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China and the MPA
from the arrogance-and-stupidity dept.
A riddle: What do China and the Motion Picture Association have in common? The answer this week: arrogance. Plus stupidity.
Both are about to learn the hard way what American educators, religious leaders, law enforcement officials - even politicians - are just beginning to figure out: The Net isn't censorable. Neither is the software that runs programs, links Web sites, plays, movies and music, stores or transmits information and ideas.
The Net is an unyielding trade-off. If you want to do business or sell things on it, you sacrifice monopoly and control, and use technology to offer choice and options. If you don't, you're heading backwards.
Both the Chinese government and the MPA have learned little from recent technological history, following in the bovine steps of the music industry, which alienated a generation of liberated music lovers by huffing and puffing but failing to slow or stop the spread of digital music technology.
Institutions both governmental and corporate that feel threatened by the Net and the Web, are developing a pattern. Rather than embrace innovative and empowering new technologies to offer consumers and citizens choice and freedom, they seek out a handful of targets to use as warnings, examples of the nasty fate that will befall transgressors.
If any approach is doomed to fail in this era, it's that one. Too bad some people will have to pay along the way, sacrifices on the altar of corporate or governmental obliviousness.
For all the media hype about technology, pornography and e-commerce, one of the most striking but still largely unrecognized legacies of the Net has been the death blow it's dealt to the very idea of censorship. One industry and institution after another - music, the law, medicine, Wall Street, academe, the media- is coming to terms with this new reality, voluntarily or otherwise.
For hundreds of years, censorship has been the primary tool by which government, monarchies, educational and religious institutions and, lately, powerful corporations, have asserted political, cultural and economic dominance. They're going to have to learn to live without it.
This week, police in Norway raided the home of Jon Johansen, a teenager, at the request of the Motion Picture Association, which has joined in the global effort to suppress certain software - in this case DVD viewing code -- deemed responsible for copyright violations and intellectual property theft (last week, the recording industry went after Mp3.com). Last month, the DVD Copyright Control Association sued 72 hackers and Web site authors for posting - or even linking to software (DeCSS) that unlocks the system for preventing illegal copying of video discs.
Johansen's arrest got widespread media coverage in America, unusual for a foreign-based copyright case. Perhaps one reason is that companies like Disney, owner of ABC News, which covered the story yesterday on television and radio, have a decidedly vested interested in publicizing the notion that music, movies and culture in general belong to private corporations, not code-writing geeks and nerds. Hackers (usually crackers) have often been singled out in this way - paraded before hordes of reporters and hauled off dramatically to jail. The authorities know they haven't got a prayer of rounding up all the alleged wrongdoers, but they can make so much noise they might fool people into thinking otherwise.
The arrest came at almost the same moment China announced restrictions on its burgeoning Net chat rooms and e-mail accounts. Ocurring continents apart, the two incidents seemed oddly connected.
The MPA - along with the music industry, one of the world's largest cartels outside of Columbia -- has claimed in several legal actions that the kind of DVD-viewing software Johansen allegedly used was developed outside of the industry's monopoly, and is thus illegal. The organization particularly wants to suppress so-called reverse engineering and the public posting and sharing of DVD codes.
Governments like China are attempting a different kind of information control, an equally doomed effort to stick their fingers in the digital dike.
On Wednesday, the agency that oversees China's Internet users [http://slashdot.org/article.pl'sid=00/01/26/1254221&mode=thread] issued severe new regulations intended to control the release of "state secrets" and other unauthorized information over the Internet, one of the broadest efforts yet by a government to do what is inherently impossible: control online speech.
The Chinese government is in a classic technological quagmire, almost the same one facing the movie industry. Does it want to grow and prosper in a techno-driven, linked global economy or not? Embracing and deploying innovative new technology is essential to investment and development in the 21st Century. That puts increasing pressure on undemocratic governments, who quite correctly dread the spread of computing, e-mail and chat rooms, and on corporations, who fear the loss of profitable monopolies.
