Internet censorship coming?

[chuckskull]

Senator Patrick Leahy yesterday introduced the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" (COICA). This flawed bill would allow the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to break the Internet one domain at a time — by requiring domain registrars/registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block Internet users from reaching certain websites. The bill would also create two Internet blacklists. The first is a list of all the websites hit with a censorship court order from the Attorney General. The second, more worrying, blacklist is a list of domain names that the Department of Justice determines — without judicial review — are "dedicated to infringing activities." The bill only requires blocking for domains in the first list, but strongly suggests that domains on the second list should be blocked as well by providing legal immunity for Internet intermediaries and DNS operators who decide to block domains on the second blacklist as well. (It's easy to predict that there will be tremendous pressure for Internet intermediaries of all stripes to block these "deemed infringing" sites on the second blacklist.)

This is backed by republic and democrat senators, and no it wont just affect browsing in the US.

COICA Fact Sheet: http://demandprogress.org/blacklist/coica

EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/0...r-stage-online

Really hope this gets shot down and as a parting shot, I'll repeat what I've said many times, if you retain the power and wealth to make multiple governments act like this then your industry isn't suffering as badly as you make out.

[TheAnimus]

meh, this will be by passed faster than you can shake a custom DNS server at.

So long as they aren't suggesting to go SPI, it will just be a small waste of time and money.

[Saracen]

My following comments should not be seen as support for this proposed bill ... though I have no particular problem with attempts to tackle the problem it represents.

But some of the supporting arguments seem a bit spurious to me.

For instance, the statement on that COICA "factsheet" ....

This kind of Internet censorship is exactly the sort of thing the US government has been criticizing China and Iran for

Erm, no. It isn't.

The criticism over China and India comes down to arguments over free speech and the fundamental freedoms of citizens, especially to express political dissent, and it's demeaning to put defence of copyright infringement in the same category. It is, in effect, an argument about what the correct values and standards of a society are ... and in many respects, is about the right to "free speech".

But any discussion of the right to free speech needs to be prefaced by the emphatic point that free speech anywhere has limits. There is absolutely no guaranteed right to completely unfettered free speech, even in the land of constitutional free speech itself, the USA. For a start, defamation laws place limits on free speech, as do conspiracy laws and incitement laws. Try inciting a riot, or trying to convince someone to commit murder and you'll soon find out that free speech has limits.

So, the basic argument is about precisely where those limits should lie, because even the US does not promote completely free speech.

What the arguments about the "censorship" in Iran and China are about is the government in those states preventing the ability of citizens to access basic information and opinion if the government doesn't like those opinions, or to express those opinions. I can express the opinion that our government is wrong, is incompetent and in some ways, even corrupt, and that out leader is an incompetent muppet that's led us to a series of disasters, and in respect of Gordon Brown, I did express exactly that view many times. The secret police haven't kicked my door down yet. I can and have expressed the view that the way Tony Blair interpreted and presented the "intelligence" on Iraq prior to the Gulf War 2 was either clear evidence of him being a grade 1 idiot that didn't understand what he was reading, or a liar that set out to deliberately spin the evidence to us, and to Parliament, to justify the course of action he wanted to take, presumably never for a moment suspecting that inquiries would lead to much of that evidence ending up in public. Having read much of the inquiry evidence, and read the way Blair characterised it, I can only conclude that it was so distinctly loaded in his presentation that the intent was to deceive, and that makes him, in my view, a liar.

But I'm not sure I'd want to express that type of view publicly, in China or Iran, about their leaders.

Oh, and this isn't a party political point either. I've picked two Labour PMs to criticise because they've been in power for almost all of the last 13 years or so. For me, the jury is still out on Cameron, Clegg, etc, but this thread isn't about politicians anyway.

So .... given that free speech is never entirely free and there are always limits, I reject the assertion that this bill is equivalent to Chinese or Iran interference with net freedoms, because they are seeking to preserve what I would regard as obnoxious regimes that suppress their people's basic rights to political opinion and discourse, and a lot more. That's rather different from legislation designed to stop gross abuses of copyright law.

Yet, the argument can be made that both this proposed US law are seeking to sensor the net in order to enforce national laws. In that sense, there's a similarity. The issue is what the laws are and what values they embody. and that's why I reject the argument that this is similar to China and Iran. It's also why I don't accept the characterisation that that document is a "fact" sheet .... it's more of a position piece, and with some rather suspect positions at that.

