Some may think this only has to do with people that download pirated software and movies.. Oh no no no!!! Think again..
The problem, in a nutshell, is the incredible, almost unbelievable expansion in intellectual property law over the last few decades. It used to be that IP law was a dry, dusty area of practice that very few people paid attention to, with the possible exception of broadcasters and publishers. With the advent of microchips, computerization, and the Internet, that all changed, as I'll get to in a minute.
This has to do with censorship. The us government in it's infinite wisdom has seen fit to put themselves in charge of what you can and can not see on the internet.
While you raise a valid point, it's only partially correct. I would argue that government is only the instrumentality, or the enabler of this activity. It is, and nearly always will be, the private sector who will be the driving force in this regard.
Back in the day, copyright infringement was a civil tort -- if you violated an author's (or corporation's) copyright, you expected -- at worst - a letter from the copyright holder's lawyer, not a visit from a squad of heavily-armed police.
All that changed when the corporations lobbied for copyright infringement to be made a criminal offense. If you didn't live in the United States, for the most part it was too expensive (not to mention difficult) for a rightsholder to pursue an alleged infringer. Having convinced many governments to classify copyright infringement as a criminal offense, this means that they have very cleverly outsourced their enforcement costs onto the public dime -- your taxes (and mine) are paying for this.
Furthermore, classifying intellectual property 'theft' as a criminal matter has also made enforcement more effective, even against alleged overseas infringers. Just look at recent events for some examples:
1) The arrest of several of the principals of Megaupload.com in New Zealand. (Presumably the American government, at the behest of the FBI invoked the MLAT treaty with New Zealand to have the New Zealand police carry out the arrests on the FBI's behalf.)
2) Another recent case involves Sheffield, U.K. student Richard O'Dwyer. Mr. O'Dwyer's crime was, while still in high school, to setup a website called TVShack. According to U.S. authorities at least, TVShack became the 9th most popular site on the Internet, yielding Mr. O'Dwyer some $230K in revenue from advertisement placed on the site. What is of interest here, is that Mr. O'Dwyer has never so much as set foot in the U.S; likewise, his site was NOT hosted in the U.S.
If reports are correct, the apparent justification for involvement of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hinges on the fact that Mr. O'Dwyer registered a dot com domain for his site. (ICE was the agency responsible for seizing his domain. The server reportedly was not located in the U.S.)
As dot com domains are registered/controlled by Verisign, an American company, this is/was felt to be sufficient justification (by the American government, and sadly now the British courts) to seize Mr. O'Dwyer's domain, and extradite him to the U.S. to face trial for alleged copyright infringement, where he faces a potential penalty of 5 years in jail. (This would be in addition to his pre-trial detention; as foreign national, he would be presumed a flight risk, and jailed for perhaps as long as a year -- perhaps even two -- before he even is put on trial.)
Another salient fact in this case, aside from Mr. O'Dwyer never having set foot in the united States, nor having his server(s) hosted there, is the fact that Mr. O'Dwyer's sites:
(a) Never hosted any infringing material themselves; rather, TVShack.com merely
linked to where such materials could be found; and
(b) These activities were (and are)
perfectly legal under U.K. law. Mr. O'Dwyer undertook legal advice and was so informed by legal counsel.
In effect, Mr. O'Dwyer's site served as little more than a search engine which showed where allegedly infringing materials could be obtained.
You don't see ICE and/or the DOJ shutting down Google, or hauling
them into court, do you? (Of course not, Google has lawyers by the score, and millions of dollars to pay for them.)
It almost goes without saying that this legal doctrine, i.e. that the U.S. has an interest in dot com domains regardless of where the servers are located, is going to be problematic in the years to come, if this doctrine is upheld by the courts. (So far, American courts appear to be giving both ICE and the DOJ a free pass in that regard.)
The tentacles of IP law have now extended into realms that, formerly, would have literally been unfathomable -- extending into the realm of personal property. Consider the following:
You buy an inkjet printer. As the market is currently structured, printers are sold at best, at cost, or even at a loss. "You might ask, "How is this possible?" and the answer is: "Because the manufacturers make their money on selling consumables, such as ink cartridges." The flaw in that strategy was, of course, that companies would spring-up to sell 'compatible' cartridges at a lower price than the original manufacturer, thus cutting into their anticipated profits. To counter this, printer manufacturers started putting chips inside their inkjet cartridges, and embedding software within these printers that check for the presence of these chips before the printer will operate. The idea is to effectively lock-out competing inkjet cartridges from being used in certain brands of printers. In cases where manufacturers of replacement inkjet cartridges designed their own chips to defeat this system, the printer manufacturers have attempted to use copyright law and, in particular, the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to stop them.
Similarly, in June or 2009, it was reported that Panasonic had modified the firmware of their digital cameras to force the user to make use of only Panasonic batteries, Panasonic having added some chips to their own batteries. Apparently the camera's firmware was designed to check for the presence of these chips, and refuse to operate if they were not found. This was done under the guise of 'safety reasons'.
It used to be, back in the day, that when you bought something, it was yours to do with as you willed. Not anymore, in the age of digital Big Brother.
It is my understanding that if you buy a game console, say a XBox 360, and you have it modified with a so-called "mod chip" you not only risk invalidating the warranty, but you also risk that if the modification is detected, your unit will be blacklisted from participating in online gaming.
