In the Garcia vs. Google case, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals states “The appeal teaches a simple lesson—a weak copyright claim cannot justify censorship in the guise of authorship.”
Read more:
Finally! Victory for Free Speech in Garcia v. Google »
Court: Actor Can’t Force Removal of Innocence of Muslims Trailer »
https://youtu.be/0hAtLCBk4gc
This is a film you really ought to see, while it’s still on Youtube: The Hacker Wars
Some days ago Wikileaks released the “dump” from the Sony hack. Among other things, we can find this piece of information…
“Finally, in regard to trade, the MPAA/MPA with the strong support of your studios, continue to advocate to governments around the world about the pressing the need for strong pro-IP trade policies such as TPP and the proposed EU/US trade agreement (TTIP).”
i) This might refer to the ISDS article of TTIP, allowing companies to sue countries who are changing laws in ways that may limit these companies future profits. In this case, suing the EU if it would reform its legal framework on copyright.
ii) It might also be a signal that TTIP will be yet another attempt to limit the freedom of the Internet — and to force Internet Service Providers to police (and be responsible for) everything their customers are up to. (Like in the ACTA treaty, that was voted down by the European Parliament.)
Probably both.
Today, copyright and “intellectual property” are concepts that are used in ways they where never intended to. They have become arguments for limiting free flow of information and free speech. They have become arguments for mass surveillance and control. And they are suffocating the free market.
Copyright must be reformed and adopted to todays markets and todays technology. But apparently Big Entertainment is doing all in its power to stop such a reform.
Finally, I love free trade. But I’m not so sure that is what trade agreements like TTIP is about. It looks more like regulations and restrictions, in many areas. And you don’t need trade agreements to have free trade. All you have to do is to open up your borders.
/ HAX
Privacy is the bedrock of individual freedom. It is a universal right that sustains the freedoms of expression and association. These principles enable inquiry, dialogue, and creation and are central to Wikimedia’s vision of empowering everyone to share in the sum of all human knowledge. When they are endangered, our mission is threatened. If people look over their shoulders before searching, pause before contributing to controversial articles, or refrain from sharing verifiable but unpopular information, Wikimedia and the world are poorer for it.
Wikimedia about their lawsuit against NSA and the US Department of Justice – to challenge mass surveillance.
Links:
Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA to challenge upstream mass surveillance »
Stop Spying on Wikipedia Users »
Glenn Greenwald and Carl Bernstein in a discussion with Fredrik Laurin, head of investigative journalism, Swedish Radio.
Apparently Google is about to make changes to its search engine. The New Scientist reports…
“A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page.”
It will be very interesting to see what is to be considered as the truth.
There are areas where we might not have reached the final conclusion on what is true, where we need additional information to fully understand what is going on – or where “common knowledge” simply is wrong. Suddenly we are moving into the realm of what we don’t know that we don’t know…
And what about disputed areas — such as war on drugs versus legalisation and harm reduction? Who will decide what is true? On what grounds?
If the “truth” is to be decided from what the majority believes – Google might become a truly conservative and reactionary force.
Tread carefully. Don’t be evil.
/ HAX
This week we learned that Google is banning sexually explicit content from its blogging platform, Blogger. As a private company Google can have any rules, terms and conditions they want for their services. And they should and must have that right. Even so, this is problematic.
My Swedish blog is on Blogger. And I must ask myself — if Google introduce rules against sex and nudity, what will come next? Will it be OK to criticise or mock religion? Will it be OK to argue for legalisation of certain drugs? Will it be OK to use the blog to make information from “illegal” whistleblowers public?
In Bloggers terms and conditions Google states that you cannot blog on certain topics / in certain ways. Among other things they mention hate speech (a tricky definition, depending on who you ask), crude content (what about proof of war crimes?), copyright infringements (often used to curb inconvenient information) and illegal activities (a tricky one when governments are trying to keep their dirty little secrets under wraps by going after the messenger).
This is not just about Blogger / Google. Similar T&C can be found at most social networks, in agreements with internet service providers and others. This is problematic in several ways…
But I’m not sure what to do about this. Saying that social net platforms should accept everything that’s legal doesn’t work — as this will vary from country to country and as many jurisdictions have absurd bans on free speech. And as a blogger your purpose often is to dispute what is deemed illegal.
In the words of HL Mencken…
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Another idea might be to start alternatives to Facebook, Google & Co. A huge project, for sure. Without any guarantee for success. I fear most people simply don’t care.
This blog is a privately hosted WordPress blog, which is a solution when it comes to blogging. But the threat against free speech online goes far beyond just blogging.
This is a discussion to be continued.
