You will remember the nation of Tunisia for being a flash point of the Arab Spring revolution, in which social media and the internet played a massive role, as well as for the post-revolution government's subsequent crackdown on those tools that brought them into power. There seems to be something of an ongoing problem within Middle East governments, in that they simply don't recognize how to handle popular dissent, often taking on the very characteristics of the dissenter's complaints to an almost caricature level. In that respect, while it may sound silly, any government learning to deal with the open communication system of the net is going to have to come to terms with memes and the manner in which they spread.

Which brings us back to Tunisia. They seem to have a problem with this Gangam Style, Harlem Shake combo-video produced by some apparently fun-loving Tunisian students (the original was taken down due to a highly questionable copyright claim, by the way, because while even the Tunisian government wasn't evil enough to block the video, a bogus DMCA claim had no such qualms).

For reasons that will never make sense to me, the Tunisian government apparently had a problem with the video and its popularity, prompting an investigation. And if you think about it for five seconds, you've probably already guessed what the response from Tunisia's people has been.

They danced en masse to the song and posted their exploits on YouTube. That prompted a quarter of a million hits and reports of an investigation by the country's minister of education and that prompted a backlash. Video after video after video of Tunisians proudly doing the Harlem shake in defiance.

Dear Tunisian people: congratulations! You've officially been made full members of the internet community now that you've engaged in trolling your own government as a form of protest. It's only a matter of time before you'll be naming soft drinks after fluid-expelling geriatrics.

Over in Egypt, the government didn't stop at a simple investigation, however. Four students were arrested for taking part in this Harlem Shake video shot in front of the Giza pyramids.

The response? A massive protest Harlem Shake performed directly in front of the Muslim Brotherhood's headquarters.

Sorry, Middle East governments, but the people have spoken, and they want their damned memes. And, actually, that brings to mind the obvious question: how the hell are memes a threat to you to begin with?

Unless you have been living under a rock the past few days, you're likely aware of the violent protests in Egypt and Libya on American missions which have resulted in several deaths, including that of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. The apparent flashpoint for these protests was a movie trailer on YouTube for what is by all accounts a horribly offensive and insensitve film about Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. We've seen similar stories in the past over website content, but this incident takes things to a whole new level.

Today we learned that YouTube has taken the step of restricting access to the video in question in both Egypt and Libya. When asked about it, YouTube responded with the following statement.

"We work hard to create a community everyone can enjoy and which also enables people to express different opinions," YouTube said by e-mail. "This can be a challenge because what's OK in one country can be offensive elsewhere.

This video -- which is widely available on the Web -- is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube. However, given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt we have temporarily restricted access in both countries."

While I understand why YouTube is doing this, I think it's misguided for two reasons. First, stupid and hateful as the video in question reportedly is, blocking access (potentially seen as taking it down in Egypt and Libya) can be interpreted to mean that the fault for what's happening is in part with the video itself. It isn't. The guilt for this violence is not in some stupid video. It isn't even in the massive protests in the Muslim world against the video (though I'd probably suggest they learn about the Streisand Effect). The guilt for the violence and death belongs on the thugs and murderers who committed it. End of story. This is especially true when the company has acknowledged itself that the video does not violate YouTube's terms of service.

The EFF agrees.

It is easy to understand why YouTube might feel compelled to act in response to the rioting over this video, especially after three U.S. embassy employees were killed in the Libyan city of Benghazi, but the blame for the violence lies not with the video, but with the perpetrators. Once YouTube has made the decision to pro-actively censor its content, they start down a slippery slope that ends in YouTube Knows Best moral policing of every video on their site. It is disappointing to see YouTube turn its back on policies that have allowed it to become a such a strong platform for freedom of expression. We hope that this new-found enthusiasm for pro-active censorship is a temporary aberration rather than a sign of things to come.

