France Agrees To Kick File Sharers Off The Internet Again; Lobbyists Call It 'Consumer Relief'

from the up-is-down,-black-is-white,-you-said-what-now? dept

There isn't a huge surprise in the news that France has once again passed a law to force ISPs to kick accused (not convicted) file sharers off the internet under a draconian "three strikes" system. We all knew this was coming. After the original French three strikes law was gutted as being totally unconstitutional, French President Nicolas Sarkozy (who apparently doesn't believe any such law should apply to him, given his history of mass piracy) insisted that such a law was necessary to defend freedom. Yes, really. And, even as France's cultural minister was planning to get multiple internet connections just in case he got cut off -- while also wishing that his own creative content were "pirated" more often, the French gov't went back to work on putting in place such a law. The big "change" this time was to give judges 5 whole minutes to rule on file sharers, so that they could say a judge oversaw the case, rather than it just being a random accusation. I'm not sure how due process works with a 5 minute limit... but what can you do.

What's much more entertaining is seeing how entertainment industry lobbyists are cheering this on. I'm beginning to think that they actually believe that kicking people off the internet will make people buy more of their content. Incredible. First up, the MPAA's Dan Glickman (who's being pushed out of his job for being woefully ineffective):

"Today's decision is an enormous victory for creators everywhere. It is our hope that ISPs will fully honor their promise to cooperate and that the French government will take the necessary measures to dedicate resources to handle the enormous task ahead."

A victory for creators? Really? By kicking fans off the internet for promoting their works? Yikes. Someone's out of touch. Then we have Rick Cotton, of NBC Universal, the man who insisted that movie piracy was really harming the poor American corn farmer since people ate less popcorn with pirated movies:

"The French action recognizes that jobs and economic growth in creative industries are under assault by digital theft. We need a safe and secure Internet that enables consumers to access content easily but does not facilitate illegal file sharing that kills jobs in creative sectors."

Yes, and the corn farmers, too, right? So, if it's really all about jobs, what about the people kicked offline who rely on the internet for their job? Apparently those jobs don't matter? In the meantime, it's already pretty clear from multiple studies that it's not file sharing that's "killing jobs in creative sectors" but the inability of executives like Cotton to understand basic economics and business models.

But, honestly, the most guffaw-inducing response to this comes from Tom Sydnor at the Progress & Freedom Foundation. Sydnor, who as you may know, has a long history of making claims that don't pass the laugh test, has really outdone himself this time (it's even better than when he accused a college that couldn't identify accused file sharers of harboring "terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers [and] identity thieves" by giving them a "get out of jail free" card). So what's his take on kicking people off the internet based on accusations? Well, it's really about consumer relief. No, seriously:

"As a consumer, I would far prefer the successive warnings that French law would now provide to the sudden financial devastation of the John-Doe lawsuit that American law would now require. I thus urge American internet-service providers and copyright owners to work together to provide American consumers with similar relief."

Ah, yes, because the only options are to sue everyone or to kick people off the internet? Apparently Tom has such incredibly little faith in the innovation ability of content providers that he assumes that they cannot craft unique and innovative business models that don't involve suing everyone or kicking people off the internet. How insulting of him towards content creators. Every time Sydnor makes a statement like this and PFF promotes it, it just weakens the work that PFF does in other areas. It's tough to take an organization seriously that has someone claiming that kicking people off the internet based on accusations of private companies is "consumer relief."

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And Of Course: RIAA Mouthpieces Defend $1.92 Million Judgment

from the time-to-pull-back-the-attack-dogs dept

It's been interesting to see the aftermath of the Jammie Thomas $1.92 million ruling, as it appears that even the RIAA is recognizing that such an insanely large award gives them something of a black-eye and has the possibility of creating a bit of a backlash. However, apparently they forgot to send out that message to all of their usual attack dogs. In an AP article discussing the ruling and the $1.92 million number with a variety of different people, the RIAA tried to distance itself from the number, specifically stating, "That was not our number, that was what 12 regular folks rendered." Uh, yeah, except that the RIAA has long used the statutory numbers in their arguments about the "risks" of file sharing.

Tom Sydnor, from the Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF), a loud and proud supporter of stronger copyright at every turn (and who is well funded by the RIAA labels), apparently missed the memo on playing down the number. He told the reporter that it was a perfectly reasonable number.