Let's not forget the disaster with Amazon's Kindle e-book reader. You might
remember how Amazon 'repossessed' copies of George Orwell's
1984 as
purchased by some Kindle users.
[
In George Orwell?s ?1984,? government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the ?memory hole.?
On Friday, it was ?1984? and another Orwell book, ?Animal Farm,? that were dropped down the memory hole ? by Amazon.com.
In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.
An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. ?When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers? devices, and refunded customers,? he said.
Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
In a story published on Techdirt, we can see the following:
"Sony Deletes Feature On PS3's; You Don't Own What You Thought You Bought"
[
Failures
by Mike Masnick
Wed, Mar 31st 2010 7:31am
Filed Under:
ps3
Companies:
sony
Sony Deletes Feature On PS3's; You Don't Own What You Thought You Bought
from the the-digital-age dept
It used to be when you bought a product, you owned it. Simple, right? And once you owned it, you could do what you want with it? But, lately, thanks to digital products and an always connected world, many companies have changed things around -- so the products you thought you owned, you actually rent. But, it can go even further than that, where a product you thought you owned can be irrevocably changed without your permission, long after you bought it. Take, for example, the recent story of Sony deleting a feature on the PS3 that let users (not owners, apparently) install other operating systems, such as Linux. It's going away. Sony announced that when the next PS3 firmware upgrade comes along, it'll wipe out this feature, whether you used it or not. The only way to avoid that is not to upgrade, but that will also greatly limit what you can do with your PS3.
So why is Sony retroactively taking away a feature that it sold to people? Apparently because some people might possibly use it in a way that Sony didn't intend. The EFF has the whole backstory:
The backstory is that Sony provided the Other OS feature in order to support IBM's Cell Project, which produced the PS3's CPU and made it practical to use PS3 consoles as compute nodes for a scientific supercomputer. The U.S. Army did just that, buying more than 2,000 PS3s to build a supercomputer. Lots of hobbyists also made use of the Other OS feature, using it to write their own games and creatively repurpose their PS3s.
Recently, however, a hobbyist named Geohot announced that he was able to use the Other OS feature along with a bit of soldering in a manner that gave him more control over the PS3 hardware than Sony had intended. Sony responded with the "upgrade" that removes the Other OS feature.
This is, frankly, obnoxious -- and I half wonder if there will be a lawsuit over this. People were sold one thing and then Sony retroactively decided to take away a feature that some found quite useful However, I imagine that in a world of interconnected devices, stories like this are going to become more common. Isn't it time that someone created a movement to highlight what products you actually own once you've bought them?
Source:
Sony Deletes Feature On PS3's; You Don't Own What You Thought You Bought | Techdirt
The next battleground is computers, proper. Apparently, the BIOS (Basic Input Output System) which dates back to the early 1980s, is now showing its age -- it is due to be replaced by UEFI -- the Universal Extensible Firmware Interface.
Apple has been using UEFI for some time. Microsoft now proposes to make this a standard in order for computers to get the "Designed for Windows 8" logo.
As Ars Technica reported:
[
PC users who run Windows and Linux on the same machine will want to do some research before purchasing a Windows 8 computer. That's because systems with a "Designed for Windows 8" logo must ship with UEFI secure booting enabled?a move that prevents booting operating systems that aren?t signed by a trusted Certificate Authority.
This could pose a problem for Linux users, though in practice most can just change UEFI settings to disable secure boot before installing the open-source OS. But users will have to depend on hardware vendors to make this option possible in the first place.
Disabling secure boot
?Microsoft requires that machines conforming to the Windows 8 logo program and running a client version of Windows 8 ship with secure boot enabled,? Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett writes on his blog in reference to a recent presentation by Microsoft program manager Arie van der Hoeven. The Microsoft exec notes that UEFI and secure boot are ?required for Windows 8 client? with the result that ?all firmware and software in the boot process must be signed by a trusted Certificate Authority.?
Microsoft has a good reason for this. A ?growing class of malware targets the boot path [and] often the only fix is to reinstall the operating system,? van der Hoeven said. ?UEFI and secure boot harden the boot process [and] reduce the likelihood of bootkits, rootkits and ransomware.?
Importantly, though, Garrett writes that ?there?s no indication that Microsoft will prevent vendors from providing firmware support for disabling this feature and running unsigned code.?
For many (and hopefully most) Windows 8 machines, this means that users have a good chance of successfully entering the UEFI settings interface to turn off secure boot. But this will depend on the hardware vendor.
Source:
Windows 8 secure boot could complicate Linux installs
You might wish to put off junking those older computers, and hang on to them just in case....
If this is allowed to stay. Under this law, anything they deem wrong in any way... They can shut down!!!! This could mean when they get around to saying that the mere discussion of anabolic steroids should ben banned.. Then so too will all of the fantastic sites like this one will disappear.
They can even block any IP's from anywhere they want.. Don't allow this to happen! Here is the best part..It requires you to do absolutely nothing!!! Don't buy anything, Don't see anything, Don't rent anything during the month of March!!! Just how easy is that.. Stand up for your rights to have an uncensored internet by doing absolutely nothing!!
It needs to be remembered that, to some extent at least, the government is still bound by the Constitution -- in the United States, that involves the First Amendment. The Constitution only governs the relationship between the government and the governed (i.e. the people).
The Constitution was written so as to limit the power of government or other state actors --
it does not govern the behaviour of private entities.
Private companies are essentially free to do as they wish, subject only to statute (and contract) law.
Mirrorshades