The second reason is that YouTube's move is almost certainly equal parts too late and ineffectual. As the company's statement itself noted, this video is and already was all over the internet. Censoring the video now is a bit like covering your ears and eyes as your house burns around you. The problem of religious intolerance and violent reactions to it is going to exist whether you acknowledge it's there or not. Nobody is served by trying to pretend the hateful attitudes in the video don't exist. And it isn't like the protests have ceased now that YouTube has restricted access in those countries. The cat is already out of the bag. All you've done now is open the door to blocking videos based on people deciding to be offended with little to no effect on the violence at hand. So what was the point?

I'll be clear again: every description of the video in question suggests that it is cartoonishly crafted and inflammatory bigotry. But it doesn't violate YouTube's TOS, it is speech, and taking it down was a poor decision made in fear. That isn't the way I expect a company like YouTube to behave.

MPAA boss Chris Dodd has apparently resorted to out and out lying as he makes a big push to get SOPA passed. On Tuesday he spoke at an event for the Center for American Progress, in which he pulled out his usual "woe is us" story about why Congress needs to pass SOPA/PIPA. However, Dodd, once again, appears to be factually challenged. For example, during questions, Dodd claimed:

“The entire film industry of Spain, Egypt and Sweden are gone.”

James Losey thought this was odd, given that he was familiar with some films coming out of Sweden:

Sweden actually produces a number of high quality films. Released in 2008, the vampire flim Let The Right One In received critical acclaim here in the U.S. Additionally, all three best-selling books of the Millennium Trilogy are Swedish films and 2009’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was quite successful. The film made a modest $10 million in the U.S. and a respectable $104 million worldwide.

Considering the budget for the U.S. remake of the film is $100 million - as much as the original film has earned to date - perhaps Dodd meant that the film does not count until Hollywood gets a chance to remake it. Ironically, the U.S. remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was shot in Sweden.

Chris Dodd was correct to say that film is an international industry, but he was wrong to say that the Swedish film industry has disappeared and misleading to imply that all Hollywood jobs are American jobs. At least for this Hollywood production, Sweden has a lot to gain.

Of course, there's also plenty of actual data on the film industries around the world, so I figured that perhaps I'd dig into the numbers a bit more than James' excellent debunking, just to see if there was any truth to Dodd's bizarre claims. Thankfully, the folks at the UN actually track this data. On top of that, the awesome chartsbin has laid out how many films every country produces in a neat interactive map:
via chartsbin.com Let's start with Sweden. I think the chart above is a bit out of date. Looking through the UN data, it shows that Sweden produced 41 feature films in 2009 -- actually a significant increase from 2007 and 2008. No sign that the industry is "gone" there. But perhaps it used to be much bigger? Back to the UN we go... to learn that in 1995, Sweden made 17 feature films. Gone? Sorry, the facts say Dodd is lying.

Okay. Let's look at Egypt. The latest UN data shows Egypt produced 46 films in 2009. Not bad. But perhaps it used to be much bigger? Oh, whoops. 1996 (the earliest data available) shows that Egypt produced 24 films that year. So it looks like the industry has about doubled. Gone? Oops. Dodd is lying.

Finally, let's check out Spain. Spain has been a favorite target of both the MPAA and the RIAA lately. They like to claim that "lax" copyright laws there have decimated the entertainment industry in that country. Once again, the facts show a totally different story. If you look at the map above, you can see that Spain is actually a movie making powerhouse in Europe, and the data shows that it just keeps making more and more movies. In 2009 it produced 186 movies, and the trend has been directly up. In 2008 it was 173. Go back to 2005 and it was 142. Go back to 1999? 82 films. Back to '95? 59 films. Yeah, film production has more than tripled in the last fifteen years.

Sorry, but Chris Dodd is flat out lying.

Why do the public and politicians let him get away with blatant falsehoods as he seeks to push a law that will set up an American censorship system? The facts say that he's full of it... and yet we're supposed to trust him that this bill is needed?

Remember when Egypt wasn't quite sure how to deal with protests in the streets, and the government decided the best course of action was to cut off the internet (because nothing attracts the travel business like a capricious and arbitrary government, running around like crazy, just because citizens start speaking up). However, then President Hosni Mubarak probably should have thought twice before hitting the kill switch. Apparently he (along with two other officials) has been fined something close to $34 million for shutting down the internet:

The court ruled that Mubarak, Nazif and Adli were guilty of "causing damage to the national economy" and the fines would be paid to the country's treasury.

