CENSORED

Today's the day that a number of high profile websites are demonstrating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA bills currently pending in Congress. The upshot of these bills passing into law is that they are tantamount to giving powerful content industry groups the power to cut-off from the internet or censor websites that are accused of hosting material that doesn't belong to them. Bear in mind that these bills have been sponsored and co-written by representatives of the entertainment industry (eg the MPAA) and it's plain to see whose interests are being served here.

Under the proposed legislation the US Attorney General would have the power to demand ISPS so block access to foreign websites suspected of dealing in pirated content, as well as making search engines delist such istes from the search indexes. Other powers include the blocking of payement services to accused sites too (and we all know what happened to Wikileaks when its funding services where blocked). If these standards were applied to several prominent US-based sites many of them would be in trouble (eg Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Google, etc).

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

There have been some last minute amendments to the proposed bills but they haven't removed the threat to free speech entirely. That's why it's good to see several prominent sites doing their bit to raise public awareness of the threats involved.

Over at TorrentFreak you can find a compilation of websites that are participating in a self-imposed censorship/black-out campaign. I'm going to add links or images to those already covered by TorrentFreak as I come across them. Please feel free to contact me either in the comments, via Twitter or email with any more.

Those sites known to be taking part are in today's black-out are:

Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the student's friend, will be down for 24 hours (except for the pages about SOPA and PIPA)

Minecraft

Insanely addictive browser-based game Minecraft is down

Reddit

The community-powered news site, reddit, is down

Open Rights Group

The Open Rights Group are UK digital activists and they are making sure people know about these heinous bills

Wordpress

The creators of the blogging content management system of choice, Wordpress, are censored.

TorrentFreak

Even TorrentFreak themselves are making a stand. Lord knows, they've been inaccurately accused of being pirates enough times

Wired

Ever-popular tech site Wired are in self-imposed blackout mode

Craigslist

The classifieds service, Craigslist, is also making a stand

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The video game review site Rock, Paper, Shotgun is down

The Oatmeal

Satirical comedy site The Oatmeal is down

Humble Bundle

Online independent games retailer HumbleBundle have gone dark

Wikia

The alternate pop-culture wiki-based encyclopaedia, Wikia, is protesting

XBMC

Makers of the free media centre resource, XBMC, have gone dark

Zeropaid

Piracy-based news site Zeropaid has blacked out

Demonoid

Long-running torrent site Demonoid is blacked out

Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing site has gone offline

UKNova


UK-based TV catch-up torrent site UKNova had an interesting message for its users

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg kinda supports the anti SOPA business but Facebook isn't quite going dark

Absolute Punk


The punks over at Absolute Punk are against SOPA

Liberal Conspiracy

Those good folks on the Left at Liberal Conspiracy are blacking out their homepage

Destructoid

The gaming site for gamers, by gamers, Destructoid is dark

Know Your Meme

Not to be outdone by a spreading meme, Know Your Meme actually became part of what they normally document

This Isn't Happiness

The photography/art-based propaganda site This Isn't Happiness embraced the darkness

imgur


As the easy way to share images, imgur was keen to protest

XKCD

Popular online comic site, XKCD, ran a blacked-out sketch

The Verge

The technology-focussed site, The Verge, voiced their opposition

TechCrunch

The AOL-owned technology blog TechCrunch had a colour make-over

Fark

Home to all things satirical, Fark went for a white out

4chan


The home of weirdness (and haters of censorship!) saw some weird things happen, but hey, that's 4chan for you

Funny or Die

Funny or Die's comedy site got serious about the censorship

GoDaddy

Sometime supporters of the bills, GoDaddy, demonstrated their (customer's !?!) commitment to the opposition

More to follow. Maybe...

The sound of inevitability

Documents (.pdf) from the Council of the European Union released today have announced what many copyright, copyleft and copyfight activists had long expected - namely that the protection given to the owners of musical productions has been extended from 50 years to 70 years.  This has the ring of inevitability as there is an established precedent for extending copyright terms whenever they come close to expiring. More often than not theses extension terms are dressed up in the rhetoric of protecting artists, but more often than not, the term 'artists' is little short of being synonymous with 'multinational corporations'.

Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group says of the matter:

Despite the rhetoric, small artists will gain very little from this, while our cultural heritage takes a massive blow by denying us full access to these recordings for another generation.

Two recent reviews by British governments (Gowers, December 2006 and Hargreaves, May 2011) have examined the support for such protection and have been highly skeptical regarding the supposed benefits further extensions offer smaller artists. The more recent of the two reviews was very clear on this point:

Copyright Term Extension

Economic evidence is clear that the likely deadweight loss to the economy exceeds any additional incentivising effect which might result from the extension of copyright term beyond its present levels.  This is doubly clear for retrospective extension to copyright term, given the impossibility of incentivising the creation of already existing works, or work from artists already dead. 

Despite this, there are frequent proposals to increase term, such as the current proposal to extend protection for sound recordings in Europe from 50 to 70 or even 95 years.  The UK Government assessment found it to be economically detrimental.  An international study found term extension to have no impact on output.

Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth, Chapter 2, Section 2.16, page 19

PJ Harvey, 2008
© Phil King, Flickr

Whether a creative artist contemplates the economic benefit of copyright duration before they embark upon making music is hard to believe. It's unlikely that the likes of King Creosote, James Blake or PJ Harvey (Mercury Music Prize nominees and winner respectively) contemplate creating music before deciding against it on the basis that 50 years worth of music protection is insufficient, and that they require 70 years of protection in order to ensure their creativity is realised.

Additionally, how does retroactively extending the duration of copyright terms help to incentivise musicians who have already made music? Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jeff Buckley, etc all made music that many people found inspirational under very different contexts, and now that they are deceased the duration of the protections afforded to the owners of their copyrighted work has been extended further - most likely to benefit the interests of bloated publishers and distributers.

The new extension does offer more protection to those musicians working in groups.  The new terms state that the "term of protection will expire 70 years after the death of the last person to survive: the author of the lyrics or the composer of the music". Given that 2012 was the year that many seminal pieces of music from the 1960s (ie The Beatles and The Rolling Stones) were due thought to be about to enter the public domain, it's perhaps inevitable that copyright protection has been extended ever further. Ringo and Paul might breathe a sigh of relief as their individual longevity benefits them both. It's a fairly safe prediction that around 2030 there will be highly vocal lobbying on behalf of the recording industry to extend the new terms to 95 years, or forever less one day.

What is worth noting from the EU Council minutes is that a number of countries did vote against the proposals (ie, Belgium, Sweden, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Slovakia and Slovenia) while a couple abstained from the vote (Estonia and Austria). This hardly reads like a unanimous vote - Directive 2006/116/EC seems to have scraped through. More than 17000 signatories also constituted a vocal part of the call to reject the extension term via the Sound Copyright campaign, but it seems like the industry has won yet another pyrrhic victory.

Copyright Extension Time - Act Now

It's that time again - the push to get the copyright protection for sound recordings to 70 years is back on the cards via the European Council.  It is questionable as to whether or not such an extension will benefit many musicians. This was something I was keen to oppose back in November of 2009, so long time readers of this blog will be familiar with the arguments. If not check out the video below for details:

The most likely practical outcome of the extension is that material recorded by (now deceased) artists from more than 50 years ago will no longer make it's way into the public domain for it to be repurposed or remixed free from licensing obligations.  There's plenty of independent analysis to support a rejection of the extension terms (see the links below).

You can make a difference by writing to your MEP now.  The Open Rights Group have helpfully created an prewritten email template for you to send and they'll even find your MEPs for you.  Click through for info and support and do your bit.

This is the edited version of the email I sent my MEPs:

I am writing to you about the European Commission proposal to extend the term of copyright protection for sound recordings from 50 to 70 years.  

I am extremely concerned about the possible passing of this Directive. The economic evidence is stacked against the proposal. And it will benefit only a small number of artists and businesses - 96% of the returns will go to the big labels and a minority of the biggest artists. It will result in large parts of our cultural history being locked away. Leading IP professors, the UK government's 'Gowers  Review' of IP, and independent economic analysts have all said that extending the term of protection is unwise. 

