Your Rights Online

[3278]

So, now that we're done with that waste of time, let's get back to a more engaging waste of time.

There's some definite concern in Spain right now over proposed filesharing legislation. The bill used to be a little more offensive: it used to allow the executive to shut down websites without judicial approval, but now they're going to try getting it through with judicial approval added. This all comes in circumvention of case law set by the judiciary, though, so it's hard to know what's going to come of all this: the courts may simply smack the law down whenever it's prosecuted, as one can argue would be their right. This isn't exactly a first for Spain: they're becoming renowned as being harsh on pirates legislatively, although the laws seem unevenly and inadequately enforced by the executive.

Another step in a trend toward increased legislation in this area is the recently signed House Bill 1783 [PDF], which makes sharing your, say, Netflix password with a buddy technically illegal. Now, that's not its intent, but its intent is almost more interesting: they want to stop people from signing up for a streaming media site and then selling their login to a hundred different people, and thus producing more demand on the servers and infrastructure without any accordant monetary recompense. I'm not wild about the wording, but the idea is definitely sound. It's no different from criminal penalties for, say, tapping off your neighbor's cable, and in fact stealing streaming access is worse, because the load to the cable company doesn't change when you and I are both watching at the same time.

Brand-new United States Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante - an RoC so new even she hasn't heard of her - hasn't wasted any time getting to work: on her first day, she stopped by a House Judiciary Committee hearing to support a proposal by the IP czar that would make illegal streaming not a misdemeanor, but a felony. Her argument is that because the punishment is small potatoes, prosecutors aren't bothering with minor cases. This is pretty much exactly the law us pirates are fearing, and is a foot pretty seriously on the path to...well, that stuff not everyone believes we're headed toward.

"All is not bleak for the prospective pirate, though," although this time that comes with some caveats. The blogospheres have been abuzz this week with headlines like, "The UN Says Taking File Sharers Offline Violates Their Human Rights," but let's put it in perspective.* What actually happened is that a single individual, with the delightful title "Special Rapporteur" has released a report that says that cutting users off from the internet for things like intellectual property crimes is "disproportionate," which is a little strong but not quite like condemning capital punishment. It's also worth noting that the "Special Rapporteur" has no actual power: it's a completely advisory position. But it still shows - see, pirate, there is hope! - that some individuals in some positions of influence believe that some penalties for filesharing are too great. I recommend reading the report, or at least skimming it: I agree with a great deal of what he has to say, although it's not really leavened with enough economic realism to raise my own personal bread.

*Best quote from this article, if you don't mind me pausing to kick a crippled puppy in a coma, is this one: "In addition to calling on governments to maintain Internet access 'during times of political unrest,' the report goes on to urge States to change copyright laws, not in favor of the music and movie industries as has been the recent trend, but in keeping with citizens’ rights." Emphasis, of course, is all mine.

[AtemHutlrt]

Oh, another swing and a miss for the Aussie!

No, Common Law is judge made law.

Except it's really not, though it's a very fine distinction. Precedent decisions do not create "laws", as the term is commonly used, they create case laws, which function as footnotes, so to speak, of statutory laws. It's the process through which laws are explicated and interpreted, not created [unless you're using "law" as shorthand for "case law", which people usually don't, and shouldn't]. And I think you probably understand that, which is just one reason this particular tangent is kind of pointless. Basically,it's more-or-less correct for you to say that, "[common law]'s the entire foundation of the legal system", but 32's also correct in that, "common law doesn't make law, it clarifies law."

[Bonefish]

is it too late to say "rhetoric"?

[AtemHutlrt]

It's never too late to wield the white-hot hammer of RHETORIC!

[Bonefish]

RHETORIC!

[Crazy Elf]

Oh, another swing and a miss for the Aussie!

No, Common Law is judge made law.

Except it's really not, though it's a very fine distinction.

If you'll read my original statement I stated that the foundation of the legal system is in judges creating law, which if you know anything about legal history is entirely accurate.

[3278]

If you'll read my original statement I stated that the foundation of the legal system is in judges creating law, which if you know anything about legal history is entirely accurate.

