A few weeks ago, I wrote about Paul Carr’s accusation of hypocrisy within the tech community for opposing bad copyright legislation and then also speaking out against plagiarism. His take was wrong, but it wasn’t unusual; it’s all too common for supporters of wrongheaded copyright legislation (like SOPA, PIPA and two decades of more successful proposals) to settle on a characterization of their opponents and then cry foul when those characterizations are not consistent with reality. It’s an example of confirmation bias: favoring information that supports a hypothesis and discarding (or dismissing as hypocritical) information that doesn’t.
The problem is that it’s not very productive to assume that actions which seem internally inconsistent are taken in bad faith. It makes a lot more sense to think of your own model as incomplete, and take in the words and actions of other as feedback to inform it.
In that spirit, I want to dig a little deeper into the motivations of the people who support legislation for expanded copyright laws. Especially in the heat of the debate, when rhetoric is running hot, it’s too easy to assume they’re real malice or profound ignorance. But to do so poisons the conversation and makes progress less likely. Worse, it makes it difficult to predict the next move and to change the conversation.
So what is it that drives the entertainment industry to promote legislation that is so offensive and anti-user it can lead to the biggest online protests in history?
Is it about money? The entertainment lobbyists provide plenty of stats about the money lost to “piracy”, but they know better than anybody that the movie industry is taking in record profits. And while there are problems with ever drawing a direct connection between infringement and lost revenues, the estimated impact of the “piracy” SOPA was addressed at was under $450 million — not pocket change, but not a crippling expense to these corporations.
Is it that these people feel there’s an inherent moral wrong in making a copy of something without authorization? That’s the basis for charges of hypocrisy against Bill Keller, the CEO of Vevo, and of course Lamar Smith, to name some very recent examples. Everybody who reads about these knew they were bound to happen — Cardinal Richileu’s famous “six lines” quote might as well be updated today to specify copyright violations explicitly.
But more importantly, if their goal were to reduce unauthorized copying, one has to assume they’d be taking the obvious action: making authorized copying easier. Or at least don’t make it harder. As long as these companies are undermining efforts to reduce piracy, it just doesn’t seem like it’s their goal.
Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.
All along, the understanding has been that the jobs in question were those of the men and women working on film sets or movie theaters (or, extending the idea beyond its logical bounds, the corn farmers behind the popcorn sales). But if that’s the case, it’s not the perception of the rank-and-file. Look at Wil Wheaton, who responded to Dodd’s quote by pointing out that he has “lost more money to creative accounting, and American workers have lost more jobs to runaway production, than anything associated with what the MPAA calls piracy.”
But the actions of the entertainment industry start to make sense when you realize that the executives are really thinking about their own jobs. The executives driving the agenda of the MPAA are tremendously well paid, and they know why that is: for decades, they’ve been able to function as the gatekeepers between artists and the public. They’ve had “exclusive custody of the master switch”, as Tim Wu quoted former CBS News executive Fred Friendly saying. For the most part, artists have hated this arrangement. But there was no alternative.
And you can bet that scares them. They know the Internet is here to stay, and absent legislative intervention, it will continue to disrupt gatekeepers. They probably know that efforts to preserve their outdated function on the Internet, things like maneuvering to control the .music TLD for “accredited” musicians, are Hail Mary passes. Too little, too late.
Echoing Tim O’Reilly a decade ago, the real threat to gatekeepers is not piracy but irrelevance. They’ve gotten comfortable as the solution to a problem that fewer and fewer people have, and now they can see they’re in a bind. It’s not an excuse, but an explanation: they’re pulling out the stops to defend their position, even if it’s against the interests of their customers, and against the long-term interest of the industry itself.
I recently re-installed Ubuntu on my home computer, and wanted to move my office Mac’s Adium OTR key and collected fingerprints over to the new install. I had some trouble, but got it eventually, so I wanted to document the process.
The first step is to make sure you’ve got Pidgin and Pidgin-OTR installed on one computer, and Adium on another.
Adium stores the OTR private key and the fingerprints in
It’s worth noting that neither application stores these keys encrypted. The threat model assumes that if an attacker has access to your Adium 2.0 or .purple folder, you’re already compromised. But that means you have to be extra careful about transferring these files from one computer to another: obviously, sending your key in a cleartext e-mail is not a good idea.
Anyway, harmonizing is just a matter of copying both files from one location to another, and then modifying the key slightly to match the format that each program stores it in. I was disappointed at how poorly documented these formats are, but fortunately the always impressive Guardian Project has gone through and documented each program’s file location and format in order to build a tool to convert files between different IM client formats. The tool’s not done, and so far only converts to their Gibberbot mobile IM client, but the README contains all the information you need.
