blacklist – Techdirt (original) (raw)

UK Buckles, Joins The Evidence-Optional Huawei Blacklist Party

from the do-as-we-say,-not-as-we-do dept

While there’s really no denying that Chinese smartphone and network gear maker Huawei engages in some clearly sketchy behavior, it’s generally not anything that can’t be matched by our own, home-grown sketchy telecom companies. And while the Trump administration has been engaged in a widespread effort to blackball Huawei gear from the global marketplace based predominantly on allegations of spying on Americans (mostly to gain leverage in what’s largely seen as a counterproductive tariff and trade war), nobody’s been able to provide a shred of public evidence that this actually occurs despite 20 years of pearl clutching.

That’s not to say that Huawei doesn’t pose national security risks. But for an argument that’s been making the rounds for the better part of the last decade (including one 18 month White House investigation that found nothing), there’s a surprising lack of hard evidence of actual spying on Americans when you actually go looking for it. And there are surprisingly few people that actually seem to care.

With that in mind, Germany and the UK (including UK intelligence services) initially balked at the Trump administration push, noting that if there were security issues with Huawei gear, they’d be caught by existing hardware security review processes. The concern is that a global blackballing — including pulling Huawei gear out of existing networks — would be cumbersome, costly, ineffective, and create potential new problems. And given that Chinese hardware is literally in everything from your home router to the litany of feebly secured “IOT” devices attached to your home and business networks — potentially futile.

This week however the UK finally buckled to U.S. requests, and announced that it would be (slowly) implementing a ban on Huawei gear in both 5G and fixed fiber networks:

“The British government said it would bar telecom companies from purchasing new equipment made by China?s Huawei Technologies Co. and gave them until 2027 to remove its technology from their 5G networks, a sharp about-face that marks a significant victory for the U.S….The U.K is also launching a consultation on when to ban the purchase of Huawei equipment for the country?s fiber-optic network. This will be followed by a transition period that isn?t expected to exceed two years.”

The ban is expected to delay development of 5G by roughly two to three years and cost up to ?2 billion ($2.5 billion) to complete. The move leaves Canada as the last country in the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance ? which includes the U.S., UK, Australia and New Zealand ? that has yet to decide whether Huawei equipment can be used in their domestic 5G networks.

Huawei, not surprisingly, wasn’t particularly happy about the news:

“It threatens to move Britain into the digital slow lane, push up bills and deepen the digital divide,” said Ed Brewster, a spokesperson for Huawei UK. “Regrettably our future in the UK has become politicized, this is about US trade policy and not security.”

Smaller telecom operators in the US and abroad also haven’t been particularly happy about the entire effort, repeatedly noting that they’re being asked to foot much of the bill for Huawei gear removal and replacement with what’s usually more expensive hardware. While the UK has now folded to the Trump administration’s efforts, Germany and much of the EU remain resistant to the idea of a wholesale ban, would rather exclude Huawei gear based on existing security review standards, and are likely waiting out the next US election to avoid policies that could turn on a dime, which to me, seems more sensible.

Again, there’s ample evidence that Huawei and the Chinese government engage in sketchy behavior. That’s not really debatable. The problem with a telecom-network specific ban for alleged spying is it doesn’t actually solve the problem and imposes all manner of new additional hurdles and costs. Yes, Huawei won’t be in the UK’s telecom networks, but Chinese gear is literally everywhere, from the hardware being used to build power plants, to the millions Chinese routers, internet of things and other “smart” fridges, TVs, door locks, and Barbie dolls (usually with paper mache grade security) we attach to our home and business networks with reckless abandon:

Post-Huawei, Chinese companies will still be supplying equipment used in UK critical infrastructure, building a UK nuclear power station, and selling huge quantities of manufactured goods.

So framing Huawei about broader security or human rights concerns doesn?t really hold up.

— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) July 14, 2020

Then there’s the whole hypocrisy thing. The “five eyes” gang has been engaging in often illegal global surveillance of foreign countries (including satellite signal interception and undersea cable wiretapping) for the better part of several generations, starting with programs like Echelon. The US, with the aid of telecom giants like AT&T and Verizon, has been spying on every shred of data that touches their networks for almost as long. That’s before you even get to the fact that the US hacked into Huawei to implant backdoors, and the NSA has been caught intercepting network hardware to install tracking technology.

Is illegal spying bad or not? If it is, surely we’d be OK with other countries banning AT&T, given it’s been made repeatedly clear the company is effectively bone-grafted to the NSA? And if we are going to be doling out lectures on what does or doesn’t qualify as illegal surveillance, shouldn’t we at least make a fleeting attempt to lead by example?

Again, none of this is to defend China’s abhorrent behavior or the genuine risks Chinese telecom companies might actually pose. But you’re not going to fix the problem with completely non-transparent allegations, myopic solutions that don’t tackle broader security issues (like the IOT), nonsensical trade wars (the cost of which are usually borne by American consumers), lobbyists eager to bury anti-competitive business interests under the guise of natsec, and bigoted and patriotic bluster.

Filed Under: blacklist, china, surveillance, telco equipment, uk
Companies: huawei

WIPO Now Gets Into The Extrajudicial, Zero Due Process, Censorship Act Over Sites It Declares 'Infringing'

from the not-this-again dept

Every few years this kind of thing pops up. Some ignorant organization or policymaker thinks “oh, hey, the easy way to ‘solve’ piracy is just to create a giant blacklist.” This sounds like a simple solution… if you have no idea how any of this works. Remember, advertising giant GroupM tried just such an approach a decade ago, working with Universal Music to put together a list of “pirate sites” for which it would block all advertising. Of course, who ended up on that list? A bunch of hip hop news sites and blogs. And even the personal site of one of Universal Music’s own stars was suddenly deemed an “infringing site.”

These kinds of mistakes highlight just how fraught such a process is — especially when it’s done behind the scenes by organizations that face no penalty for overblocking. In such cases you always get widespread overblocking based on innuendo, speculation, and rumor, rather than any legitimate due process or court adjudication concerning infringement. Even worse, if there was actual infringement going on, one possible legal remedy would involve getting a site to take down that content. Under a “list” approach, it’s just basically a death penalty for the entire site.

That’s why it’s especially ridiculous that WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, a part of the UN, has decided to leap gleefully into the space with one of these “blacklists” of evil piratey sites.

WIPO, which is part of the United Nations, was founded more than 50 years ago with the aim of protecting intellectual property. This includes combating online piracy, something it hopes to facilitate with its ?BRIP? Database, short for ?Building Respect for Intellectual Property.?

So, uh, what’s the process to get on the list? Surely it must involve a court of law determining that a site is engaged in copyright infringement, right? Oh, of course not.

The goal of the project is simple: allow stakeholders from member states to report problematic sites and share this list with advertisers, so they can block bad apples. This will result in less money going to pirate sites, making it harder for them to generate profit.

“Stakeholders”?

?The BRIP Database is now open for the acceptance of Authorized Contributors from WIPO Member States and Authorized Users from the advertising sector,? WIPO writes.

?It comprises a secure, access-controlled online platform, to which authorized agencies in WIPO Member States may upload lists of websites which deliberately facilitate the infringement of copyright.?

Ah. So, it’s “Authorized Contributors” and “Authorized Users from the advertising sector” and the entire list is secret. It’s “secure, access controlled.” I’m sure that won’t be abused at all.

Not answered:

I’ve sent these questions to WIPO, which has not yet responded at the time of publication.

What’s fairly stunning about all of this is that anyone who knows anything about these issues and how they’ve been treated over the last few decades would recognize the pitfalls of WIPO’s approach with BRIP. And yet… no one at WIPO even seemed to bother to care about some fairly fundamental issues regarding due process and proper adjudication of accusations of infringement. Honestly, it raises significant questions about WIPO’s own understanding of copyright law.