Nuh-uh! If you know anything about legal history, you'll see you're full of shit. See, I can link to Wikipedia pages that don't support my assertions, too! The fact that courts exist - which is all your article says - doesn't support your assertion that precedent is how we make laws.

Atem has it exactly right: courts make case law, while legislatures make statutory law, and the executive makes regulatory law. None of them "make law" exclusively or completely or ultimately [that's actually what our Constitution does, here]. So how about this, if you're seriously going to bother to keep up this completely pointless argument: set aside the ultimately semantic argument of who makes what kind of law, accept the standard definitions - case [or common] law, statutory law, and regulatory law - and then use those definitions to support whatever it is that your position is. I'll do the same, because frankly I've been too careless about talking about "law" like there's only the one kind, and that's completely inaccurate of me. I will gladly admit to oversimplifying the reality of the different types of law: I'd highly recommend you do the same, yeah?

Not that it matters, of course: this Tangent of Astonishing Ignorance is really just meant to support the idea that we should punish criminal acts through civil courts, which is conceptually ludicrous and which you've so far of course failed to support with any evidence at all, despite what I can only assume must have been at least 15 seconds reading Wikipedia.

[Salvation122]

Arguing that the results of a trial (case law) creates laws is a not entirely unreasonable assertion. For relatively straightforward examples, look at Dredd Scott, Brown v. Board, and Loving v. Virginia.

The counter-argument is that creating judicial policy, which is what Common Law does, is only meaningful if there's someone to enforce it. In most jurisdictions, the courts rely on the executive for enforcement.

Also note that courts (in the United States) are restricted to the instant case, which requires mootness and so forth; there need to be actual damages to rule on, and a reasonable path to correcting those damages, before case law can be created.

[3278]

Arguing that the results of a trial (case law) creates laws is a not entirely unreasonable assertion.

I absolutely agree. Nor is it entirely unreasonable to argue that the results of legislation [statutory law] create law. Nor is it entirely unreasonable to argue that the results of executive order [regulatory law] create law. All three create law, and the essence of the error made by both CE and myself was to posit that only one of these three ultimately created law; none of them do, in truth, at least in our respective nations: in America and Australia, law springs ultimately from constitutional law. Any assertion that the other three "ultimately" create laws is incorrect, including my earlier assertions.

[3278]

Those who have technical concerns about how law enforcement groups might crack down on intellectual piracy should feel assuaged by details such as the arrest of one of the LulzSec hackers, LulzSec being the group which has so actively been - and continues - hacking the crap out of Sony wherever they can [sort of in retaliation for Sony's case against PS3 modder George Hotz, but largely just for the lulz]. That arrest is likely to lead [through those real-world connections many online types forget exist] to many more arrests, and eventually, one presumes, to the elimination of the [current] threat.

Can they turn him and get information from him? The publisher of hacker mag 2600 estimates 25 percent of US "hackers" are actually either informants for the federal government, or are secretly federal agents themselves. As an example, he points to Adrian Lamo, who ratted out Bradley Manning in the Wikileaks diplomatic cable fiasco. Something to remember is that the hackers [and certainly the members of the release groups who put out so much of the pirated material] aren't hardened criminals, or former Soviet KGB agents: they're typically young males with a lot to lose and little to gain from resisting government pressure.

Infiltration and subversion will be critical to the initial undermining of intellectual piracy by the executive agencies, much as they are to drug enforcement. And much like the War on Drugs, the War on Piracy won't be easy or absolute, but the fact that we haven't won yet hasn't exactly stopped us from fighting. Besides, the relative scope, scale, and effect of the US failure in the war on drugs isn't mirrored in other countries with similar legislation, suggesting that our problem has more to do with the US - our geography, our history, our cultures - than it does with the idea of enforcing laws against things lots of people like to do.

At least as culpable for the rolling up of the chaos mat will be fears of cyberterrorism; while governments aren't wild about pirates undermining the property rights of their nations' corporations, they really hate the idea that someone might undermine them. And so - hello again, Rapporteur! - the UN is again [again, one guy at the UN] talking about the sorts of efforts that need to be applied to groups like Anonymous.

