs on TVs, etc.) are sold in relation to the work.

But to make a work that many people are willing to buy or otherwise "consume", it has to have universal appeal. Unfortunately, to do so you have to cater to the lowest common denominator.

Thus copyright in a sense, encourages artistic works that cater to the lowest common denominator. These works will naturally sell the best, therefore provide the best return for investment to investors, which will then encourage creations of more works of similar merit, leaving the content industry creating endless amounts of idiotic drivel.

Why Copyright Used to Work Well and Why Copyright Doesn't Work Today

aka. The source of all the problems with modern copyright summarized. This is especially designed for copypasta usage.

In the olden days, mass copying of information was an industrial activity. To copy something you needed machines that were expensive. For example a printing press. These machines where not typically owned by individuals, but rather specialized businesses like publishers and print houses. Copyright chiefly exists to reserve the right of copying to the original author of a work. As mass copying was an industrial activity, copyright was an industrial regulation. Copyright worked very well.

The main result of the information age is the invention of powerful copying machines which are created for the general public. These machines are owned by almost everyone (smartphones, computers, etc.). The tools for mass copying are now in the hands of the general public. Copyright is therefore no longer an industrial regulation, but a law that affects the ordinary dealings of the people wit large. The problem is copyright was never designed or intended to be anything more than an industrial regulation.

All, and I mean all issues with copyright today stem from this.

Richard Stallman goes into more detail on this and what should be done.

On Modern Propaganda Promoting the Idea of Copyright

It's interesting how copyright propaganda changed over time. Historically, copyright propaganda made a moral argument: it's simply wrong to copy. Why? People depend on creative works for their livelihood. If you copy, you harm the industry's continued existence and its ability to create. You can see this in the famous "Home Taping Is Killing Music!" campaign or the original "Don't Copy That Floppy".

This approach was largely abandoned in propaganda produced after the mainstream rise of computer networks and the widespread copyright infringement that followed. Perhaps because the actual moral qualms come about over restrictive copyright? Perhaps because more music is being made then ever despite this "industry's" virtual existence on life support? Hrmm? I'm not sure really, but it's interesting.

The new copyright propaganda is based on fear. They try to scare people into submission. You can see the moral viewpoint shown in the new "Don't Copy That Floppy", and other propaganda videos such as "Downloading Movies Is Stealing" or FACT videos on copyright. The point of these propaganda videos is to show the legal consequences of copyright, like for instance showing like a mass infringer making hundreds of thousands of dollars and that he's in jail. Great. The problem is, the vast majority of copyright infringers aren't like that. So they are using hyperbole to attempt to scare people. Maybe it's wishful thinking.

They also have made arguments that copyright infringement is equivalent to supporting terrorism. This almost feels like it belongs in a parody of copyright propaganda, but it's the real deal (see: "FACT Anti-Piracy PSA"). I almost feel like this kind of thing goes down with something like "Fuck it. Terrorism is bad, lets go with that. Film the stupid video and lets go the pub already." I feel like I could be a good propagandist for them. Imagine a plane crashing into a skyscraper, dramatic music, people screaming in the background, followed by a narrator saying "this happened because you downloaded The Hunger Games yesterday. I hope you are happy." Instant success!

Also interesting of course is the always present cultural references, for instance, Star Trek characters in the new "Don't Copy That Copy". It's possible that they utilized them with permission, but it's not out of the ordinary for copyright propagandists to regularly violate copyright themselves often in their efforts of promoting it.

It will be interesting to see how copyright propaganda evolves in the future, but one thing I feel is certain: they aren't getting their message across.

Is copyright simply not compelling?

On Google Books

It's an easily derived opinion from my philosophy on copyright and the information age, but here's something I posted on a blog in response to the idea that the Google Books case is not over yet. I'm very excited about the potential of Google Books, but indeed, it's not out of the woods yet. I summarize my opinion on the situation (keeping it here, with some fixed grammar for posterity):

The Author’s Guild could also appeal as well. But it limits the plaintiffs’ options, so it is a pretty significant win for Google at this point.

I don’t view this as David vs Goliath, since there are huge financial interests on both sides.
What I see though, is Google made a service that could literally give access to entirety of human knowledge to anyone with Internet access, and the ability to search through tens of millions of books no different then any other search query. It’s not a pipe dream. They made it already.

