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.