China has nearly nine million Internet users, significantly up from two million a year ago, according to a survey by the government's China Internet Information Center. But many Chinese believe the figure is dramatically higher. One computer analyst working from Hong Kong wrote earlier this year that China may actually have more than 35 million e-mail accounts. As for the world's code-sharing DVD nerds, nobody knows how many there are - but it's believed to number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
Despite Johansen's show arrest, and the imprisonment of a handful of Chinese political dissidents speaking out online, both groups are beyond conventional policing. But that doesn't mean a lot of people won't pay by being persecuted, jailed or worse before the futility of the censorship effort becomes clear.
This week's regulations in China were announced by the aptly-named State Secrecy Bureau, a murky agency which seems to be taking over efforts to control the Net and to identify and arrest users who post "illegal" information on the Web.
Does this seem vastly different from the way corporate interests around the world (for more on the issues surrounding the Johansen incident, see http://www.eff.org/ ) are seeking to curb the dissemination of software and intellectual property online? Maybe it isn't. Both corporations and government, since they can't monitor all of the many millions of offenders online, are singling out targets of opportunity. They believe they're sending miscreants a message, but instead, they appear to be alienating and enraging the next generation of consumers as well as prodding geeks and nerds to continue to develop software as a political and cultural tool.
The powerful reality is that there aren't enough cops and lawyers on the planet, not even in China, to monitor all the chat rooms and the millions of e-mail accounts. There sure aren't enough to police the distribution of open source and other code like the one that runs DVD's.
Ultimately, such regulations are utterly doomed, as are efforts to restrict source codes for DVD players or the transmission of music and information online.
But before China and the MPA learn this inevitable lesson, an indeterminate number of victims will be snared and made examples of. As futile and sometimes tragic as these persecutions are, these people will pay the price for the growing freedom everyone else is enjoying.
Re:The Net can be censored (Score:3)
DeCSS has become more widespread than most code fragments not because people are using it, but because people are taking a stand against those trying to censor them.
More effective censorship in this example would have been to not do anything about, then it would have been a midly importent project in the open source world, but would never have become as popular as it is now.
Finkployd
Re:Is Censorship/control ALWAYS bad? (Score:3)
It's the same assumption made by those who think voters should have to register.
It's the same assumption made by those who thought that women shouldn't vote, or that the poor shouldn't vote, or that no one should vote.
It's the same assumption made by those who apathetically allow others to make decisions for them.
The assumption is that people are not capable of running their own lives, and making their own decisions.
I would ask the poster: what measures do you recommend for stopping these examples of hysteria? It sounds to me like the best recipe is creating a society where people are encouraged to think for themselves. How exactly does a society become mature enough to respond correctly to misinformation? By being exposed to it, and simultaneously being allowed to look at all the information, and decide the facts themselves. What caused the harms that were corrected by the laws you mention? Lack of access to the truth.
Maybe people don't always act like adults. Maybe we do make horrible mistakes due to ignorance, fear, and gullibility. But the lesson of liberty is that we must be allowed to act like adults, educate ourselves, and make the important decisions. Because the alternative is tyranny.
MPAA boycott (Score:3)
I normally post a movielog on my web page, detailing every theatrical release I see. After these recent events, I've decided to start an Anti-Movielog, in which I will record all the movies I don't see, but otherwise would have if these outrages had not occured.
I just got to thinking, why not implement it on a massive scale? How many people who normally go to movies are actually planning to boycott? If there's an appreciable number, wouldn't it be cool to have a web page where people could go and tell everyone exactly which movies they're not seeing on what dates. Then we could keep a running total to show the movie industry exactly how much money they're costing themselves.
Of course, keeping it honest could be a potential problem. We wouldn't want the hypothetical database to be Slashdotted and the polls stuffed by repeat voters, or people who wouldn't have seen the movies anyway. Still, it's an idea to think about. I'd like to know anyone else has ideas about this. If there's enough interest, I'd be willing to help out on such a project.
don't forget australia (Score:5)
So far, the Australian Broadcasting Authority [aba.gov.au] has issue a couple of "Takedown Notices" to certain websites hosting prohibited content. Each of those sites was back up again running from an offshore host server within hours.