And I see a bunch of plaintiffs that just don’t want this. I see them defending business models built in a world where a service like Google Books is a pipe dream, not a reality. I see them defending business models that are based fundamentally on developing and maintaining a scarcity of knowledge, business models that intentionally make knowledge more difficult to access, and where knowledge is less accessible to lower economic classes.

To not allow a service like Google Books is to put a damper on the progression of humanity. All to serve no other purpose but to maintain business models that can no longer, and do no longer benefit the public interest.

Unfortunately, due entirely to these interests, Google Books is not as useful as it could be. In fact, this has entirely everything to do with the sorry state of copyright law and nothing to do with the technology itself.

Google had to spend significant engineering efforts, efforts that could be used to improve the service instead, to serve no other ends except to literally make their service less useful. They do this by randomly introducing defects into the service, such as removing pages from books and other shenanigans so that researchers can’t use the service to get a complete context. These are not features, they are anti-features. They exist for no other purpose but to disallow the service to function in its true potential. By literally introducing defects into the service, they are working to make it defective by design. All because of a legal regime that demands defects in products such as Google Books.

But removing all those legally-imposed defects will be a trivial change (perhaps just setting a configuration variable) and I think one day we’ll see a books service that is not hampered by the current limitations imposed by copyright law. That’s my hope. I want to see a world where the entirety of knowledge and culture is made available to the whole world.
 

Isohunt shut down.. and back up a few days later

In recent news, we find out that IsoHunt was shut down by the legal system.. and it's back up a few days later (under new management of course).
 
This blog post talked about the inevitability of this kind of thing. Raiding and shutting down a website is not like raiding a factory or physical space, where the damage of shutting it down is real - where it takes time to build a new factory. Unlike physical stuff, websites can be copied and reproduced much like anything else on the Internet - nearly instantly.

Did I predict this would happen? Yes. But it's not like I'm kind of oracle, this stuff is almost completely fucking obvious. It's bound to happen.

How the hell are you suppose to combat this? I can answer that actually: it's impossible!

Tell me, why do we still pretend that we can have a functioning copyright system today?

Instead of working on a new kind of system that could reward creative effort today, we continue to promote this BROKEN system of copyright almost everyone agrees no longer works. By pretending that copyright can work, you keep creative industries chasing an impossible dream that produces diminishing returns. Don't chase copyright to your grave.

Selected events on modern copyright

Pretty long time since my last blog post, mostly because there really hasn't been anything interesting to say about current events, nothing worthy of a blog post. I feel that I've said what I need to say philosophically about copyright, so current events is all that is left.

• France's "3 strikes" system (Hadopi) falls apart after studies showed it did little to improve content industry revenues. Nobody saw that coming (that's sarcasm).
• USA is going through some really long winded profound reform of its copyright system. My guess from what has been said so far in the debates is it's going to be just a tad different from previous attempts at copyright reform (in that, it will actually weaken copyright in important areas). But it's too early to tell, so nothing really to write a big blog post about. If they want someone to help them write copyright bills, I'm available. :)
• On the free culture front, we are now up to 17.6 million freely available content media files available on Wikimedia Commons. Wikipedia also continues to grow, and companies are producing derivative works from this stuff already. Far cry from the sum of human knowledge and culture being freely available, but the Commons (content free of distribution restrictions) continue to grow even though the public domain remains frozen in place.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

I figure I should make a post about this because it's been annoying me for awhile. Streaming is something I generally support as "information age friendly", because it doesn't rely on artificial scarcity to create revenue for content creators. I probably have some blog posts that go on why artificial scarcity doesn't work too well these days, so I am not going to go into too much detail on that.

What is annoying is the raw, unadulterated hypocrisy of many people who are opposed to streaming. Faza of The Cynical Musician is a shining example of this. He spends inordinate amounts of time and effort (seriously, like hundreds of pages of arguments) for years trying to show how streaming is a bad business model for musicians. Yet to this day, you can find his music on streaming sites without issue. This is true for a lot of musicians who spoke against streaming like The Black Keys.

I wonder if streaming really is so bad for you(tm) as a musician, why are the same people who spending hours and hours arguing this finding it so fucking hard to spend 10 seconds to press the button that withdraws their music from streaming sites? Well it's obvious actually, because they don't believe their own "business advice". And if they don't believe it, why do they expect others to?