Filed Under: advertising, blacklist, censorship, due process, transparency, un, wipo

Rockstar Ports Its Old, Antiquated, Flawed Censorial Blacklist For Player Chat Into New 'Red Dead Redemption' Game

from the don't-say-that dept

Those familiar with how multiplayer online gaming works know that inter-player chat is both a feature of this gaming genre and one of its primary hellscapes. On the one hand, in-game chat can be both fun when it’s part of the game and funny when you get lively banter between players. On the other hand, such chat is also rife with stupid, sophomoric, abusive language casually bandied about by teens and adults alike. Because of this, some game developers have tried to limit what words can be inputted into the game’s chat system. The end result of this is mostly spectacular creativity for players dedicated to being assholes in getting around such systems. But for Rockstar, when it came to the online portion of Grand Theft Auto, this chat blacklist was also a place to stupidly blacklist references to illicit gaming sites like “The Pirate Bay”, meaning users entering that text would see their words simply disappeared.

But this all gets doubly stupid now that Rockstar is set to release Red Dead Redemption 2, within which it simply ported over its previous blacklist.

As revealed by a user on Reddit, the company has implemented a banned words list, which attempts to deter people from using some of the worst sexual, racial, and religious insults, which is fair enough.

However, the developer has also seen fit to prevent players from talking about sites like The Pirate Bay, with the word ‘PirateBay’ banned from the game. Since the galaxy’s most resilient torrent site is hardly a friend of the gaming industry, the decision is not that much of a surprise. However, the developer goes much further with a whole range of bizarre censoring decisions that start of weirdly and get worse.

Taking them in alphabetical order, first up we have the term ‘BTJunkie’, which refers to a once-prominent torrent indexing site. What’s so special about this platform is that it’s been shut for well over six years. In fact, the site closed down for good in 2012following the massive raid on Kim Dotcom. Safe to say, it’s not coming back.

The examples go on from there. Now, there are a couple of things to say about this. Obviously blacklisting long-dead websites, even if it would have been once understandable that a game developer would want to keep those names out of the game chat, is painfully stupid. I’m not sure what Rockstar thinks it was accomplishing by keeping those site names out of their game chat when those sites were live, but I’m super-certain that they’re accomplishing nothing by doing so when those sites are dead. And because, of course, there is the inevitable collateral damage caused by such word-bans.

The initialism ‘VCDQ’ has also made it onto Rockstar’s Great Firewall, which is nothing short of ridiculous. VCDQ – otherwise known as VCDQuality – was a site that reported on freshly-leaked pirate copies of movies and commented on the quality of the release. The site never offered copyrighted content and was a really useful platform. It too has been dead for a number of years.

The other thing to say about this is simply that any company that would so callously treat chat censorship in this way, where the company thinks that a simple port of old blacklists would suffice, is a company that doesn’t care much for its own players. Gaming companies can put in these blacklists if they like, and they might be good things when it comes to hateful and abusive language, but they should do so with care. Gamer interaction is kind of a key component of online multiplayer, after all. To treat banning words with so little regard isn’t a great look.

So, the end result? Anyone want to place money betting that this censorship of its own customers has made Red Dead 2 free from abusive language and conduct? Or that there aren’t more examples of collateral damage out there, specifically since the blacklist also bans the word “Torrent” entirely?

I didn’t think so.

Filed Under: blacklist, censorship, red dead redemption
Companies: rockstar games

Malware Purveyor Serving Up Ransomware Via Bogus ICANN Blacklist Removal Emails

from the for-best-results,-enable-macros dept

Fun stuff ahead for some website owners, thanks to a breakdown in the registration process. A Swiss security researcher has spotted bogus ICANN blacklist removal emails being sent to site owners containing a Word document that acts as a trigger for ransomware.