The Financial Times called the proposal 'disgraceful' in an editorial in 2009. The University of Cambridge's Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law concluded that 'it would be particularly inadvisable, given our present state of knowledge, for a rational policy-maker to extend the term of copyright in sound'.  

I wrote to my MEPs about a similar matter in November 2009 and since then a number of independent academic studies into copyright extension terms have been published in which they've questioned the value of increased powers, for example, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) project headed up by Joe Karaganis entitled 'Media Piracy in Emerging Economies or the work of Bart Cammaerts and Bingchun Meng of the LSE.  I will be co-conveening a series of ESF-funded exploratory workshops in Leuven, Belgium this week with several other academics from the social sciences, law and computer sciences in which we will be seeking to foster a more empirical approach to data in this area and the effects of policy changes. 

Since the Directive passed in 2009 a new Parliament has been elected. However, I am concerned that it may now pass through the Council without any fresh scrutiny or debate. I would therefore urge you to sign the request for 'renewed referral' being tabled by MEP Christian Engström (of the "Greens - European Free Alliance" group), and to oppose this damaging proposal. 

Copyfight!

The Digital Economy Bill #debill summary to date

Late yesterday afternoon amendments made to the Digital Economy Bill (Twitter hashtag #debill) were heard in the House of Lords. This is a controversial bill for a number of reasons, not least the threat of disconnection for illegal filesharers without due legal recourse, but also for the sweeping powers the Bill seems to give to Ofcom to regulate 'broadcast' content (ie the content that a partial newspaper or press publisher can host on their website), thus jeopardising press freedom. Writing in the Guardian last November, Lillian Edwards, a professor of internet law warned how the Bill would jeopardise open wi-fi spaces. Universities and libraries have also complained about the Bill's impact.

For the uninitiated text from the original Bill can be found here and the amendments can be found here.

Responses

There has been a great deal of interest in this Bill from people interested in copyright and what it might mean to them in the future. Indeed, the Open Rights Group have been actively lobbying to raise public awareness, and several of their members provided excellent Twitter commentary whilst the debate was taking place (notably Glyn Wintle @glynwintle and Florain Leppla @florian107).

In the blogosphere photographer, Philip Dunn, wrote one of the most compelling and lucid criticisms of the Digital Economy Bill. I'll have to link to the Google cached page hosting the piece as his host received so much attention the server was closed. [Edit: Paul Bradshaw @paulbradshaw is hosting the article via the Online Journalism Blog]. His main bone of contention was with what the Bill describes as 'orphan works' under Clause 42 - these are typically works where it's difficult or impossible to contact the copyright holder. This situation can arise for many reasons, not least that the author may never been publicly known because the work was published anonymously or the work may have never been traditionally published at all. The concern in this context is that the bill may mean that photographers might lose ownership

You can find excerpts of his argument below:

Photographers to lose copyright protection of their work

This startling and outrageous proposal will become UK law if The Digital Economy Bill currently being pushed through Parliament is passed. This Bill is sponsored by the unelected Government Minister, Lord Mandelson [sic].

[...]

The idea that the author of a photograph has total rights over his or her own work – as laid out in International Law and The Copyright Act of 1988 – will be utterly ignored. If [sic] future, if you wish to retain any control over your work, you will have to register that work (and each version of it) with a new agency yet to be set up.

[...]

International Law, through the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, recognises the ownership rights of the creator of the ‘property’. This enables image owners to control how their work is used, and whether it is used at all.

International Law will be ignored by the British Government and this new Act will overturn more than 150 years of UK copyright law.

If that wasn't enough reason to be concerned, there are even more problematic implications:

Photographers are to lose all effective rights to take photographs in public places.

Not content with taking away photographer’s copyright, another section of this Government is proposing sweeping changes to your freedom to take pictures in public places.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has deemed that a photograph taken in a public place may now be considered to contain ‘private data’

This means that if you take a picture in the street and there is a member of the public in the shot, that person has the right to demand either payment – if you wish to publish the image – or that you do not publish it. In fact, according to the ICO. There does not actually have to be an objection, it is up to the photographer to ‘judge’ whether the subject might object.

You can find more posts by Philip Dunn over on www.photoactive.co.uk

Philip goes on to question the sense of such a decision when the average Briton is captured on surveillance camera as much as 300 times per day! It also calls into whether or not a photographer can be prosecuted for uploading an image featuring members of the general public to a photo sharing site like Flickr or Facebook.