As for the proposed bill, I see no problem at all with legislation to do what they say this is intended to do. And I stress "intended". If a website is primarily aimed at large scale copyright infringement, I have no problem with it being taken down. And the problem with the court route advocated by COICA is that it's largely ineffective, for a couple of reasons. First, take down a pirate site and it'll probably spring back up again somewhere else a day later. So, it's simply not practical to spend 6 months or a year, and a small fortune, dragging a case through court only to find the site back up on a different server with a different name 24 hours after the case concludes, even if the copyright camp won it.

The nature of the technology is that that technique won't work. This, therefore, is an attempt to use the technology of the net to prevent the abuses of the freedoms of the net and to curtail a growth industry in illegal activity.

And that I support.

Where I do agree with that COICA position paper is on their fears of the "thin end of the wedge" argument. An almost inevitable consequence of so many pieces of legislation is "function creep".

Who intended the anti-terror laws to be invoked in dragging Walter Wolfgang out of a Labour party conference because he heckled a bigwig? Who ever thought local councils would use RIPA laws to spy on people with dogs fouling the pavement or to subject a family to weeks of surveillance because they were suspected of fibbing about where they lived to get their kids into a school in a different catchment area?

If you pass a piece of legislation giving those in authority some power, far too often they then seek to use that power to do something it was never intended for. And I'd bet that COICA are right and that this would be abused too.

Giving a court the ability to add to a mandatory block list is one thing, but giving political figures the ability to add to one that, while not technically mandatory may well be effectively so, is entirely another.

So my conclusion is that while I don't have an issue with taking down sites that are primarily or explicitly dedicated to overt copyright infringement, I do worry where this might lead, and quite what the unintended thick end of the wedge might turn out to be. We ought to be very careful what powers we give those in authority, because once given, it can be very hard to take them away again.

[SeriousSam]

I'd rather they did something about the "stand alone complex" situation... way too much spurious information causing odd internet spawned phenomena.

[chuckskull]

Excellent points as always Saracen.

First of all I feel the need to say that despite my near constant berating of groups like MPAA, RIAA et al, I do actually support copyright and intellectual property rights and believe they were crucial to the advancement the world has seen over the last couple of hundred years and will continue to be, if necessity is the mother of invention, profit is the father. It is not their intentions I disagree with, it is their tactics. This tactic of trying to introduce frighteningly broad laws when 'no-ones looking' for lack of a better description, being the most vile.

Secondly yes that fact sheet does contain rather to much opinion, but to give some context to the link, when I googled COICA at the time, Google came back with the results for cloaca instead, for a law with global repercussions to a fundamental human right, that looked set to pass in a matter of days. In short; best of a very small bunch. Lobbyist's were aiming for a repeat of their success with the Digital Economy Bill in the UK, but thankfully this has now been delayed until after the Senate recess. http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09...p-bill-delayed

Speech is never totally free and reasonably so, agreed. However, to my mind it is sacrosanct and any limitations placed upon it must be very carefully considered and have every possible safeguard to prevent abuse. Freedom of speech is the right that most protects every other right. Hence it being the first thing to go in any totalitarian regime and is equally crucial to our development as IP and copyright.

The internet is the greatest advancement to free speech since the printing press and it's reach many orders of magnitude greater. Thus, I consider any laws curtailing use of the internet a law curtailing free speech. This is not to say the internet is above legislation, but that, this is the context that internet legislation should be viewed in. It might say prevention of copyright infringement on the box but, this law would grant the US Department of Justice, thereby the US government, the ability(in a legal and technical sense) to censor any website without judicial review, thus without any checks or balances. This is where we disagree; because as far as I'm concerned that is exactly like Iran and China. As you rightly pointed out, and gave excellent examples of; function creep is a dangerous thing. The current US administration might not go around censoring it's objectors but politicians change constantly, whereas laws have incredible inertia.

The thick end of the wedge on this legislation is rather terrifying to me, hence my absolute objection. As demeaning as it is to put copyright infringement in the same category, it's as criminal as it is demeaning to use copyright infringement as a stick to beat freedom of speech with.

As for the slightly OT political points, the last two governments left us in debt and unnecessary wars imo and don't even get me started on Blair. As for Clegg and Cameron, unimpressed so far, but early, very challenging days and a whole other thread.

[Saracen]

I don't disagree with anything much of that (pre-edit, anyway), chuckskull, and agree emphatically with a lot of it.

Only on the China/Iran point do I part company a bit ... in two ways.

First, the way you consider it to be like China and Iran isn't quite what I interpret COICA as meaning, and I'm closer to you than them. But second, the difference is that while this might, might give some scope for the US government to censor in some similar ways Iran or China have, to attribute them actually doing so is still a hypothesis .... just because the potential for this abuse exists doesn't mean it'd be abused in fact. Yet, China and Iran have been abusing it.