Fake @ICANN Domain Abuse Notices being spammend out to domain owners, distributing malware (Dridex?) – icann-monitor[dot]org

These fake @ICANN abuse notices distribute Cerber Ransomware (hXXp://csenet.org/view/file5.exe) calling out to ffoqr3ug7m726zou.1nuljt.top

— abuse.ch (@abuse_ch) December 29, 2016

These fake @ICANN abuse notices distribute Cerber Ransomware (hXXp://csenet.org/view/file5.exe) calling out to ffoqr3ug7m726zou.1nuljt.top

The email appears to orginate from somewhere legitimate, as seen in this screenshot:

But the quasi-legit URL (icann-monitor.org) was only very recently registered through eNom, which apparently had no problem with some internet rando snagging a URL closely associated with the international group that governs domain names.

Domain Name: ICANN-MONITOR.ORG Domain ID: D402200000001096932-LROR WHOIS Server: Referral URL: http://www.enom.com Updated Date: 2016-12-29T15:25:14Z Creation Date: 2016-12-28T20:19:57Z Registry Expiry Date: 2017-12-28T20:19:57Z Sponsoring Registrar: eNom, Inc. Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 48 […] Tech Email: legal@whoisguard.com Name Server: DNS1.REGISTRAR-SERVERS.COM Name Server: DNS2.REGISTRAR-SERVERS.COM

Ironically, the emails containing this malware inform recipients that their domain is “being used for spamming and spreading malware.” The spam email invites site owners to download a malware-laced “report” for further instructions on how to remove their site from the blacklist, warning them they only have 24 hours to fall victim to ransomware respond.

The researcher is now “counting the hours (days?)” until either eNom or ICANN act in response to this spoofing/ransomware attack. Don’t hold your breath. ICANN has yet to say anything publicly about this and, as of this point, eNom has yet to deactivate the account. For now, the fake ICANN still lives and breathes and poses a threat to recipients of this official-looking email.

Filed Under: blacklist, malware, ransomware
Companies: icann

German Government Tries To Censor Publication Of Its List Of Censored Websites

from the let's-keep-it-quiet-by-making-it-even-more-public dept

A few weeks ago, an anonymous internet user was able to acquire and subsequently extract a website blacklist used by Germany’s Federal Department of Media Harmful to Young Children (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien [BPjM]). This un-hashed list was posted to the user’s Neocities blog, along with some analysis of the blacklist’s contents and a rundown on the minimal protective efforts used for the list.

The actual blacklist is much more extensive than what’s published here. In fact, as is noted in the post, a majority of the list is publicly viewable.

The censorship list (“index”) is split into various sublists:

Sublist A: Works that are harmful to young people Sublist B: Works whose distribution is prohibited under the Strafgesetzbuch (German Criminal Code) (in the opinion of the BPjM) Sublist E: Entries prior to April 1, 2003 Sublist C: All indexed virtual works harmful to young people whose distribution is prohibited under Article 4 of the Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag Sublist D: All indexed virtual works, which potentially have content whose distribution is prohibited under the Strafgesetzbuch.

The sublists A, B and E contain about 3000 movies, 400 games, 900 printed works and 400 audio recordings. That sublists are quarterly published in the magazine “BPjM-aktuell” which can be read in any major library in Germany.

Sublists C and D are what’s been withheld from the public, even as these URLs are distributed once a month to software and hardware companies. As of the time of the posting, there were more than 3,000 URLs on the blacklist.

The leaker spotted some unusual things in the list of banned URLs. To begin with, it appears that there’s very little effort being made to keep the blacklist current.

On only about 50-60% of the domains on the list the questionable content is still accessible: About 10% of the domains are not registered at all, another 10% are parked domains, and about 20% don’t provide any content at all (either no DNS A record, no webserver on port 80 or a redirect to another domain).

Beyond that, the government body building the list seems to be suffering from technical ineptitude, resulting in supposedly blocked sites not being blocked at all.