Electronic Frontiers Australia [efa.org.au] has more details..
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You got it wrong this time (Score:5)
I wish you to be right. But I think you are wrong. Neither the politicians, nor the leaders had the resources behind them MPAA has. They had to push questionable laws and usually they failed (Australia being a noteable exemption). The difference in this case is:
The law (MCPA) has already been pushed and quite a few previous laws exist.
These people do not need to finance a media campaign to promote their cause. And they can promote it at no extra expense. As I said in one of the previous threads on the topic they can lie as much as they wish and there is nobody to oppose them with an equivalent amount of firepower. Quoting myself from a previous thread:
A LIE REPEATED ONE HUNDRED TIMES BECOMES THE ULTIMATE TRUTH.
Gobels
Repeat after me: "encrypted DVD cannot be copied" - exempt from the presentation of MPAA for the preliminary injuction in New York. The transcript is at:2600.com - one of the sites hit with injunction. The quote is located in the very beginning.
Presenting it here once again for sake of paranoia (who knows what will they try to injunct next time, the truth maybe):
MR. GOLD: Now, before plaintiffs were willing to make DVDs available, they decided that they had to have an encryption technology so that the content and their copyright interest in the content could be protected, something that would scramble the picture and scramble the sound. And that system was created, and it is called CSS, which stands for content scrambling system. And you can't watch a movie unless you have an authorized DVD player, and the authorized DVD player has the computer key to the program. So with a DVD and an authorized player, the authorized player will unscramble the picture and the sound and you can watch your movie. But you can't copy it. The CSS technology prevents that.
Yeah, right, not like I can copy the entire DVD bit by bit encrypted, make a 100000 copies and sell them...
And as you see the judge accepted this argument wholehartedly and put the entire weight of the US law system behind it. Though the argument is a lie. One that has been repeated 100 times so far and shall be repeated until Gobels holds true.
There has not been a single case when such firepower and finances have been used to make the net silent. And the chances of bringing the Net silent in this case are too high.
You also miscalculate for the fact that all those who failed before are likely to join the crusade seeing MPAA to score points aginst the net as a whole. The Net against all who want to put it under control... Well, I will make no guesses here. I doubt that the net will win so we can all go to O'Raily and by ourselfs a coopy of DataBase Nation to educate ourselves on how shall we live further on. Or a copy of 1984 for that matter.
P.S. I hope I am wrong as well... But...
Katz is a College Freshman (Score:4)
In *every single essay* Katz has a sentence that reads remarkably similar to this:
"For hundreds of years, censorship has been the primary tool by which government, monarchies, educational and religious institutions and, lately, powerful corporations, have asserted political, cultural and economic dominance. "
Or, how about this:
"Institutions both governmental and corporate that feel threatened by the Net and the Web, are developing a pattern. Rather than embrace innovative and empowering new technologies to offer consumers and citizens choice and freedom, they seek out a handful of targets to use as warnings, examples of the nasty fate that will befall transgressors."
Does anyone edit Katz's writings? These lines are the typical "throwaway lines" used to link paragraphs in five-paragraph essays. They don't say anything specific and are always rooted in nifty generalizations that have no basis in fact. "For hundreds of years..." For chrissake, Katz: do some fucking research and get us a number. Use a fucking incident -- an actual event to make your writing more persusaive.
I read all of Katz's essays, and I'm amazed: he's a remarkably lightweight critique who never offers any specfic "insights." What Katz offers is generalized FUD: he picks up on an issue, decides to fit it in with his "project", and, damn the facts or specifics, writes around the issue until he drills home a point that could have been "drilled home" in the first sentence.
Does Katz just write these things willy-nilly and send them off to Slashdot to be "published?" Does anyone actually offer Katz some constructive criticism about his pieces?
Jon, really: you need an editor. You shouldn't fire these pieces off for public consumption until you do some real research. They're not persuasive texts: they're ramblings.