An analogy ..... two neighbours buy (legally) a gun. One goes and and murders someone with it so do you accuse the second of being a murderer, when in fact, he's an Olympic pistol shooter?

Okay, I'm pushing it a bit, but you get my point.

I might be concerned about function creep, but it's a stretch to convert this bill into a charter to become a despotic dictatorship.

And, as always, laws are a balance. Some anti-terror laws are necessary, in some circumstances, to deal with the threat posed, and the art of it is to enable anti-terror operations, without giving every policeman the right to harry and harass everyone carrying a camera in a public place. So .... on the one hand, you have the intentions of the proposed law, and the duty of competent legislators, surely, is to enact it in such a way that it does the job but does preserve adequate limits, checks and balances?

As for the fundamental importance of free speech and it's relevance as the basis for any free society, well I could hardly agree with you more if I'd said what you said myself. So, indeed, we need to be very careful in monkeying with it, which is why my first sentence was that the following comments weren't an endorsement of the bill, but rather, an endorsement of what it seeks to so .... as opposed to how it seeks to do it.

If you'll excuse the painfully mixed metaphors, we must ensure that the thick end of the wedge doesn't include chucking baby out with the bathwater, but while the ends don't justify the means, the cause is a worthy one and you also need to be careful not to be so scared of getting something wrong that you never do anything at all. We shouldn't rush into this .... but there is a problem, created by that very technology that does so much for freedom in oppressed countries, and just as the problem is technological, I'd bet the solution is as well, rather than purely legal and administrative.

[chuckskull]

Ahh the tortured metaphor, staple of the internet debate, allow me to get my electrodes.

I think we agree on a great deal tbh, but now my electrodes have warmed up, let's continue on the bits we don't.

Where that particular metaphor falls down to me, is that the gun, regardless of it's owners admirable sporting achievements, would be left in the house and loaded for any future resident. Which is at best, irresponsible and to really crank the voltage this Olympic shooter has hit people in the crowd more than a few times. The US human rights record while better than many is far from spotless; Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, discrimination against homosexuals in the government and military, use of banned weapons, illegal wars and support of totalitarian regimes to name but a few errant shots.

It is indeed the responsibility of legislators to ensure such laws are fair and balanced, in this case a responsibility they ignored. The law in it's current form, including lack of checks and balances, was in spitting distance of passing the senate and had genuine bipartisan support, thanks to the power of the lobbyists. Meaning it stood a serious chance of becoming law with all it's current flaws without even the president having the ability to veto it. Flaws that would not be remedied until their abuse had become so prevalent as to create enough political pressure to repeal or amend the law and flaws in which said abuse could be used to suppress that political pressure.

I'm not accusing the US government of behaving like China and Iran, I'm objecting to them moving towards being able to do so and especially being able to do on a near global scale even if it is not their intent to do any harm. Which could have grave implications for the future of the internet. Sure countries that objected could create their own DNS servers to get around the censorship, so could individual users but this compromises the Internet's greatest strength it's universality. The danger of this aptly demonstrated by Iran and China.

I'm certainly not saying we should do nothing about it, I absolutely believe innovators and creators deserve to have their ideas protected and rewarded, not only because it's fair, but because it's the most sure-fire way to ensure further innovation and creation. IP law has already been massively strengthened over recent years, particularly regarding the internet. Rights holders now have robust and far reaching legislation backing them and massive statutory damage awards in US civil cases. While these are not perfect solutions, this law is a step to far in it's basic concept and has the potential for far to many unintended consequences from it's flaws, broad definitions and lax oversight. We shouldn't rush into this, but we so often do and have.

The road to hell... and all that.

[Lucio]

I think the biggest concern right now about this proposal is the lack of oversight, being able to "instantly" block of sections of the internet is a dangerous power to grant a government, and whilst I agree that the typical time it takes a court to resolve the issue is likewise unhelpful, is this the right way to go about making the transition?


For example, could the bill also include a fast track courts system to handle the disputes, in a similiar way domain name disputes are handled (though admitedly they're not always so quick)?

[Saracen]

....

For example, could the bill also include a fast track courts system to handle the disputes, in a similiar way domain name disputes are handled (though admitedly they're not always so quick)?

Do we know it doesn't? I've read the articles, but not the actual bill. I'd be a bit surprised if there wasn't an element of oversight.

[chuckskull]

Full text; http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill...bill=s111-3804

It creates two paths to site removal, one through the courts, not an unreasonable goal if it's done with proper care and oversight, and a second which is at the behest of the AG and DOJ. Which is the really objectionable bit.

[aidanjt]

Time to decouple addressing and naming from US stewardship, me thinks.