On a final note: It’s puzzling that Google bans sexually explicit content from Blogger — when a simple Google picture search on such matters will produce the most esoteric results.
/ HAX
Read more: Engadget — Google’s banning sexually explicit content from its blogging platform »
Worrying reports…
“Google has so far been removing links only from its European sites, for example google.fr in France and google.co.uk in the UK. However, a French court has now ruled that Google is required to remove links globally, and that local subsidiaries can be fined if the company fails to do so.”
Read more:
‘Right to be forgotten’ by Google may extend beyond Europe following court ruling »
Google’s French arm faces daily €1,000 fines over links to defamatory article »
The Disruptive Communications Project runs an important and interesting piece about “jurisprudence-shoping”— by Georgetown adjunct professor Matt Schruers.
His point is that copyright law and its’ far reaching remedies “are so attractive that they attract plaintiffs from other areas of the law”. This leads to legal migration, where all sorts of legal conflicts are dealt with under laws written with a totally different purpose.
For instance copyright law is being used to silence people who ought to be protected by freedom of speech.
For me, the Nadia Plesner case springs to mind. This artist was sued under copyright law by the luxury brand Louis Vuitton for depicting an undernourished African child holding a designer handbag in her painting Darfurnica.
Read the Schruer piece here » (Via: Techdirt)
/ HAX
A few years ago Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Bank of America pulled the money plug for Wikileaks. There was no legal way for the US Government to stop Wikileaks from spreading disruptive facts. So they called in some corporate friends to help.
Now, I do believe that companies have the right to decide who they want to engage in business with. Nevertheless, there is a problem when market dominant companies do so to limit free speech. And Government pressing them to do so is clearly a democratic problem.
In the Wikileaks case we (I used to work for the Pirate Party in the European Parliament) fought in the political arena to bring attention to this. And in a moment of clarity the EU Parliament adopted a resolution (opinion) stating that such action is problematic.
The adopted EP text by Engström et al.
32. Considers it likely that there will be a growing number of European companies whose activities are effectively dependent on being able to accept payments by card; considers it to be in the public interest to define objective rules describing the circumstances and procedures under which card payment schemes may unilaterally refuse acceptance;
If this resolution will lead to any actual political action is unclear. But we tried.
(Later an Icelandic court partly repealed the money embargo against Wikileaks.)
But, as it turns out, this was not an isolated incident. Recently PayPal pulled the plug again. This time the target was the end-to-end encrypted NSA-safe email service ProtonMail. The reason stated was that PayPal is in doubt about the legality of encrypted e-mail, according to US law.
This is a huge issue, in so many ways.
Now, ProtonMail is based in Switzerland. And it is developed by some pretty weighty people, such as MIT, Harvard and CERN researchers.
It is highly questionable if US law is applicable in this case. And, anyhow, if in some strange way it is – this issue should be settled in court.
Here lies a major problem with this kind of outsourced execution of political power. There is no rule of law. (There is not even any law to relate to.) There are no prior proper judicial proceedings. And there is no possibility for redress.
In the ProtonMail case PayPal froze some 275,000 USD. And there is apparently nothing to do about it.
On a similar note, payment providers have blocked the payment channels for VPN services in some countries.
And there are some other, smaller examples from my country, Sweden, where payment providers pulled the money plug for clients that they find to be morally questionable. Among others this has happened to a small company selling DVD horror movies (!) and a web based shop for sex toys.
In these cases, it is not even a question about what is legal. Here it is up to corporate policy makers in board rooms to decide. Often they rely on rather dim, square and uneasy “moral” standards. (E.g. not to upset the US christian right.) And these standards are enforced by multinationals on an international, world wide scale by terms of service.
What to do?
Well, you could call for politicians to draft laws stating that dominant payment providers may not refuse clients who provide goods or services not breaching local law. But doing so might be questionable in principle and difficult in practice. And knowing my politicians, I’m not sure exactly what they actually would deliver if asked to regulate in this field.
Then we have the possibility of consumer boycotts. But for boycotts to be successful, there must be some competition for consumers to turn to. And in this field, there is almost none. It is also doubtful if the general public would get on board, to make a boycott effective enough.
The third option is to turn to digital currency, such as BitCoin. This is by far the best option. Or it would be, if it was more widely adopted. We might get there, but we are not there yet.
So… we have some serious problems here, with no perfect or yet functioning solutions.
But there is one thing we can do, right now: We can raise our voices. We can explain the problem. We can get media interested. We can make this a exhausting PR-issue for the industry. We can make this not only an issue of free speech and privacy, but also about free enterprise for the rest of society. We can name and shame Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others who give them self power over our very civil liberties.
Spread the word.
/HAX
Update: They just did it again… »