Who knew it was illegal to do that?

Having already covered how hackers from Anonymous have been taking part from afar in various middle east uprisings, it's probably worth noting that some other folks are doing some cool hacking projects as well, including a Hackathon for Egypt effort, that brought together hackers and activists to see if new technologies could be built that might be useful to implementing a more democratic system in Egypt. For example, some folks put together a platform for crowdsourcing the creation of a Constitution:

The conference's most intriguing result was a platform for crowdsourcing the new Egyptian constitution. The platform, which appears to have drawn inspiration from a similar project in Tunisia, allows users to simultaneously browse constitutional texts from multiple countries, propose articles and ideas online and to collaborate on compiling the ideas into a workable text. Owing to Egypt's special circumstances, the platform also contains extensive provisions for off-computer use--many Egyptians simply don't have regular access to either a computer or the Internet.

Who knows how effective these efforts will be (my guess is that, initially, they won't get much use), but it's still nice to see, and hopefully as we see projects like this grow, they'll become more effective and useful.

On Friday, after Clay Shirky's excellent talk about social media and the Middle East at SXSW, someone in the audience pointed out how some photos from Egypt of secret service agents had been removed from Flickr. Shirky later tweeted a link to coverage of the takedown letter, which mentions vague terms of service violations. Yahoo later came out and claimed the images were taken down because they weren't taken by the uploader. Of course, as some have pointed out, that's a bogus excuse, since plenty of people -- including Flickr's top employees -- regularly post images that they did not create. And, of course, in true Streisand Effect fashion, all this has really done is call that much more attention to the images and information that was taken down.

After Egypt shut off internet access a few weeks back, most of the analysis of how it was done suggested in basically involved calling all of the country's ISPs and ordering them to shut down access. Yet, a new report claims it really was more of a "kill switch" scenario, in that the majority of the shut-off came from flipping a single switch in the Ramses exchange -- a key data center in Cairo. That didn't stop everything, so the rest was accomplished with a few phone calls -- but it was that switch flip that did most of the work.

The same report notes, as we predicted, that the economic impact of the shutdown were pretty big:

The presentation suggests the weeklong shutdown had severe effects on Egypt’s economy, in the short term from loss of commerce, and in the long term from a likely plummet in tourism, and an exodus of call centers from Egypt.

The presentation concludes that the ministry’s course of action in obeying the orders may have some positive effects in the future: “Itʼs unlikely that Egyptʼs communications ministry will ever be asked to flip that switch again.”

Well, hopefully it also makes other countries aware of the negative impacts of killing off internet access.

We've discussed how US political attacks on Julian Assange and Wikileaks have really hurt the US's supposed moral high ground on internet freedom -- something our leaders have long insisted they're in favor of. Yet, with the recent events in Egypt and the attempts to shut down internet communications there, Tim Wu is noting that the federal government should drop the attempt to charge Julian Assange with anything, or else risk looking like total hypocrites:

It is time for the United States to drop the case against WikiLeaks. Pressing forward with efforts to prosecute an Internet publisher at home while standing up for an open Internet in Egypt and the world at large is an increasingly tenuous position. The WikiLeaks case endangers the reputation of the United States as a defender of free speech and an open Internet globally, while forcing the Obama administration to take uncomfortable constitutional positions better suited to the Nixon administration. The importance of this issue is hard to overstate: At a time when the Internet is increasingly recognized as a medium of global resistance to authoritarian rule and when protestors in Tahrir square are holding up signs that say "Thank you, Facebook!", the Obama administration and the United States must make sure that they stand on the right side.

Of course, it seems unlikely that this will actually happen, but I think that US officials significantly underestimate the ammo they're about to hand critics around the world, and what the resulting backlash will create. This one issue will be thrown up in our faces any time the US steps in or complains about a lack of internet freedom elsewhere. It will make pretty much all statements about the importance of internet freedom around the world a punchline rather than an issue worth taking seriously.