It's the typical sort of Slashdot mentality: well, if I can't think of a comparison, well, I'll use Hitler -- or, better yet, I'll use the typical "communism bad, capitalism good" sort of comparison -- or, wait! -- how about "open source good, non open source bad" -- yeah! that's it.
Katz, go ahead and respond to this. I never see any responses to your so-called "pieces". Why do you write like a college freshman? Why don't you do better research? Why don't you use an editor?
Refuse to sit in the back of the OS Bus (Score:3)
The more things change the more they stay the same. We've been sitting in back of the OS bus for years. Since the media has discovered that Linux is "cool" and companies realize they can turn a buck on the hard work of the Open Source revolution, it is this revolution that is in a position of power and importance. It's time to
change the world.
Katz is right. This is a fight we can and will win. We have to. We have no choice otherwise it's over. This is our Waterloo. Or rather I should say, this is their Waterloo. This is where we stand up and say, no we are in charge of our destiny and we're not going to tolerate the behavior of jackbooted thugs like the MPAA.
I wanna play DVDs on my Linux box. It's a simple yet tragic hard fought freedom. And if we all don't earn this freedom, what's the next one to fall?
I hope that come LinuxWorld this week that there are plenty of folks that take some time out of the convention and protest. Let the media know, blast the message, we're not going to sit in the back of the bus. We don't back down, and we're not going to tolerate some mega corperation dictating terms of what we can or can not do with our computers.
If the petigree of DeCSS is in doubt, time to make an alternative implementation and post it on the net.
Regards...
Is Censorship/control ALWAYS bad? (Score:3)
Disclaimer: Deals more with the govt censorship issue than the MPAA. I happen to hold the personal opinion that the MPAA is just trying to find a way to gouge the average consumer more :)
Summary: Not all censorship is bad. Take a chill pill
That felt like a highly inflammatory article, which painted everything with a huge, broad brush. Ok, so we know that Jon Katz feels that censorship, big government and big organizations of any kind are bad. But is that always true? The average American judges based on what they see around them, which is not necessarily true around the world. Education levels, gullibility, etc, vary. Are there places where SOME controls might not be bad? A couple of examples:
These are anecdotes which I know through personal experience or through friends who were actually there. I'm very sure that most non-first world country people have heard these and could contribute some even funnier/sadder stories. Or even people in developed countries.
Truth is, in any country where education isn't sufficiently high and skepticism isn't strongly in place, the free flow of information can hurt much more than it can help. Censorship to most governments is less about keeping total control over their citizens than it is about keeping out false information, information that can lead to totally irrational and damaging actions. For instance, a funny facet of politics in M'sia are the "poison pen" campaigns, when unsigned letters are circulated about a particular political candidate. These letters contain some absolutely unbelievable accusations. It doesn't matter that the average, well-educated voter would dismiss this out of hand. It just needs to hit the more gullible ones who will believe it and the candidate's reputation is ruined ... for no reason.
The US has plenty of such safeguards too. It's just not called censorship here, even though it is the control of information. Think "Truth in Advertising", or FDA approval for health claims.
Personally, I think that as a population matures, people get more skeptical and you can trust the general population to decide for themselves what is right and what isn't. However, in a developing world, a little more control and protection may be a better idea. Something along the lines of Plato's Philosopher King ideals ... only when you are truly "educated" can you make better decisions. Also akin to the parent/child relationship, where the parent must guide the child until he's ready to make his own decisions.
Dangerous Sentiments (Score:5)
The Net not censorable? This is not the case!
Consider two stories recently from slashdot: universities around the country banning the use of Napster [napster.com], and one university banning access to the webpage dialpad.com [dialpad.com]. It is only a matter of time before governments and others start seriously toying with the idea of various technical solutions to prohibit access to pornography, copyrighted materials, source code deemed illegal, whatever.
The most dangerous way to approach this threat is to assume everything will be okay. Every one who reads slashdot that lives in Norway should be writing dead-tree mail to complain about the treatment of Jon Johansen, everyone in the US should be writing congress and the press to point out that the MPAA is using the DMCA to usurp fair use rights in spite of the intent of Congress. If you live in Australia you should be writing letters every month ccomplaining about the net censorship law, if you live in Arizona you need to write your representative to complain about the propsed legislation to prohibit students from using their net access for non-educational activites.