The domain “homo.com” offers a wildcard domain which echoes anything that is entered as a subdomain on the website, eg. visiting “Fritz.homo.com” results in a webpage “Haha, Fritz is gay!”. On the BPjM list there is a entryirgend.ein.name.homo.com – the German “Irgend ein Name” stands for “any name”. Contrary to the belief of the BPjM public servants this doesn’t work as a wildcard – just this specific domain will be blocked…

several URLs with a wrong trailing slash:

Death.html/ welcome.htm/ free/index.html/ freecontent.html/

A URL path with a trailing slash means that the part before the slash is a directory and not a file. The examples above are filenames. The entries on the list with the trailing slash are invalid and return a 404 file not found error. The correct URLs without the trailing slashes won’t match the hash and are not blocked. Explanation here…

As is inevitable when entities pursue bulk website blocking, non-offending content is part of the collateral damage.

[T]he complete sell list of leading online music database Discogs. Probably at one point in time there was a listing of a music album which is forbidden in Germany – this was enough to block access to the “eBay of music” for years…

[A]ccording to archive.org the domain facegoo.com is since at least 3 years not an porn website anymore. Now it is the website of an iPhone App for fun picture manipulation. The startup has no chance to be listed in German search engine results at all…

This is on top of strange and very arbitrary blockages, like a listing for the videogame Dead Island at amazon.co.uk and a few offending YouTube accounts whose account pages are blocked, but not the offending videos themselves.

Beyond that, the list covers a wide variety of offensive-to-the-German-government (and in some cases, offensive to nearly everyone) content, including “normal porn, animal porn, child/teen porn, violence, suicide, nazi or anorexia.” Notably, the Wikipedia page quoted in this post points out that BPjM is an anomaly in the “free” world.

Germany is the only western democracy with an organization like the BPjM… The rationales for earlier decisions to add works to the index are, in retrospect, incomprehensible reactions to moral panics.

With its secret list exposed, the German government has gone after Neocities in a belated attempt to keep its no-longer-secret list secret. Neocities has complied, but not without protest.

An anti-censorship activist, concerned citizen and security researcher has proved that the hashes are very easily reversible, and published the disclosure, including a plain-text list of the censored sites on a Neocities page. Now the German government is pressuring Neocities to take the site down, and are claiming we were breaking German (and possibly US) law by hosting a copy of the list of sites that they distribute.

The letter from KJM (Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media) makes some rather odd statements.

Two lists (containing URLs) were published on one of your blogs, namely https://bpjmleak.neocities.org/. The list of URLs contains child sexual abuse material (CSAM), animal pornography, nazi propaganda, minors in poses involving unnatural sexual emphasis and content inciting hatred, just to name a few. All of the URLs are illegal under German law. Since CSAM is also illegal under US law, we are of the opinion that this site violates the laws applying to your service and also violates your terms of conditions.

More properly stated, the websites contain the offensive material, not the URLs themselves. And, as was pointed out by the person researching the list, much of what’s in the list is out of date (i.e., the URL no longer contains the illegal content, domain is expired, etc.) or is ineptly targeted (typos, invalid URLs, etc.), which means the list isn’t nearly as useful as the government believes.

And, if the statement about violating two countries’ laws wasn’t (theoretically) frightening enough, KJM goes on to claim that posting this content violates Neocities own mission statement. (No. Really.)

The KJM sees that neocities values anonymity and states to be uncensored. But the KJM thinks that https://bpjmleak.neocities.org/ is not what your service is intentionally for as your website states: “But our goal is clear: to enable you to harness the creativity, beauty, and power of creating your own web site. To rebuild the web we lost to monotony, and make it fun again.”

The statement is truly wondrous in its inanity, approaching the level of non sequitur. At no point does the mission statement encourage the stripping of anonymity or encourage censorship. Neocities is a platform for website construction, something KJM believes is somehow contrary to sticking up for its users and their content. Leave it to a government agency to craft one of the emptiest paragraphs to ever grace an official takedown request.

The biggest issue is the list itself, the one the government wants to keep out of the hands of the public, as Neocities points out.

There is apparently no legal way to challenge the list. It is decided by fiat in secret by a German government agency, and there is little or zero recourse for those falsely condemned.