This week's list of "favorite" posts of the week is handed off to Gabriel Tane

Friends! Countrymen! Techdirt-ians! Lend me your... eyes! It's my turn to stroke my ego and pretend that anyone cares to hear what I have to say about issues. But, if you're still reading (and keep on reading), then I'll assume you're at least interested. So, read on and thanks for your attention.

First up, we'll start with a whole slew of related articles that show how the DHS/ICE domain seizures have some serious questions that need some answers. This week, we've seen stories that discuss what does the situation mean to our international relations. The question of jurisdiction has been batted around in the comments as a matter of technicality, but not a lot was said about how far-reaching of an effect this may have if other countries decide they don't like how we seem to be rather bully-ish about how our laws are more important than others'. I don't know the answer to that question, but since our actions so far have been to pull our plug out and thumb our noses, I don't think I want to know the effect.

Further, we've seen where the technical understanding and legality have been called into question by more than just bloggers and interested lawyers. Now, have the questions been raised in such a way that will force the hand of DHS/ICE? Probably not; but the fact that so many people are raising their eyebrows about it means there is something going on that needs to be looked at. And it will, sooner than later I hope.

Second, I also got quite interested in the patent-vs-innovation article that was posted. It seems that the status-quo is being questioned even by those "inside" the system. In a very broad way, I wonder how long until actual common sense is going to win over the juggernaut of established bureaucracy. Hmm...

Third, I was very interested to hear about the situation in Egypt. Actually, I heard about it here first. I didn't follow it completely and thoroughly, but I did have a face-palm moment at this story about the timing of American legislation that people said included an "internet kill switch." I was worried about someone posting comments from a tin-foil fort about how Egypt was some kind of warning about what would happen if the US increased its censorship... and here comes the government showing how such a claim wouldn't be too far of a stretch. sigh. At least China was worried about the implications.

Further on the face-palm front... I was glad to see the TSA getting a clue with new scanners that don't show you naked, and realizing the people who write the paychecks are not happy with their actions -- and not surprised to see them completely ignore the need for effective screening that actually does something other than justify a paycheck.

Fourth and finally, ain't technology grand!? Seeing Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric discover the internet was fun. Now, much like the rest of you, I found this to be an amusing view on how technology has grown and how silly we see ourselves then, 20+ years later. I was, again like most of you, sadly not surprised when a major news corp followed this up by completely overreacting to the situation, firing the person responsible and, thus, creating the much-loved Streisand-effect. I wonder how long it's going to take before the reality of the internet's openness and, well, immortality sinks in to the people who think they can just wish information away.

There were so many fun stories this week, I know I didn't get them all covered. I think I covered the ones that echo strongest with me: the fact that our government seems to want to censor what's on the internet (arguably, at the beck and call of the entertainment industry) while another country (our ally?) faces some very serious consequences for that very action.

I think we've seen the start of a trend towards people wanting real answers to what's going on. I know that as I read the comments from both sides (at least, those on either side that choose to provide data), I learn more and more about how these things do and should work. For that, I would like to take a purely-selfish moment and thank all the commenters -- regulars, ACs, insiders and outsiders -- for helping me broaden my knowledge about the world around me.

And, of course, I do so love to see how far technology has come in the last few years... and if anyone wants some authentic AOL coasters, let me know ;).

As has been widely reported today, Egypt has rejoined the internet, after the government told ISPs that it was okay to reconnect to the world nearly a week after it shut off the internet. What's fascinating to me, however, is the basic thinking on both moves. The idea behind shutting down the internet (and mobile phone service) was to try to cut off the ability of protesters to communicate and organize, hoping that it would stifle the protests themselves. Of course, it seemed to only add to the fire, inciting even more anger towards the government, and contributing to even greater numbers of protests. So, now, the reasoning for removing the blocks... is basically the same thing. The government seems to think that letting people back onto the internet will also quell the protests. Perhaps they just shouldn't have turned the internet off in the first place. Either way, this seems like yet another example of governments realizing that it's a lot more difficult to "control" the public than they thought...