I have an idea. Remove your music from streaming sites, Faza. What are you waiting for?

Why non-technologists shouldn't be in the business of dreaming up technical solutions

So recently I had one of my regular Internet comment wars in the copyright debate with a fella named "Zoran" at the The Cynical Musician. Zoran had a foolproof idea for copyright enforcement that involved "searching for metadata" [in packets], this metadata would prove that the data in question is copyrighted or being used in copyright infringement. Metadata is one of those words that in my professional experience, non-technical people like to throw around a lot but have no real idea what it means or how it can be used.

This reminded of a similar Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet protocol proposal, RFC 3514. This proposal procribes adding a field to an unused area of the IPv4 packet header (ie. "metadata") to signal that the packet contains evil content; that is something that is in some way harmful, malicious or otherwise undesirable. Since copyright infringement is obviously malicious and undesirable, Zoran's idea would fit nicely to this standard. It felt to me that Zoran was indeed reinventing RFC 3514, which I suppose could be quite brilliant. Perhaps he has a great future as an Internet Engineer.

Or not. You see, the people of the IETF have a wicked sense of humor, and every now and again, they create a joke RFC (usually on April 1st, ie. April Fools Day). To the most most basic trained Computer Scientists, these proposals are usually immediately noticeable for what they are, because they contain impossibilities or very obvious flaws. In the case of the evil bit, since headers are created at the sending endpoint, the sender has to decide to set or unset the evil bit. The standard has the obvious implication that a hacker or copyright infringer would simply "play nice" and mark their bad deeds as "evil", so that receivers and intermediaries can take appropriate action (some of their suggestions on what actions to take are themselves amusing, like immediately crash).

The problem should be obvious. Maybe this scheme would work in a world like in the hit Hollywood movie "The Invention of Lying", but not in the real world.

Yet when I asked Zoran to look at this RFC, he took it really seriously, and even criticized the authors for having a limited vision; obviously they forgot to address the nefarious case of copyright infringement in their proposal.

I can't make this up. Go here and read the thread.

So what did I learn from the expirence? Something that I didn't realize. A lot of these people have no utter clue what they are talking about when it comes to technology. They might be a nice people and cool to hang with. Maybe they know how to put together a song. But that does not them Internet Engineers.

It doesn't even make them the Geek Squad at Best Buy. They are simply totally unqualified to talk about these things at all. Taking technological countermeasure ideas from ordinary musicians is batshit insane. It's like having a waitress piloting your jumbo jet. Do you want that? Why the fuck is it acceptable for people who have no clue what they are talking about to dictate technological regulations?

While a lot of technology and Computer Science is obvious to me, I forgot to realize that because I'm a fucking trained Computer Scientist with a specialization in networking. I spent lots and lots of nights with no sleep at all, huddled in front of a computer screen to get where I am today. So this should be obvious to me, but I forget it's like gibberish to most people. And that's important to remember.

The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard

I thought this was an interesting film. One thing about it is it exposes the kind of asymmetric warfare copyright holders deal with. On one hand, you have the Pirate Bay, a site that literally is the largest filesharing site for years. And it is run by a total of three young gentlemen, who don't even really like each other so much.

How is this possible? Well obviously TPB people are quite smart. But, Pirate Bay builds on decades of technological development. From TCP/IP to BitTorrent, all they had to do was put it all together. And BitTorrent is largely P2P - so you don't need massive amounts of hardware to run a BitTorrent tracker, even a large one like The Pirate Bay. This is even more true since the website moved to using magnet links, which wasn't the case when this documentary was produced.

Copyright enforcement and crickets

Can you point to proponents of copyright on the Internet mentioning copyright enforcement other than "it should be enforced better"? Because I can't*.

The question, "how to enforce it better" is largely missing from the conversation surrounding copyright. Yet the issue surrounding copyright is entirely about copyright enforcement.

But anytime copyright enforcement comes up, it's like the crickets just come right out. Why is this? Is it because they can't figure out a copyright enforcement strategy that doesn't cause them scorn throughout the Internet (hello SOPA/PIPA)? Is it because there isn't any workable copyright enforcement strategy that doesn't have scary implications, and they are afraid their ideas will get picked apart? Is it because they just like patting themselves on the back about how great copyright is without tackling the hard issues surrounding it?