Something to consider - and you can't do much more than that, because hard numbers are thin on the ground - is which has done more damage: Anonymous or, say, Reloaded, or DEViANCE, or PARADOX. Are you running Windows XP? Did you know some of your system sounds were created on pirated software cracked by release group Radium [who I have to thank for the majority of my music back in the day]? That's how far the cracking effect has gone.

[Crazy Elf]

Nuh-uh!

I absolutely agree.

Right. So you don't actually understand or feel inclined to look into the evolution of law unless Sal tells you to?

I'm done here.

[3278]

So you don't actually understand or feel inclined to look into the evolution of law unless Sal tells you to?

Sal is definitely correct, and you and I were definitely incorrect: law doesn't ultimately stem from the legislative [as I said] or the judicial [as you said], but rather ultimately stems from Constitutional law, which gives all three branches of government the power to create their own sorts of laws. We were incorrect, and he was correct, and it would be supremely intellectually dishonest of me to say otherwise. I don't feel any shame in admitting that, and it's saddening that you clearly do.

I'm done here.

Yeah, I know, and that's a little saddening, too. You've been done for a while. You've never been particularly great at making sense, or being logical, but you've at least been creative, and some would even say funny. Now? You're a limp dishrag, half damp and smelling faintly of mildew; you're the braying of a donkey, stubborn and stupid; you're the dying words of an uninteresting mute, drowning in stale soup; you're crackers left too long open, and gone stale; you're paint on the hood of a cheap Chinese import car, left too long in the sun, faded and cracked, blistered and peeling; you're spoiled fruit, sagging and worm-eaten, but not yet even interestingly fuzzed with mold; you're algae in a shallow puddle, a half-membrane of half-life, struggling in the fierce light of the killing sun; you're stolen laundry washed in dirty water, hung on the frayed clothesline for weeks through battering storms, ragged and vague, tattered and flaccid; you're a pile of discarded foreskins from a mass bris, crisped and blackened; you're a tomato whose juices have been consumed by some vegetarian vampire, leaving a pinkish mass of mush; you're a bowl of oatmeal sitting on the counter overnight, not hard enough to scrape off nor liquid enough to pour out, just hanging on with a slimy, tenacious and disgusting film that raises the gorge on contact.

We all know why: it's as obvious as <s>the hair on your head</s> the nose on your face: my penis bit you, and drained you of all humor, all creativity, everything vivacious and vital, everything interesting and useful. You've become a sad, limp, boring, bland approximation of a human, not even an amusing parody of yourself. You're the dead walking, if the dead walking could manage to be completely uninteresting. And it brings me some vague sorrow to see your corpse meandering about in this dismal fashion, but great joy to know your powers - overuse of smileys, shock-jock stand-up - are now my penis' powers, and when it wreaks terror upon the universe, some very, very small portion of its might will have been drained from you, leaving you a pale, withered husk of what little you ever were. You've gone from slim to none, half-full to empty, little to nothing.

Run off, again, tail between your legs, tiny cur, as always you do when clearly proven foolish. Come back when you've found whatever it is you've lost.

[3278]

13 have been arrested, a 14th is being searched-for, and their site - which didn't host infringing content, but which made millions of Euro linking to it - has been shut down [the right way, not the DNS way]. This wasn't a tiny site: they had hundreds of thousands of video streams aggregated, which is an awful lot by just about any standard.

It was a joint operation of German, Spanish, French and Dutch forces: as many as 250 officers were involved from Germany alone, and 17 nerds behind them. If this seems like a lot, think about how many lost sales of movie tickets 66,000 streaming films involves, and how many people work for the studios which made those films.

[Bonefish]

Keep that penis away from me.

[3278]

Well, I'll see what I can do, but at this size, pretty much everything is close to it.

[Bonefish]

Also, your penis ate my neighbor's dog. Now, normally, I wouldn't care. But this obnoxious bitch is all up in my face about it, and I'm like: "dude, only the Hauze can control that monster!". Please be more considerate of your unattented penis in the future.