The net hasn't "destroyed the very idea of censorship." The last thing we can afford to do is assume this. Those who value the current freedom of the net and the current freedom to code should be writing one letter at least every month to a politican or newspaper.
Not about copying! (Score:3)
Misconceptions. (Score:3)
One of your better articles, Katz (Score:3)
But the RIAA, MPAA, and other various "cartels" in the USA can be fought.
As it stands, the Linux DVD project is just a bunch of viewing tools, and filesystem and hardware drivers--not something the average Linux luser is going to be able to put together yet.
What will finally put the nail in the MPAA's coffin is a graphical, userland program that is simple to install, and comparible to the various Windows players out there. Get it into RedHat or one of the other distributions.
Think of it from the journalists' point of view: sure, we can mirror the source all over the place but face it, a bunch of source files is meaningless to a clueless reporter, or worse, to them it means hacker. A full-featured (at least professional looking) application that any luser can install and play DVDs out of the box would really get the point of this lawsuit across to the various journalists and shapers of public opinion.
If you are a bored coder looking for a project, please consider helping the Linux Video [linuxvideo.org] project!
________________________________
Re:A message to Mr. Katz (Score:3)
This is kinda off-topic, but since Katz's brings it up, and everyone seems to be talking about it, I'll talk about it too. I'm not taking sides on the whole DeCSS thing, because I think it has legitimate uses, but can also see how it opens things wide up for pirating of DVDs, but I have a feeling the MPA will easily win this case if the OSS doesn't figure out what exactly it's argueing. There are so many confusing points the OSS is trying to make that the may very well lose through disorganization.
One thing that they really need to figure out is the issue of copying. I have read that you can already make bit for bit copies of DVDs. But I have also read that these copies can't play on any standard DVD since the "copy protection" part of the disk is not burned correctly on these copiers. Also, the major point the OSS is making is that the MPA is keeping them from making backup copies of their DVDs, which they are legally entitled to. The problem being they have already argued that copies can be made. They then continue to argue that DeCSS doesn't help pirates make copies of movies, which defeats the whole point of argueing that they are using DeCSS for making legal backup copies. There are only 2 options, either DeCSS helps people make copies (whether they are legal copies or not) or it doesn't have anything to do with making copies, in which case their arguement about making legal backups in null and void. Everyone needs to get their ducks in a row if they plan on having any chance to win this case, because at the rate it's going, it looks like a lost cause...
Re:Katz is a College Freshman (Score:3)
A message to Mr. Katz (Score:5)
This is not what CSS does, it scrambles the content from being viewed by anything but a registered player capable of returning authentication tokens back to the hardware. The wording Jon uses here implies that Jon Johansen is a Cracker that wanted to start a piracy business selling ripped DVDs. This is not the case, Mr. Johansens thoughts were somerthing like this: "I like Linux...I like DVDs...too bad I can't watch DVDs on Linux...OH! Wait. I will just reverse engineer the CSS system and make a player for Linux. HEY I DID IT. I had better tell the world." That had not intention of ripping DVDs. Please remember that the courts are going to be listening to what we say, and if we stray off and say that de_css is for ripping DVDs, were going to lose this case.
Munky_v2
"Warning: you are logged into reality as root..."
"The reports of my death ..." (Score:3)
Katz writes:
Comments like that have been made for hundreds of years, each time a new means of publishing has enabled more to published wider and cheaper, but have any been the death blow? If they had, Jon wouldn't be writing that sentence, would he?
Among many, the urge to censor runs strong and deep. It always has, it always will. Many with that urge are just now beginning to pay attention to the Internet. The battle lines have been drawm, but the war is not remotely close to over.
I will dance in the streets if and when the day comes when the Internet has dealt a death blow to the very idea of censorship. But to argue that the day is already upon us is fatuous at best