I've been waiting a year for someone to please try and prove me wrong. Is there any copyright blogger out there brave enough to talk about copyright enforcement?

Tangent*
I'll tell you, as rare as it is I've seen some copyright enforcement talk out there. The closest thing I found was Faza and "David" from his blog basically arguing that anyone publishing content on the Internet needs to file for a permit with some sort of yet to exist copyright police agency and put down some cold hard cash (or a credit card number, as I recall Faza mentioning), I assume this permit requirement would have to apply for comments, e-mails, IMs, etc. that is, anything that could be used to violate copyright. Or there will be holes that pirates will exploit. I'm not sure how to even technically implement a legal mandate like this, it would require some kind of level of governmental control that is beyond most government's law enforcement infrastructures. Of course, that could be changed.

This sort of suggestion was hilarious and scary at the same time and give me some insight to their goals and understanding of the issue, but at least they tried. It proves to me that they realize that the core nature of the Internet as a unrestricted communications medium is the problem, and for copyright to work, the Internet communications need to be heavily restricted. Which is what I've been saying all along. Now this sort of thing is crazy unpopular even with the mainstream, which is probably why it's all hush hush silence most of the time. Maybe when they are behind closed doors they are more open about their intentions to dig a grave for the Internet. Who knows?

Imaginary Property on Imaginary Infrastructure; also known as the Internet

Enforcing copyright on the Internet is quite weird, for lack of a better term. How do you shut down a website? Well a website is "intellectual property". It might exist in any physical location at any given time, but it doesn't need to. You can easily copy this website and produce your own copy, if you wanted to.

If I want someone to stop using a factory, I can just have the authorities shut it down (maybe, if they agree to). It's not going to mysteriously pop back up again 5 seconds later. But if I want to shut down a website, how do I do that? Do I go to the website factory and tell them to stop operating?

The very thing that makes copyright hard to enforce, also makes it even harder to enforce (yes, you read that right). I can't use meatspace solutions to enforce my non-meatspace property.

Aaron Swartz commits suicide, dies at 26 years

Aaron Swartz will be missed. Aaron Swartz was a prolific computer scientist, in his short life he invented RSS, now used in millions of sites including this one, and cofounded Reddit, among many other accomplishments. With the money he made from Reddit, he retired early and worked full time to protect civil liberties on the Internet, and started a very effective activist organization DemandProgress towards this goal. Here is Reddit's blog post on the topic with more information.

He was a staunch opponent of SOPA and PIPA. In this video "How We Stopped SOPA", he discusses his work in this matter.

Mr. Hart: Copyright Creates Scarcity... and Scarcity Is [Often] Bad

Recently Terrence "Terry" Hart of Copyhype posted a flawed argument in regards to copyright and the nature of scarcity over at his blog. The scarcity model copyright encourages is one of its fatal flaws in the age of computer networks. Thus I feel the need to respond to his argument alleging that this is not so.

In his typical fashion, his argument is well written and well researched, complete with footnotes. I must commend him for having so much time to write such scholarly blogposts.

His argument revolves around disproving a trivial misconception (that copyright isn't about the copy, but the act of copying). In his odds and ends section, he proves that copying isn't infinite. While he provides an interesting and useful idea, this doesn't imply that something is equally scarce to something else because quantitatively they are both countable values. If I there exists 1 widget of type X, and there exists 1,000,000 widgets of type Y. It is safe to say because X < Y, X is more scarce than Y.

He explains that copyright is does not cause scarcity largely based on the premise that copying itself is scarce. I wondered, how does this make sense? For most of his post, he discusses X ("the rights associated with copyright") and Y ("property rights on the work itself"). Terry spends a lot of time focusing on proving X != Y and Scarcity(X) != ∞, to come up with the conclusion Scarcity(X) = 0. To elaborate:

• If X != Y, it doesn't automatically follow that Y is a property of scarcity, ie. Scarcity(X, Y). He makes no any effort to prove the existence of a casual relationship, just inequality, X != Y. That is, his conclusion Scarcity(X) = 0 seems sort of tangential to his point.

• If Scarcity(X) != ∞, it doesn't imply Scarcity(X) = 0, because Scarcity can be N where N != ∞.

He puts together a bunch of well written, supported arguments on the nature of copyright as property, and that there is indeed a finite limit to copying. I agree with both ideas. But he proceeds to use these ideas to reach an invalid conclusion.