Exactly how this can be policed or enforced remains to be seen, especially when the services listed may be outside the national jurisdiction of the UK. Already, Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act has deemed it illegal to take photographs of police officers - something that would render the recording of Ian Tomlinson's death following police intervention during the G20 protests a crime. Critics fear this may lead to people being unable to record or photograph legitimate public protests which frequently feature the police.

Back to the Bill

Another area of concern was addressed by Conservative front bencher Baroness Buscombe (Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission), a point I alluded to briefly in the introduction. She pointed out that the phrasing of the Bill seemed to give Ofcom the power to regulate what was described as "broadcast material". The concern here lay at how that term was interpreted. Currently Ofcom regulates broadcast television content whilst the PCC deals with matters involving the press. In the context of news this is very important and the rules governing "due impartiality" are applicable to broadcast content, but not to the press which is permitted to be partial (ie the oft-quoted 'freedom of the press').

Lord Puttnam supported Baroness Buscombe in this matter by expressing his concern over what can be described as "broadcast" in a converged multiplatform media environment by citing the example of material rejected by a Public Service Broadcaster which then goes on to be picked up by a partial press publisher and is subsequently hosted on their website. Does Ofcom or the PCC regulate in such matters? Lord Davies' response was less than precise in that he described broadcasting as that pertaining to be the type of content appearing on television. The way in which audio and video content is remediated in the digital age poses more questions of this Bill than can be answered by its proponents, so it seems.

Anger

Lord Puttnam (a former Chancellor of the institution in which I work) expressed some anger at the fact the Bill was not going to be referred to the Information Commissioner, responsible for dealing with privacy issues. Lord Young (who is co-sponsoring the Bill with Lord Mandelson) indicated that such a deferment would delay the Bill from being passed. It seems the government would rather pass a Bill that is deliberatively vague, poorly written and ill conceived which would need to be rewritten rather than make the appropriate amendments first!

Lord Puttnam accused Lord Young of attempting to rush a Bill though the House "that none of us is particularly proud of" and which hasn't been discussed appropriately. He also expressed concern at the "extraordinary degree of lobbying" that those involved in drafting the amendments had come up against from the creative industries. Lord Whitty expressed concerns that the Open Rights Group have been actively campaigning against: that the consumer accused of infringement will not be able to defend themselves in a court of law.

Make no mistake, this is a Bill which seeks to favour the rights of the content industries over the rights of individuals who will be labelled as guilty until proven innocent. They will be pit against the strong arm of the content industries and their financial powers, with the burden of evidence placed at their feet to prove their innocence.

ISP TalkTalk has already expressed their concern at this Bill:

"The Digital Economy Bill will give rights holders the power to act as a judge and jury, allowing them to demand that ISPs disconnect their customers without having to prove their case in a court of law. TalkTalk is the only major ISP that has said it will simply refuse to do this and will fight its case in every court in the land and in Europe if it has to."

It's still not too late to get involved and have your concerns voices. Visit the Open Rights Group's website today and find out what you can do to be heard.

---

nb: apparently #debill is an appropriately hashtag - in Polish it means 'moron'. Thanks to Falkowata for that.

Tracking musical expenditure: November

This month has been a curious month in terms of purchases as a number of factors have come together to produce a few interesting things - call it serendipity. Firstly, I had planned on doing all my Christmas shopping online in November given the recent postal strikes delaying things. Having said this, I only ended up buying one CD as a gift so the impact this will have in the big scheme of things is minimal at best. Secondly, Juno Records gave me £5 worth of credit to spend on digital downloads for being a member of an online fan community. This might have been money I wouldn't have typically spent but never look a gift horse. Thirdly, a filesharing site I have access to was 'promoting' the iTunes LP format, which have all sorts of extra features, which led me to buy one from the limited range on offer. Fourthly, I purchased a Sunday paper solely in order to get a 'free' live album (via iTunes) which needs to be taken into account - it's unlikely that I'd have bought the paper otherwise.

All said and done, this month's expenditure on music comes in at £27.63, bringing the grand total to date of £770.49.