In the case of Adium to Pidgin key transfer, which both use the standard libotrname field, which is an integer in the Adium config file, needs to be changed to the actual account name. The protocol field needs to be changed from libpurple-jabber-gtalk (in the case of a GTalk account) to prpl-jabber.
You may need to turn Pidgin’s OTR plugin off and on again, but it should recognize your key, and all of your verified fingerprints should show up as well.
Twitter made some waves this week when it announced a new feature — granular country-by-country censorship of Tweets. It was probably a tactical misstep to make this announcement in the wake of the anti-SOPA blackout protests, and initial reactions ran accordingly hot, but cooler heads have since, for the most part, prevailed. The reality is that Twitter has “boots on the ground” in a number of countries that have different speech laws than we do, and as long as it must comply with those laws to avoid endangering its employees, the best course is to make that compliance as transparent and non-disruptive as possible. Local blocks are better for the greater Twitter ecosystem, and direct attention to the bad laws that deserve the blame.
So, yes, Twitter’s style of censorship is “best-in-class”, and its continuing defense of freedom of expression also grants it some benefit of the doubt when implementing this sort of policy. Given the background facts of the situation — a centralized architecture run by a global corporate entity, Twitter has done as well as anybody could reasonably expect.
In other words, as my friend Asheesh has explained, we each have a “risk profile” that shapes the actions we choose to take. Your risk profile probably allows speaking in ways that are illegal in, say, Thailand or Germany. But when you use Twitter, you’re required to adhere to their risk profile. Twitter’s historically been very good about managing its risk profile to interfere only minimally with speech concerns, but it is bound to observe at least some minimum as befits a responsible global corporate entity. Where there are conflicts between the risk profile of the users and the risk profile of the service, the service takes priority.
(It’s worth noting that these mismatched risk profiles can cut both ways, too: people who were using MegaUpload for the legitimate storage and distribution of personal files may have been very conservative about what they were uploading, but were tied up with MegaUpload’s relatively permissive risk profile.)
Those background facts, though, the ones that dictate the shape of risk that the operators of a communication channel are willing to take, don’t have to look like Twitter’s. While we the users have overwhelmingly opted for services that are centralized and run by global corporations, there are other models available. Services that follow these other models, like Status.Net — which powers Identi.ca — or Thimbl for example, are not operated by large groups that have to worry about liability in different parts of the world. Increasingly, too, using these services doesn’t require a tradeoff in functionality or performance.
There are certainly people who still have problems with the sort of censorship that Twitter has admitted to participating in, but that blame is misplaced. Twitter is just being transparent about the requirements of operating a centralized corporate communication channel. Anger about these issues should be channeled in one or both of two directions: reducing the risks corporations undertake operating in foreign markets by improving the laws in those countries, or choosing models that aren’t bound to the same risks.
I prefer the latter. John Gilmore famously said in 1993 that the Internet views censorship as damage and route around it. That’s still true. But corporations don’t have the same attributes. We can try to reduce the effect of censorship in the world by changing laws and governments to cut the problem off at its source, which is a noble goal. But we can also design and use services that are decentralized in function and control, and so take advantage of the fundamental censorship-busting quality of the Internet.
There is so much aggressively wrong with Paul Carr’s recent “Angry Nerds” piece that it is hard to know where to begin. To summarize: Carr is shocked to see that the very same tech community who rallied against SOPA and PIPA is now rallying behind 37 Signals in a case involving blatant design plagiarism — down to hotlinked images — by another start-up named Curebit.
Clear thinkers have long complained about the hit job the content lobby have done on the language of copyright but rarely has the point been so clearly made that a muddled use of language translates into unclear and outright incorrect arguments. Carr’s accusations of hypocrisy by the tech community in this situation rest on two blatantly false premises. For one, Carr doesn’t know the difference between “infringement”, “theft”, and “plagiarism”. To quote the article:
Is it, as some argued on Twitter when I asked the question earlier, that plagiarism is different from copyright theft? No. And not least because plagiarism is copyright theft.
It would comfort me to know Carr is trolling here, but I’m afraid he isn’t. If you’ve ever been curious about why it’s important to use the correct words in this area, you’ve got a grade A example in Paul Carr. Let’s break it down: plagiarism is wrongful appropriation, and is not a crime. An act of plagiarism can also be copyright infringement, but an act of urination can also be public indecency, and you’d do well to know the difference. As for what “copyright theft” is here? Completely irrelevant to the case, and serves as a clunky malaprop throughout the entire piece. And just to get it out of the way, is copyright infringement theft? No, no, no, no.
Second, instead of examining the premise that “the tech community doesn’t care about authorship” and determining it’s a straw man lobbying tactic, Carr swallows the point hook-line-and-sinker and uses it as evidence that they’re behaving hypocritically.