Copyright produces scarcity because it enforces limits. In fact, that is literally what copyright is, a limitation on the public sans-copyright-holder to engage in various activities, included but not limited to copying. Any such argument about how copyright encourages creative activity, even if they are perfectly valid and reasonable, simply build on this fact.

In fact, copyright is a specific kind of artificial scarcity. (M: some pro-copyright'ers take offense to this idea, because the "artificial scarcity" seems to have some kind of negative connotation. But I would argue that it's copyright that gives artificial scarcity a negative connotation, not the other way around.) Natural scarcity is scarcity that exists given our understanding of nature and the limitations it imposes on us. The fact that there only exists a certain acreage of land on this planet implies that land is scarce (and ideally habitable land even more more scarce). Scarce, but naturally so. That doesn't make natural scarcity good or intuitively acceptable though.

Artificial scarcity is scarcity that only exists in the laws of man. Copyright is artificial scarcity because it exists only in the laws of man. Without copyright law, the limitations enumerated in copyright law wouldn't exist naturally. This isn't even making an argument, it's stating the obvious.

As Terry points out, the upper bound of copying is a natural finite scarcity, that is, Scarcity(X) != ∞. If you have a printing press, eventually you'd run out of trees to make paper from. Even Internet bandwidth is limited. So there is a natural scarcity in making copies... this is true.

But, technology exists to push the boundaries of scarcity. When we develop new farming techniques for instance, food becomes less scarce. More people can eat. This is good, especially for people who otherwise couldn't eat.

But the key thing for copyright is that technology has also made the the act of copying and distribution substantially easier and cheaper. No longer do you need an expensive printing press or media press to make large numbers of copies. Any old computer will do. Technology has pushed the natural scarcity inherent in copying to the stratosphere. While copyright has always been an artificial scarcity, it was never noticeable until the natural scarcity surrounding it was lifted as it was during the rise of computer networks.

It's like if you had a law preventing people from visiting Mars without the NASA's concurrence. This wouldn't be very controversial today. Who can go to Mars anyway, besides NASA (with a ton of funding)? But it would be controversial in a world where going to Mars was as easy and safe as going to the supermarket. Suddenly such a law would be an intolerable restriction on humanity's freedom of movement. Technology changes perspectives on the law.

Likewise, in the world of the printing press: who cares if they can not make copies of works? Who even owns a printing press? Only specialized companies.

This is no longer the case. We now live in a world where the technology exists to provide the sum of published human knowledge and culture to all the world's people. In such a world as it stands, copyright and specifically the scarcity it brings is an intolerable restriction. It's unfortunate Terry can't see this.

Copyright Is Self Defeating

I often find that copyright proponents are often several years behind when they talk about copying technology. They see the icebergs floating on the pirate waters, but fail to see all the piracy underneath.

All this talk always seems to ignore all the BitTorrent advancements over the last few years, especially the move to distributed hash table-based coordination systems, which are fully P2P. P2P by definition is not centralized, that is, P2P file sharing can’t be shut down by going to some central authority. You'd have to shut down all the peers (in the case of BitTorrent DHT, the millions of people around the world using it). Of course, mass monitoring of people’s communications would be a prerequisite to this copyright enforcement activity.

Some sites like The Pirate Bay assist in finding content, but they aren’t strictly necessary. The new BT sites are designed to be trivially mirrored. Even if you find where in the world TPB’s servers are (and they change perhaps multiple times per day, and are located in many dozens of places redundantly), TPB has designed itself such that anyone can trivially pick up and run a mirror without much money involved, because there is very little to host. In fact, the entire TPB can fit in a single cheap $10 USB stick. In practice, there are thousands of such mirrors currently active on the Internet in any given moment. In the end of the day, they know that powerful interests want them gone, and have already taken many actions all over the world to try to shut them down. So they’ve in turn taken many countermeasures to make that difficult.

All this technology means that it’s not impossible to to fight piracy. It does however, make it harder. Improving copying technology forces the enforcers methods to become increasingly intrusive and draconian. Which is exactly what has (and will) continue to make copyright itself controversial. This was pretty much my original point – copyright itself hasn’t changed much, but as technology makes copying even more easier, convenient and private, it forces copyright holders to do even more disagreeable things to counter. They don’t want to do it, but they have to if copyright will have any sort of enforcement anymore. Because of this it’s the copyright enforcers themselves that are chipping away at the concept of copyright.