"Legally acquiring a license to give copies of a song to potentially millions of Kazaa users might well have cost $80,000 per song,"

Except... that's not even close to accurate. The record labels presented no proof that she gave the song to millions of users, and seem to totally ignore the fact that these songs were available from tons of other sources (either legally or illegally) for prices between nothing and $1. To claim that the record labels would literally consider an option to license a single user putting a song into a shared folder at $80,000 is simply ridiculous.

But, of course, it shows the mentality of those paid for by the RIAA. These are the same people who accuse Larry Lessig of being a communist by taking a few statements totally out of context, and then accuse universities of supporting terrorism by not violating students' privacy and handing over their details to the RIAA.

So, if the RIAA is really serious about playing down the size of the jury award, it might want to rein in Sydnor before he says much more. If you're looking for someone to get out a message by appearing as a caricature of the evil record labels, I don't think you could find any organization better than PFF. But, that's probably not what the RIAA needs right now, unless it really wants to give the folks on the fence even more reason to leap over to the side who recognizes just how much the labels have twisted, stretched and abused copyright law over the years, totally at odds with its constitutional prescription of promoting the progress of science. Defending a $1.92 million award to the record labels for 24 songs in a shared folder, with no evidence that a single one was actually shared, is not promoting the progress. It's promoting massive greed and regulatory capture at the expense of society.

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PFF Says BU Helps Terrorists By Not Handing Over Students To RIAA

from the today's-shill-brought-to-you-by... dept

I really try to avoid reading the Progress & Freedom Foundation's intellectual property blog, because it just raises my blood pressure with a near constant stream of highly misleading arguments or just purely ridiculous claims. However, Tim Lee points out that Tom Sydnor is up to his usual tricks of taking some bit of news, twisting the context around completely, leaving out fairly important details and coming up with a conclusion that doesn't even add up from his own twisted reasoning. This time, it's about the recent story where a judge correctly dropped RIAA lawsuits against some Boston University students after the school noted that it could not identify who the alleged infringers were with certainty.

This set off quite the rant from Sydnor, who claims that this now means that BU's network is a "safe harbor" for "terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers [and] identity thieves" by giving them a "get out of jail free" card. This is similar to those silly and easily disproved arguments from years ago that open WiFi would allow criminals to all get away with any online crimes they wanted.

This makes two faulty assumptions that Sydnor either knows and ignores, or is ignorant about (neither of these are good options). First, it assumes that all of those other activities wouldn't leave any other trail. That, of course, is ridiculous. Your network usage is hardly the only bit of information all of those other criminal uses leave. Second, it assumes that every person on a network is easy to identify. In fact, it's quite difficult to establish, with any degree of certainty, who a particular IP address belongs to. Thanks to a variety of different factors, an IP address is not at all a good identifier of who is doing something online. This has been one of our problems with lawsuits relying on such info. It's notoriously unreliable, leading to many bogus charges (collateral damage to supporters like Sydnor, apparently, but not to those of us who believe in actually having evidence before accusing someone of a crime). It also does not mean, as Sydnor claims, that BU network administrators are "incompetent." It just means they're honest.

But, rather than face up to any of those facts, Sydnor skips over them and goes for the emotional charge:

Perhaps the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security should explain the broader implications of this ruling to BU before clumsy efforts that coddle student piracy help get someone defrauded, molested, or killed. BU's IT Department might also consider the potential legal implications of acts that tend to conceal the identity of lawbreakers.

Yes, or perhaps anyone with a bit of common sense could explain to Sydnor how networks work and the difference between not being able to identify a user vs. "concealing the identity of a lawbreaker." Apparently, based on Sydnor's twisted reasoning here, any network operator who cannot identify each and every user on its network may be guilty of being an accessory to a crime. Sydnor, who rushes to point to legal precedents supposedly (though often not really) supporting his position at every opportunity, somehow misses out on the right to anonymity which has been established many times in court. But why let little things like facts and reality get in the way of claiming that a reasonable response from BU sysadmins is going to lead to a safe haven for terrorists and pedophiles and criminal charges against BU network operators?

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The Smear Campaign Against Larry Lessig And Free Culture

from the getting-nasty dept

You may recall that I've had my run-ins in the past with the incredibly misnamed Progress & Freedom Foundation. While I tend to think that Adam Theirer does okay work for them, almost every other report that comes out of the "think tank" seems highly questionable. We haven't heard much from them lately on intellectual property rights -- perhaps since two of their most outspoken folks on that topic (Patrick Ross and James DeLong) moved on. However, it looks like they've found someone new to drum up ridiculous arguments on intellectual property issues. If you don't recall, PFF is the group that has claimed that fair use harms innovation, that net neutrality is theft, and that open spectrum harms innovation (obviously WiFi was a huge problem). The most amazing thing to me, though, is that the PFF positions itself as a "libertarian" "free markets" think tank that thinks there should be less government regulation. But... anything having to do with intellectual property or spectrum, and suddenly all those libertarian statements go out the window.