[3278]

Now, here's an interesting case, not because of the clever investing scheme, but because it tells us that the SEC actually has a staff of 200 or so people who search the internet for possible SEC violations.

[3278]

In the escalating arms race between governments and hackers - or "cyberterrorists," if you want to go that direction - things have been heating up of late. NATO mentioned Anonymous wasn't likely to last and Anonymous gave no ground in return. Which didn't stop Turkish police from detaining 32 suspect with ties to the group, or, the week before that, Spain arresting 3 others.

Anonymous seems to think technology will make them immune to real-life repercussions, but the fact is, the government holds the real-world keys to everything that makes the internet work, so at the end of the day, the government's going to have the same kind of control over the internet as they do over the rest of civilization, which is to say something slightly-less-than-complete.

It's strange to think that on the one hand, our governments are enacting all these laws to deny internet access to small groups of protesters taking illegal actions to pursue their goals, while at the same time we're giving internet-in-a-box solutions to allow internet access to small groups of protesters taking illegal actions to pursue their goals. We talk about being against terrorism, we talk about being against revolutionary violence, but it's really just victors writing history, really just a matter of who we agree with. That wouldn't bother me if we'd just admit it, but trying to be the shining beacon of hope on the hill is disingenuous if we're just going to go out at night and stab people in the dark like everyone else.

[3278]

Keep your eyes open: here comes the first one. The first challenge to the ICE domain seizures is, unsurprisingly, Rojadirecta, who has already survived two legal challenges in Spain. The results of this case will be...well, not the Roe v Wade of the field, but important, I suspect.

[3278]

The question now is whether this is a declaration of war, or just another day in the life. This could inflame the conflict, or just fizzle like so many of the things these groups have done. I think all they lack is a stronger, smarter nucleus, and we could see real trouble; as it is, my guess is this will be just another in the list of minor conflicts.

[3278]

LulzSec is coming apart. other hackers are defacing their personal sites, and the authorities are closing in. Somewhere, there's an executive at Sony thinking, "Okay, they did this for security breaches, but they won't do anything about the people stealing my intellectual property?"

[3278]

And along comes Ars, following in my footsteps yet again. How does it feel to get scooped, Bright?

[3278]

The thing that strikes me about the latest LulzSec "release" isn't the target - talk about random liberal youth cause célèbre - but the ubiquity. This group of shameless and self-admitted script kiddies isn't exactly what you'd call gifted or brilliant: these hacks they're using exploit well-known vulnerabilities, and yet they seem to have no shortage of potential victims. Despite the ever-increasing attention to security in our society, it turns out we've actually been pretty lazy, pretty lax.

It reminds me of the early days of the arms race between thieves and the manufacturers of locks and safes; it's as if a string of bank robberies has just brought to the attention of the public that most banks don't actually lock the bank vault at night.

[WillyGilligan]

The thing that gets me is, that one tweet said that they'd released the kraken on those guys. All they did was tip off the FBI. Nothing says "tough guy" like going and telling Mom on a dude. The line is "snitches get stitches", not "snitches get reported to the appropriate authorities".

Otherwise, the whole thing is over my head.

[Jeff Hauze]

Suddenly, I'm beginning to picture LulzSec as Wendigo circa 1999. This makes this entire thing much funnier.

[3278]

The thing that gets me is, that one tweet said that they'd released the kraken on those guys. All they did was tip off the FBI. Nothing says "tough guy" like going and telling Mom on a dude. The line is "snitches get stitches", not "snitches get reported to the appropriate authorities".

That's one of the most amusing elements of all this: most all of the agents involved are youthful, ignorant, and arrogant, so it's like watching kids strut around on the school yard...except they all have weapons. They're not great weapons, but they're still weapons, and that's the part that I guess isn't amusing...for some people. Still funny for me.