The biggest allies of anti-copyright advocates are the copyright enforcers themselves. The actions they do to enforce their copyright are often useful triggers to change the public’s perceptions on copyright. This is what helps the bigger fish in the fight write articles that generate the outrage that causes anti-copyright protests. I like the latest one where some copyright group sued a 9-year old girl and stole her Winne the Pooh laptop. Even the artist who’s copyright there were apparently protecting condemned their actions as draconian and cruel. Copyright is in a way, self defeating.

I’ll just add that while this is one of many independent ways modern copyright is self-defeating, it’s not the certainly not greatest flaw. The ultimate copyright killer is that it represents a defect on potential inherit in what it is protecting. I could write a dissertation on that topic in particular that would fill many pages. But I’ll spare this because Lessigs and Stallmans of the world have written better treatises on that sort of thing.

It's Not About Copyright; It's About Copyright Enforcement

The arguments from pro-copyright people often revolve around copyright as a concept:

• An author should be able to make money from their work!
• Copyright enables a market for works, and this encourages the creation of new works! (M: This is actually basically the argument for copyright that is recorded in the Constitution.)
• Copyright is property, and a property rights are essential to a modern society!

These are typical arguments I've seen and I think most if not all pro-copyright people agree with.  The strange thing, as someone that is skeptical of copyright, I agree with them too. They are sound arguments. Someone who makes something that is useful in some way, why shouldn't they be rewarded for their work? And doesn't rewards encourage the creation of useful works? These statements are quite sensible.

So what is the problem with copyright? The problem with copyright is when you scratch beyond the surface. The surface beyond these cheerful agreeable slogans is called copyright enforcement. Lets add copyright enforcement to the mix.

• An author should be able to make money from their work. To enforce this, I should be able to spy on everyone's private communications!
• Copyright enables a market for works, and this encourages the creation of new works! To enforce this, we should scour the web and search for things that potentially violate copyright and shut them down without even a court order!
• Copyright is property, and a property rights are essential to a modern society! Therefore, we should sue single mothers and students for millions of dollars when we catch them violating copyright!

Whoa. These statements look a lot similar to the ones above, all I did was add copyright enforcement to the mix. Now these statements I don't agree with, and in fact, just reading them makes me nauseated with disgust.

Some pro-copyright'ers might be like "still looks good to me". Especially the few that supported SOPA/PIPA, Hadopi and thought record companies suing random Americans into life servitude is a noble cause. But once you add copyright enforcement to the mix, naturally the support for copyright starts to fall apart.

But that is real copyright enforcement. It's incredibly ugly, and even the most ardent pro-copyright'ers don't like to talk about it very much. You won't see any of this on a pro-copyright blog:

• If you can't audit people's private communications, you can't know if what they are doing is copyright infringing. Therefore, you can not have a healthy copyright system. France has decided that mass invasion of privacy is an essential element of copyright enforcement - and the USA is following their lead even though this violates the Forth Amendment - by taking this system private via a conspiracy of ISPs and content companies called the "Center for Copyright Information".
• Due process, proving infringement is difficult and expensive. Therefore content creators have helped pass an oppressive law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows them to remove content from the web without having to prove that actual infringement occurred. There are many example DMCA gung-ho philosophy to injunctions being used to outright censor speech, even political speech, including the Democratic National Convention's live feed. Other attempted bills such as SOPA/PIPA could have extend this idea to entire websites but were narrowly defeated.
• Copyright damages that were designed for massive scale. Fines of up to $150,000 per instance of infringement are applied on the average citizen by copyright holders. Copyright holders don't even have to prove that damages occurred under the current law to get these kinds of judgements!

Without copyright enforcement, copyright law is worth less than the paper it is printed on. And the pro-copyright'ers are always hungry for new enforcement, because the crazy amount of leverage in the law that they have today (high statuary damages, injunctions without proof, suspension of privacy rights) is not sufficient against the tide of the information age.

Problem is you can't have real enforcement without violatating basic principles of liberty and privacy that we are accustomed to (feel free to correct me, but I haven't seen it).

So with enforcement, copyright shows it's ugly side. And since copyright and enforcement can not be separated, copyright itself is ugly. Don't support copyright.