By keeping it secret — ostensibly to prevent the public from accessing illegal content — website owners are kept in the dark about the German government’s censorious efforts. This sort of power is dangerous without accountability. The list is outdated and composed carelessly. Sites like Discogs are blocked off while true offenders remain uncensored because the “for the children” agency can’t be bothered to ensure its slash marks are properly used or that the URL is free of typos.

Neocities has discussed this unofficially with the EFF but, as the post notes, the legal implications of this leaked list are still very murky. As a precaution the list has been removed. (It survives, for now, at the Internet Archive.) And, if given notification that the posting of the list does not violate US law, the BPjM blacklist will be reposted. Either way, Neocities states that it will not punish the end user in any way and that his/her access to the site will remain intact.

The ultimate stupidity of this debacle is the fact that the German government thinks it can undo what’s been done. By acting in this fashion, it’s only drawn more attention to the list it wants to remain a secret. Worse, it’s drawn more attention to the blog post highlighting the many failures of the list itself. It’s one thing to want to prevent access to clearly illegal material. It’s quite another to slap together a list composed of dead sites, mistyped URLs and a variety of bizarre blockings based on “incomprehensible reactions to moral panics.”

Filed Under: blacklist, block list, bpjm, censorship, free speech, germany
Companies: neocities

Russia Blacklists Cultural Wiki Without Explanation, Site Just Moves To Circumvent Block

from the what-a-waste-of-effort dept

Techdirt has been following the worsening censorship situation in Russia for some time. Back in July, the country’s parliament passed a new law ostensibly designed to “protect the children”. It took only a couple of weeks before it was used to shut down the whole of LiveJournal for part of the country. That was apparently because a neo-Nazi blog had been found among the thousands of others hosted there — an indication of just how blunt this new instrument of censorship is.

Now another popular site in Russia has been taken down, as Rick Falkvinge reports:

> This Monday, the Russian Government placed a Russian Wikipedia clone on a censorship blacklist. The Russian Government maintains such a kill switch for “harmful sites” – motivated with protecting children from drug use, child porn, or suicide methods. In reality, as usual, give anybody such a switch and they’ll shut off things they plain don’t like. > > The Russian Wikipedia clone Lurkomore has long been a Wikipedia-on-steroids in Russia. With the notability requirement for articles relaxed, Lurkomore had become an “encyclopedia of contemporary culture, folklore, and subcultures, as well as everything else”.

Presumably there is something among the thousands of articles there that someone, somewhere has taken a dislike to, causing the entire site to be blocked. However, an article on the site Lenta.ru (original in Russian) says that the people behind Lurkomore still don’t know what that was, and intend to appeal against being placed on the censorship blacklist in this way. In the meantime, they have moved the site to a different IP address, at lurkmore.to, where it can presumably be accessed even by Russian children — thus neatly demonstrating the futility of this kind of hamfisted censorship.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: blacklist, censorship, culture, russia, wiki
Companies: lurkomore

Russia And China Both Want To 'Protect Children'; Both Want To Do It By Increasing Censorship

from the what-about-protecting-rights? dept

As expected, Russia has passed a law that will allow Web sites to be blacklisted, ostensibly to “protect children”. According to this AFP report, the very vague “harmful information” category has been narrowed somewhat, but future threats remain:

> Russian newspapers said Wednesday the final version has specified a previously broad term of “harmful information”, saying only child pornography, suicide how-to instructions and drugs propaganda can lead to website closure without a trial. > > However, an expert on Russia’s security services, Andrei Soldatov, said the bill would lead to creation of a mechanism for blocking foreign sites for the first time by forcing Internet providers to install special equipment.

As the UK experience shows, once the technology is in place to block child pornography, say, the calls to deploy it for things like alleged copyright infringement become more insistent.

China, of course, already exercises pretty tight control over all forms of media, but it seems it wants to lock down online activity even more:

> China’s broadcasting and Internet regulators have told Internet video providers that they must prescreen all programs before making them available, tightening state censorship of increasingly popular online drama series and mini-movies.