LulzSec has apparently bowed out, claiming 50 days was all they had planned, but I think they're running home to lick their wounds [am I mixing metaphors?] and trying to hide before the cops show up. Many of them probably won't succeed; it usually takes us a while to arrest high-profile hackers, but we usually get it done, particularly if we can start taking apart the "organization" and turning suspects into witnesses.

[Nicephorus]

particularly if we can start taking apart the "organization" and turning suspects into witnesses.

Which is pretty likely. Online bravado tends to evaporate in a holding cell.

[3278]

Looks like we're a lot closer to a voluntary anti-piracy agreement between the ISPs and Big Content: since the government doesn't have and won't obtain the resources required to enforce its own laws, it's done what it can to shepherd a willing agreement between the largest ISPs and the largest content groups [the *IAAs]. It would provide - so the rumor goes - graduated responses to piracy, and in fact wouldn't be significantly different from something they've tried earlier, and elsewhere: in practice, a rightsholder complains to your ISP, so your ISP warns you; if you keep going, and a rightsholder complains, then maybe you get slower internet for a while; if you keep going, and a rightsholder complains, then maybe every time you open a web page, you also have to click through a page reminding you not to steal shit. You'll notice at no time do you lose internet access, no matter what you do: this is to prevent all that UN "internet access is a human right" stuff that came up after the discussion of a possible EU three-strikes law.

This is still and clearly the wrong way to do this - like asking gas stations and car companies to get together and find a way to stop people stealing cars at gas stations - but what else are they to do?

Since the mandatory government-mandated Australian internet filter didn't pan out - too many reasonable objections - what's happening instead is that the two largest ISPs may voluntarily adopt the filter, neatly sidestepping government accountability, without actually giving users the right to choose, although Telstra may actually be hesitating in the face of possible LulzSec reprisals, an issue which may be passed, anyway.* It interesting to see vigilantes - bad, bad vigilantes - actually shaping major policy at major ISPs: will the internet bow to terror, if you're good enough at it?

Major internet shakers objected to the idiocy that is the Protect IP Act. But that's not news.

*Hard to keep up when you're getting turned out.

[Bonefish]

Suddenly, I'm beginning to picture LulzSec as Wendigo circa 1999. This makes this entire thing much funnier.

Jeff wins a cookie!

[3278]

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is a high-level economic collective of developed nations, including the North American and European nations, Australia, Japan...you know, the rich kids. Last week they had a high-level meeting about the internet, and all the cool kids were there. The resulting text [PDF] is a blueprint for tomorrow, government and commerce's view of how intellectual piracy is going to be prevented. And I think the ISPs just got drafted.

That said, I've been reading more and more judicial decisions in favor of increased online liberties, largely as they relate to expression. At some point, this push from the legislature for order, and this push from the judicial for liberty, are going to intersect.

Telstra gave in, by the way, and turned on their filter. Truth be told, for all the trouble I give them for it, other than philosophical and slippery slope objections, I don't think this is actually that big a deal.

[3278]

I've /really/ got to stop doing this. It's a surprising amount of work, with no discernible purpose. But I've got a few more threads I've been following, so I'll try to get those out and then resist the temptation to keep going.

So: Anonymous/AntiSec has had a rough week or two. 32 raids were carried out by the Italian police in the wee hours of July 5, resulting in the arrests of 15 people, including a sort-of-leader named Frey. [Anonymous doesn't have "leaders," but no group of people is without a ringleader of some sort.] And, of course, they're pissed, and vowing revenge, but they don't seem to get it: they're script-kiddies with a global manifesto, hangers-on to the next cool thing, and not the hacker elite. [No offense, y'all. You know it's so.] Many don't even take the most rudimentary efforts to hide their trail, and thus will continue to be arrested in droves. All the more fools they.

Several notable figures have signed a letter cleverly pointing out that the PROTECT IP Act is unconstitutional, or at least that precedent exists to render it so. The trick is this: courts have decided in the past that the US government isn't allowed to restrict your speech without allowing you to tell your side of the story; PROTECT IP would shut down sites without ever even /notifying/ the effected parties. There's a lot more to the letter, as well, but it's all stuff I've mentioned in the past, and if you really care, you can always read their letter, yeah?