Pirate Party Founder Rick Falkvinge on Political Activism

Pirate leader Rick Falkvinge gives a TED talk on how a person can start and nurture a growing political movement. He also mentions many of the inconvenient truths about copyright enforcement on the Internet. Excellent talk.

Mimi and Eunice

This is a very funny comic series by Nina Paley of Sita Sings the Blues fame.

Obviously, I especially like the cartoons that poke fun on the idea of "intellectual property" (or more correctly "intellectual poopery").

Long Copyright Terms Kill Culture to Benefit Glorious Creative Industry

Some people focus on the fact that long copyright terms help artists make more money from their work. But I don't see that as the real effect of long copyright terms. See this article on The Atlantic that shows the effect of long copyright terms. It's really profound what a small graph can tell you.

The effect of long copyright terms is a kind of artificial scarcity, I should call it artificial extinction. When an author or publisher is no longer interested in a book, yet it is still under copyright, it becomes very increasingly hard to find. This makes older works entirely unavailable for many. This is really bad for our culture, but it's good for the culture industry. Because the culture industry doesn't want to compete with the public domain. A healthy collection of public domain works which are de jure free will hurt the creation of new works because people can just tap into the public domain for content.

When you see pro-copyright people complaining about Creative Commons, they are actually channeling this idea. Creative Commons is an artifact of copyright itself, how could someone who is pro-copyright be against it?

The problem is Creative Commons is competition. You'll see some copyright crusaders promoting Britannica these days. Really? Why? I read and contribute to the free encyclopedia Wikipedia. I'm sure you've heard of it. I like most others have no need for Britannica, which contains a tiny fraction of the content available on Wikipedia. So really, why have they suddenly become Britannica fans? It's quite obvious because Britannica's business model is based on the typical artificial scarcity concept and it costs money (pre-Wikipedia it used to cost a lot of money). Attributes they like in their cultural works. Wikipedia has neither, it's actually a free culture project. Likewise, I don't see why I need to buy music from iTunes at 99 cents a track when I can download thousands of tracks from Jamendo for free. When you tell pro-copyright people this sort of thing, they get extremely uncomfortable. Because they have no easy way to react. Suddenly their usual rhetoric feels cheap.

Public domain is a threat for the same reason. And how do you kill public domain? Extend copyright durations of course. The public domain is essentially frozen in time, just the way they like it. But is that really good for society? Hell no.

And this sort of thing encourages piracy. Now if someone wants this content, they can't even pay for it. Suddenly file sharing looks less like "evil pirate activity" and more like the most effective systems for ensuring the preservation of human knowledge and culture.

You Can't Ignore Engineering and Mathematical Facts When Discussing Copyright

Unfortunately a lot of the pro-copyright crowd is totally tone deaf to the concerns of engineers. Some of them, especially the lawyer types, think there is some magical Internet fairy that can sniff websites for copyright infringement. If only Google knew about this, they could stop piracy overnight!

Devlin Hartline points out some sites Google blocked. Over 11 million domains blocked by Google! That's a HUGE number. Huge numbers conclusively prove that the Google censors can stop piracy, if they wanted to. Somehow.

It is only people who know nothing about Computer Science who would make such absurd claims. Those 11 million sites could be matched by a single trivial regular expression. Go ahead, write Google the regular expression needed to block piracy. I'm sure they'd put it into production right away.

In our debates about copyright, let us not ignore protocols which implement a peer-to-peer topology. This is where a lot of filesharing happens. P2P is the idea that various peers (filesharers in this case) connect to each other directly. There is no intermediary involved. P2P filesharing has been going on for 10 years unabated though networks like Gnutella and the copyright crusaders can do squat about it, Gnutella can't be shut down because there is nothing to shut down. It's a protocol, not an infrastructure.

TPB has engineered itself to be based on P2P technology, using the new BitTorrent DHT system based on the concept of magnet links. A $10 flash drive can carry the entire TPB website in your pocket. If they shut it down, anyone can just put it back up. That's why TPB hasn't been shut down despite being declared illegal in over 9000 jurisdictions.

Here is an example of the dreaded copyright-killing magnet link. With this information, you can download something via P2P BitTorrent:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5da07f31494caa08885fa019a7d83c83779a9259

There is nothing hidden, no secret link to TPB or some random cyber locker. That string of text you see in your face would work just as well tattooed on your butt.