Prescreening all uploaded videos might seem a tall order, but it’s already going on with some services:

> A woman working in the public relations office for Youku, China’s most popular online video provider, said Wednesday the new decree had little impact on the company because Youku already has hundreds of prescreeners who examine all content uploaded to the site.

You can probably guess what justification China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) is using for this move:

> SARFT said this week in a statement on its website that the rule is in response to the rapid growth in online video programs, some of which it said contain vulgar content, excessive violence or pornography. It said the rule would protect younger people and promote high-quality online programs.

It’s so nice to know that governments everywhere are united by this desire to protect children; pity they seem equally united in not caring about the erosion of people’s rights through the ever-deepening censorship they apply as a result.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: blacklist, censorship, china, russia, sarft

Does Congress Really Want To Give China & Other Oppressive Regimes A Blueprint For Internet Censorship?

from the one-hopes-not dept

Rebecca MacKinnon, from the New America Foundation, has an absolutely fantastic opinion piece in the NY Times today, explaining why SOPA/PROTECT IP represent the Great Firewall of America, and why it’s the exact wrong approach. It notes that the bill doesn’t just bring the “major features” of China’s Great Firewall to America, but that it also strengthen’s China’s ability to censor. While she notes that the intentions are not the same, the “practical effect,” would be:

Abuses under existing American law serve as troubling predictors for the kinds of abuse by private actors that the House bill would make possible. Take, for example, the cease-and-desist letters that Diebold, a maker of voting machines, sent in 2003, demanding that Internet service providers shut down Web sites that had published internal company e-mails about problems with the company?s voting machines. The letter cited copyright violations, and most of the service providers took down the content without question, despite the strong case to be made that the material was speech protected under the First Amendment.

The House bill would also emulate China?s system of corporate ?self-discipline,? making companies liable for users? actions. The burden would be on the Web site operator to prove that the site was not being used for copyright infringement. The effect on user-generated sites like YouTube would be chilling.

I’d argue it’s even worse than that. We’ve already seen how countries like Russia have abused copyright law to stifle speech. Do we really want to justify that kind of activity? If SOPA/PROTECT IP is in place, any government around the world can put in place something similar, justify blocking access to just about any website by abusing copyright law to find some form of “infringement.”

In the hearings today, the MPAA’s Michael O’Leary somewhat stunningly suggested that repressive regimes that censor the internet are a model worth emulating in the US, since they didn’t “break the internet.” Perhaps he should speak to those who have had their speech blocked in countries like China and Iran to see how they really feel about that. And is he really comfortable setting up the same system here in the US? Is he convinced that it won’t be abused, despite the long history of abuse we’ve seen by the members of the MPAA? Just last week alone we heard a story about how MPAA member Warner Bros., took down tons of content it had no right to, including some open source software it just didn’t like.

Fact is: we’ve seen copyright law abused repeatedly, even by MPAA members, to stifle companies and speech they don’t like. We’ve seen how repressive regimes use the same tools in their countries to stifle speech. Setting up such a system in the US would be an epic mistake.

Filed Under: blacklist, blocklist, censorship, china, copyright, free speech, protect ip, russia, sopa

Time Magazine Says SOPA Is 'A Cure Worse Than The Disease'; Would Encourage Censorship

from the mainstream-press dept

It appears that more people in the mainstream press are beginning to recognize just how horrible the SOPA/E-PARASITE bill is when you look at the details. Over at Time Magazine’s Techland blog, there’s a post by Jerry Brito, saying that it’s a “cure” that is “worse than the disease.” The post notes that it won’t do much to actually stop infringement, beyond at the margin, but the costs of doing so are quite a lot — especially as the State Department is trying to convince others around the globe not to regulate the internet:

At a moment when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is urging world governments to keep their hands off the Internet, creating a blacklist would send the wrong message. And not just to China or Iran, which already engage in DNS filtering, but to liberal democracies that might want to block information they find naughty. Imagine if the U.K. created a blacklist of American newspapers that its courts found violated celebrities’ privacy? Or what if France blocked American sites it believed contained hate speech? We forget, but those countries don’t have a First Amendment.