Members of law enforcement plan to propose a law that would require ISPs to retain broad swathes of user data for 18 months. My objections to this have been stated before, as well, but basically it boils down to the fact that security is awful, pretty much everywhere, and keeping that much information begs for hacking by professionals who can make actual money off such data. It's an unacceptable risk for a return that can be gained more easily in other ways. But /of course/ it's being touted as being intended for child pornography, so if you're against it, you must like babies being raped. This is the same trick used [according to CE, many times] by the Aussies, thankfully with limited success.

The six-strikes plan has been approved by the major ISPs, but it's weak tea. Check the article for the penalty schedule, then check out Peerblock, and then stop giving a shit. Stupid plan, stupid waste of time and effort.

Google has done something pretty unprecedented by yanking a whole subdomain from their search results. They checked to find domains that fed the most malware, found this free host in Korea, and stopped displaying any results from their domain. This doesn't pull those sites off the web, mind you, but without Google, no one's going to go there. This sounds awesome, until you reflect that the majority of those sites aren't doing anything wrong at all, and now their voices have been squashed in the name of other people's safety. Kind of lame, if you ask me.

Okay, that's enough for now. I'll finish up later.

[3278]

This seems like as good a place to stop as any: an interview with the new Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante. It's a fascinating view into the next chapter of copyright in this country. She's worked as a artist advocate, and written amicus briefs on behalf of artist organizations, and so on: she's definitely on the side of stronger copyright, but it should be noted that she's clear on the role of fair use, as well. But her overwhelming - overwhelming - emphasis is on enforcement. Let's listen selectively to her:

"I would like to see people respect copyright...enforcement issues...I always start with the enforcement issues online because if there isn't effective enforcement possibility, then there is no meaningful exclusive right and then copyright doesn't work...Unfortunately, I start with enforcement..." She not fucking around. In her view, you really can't really have an effective policy if that policy simply isn't going to be enforced.

Which brings us right 'round to where I started: the days of online anarchy are numbered. We will civilize the internet, a little bit at a time. Idealists and anarchists will continue to resist, criminals will continue to do as they please for profit, but the Wild West is being fenced, and all that can be done is to slow the inexorable advance of order over chaos, if that's what we choose to do. Personally, I'll be enjoying the anarchy while it lasts, despite the persistent immorality and illegality of my actions, until that "enforcement" she's talking about gets here, because it's only the fear of prosecution that keeps some of us honest.

[Nicephorus]

Anonymous and Lulz want to start a paypal boycott. Why? Because Paypal decided to bow to government requests to not process payments to that modern day Che Guevara, Julian Assange.

I'm more curious about why a boycott instead of a ddos or hacking into the system.

I can think of 2 possible reasons.

1) fear of legal authorities after recent arrests so trying to appear above board.

2) tech failure. Their normal methods aren't having much effect so they're resorting to old fashioned methods. Or, arrests and seizures have impaired their abilities.

It could be that this is just an add on to their normal methods but it strikes me as odd and possibly an action of weakness.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14308407

[3278]

Hee hee hee. This is because of that most awful of reasons: finally thinking things through. You know where the FBI got the list of Anonymous supporters they're using to find the ringleaders? By taking the top 100 DDOSers from the Paypal attack last year. Now, most of those people are just pawns or supporters, but many are ringleaders, and those who aren't are founts of intelligence.

Anyway, that's why they're going lo-tech: because they finally realized they're actually not anonymous.

[Jeff Hauze]

Low-tech? Sure. Effective? Not likely. Boycotts seem pretty spectacularly doomed to failure.

[3278]

Yeah, they're very seldom effective on their own, although large-scale enough ones bring media attention, which itself can be useful. But usually, there's a better way than boycotts to do that, too.

And companies can be induced to change their policies - see McDonald's menus and containers from today versus 30 years ago - but who the fuck things Paypal is really going to change their policies on accepting donations for possibly illegal activities, or their policies on surrendering attack logs? No way.