First of all, how do you know what this gets you? It's a hex string that doesn't encode the contents it describes. It could be the latest Hollywood movie, it could be something even worse.

Remember, there is no magical way to know if something is copyright infringement. In fact, without telling you what that magnet link is, there is no way for you to even know what is until you actually try to download it. Copyright is not a natural trait of data, no matter how many laws you force down the legal system this will always be so.

In this case, this magnet link points to a popular open source Linux distro. Non-copyright infringing uses for P2P, who would have known?

Don't even get me started on DRM, the whole concept is built on mathematically unsound foundations. How the hell are you suppose to protect a decryption key when that key is needed to play the media?

When you are fighting against piracy, you aren't just fighting against an increasingly politically connected foe, you are fighting against a foe that has the technology and quite frankly the laws of nature and mathematics on their side. I'm glad I'm not in that camp, it must be frustrating as hell.

Privacy vs Copyright

Dominic from the Copyright Blog offers striking examples of how copyright and privacy are similar. On the surface, his quotations missing the word "privacy" can very much be used in the context of both pro-privacy and pro-copyright arguments. He uses this to justify the fact that if you support privacy, it really isn't much a stretch to support copyright. However, I can not ignore that the primary justification he provides for copyright, namely "it advances our culture and our knowledge, it inspires others to create more things, it moves us forward as well as entertaining and delighting people", does not make any sense for privacy rights.

I see similarity with arguments for protecting "intellectual property" without taking into account the differences in what constitutes intellectual property. The rules and philosophy between copyright, patents and trademarks are quite different.

And if you scratch past the surface, privacy rights and copyright are quite different.

Privacy is fundamentally a system to protect you from others who may find your private dealings objectionable. Even if you are perfect, someone out there will want to put you in jail, embarrass you, or threaten you if they figure out enough information about you. This could be copyright enforcers, it could be the DEA, it could be anti-abortion activists. Privacy is a protection of the individual against any kind of (state-sponsored or not) malicious harm to them. It's a check and balance against coercive power.

Copyright does not have any of these privacy attributes. It protects published work which are intended to be in the public sphere. Copyright serves as a profit incentive for publishing work to a public sphere, the goal of which is to generate revenue. This is by selling as much copies of that work as possible, with as much possible cost and government-endorsed scarcity as the market will allow. Copyright may look like privacy at a shallow level, because it's enforcement is to make information scarce or unavailable.

But the purpose behind copyright is different. The purpose of copyright it is not to make information scarce or unavailable, quite the contrary. As Dominic rightfully points out, the theory behind copyright it to use the economic powers scarcity affords to make the continued development of artistic and useful works more economically feasible, to allow new and more diverse creative works to be made available to the public. This is fundamentally different from the idea of privacy!

In fact, they are so different that privacy and copyright are diametrically opposed to one another. In the world of the information age, you have to pick between privacy or copyright. You can not have proper enforcement of both.

The problem with copyright infringement is that copying is typically done in private. Nobody wants to "publish" their legal transgressions, so copyright infringement is one of the most private of acts.

So how are you suppose to even discover copyright infringement? Simply said, you must invade everyone's privacy on a massive scale. If you want to enforce copyright, you have to gain knowledge of people's private dealings. Yes, your Internet usage, your e-mails, your file and program usage behavior on your personal computer are all things that can be used to discover copyright infringement. The problem is, they are not things you have "published" for the world to see. Allowing companies the ability to access, store and data mine this information for various purposes is an invasion of privacy.

But copyright enforcers want this information regardless. Of course you can't not opt-in or opt-out otherwise all the filesharers would opt-out from being monitored. So they want involuntary access to your private information, the purpose thereof so they can punish you for any legal transgressions they find.

To be fair technology companies on the free culture side of things, like Google, want this information too. However Google wants it for different less malicious reasons. In addition, Google doesn't need to personally identify you the way copyright holders or their enforcement apparatuses need to.

So in conclusion, copyright and privacy can not really coexist anymore. Comparisons between copyright and privacy are not so simple, and there needs to be a focus on the differences between the philosophies of privacy and copyright to understand how one can be opposed to the idea of copyright but for the idea of privacy. In fact, you can only really be for one or the other.