It’s good to see the mainstream press recognizing that this isn’t just a fight about “foreign rogue sites” as the entertainment industry would have you believe — but about massive regulation of the internet and free speech.

Filed Under: blacklist, due process, journalism, press, sopa

US Chamber Of Commerce So Clueless It Thinks You Have To Be 'Anti-IP' To Be Against E-PARASITE Bill

from the not-the-case,-steve-o dept

Steve Tepp is the US Chamber of Commerce’s (the world’s largest lobbying group) point man on PROTECT IP/E-PARASITE/SOPA. His latest move is to try attacking anyone who points out the problems of E-PARASITE/SOPA. First up? Demand Progress, who dared to call it a “blacklist bill.” According to Tepp, it’s not a blacklist bill, because the lobbyists who wrote the bill (potentially including Tepp himself) were smart enough not to write “list” in the text of the bill.

Of course the bill doesn’t actually say that there’s a list. Just as the Chinese Great Firewall doesn’t actually involve the government “listing” sites, but merely threatens ISPs with liability if they let bad sites through, E-PARASITE massively broadens the definitions of what’s “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property” such that it now includes, more or less, the entire internet, and threatens sites with the equivalent of internet death: blocking from search engines, blocking from DNS (and more!), cutting off any funding sources. No, there’s no “blacklist,” there’s just the threat of cutting off just about any internet site. On top of that, there’s an awkwardly worded attempt to force every site to proactively monitor any infringement. Is that why the US Chamber of Commerce doesn’t allow comments on its site? Or is it because it knows that no one actually believes the crap it shovels?

But Tepp’s intellectual dishonesty is worse than just pretending that without the word “list” there’s no actual blacklist. No, the really cheap move is to imply that only the “anti-IP crowd” is against this bill. This is the latest strategy of those who wish to massively regulate the internet so that it looks more like TV — a broadcast medium, rather than a communications medium. They refer to anyone who points out the massive negative consequences of their legislative nastiness as being “anti-IP.” You’ve seen it in Techdirt’s comments for the past few weeks, with certain anonymous commenters throwing hissy fits about how I’m actually “pro-piracy,” when I’m anything but. If you don’t think this is part of the coordinated marketing campaign by the largest lobbying organization in the world, you’re not paying attention.

So, Steve, let’s be clear: being against this bill is not about being “anti-IP.” It’s about being pro-innovation, pro-internet. It’s about recognizing the massive benefits of an open internet. It’s about recognizing the massive benefits to the American (and world) economy that were created from an open internet that didn’t involve misplaced third party liability.

The concerns of those about this bill have nothing to do with intellectual property and whether it’s good or bad. It’s about the collateral damage that such a vast change to the legal and technical framework that the internet has been based on for years will cause.

To brush those concerns away as being “the anti-IP crowd,” is to show ignorance of what’s at stake.

What we don’t understand, Steve, is why you would seek to shut down the open internet, killing off more jobs than ever existed in the entertainment industry. We thought the US Chamber of Commerce was supposed to support small businesses. Instead, you’re seeking to make any internet business nearly impossible, unless they’ve already hired a dozen lawyers. I guess if your goal is for full employment for trial lawyers, you’re making headway. But, seriously, if you can’t debate this subject honestly, don’t be surprised when the next generation of businesses dumps the US CoC. Pro tip: pissing off every company of the next generation that might support your bloated organization is no way to build for the future. And don’t think jobs “in the industry” will be waiting for you. Without the next generation of great startups that you’re trying to kill off, the big content companies who pay your salary these days, won’t have the new platforms they need to succeed.

Filed Under: anti-ip, attacks, blacklist, e-parasite, sopa, steve tepp
Companies: demand progress, us chamber of commerce