Given all of that history, it's still rather amazing to read its newly released report on how the "Free Culture" movement, as explained by Larry Lessig, is really a "quasi-socialist" movement. Reading the full paper, you get a sense of how Washington DC works. It's a pure smear job that takes Lessig quotes out of context for ultimate impact and fills the rest with ad hominem and totally unsupported attacks. I certainly don't agree with everything that Lessig has to say -- and I particularly disagree with some of his policy recommendations. But there's simply no way to read Lessig's work and come to the conclusions in this paper if you are being intellectually honest. You can disagree with his conclusions. You can disagree with his reasoning -- but to paint what he has to say as a celebration of communism or socialism is simply a smear tactic and a political hack attack.

What becomes clear as you read the attack is that the author, Tom Sydnor, simply read through Lessig's works in search of sentences that could be taken out of context in order to paint Lessig as a secret socialist/communist. It's hard to see how that's "scholarship." It's not worth refuting each and every statement here, but we'll give a few simple examples. First, Sydnor claims that Lessig "demonizes" property owners. Actually, Sydnor claims that Lessig "literally demonizes property owners." Unless Lessig is turning property owners into demons, then I'd have to say that Sydnor doesn't understand what "literally" means. But, more to the point, this is a rhetorical trick by Sydnor, which is the basis of nearly his entire paper, where he repeatedly assumes that intellectual property is no different than tangible property. This is a fabrication. There is no reason to ignore the very real differences between the two unless you're trying to unfairly and dishonestly paint someone as supporting something they have not.

While making fun of Lessig (Sydnor snidely accuses Lessig of "name calling" before referring to Lessig as a "hypocritical demagogue" -- kettle, pot, etc.), Sydnor points out that Lessig "analogizes property rights to the pesticide DDT." If you're playing along in the home game, Sydnor is pulling this from page 129 in Lessig's book Free Culture. Lessig's actual point, which is quite valid and interesting is that DDT was originally designed to serve a good purpose, but it was only later that it was realized that it had negative unintended consequences. This isn't "demonizing property rights" as Sydnor implies. It's merely pointing out that even those with the best of intentions (the makers of DDT or the creators of copyright law) may not realize the negative consequences of their actions, and how those negative consequences may outweigh the positive consequences.

"No one set out to destroy the environment. Paul Muller certainly did not aim to harm any birds. But the effort to solve one set of problems produced another set which, in the view of some, was far worse than the problems that were originally attacked. Or more accurately, the problems DDT caused were worse than the problems it solved, at least when considering the other, more environmentally friendly ways to solve the problems that DDT was meant to solve."

If someone can explain how that's somehow demonizing property rights, I've got a job for you as a paid shill in DC. Instead, it's making a valid point that isn't demonizing anything -- most certainly not property rights. You can go through the rest of Sydnor's piece, and each and every time you'll notice he does one of two things: he conflates copyright with tangible property or he takes statements out of context to prove his point. He's also not beyond ridiculous hyperbole. In pointing to a rather reasonable quote from Lessig about why we should be interested in seeing if other systems can provide better outcomes, Sydnor brushes off all other systems of copyright by claiming:

"But during the last century, humanity conducted many vast experimental investigations of the relative merits of these "different property systems and the freedoms each allowed." Those experiments were run by well-intended people who sincerely believed that replacing systems of private property with "different systems" would improve the material and spiritual well-being of humanity. During those experiments, millions were murdered and billions were impoverished and enslaved.

Hyperbole much, Tom? Sydnor, once again, is equating copyright to tangible property (missing the irony that copyright -- a government granted monopoly -- seems a lot more closely aligned with the centralized governments of the former socialist nations than a system that relies on the free market). He then cuts off any questions about looking for a more reasonable system than copyright (which is a monopoly right, not a property right) by suggesting that any other system leads to "millions murdered" and "billions impoverished and enslaved." It's quite a leap. If there was any left, this paper destroys any credibility on pretty much anything coming out of PFF these days. It's the worst kind of political smear tactic.

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