If we go only on single and album sales to date the figure arrives at £51.85

After a quarter of the year has passed, it seems that the amount spent on music has began to increase

It seems I'm getting closer to the £77 figure mentioned in the Demos report from October 2009 (Powerpoint file here: 3.7 mb). I wonder how, if at all, the Virgin Media/Universal deal will impact on those sales hen it eventually gets rolled out? If Virgin Media customers have full access to Universal's back catalogue, will they spend less on music? I'm still waiting for pricing plans for this service to be announced

Pirate Finder General

Yesterday it emerged via Cory Doctorow's boing boing blog that the UK government is planning to introduce some radical changes to the Digital Economy bill that will seek to combat copyright infringement in a most aggressive manner. One of the consequences of these changes is a serious threat to democracy in that the Secretary of State (currently Lord Mandelson) will have the power to make "secondary legislation" (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).

Effectively, this would give an unelected official the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright - something which benefits big business in cases where only around 2% of copyrighted products are worth supporting in law (98% of copyrighted material is no longer supported by the market but is still covered by the blanket law). This is clearly a case of industry being more important the people. Doctorow attribute the following reasons for his new proposal:

1. The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example, he could create jail terms for file-sharing, or create a "three-strikes" plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)

2. The Secretary of State would get the power to create procedures to "confer rights" for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)

3. The Secretary of State would get the power to "impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement" (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright "militias" can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)

What does this mean for you?

There are far ranging implications at stake in the changes being proposed here. Imagine the implications for uploading a recording of, say, a birthday party featuring background music to YouTube... That music would be subject to copyright law making the uploader a copyright infringer and a potential victim of this new bill - liable for any breaches made. Place this scenario in the context of point 2) and you can imagine being the target of record company surveillance watching your every move, even going as far to restrict your access to specific content. At what point did the British public decide to let the entertainment industry police its behaviour as if it was a state authority?

Get involved

Naturally, organisations like the Open Rights Group are campaigning against such changes and encouraging members of the public to phone their MPs with their concerns. I urge you to do the same as time is very short. You can email your MP here but due to the time limits a phone call is more likely to be effective.

Further reading:

Charles Arthur, Guardian, 20/11/09 'Treasury secretary defends government's online piracy plans'
Charles Arthur, Guardian, 20/11/09, 'Why are cyberlockers suddenly such a problem, Lord Mandelson?'
Dept for Culture, Media & Sport, 2009, Digital Britain report

Tracking musical expenditure: October

The second month of the experiment to track my music related expenditure has ended and, as I expected, fell far short of the previous month which was packed with festivals and live concerts. I almost spent a fortune buying Fleetwood Mac tickets (for my wife!) on eBay but I couldn't afford them in the end.

So this month was a relatively tight month with a grand total of £69.72 being spent on music. £50 of that was the deposit for Glastonbury next year, with the rest being spent on 2 CDs and 1 digital download album. I think that is the first time I have ever paid for a digital album. I always opt for the CD version if it's available, but this was a digital-only release.

This brings the total spend on music up to £742.86 (the data for the 2 months to date can be found here) in a month where a few different sources have suggested that filesharers spend more money on music in a year than non-filesharers.

The idea that filesharers spend more on music than non-filesharers is nothing new to those people who actively participate in music file-sharing communities where you can find many posts on the subject of how much they spend on music. The Mail cite a Demos paper which claims filesharers spend £77 a year on singles and albums as opposed to £33 for non-filesharers. This data is very similar to an Ipsos-Mori poll in the Independent which says the same thing... Hmmm. If I add up my expenditure to date on albums and singles only (excluding music bought for games like Guitar Hero) my total comes to £28.71. If I add on the Guitar Hero DLC that comes to £34.39 - more than non-filesharer spends in a year!

Despite this, Lord Mandelson is still intent of curbing the behaviour of those accused of filesharing even though they seem to contribute more to the music industry. Admittedly, the data seems to be gathered from those people willing to admit to filesharing which many of the 1000 respondents may not have wanted to do, especially as it is being increasingly linked to criminality. I suppose Mandy will see this as evidence that more money can be squeezed out of people that are willing to spend money on music.