Think about it: Doesn’t this reaction serve as pretty good evidence that members of this community — many of whom produce creative content all day at their jobs — really do care about authorship? That maybe the MPAA spokespeople were wrong, and the tech community’s arguments against SOPA and PIPA as major unconstitutional free speech violations that would undermine Internet infrastructure and human rights efforts around the world were more than just a fig leaf for the “I like free stuff”?
A gross conflation of terms gets you to the point where you don’t realize that both Hollywood’s complaints and their reactions look very, very different from 37 Signals’. Hollywood’s big problem is with freeloaders, unless I missed something big and they wanted to shut down these rogue sites for their roles in helping distribute scripts for shot-by-shot remakes of blockbuster films. And they’ve chosen to address that concern not by complaining on Twitter, but by pushing for backroom legislation so obviously and outrageously opposed to the public interest that the reaction from the Internet scared the otherwise lobbyist-cowed legislators into retreat.
It’s not like the MPAA studios haven’t tried to just appeal to social norms as a way to stop unauthorized copying, but their messages — “You wouldn’t steal a car” — suffer from the same lack of understanding and contempt for their users that Carr’s piece displays.
It seems simple to me that Carr thought this latest event was noteworthy because he doesn’t understand the issues, so every new twist and turn is unexpected. This distinction between infringement and theft everybody keeps talking about? Don’t worry, it probably doesn’t matter. The tech community’s actual articulate position? Nah, just take the MPAA’s word for what they’re saying.
This online blackouts last week were not only the largest in recent history, but in a narrow sense, they might be the most effective ever. Imagine: online protests and the resulting media coverage and legislator calls led to the shelving of two “sure thing” bills over the course of two days.
But the protests shouldn’t just be considered in that narrow a frame. As Dan Gillmor and Marco Arment correctly point out, any victory against specific legislation in this field is bound to be ephemeral. The entertainment lobbying groups aren’t going to rest in drafting new laws to slip by under the public notice.
So the question becomes: were the online protests effective on any scale beyond the legislation at hand? I think the answer to that is yes. For one thing, these online protests brought copyright policy to the public attention, and that’s almost always a good thing. The moment at this week’s South Carolina GOP primary debate where all four candidates came out strongly against SOPA and PIPA felt unprecedented in the copyright world. In a field where “common sense revolts” at the industry-penned laws that are on the books, public attention is a real first step to reform.
Another change that I hope persists is the way that contested facts are being framed. One of the frustrating things about statements against the bills has been the formula they all seem to follow: we all agree that piracy is a major problem, but these bills are the wrong way to address them. Joshua McVeigh-Schultz at USC has done some good writing on this phenomenon.
Until the last few days, people who were questioning the premise, by suggesting that maybe piracy isn’t a serious economic problem, were on the fringe. Rick Falkvinge of the Pirate Party opposed the statements on the grounds that we need to “stop pretending to endorse the copyright monopoly“. Tim O’Reilly has been persistent and eloquent in questioning the economic harm of piracy. And of course Julian Sanchez’s spot-on analysis for the Cato Institute has consistently called the MPAA et al out on their funny numbers.
But in the past few days, I think we’re starting to see this discussion creep into the mainstream — or at least from the “copyright nerd” to the “general nerd” arena. Not only have musician Jonathan Coulton and actor Wil Wheaton (admittedly, both nerd icons) come out with statements that piracy is not the issue, but sites like Forbes and Freakonomics have picked up the question as well.
Detractors of the Occupy movement complain that those protesters’ issues were too nebulous. Without specific demands they couldn’t expect to effect change. In the short term, it’s true that they couldn’t claim the legislative victory that this round of protests have. But the Occupy protests were absolutely able to change the conversation. As Alexis Madrigal describes in the Atlantic this week, the Occupy protests created a problem in the particular set of “foregrounding” a set of issues into something that should be addressed. Madrigal is skeptical that the anti-SOPA efforts will be able to bridge from specific to general, but I remain hopeful.
Finally, it’s important to consider how this week’s actions have changed the face of online protest. Anil Dash has taken a good look at the history and future of online protest, with thoughts about how it might develop. I’m encouraged by the Reddit front page lighting up with stories about ACTA, and Hacker News discussing anew the YCRFS 9 proposal to kill Hollywood. There’s energy in the air, and it’s being directed in the right place. Hopefully now we can look at ways to proactively shape copyright policy in a way that benefits the public, instead of reacting to bad legislation one after another.
There are a lot of places to reform copyright. Joel Spolsky has put together a good list of them, if you’re interested. We can’t know yet, but I hope to look back on the events of this week as a starting point for big changes.