[Nicephorus]

You know where the FBI got the list of Anonymous supporters they're using to find the ringleaders? By taking the top 100 DDOSers from the Paypal attack last year. Now, most of those people are just pawns or supporters, but many are ringleaders, and those who aren't are founts of intelligence.
[/i]

I was amazed that the the ddos tool that they provided their members made no attempt to mask the user's IP. I mean, really, what kind of supposed uber hackers are they?

[3278]

That's the funniest thing: they're totally not. They're mostly very young guys - in their teens and early 20s - with neither hacking skills nor hacking experience, and it's getting their asses kicked. Even their own tools - like the Low Orbit Ion Cannon you mentioned - aren't theirs! They're script kiddies, downloading security auditing tools and just pushing buttons.

Lulz is/was worse: they were just randomly trolling for known vulnerabilities and then coming up with the politics to fit the targets. Script kiddies.

[3278]

Oh, my. Here we go, now. It's a real burden being right all the time.

[3278]

I'm not sure how bad this is. When you read articles about it, you see quotes like, "commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses," but reading the bill itself, it seems like ISPs will be forced to log and retail all IP addresses for 18 months.

However bad it may actually be, it's pretty bad. There's a provision for Congress "expecting" ISPs to keep this log secure, but nothing beyond that, and certainly no penalties for failure to do so. Obviously many people are concerned about the possibilities these logs would impose on things like civil cases [How often was my wife on Facebook?] and crimes not at all related to the child pornography this bill is intended to address.

Worse, the law doesn't prevent criminals from using public connections. It also doesn't pertain to wireless connections. This close to the explosion of 4G wireless internet, and with such widespread deployment of 3G service - which is plenty fast enough - all this law will do is build an insecure database of legal users that can be abused by government and citizen alike, with no accordant benefit in terms of preventing criminal activity. This entire notion needs stripped from this bill.

[Jeff Hauze]

Sort of related to the thread, I guess.

Copyright troll handed ass again

I figured it was worth sharing, at least for the laughs.

[3278]

The draconian law recently enacted in New Zealand is interesting on its own, but it raises an indirect question, as well: as other first world nations, and the UN, increasingly rule that internet access is a human right, what will happen to the NZ disconnection provisions?

[3278]

But, no, CE's definitely right: we're on a path to information freedom. This isn't the end of the wild west, it's the beginning.

[Heavy_D]

Well here in Europe it seems the ACTA treaty is slowly raising more eyebrows before it is signed. Today the Czech Republic decided to stop de ratification process to better study the exact impact of the treaty on daily life

Czech Government suspends ACTA ratificationl

[3278]

Oh, my. And Japan leads the way, with criminal penalties for downloading infringing content. Poop.

My favorite part, though, is how people against the measure chose to protest: by spending an hour cleaning litter in a public park. Uh, come again?

[Salvation122]

Japanese people are weird.

[3278]

I don't know about a "game changer," but this is a step in a particular direction. A large federal grant [well, large by relative standards to, say, my personal finances] has been given out to several local police departments to step up their IP enforcement programs. So, a little closer to Japan, then. Anyone want to pick up some garbage?

[3278]

Members of Bulldrek in Britain may want to run far, far away: a 20-year-old man made some tasteless jokes on Facebook about a missing child and has been arrested as a result. He's been sentenced to 12 weeks in prison. The joke I've read is a great deal less offensive than things CE or myself might say in passing. To our mothers. The fuck.

[Salvation122]

$2.4 million dollars to the DoJ is roughly equivalent to the change in your couch, and the odds of the police actually using it to prosecute IP infringement that doesn't include selling bootlegs out of a van asymptotically approach zero, since local police departments have no jurisdiction over The Harbor of Buccaneers.

[3278]

Most of the money is going to prevent the sale of counterfeit goods: fake purses, that sort of thing. But St Louis specifically is targeting peer-to-peer downloads, and they're not alone. While most of the DoJ's efforts are on sites - Megaupload, most famously - St Louis is setting up their own server to catch pirates themselves. Which would be absolutely trivial if they decided to get serious about it, which I predict will get much more widespread in the next 10 years.