By Cory Doctorow at 1:47 pm Friday, May 25
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For many years, Google has published a "Transparency Report" with the number of non-copyright-related takedown notices it receives from governments, police, courts, individuals and corporations. Now, the company have added copyright takedowns to the mix. Sadly (and weirdly), this part of the report isn't searchable, as Alan at Copyfight notes: "I cannot search to see if someone has requested that, say, material owned by me be removed from any domain. This is important because in the past organizations that didn't actually own copyrights sent takedown notices. Only a copyright holder should be entitled to do that. Like any other 'big data' source the uses to which these data could be put are varied, but lack of search will hamper most efforts."
Today we’re expanding the Transparency Report with a new section on copyright. Specifically, we’re disclosing the number of requests we get from copyright owners (and the organizations that represent them) to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content. We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason. So we’re providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which websites. As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons of different proposals to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion.
For this launch we’re disclosing data dating from July 2011, and moving forward we plan on updating the numbers each day. As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly. These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results. These requests targeted some 24,000 different websites.
As TechDirt points out, many of the takedown notices that Microsoft sent to Google were for sites that were not removed from Bing, Microsoft's competing search engine.
Copyright Removal Requests – Google Transparency Report
Transparency for copyright removals in search (Google Blog)
(via Copyfight)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:42 am Friday, May 18
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Leah sez,
Bespoke troublemakers, the Space Hijackers, have announced that they are the Official Protesters of the London 2012 Olympic Games. To this end, they've launched a site where you can register for tickets for the official protests. They have also outlined the top ten reasons why the Olympics are worth protesting against.
A spokesperson said "accept no imitation, we are the Official Protesters. We shall be taking steps to ensure no unauthorised protest occurs around the London 2012 Olympic Games".
The Space Hijackers stress that LOCOG, the IoC and the ODA should expect protest wherever Olympic legislation and regulation is applicable and enforced. An international network of Olympic protesters have partnered under the Protest London 2012 umbrella and are planning as invasive a campaign as the Olympic Games themselves. However, only those groups authorised by the Official Protesters of the London 2012 Olympic Games will be allowed to express dissent.
Disclaimer: "Official Protesters", "Official Protester", "Official Protest", "Protest", "The Space Hijackers", "Space Hijackers", "Spacehijackers", "Space", "Hijacker" and "Hijackers" are protected under trademark and copyright. Unauthorised use without express written consent from the Official Protesters of the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Some background: as part of its campaign to win the games, the UK promised the International Olympic Committee that it would extend extraordinary privileges to it and its corporate partners. It's a criminal offense to use "London" and "2012" or "2012" and "Games" in a commercial context without authorisation. Yes, criminal: you can go to gaol for putting up a pub signboard that says "Watch the Olympic Games here today!" Parliament's Olympic lickspittles also delivered a law that gives the cops the power to enter your private home and remove anti-Olympics posters. And there are 10,000 private security guards on-site who insist that you're not allowed to stand on public land and take pictures, despite assurances from the government and police that they've been trained and briefed.
Here's an earlier Space Hijackers action: "Life Neutral" certification for arms dealers.
Official Protests for the London 2012 Olympics
(Thanks, Leah!)
By Cory Doctorow at 1:09 am Friday, May 11
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A Google-commissioned legal paper on the constitutionality of regulating search results concludes that the such a regulation would violate the First Amendment. "First Amendment Protection for Search Engine Search Results" was written by eminent legal scholar Eugene Volokh and attorney Donald Falk, who argued that search-results are like the table of contents in a magazine, reflected protected expression in the form of editorial judgment.
In the case of a magazine, the articles are selected by a human editor. In the case of Google, the search results are selected by an algorithm, but the algorithm is created and managed by engineers who apply editorial judgment to the results. I absolutely agree with this conclusion.
However, I'm surprised to see Google in accord with me on this one. In all my discussions with googlers on this subject to date, I've always been told that search-results represent a kind of abstract "relevance," not anything as sticky and human as "judgment." It was as though Google's sorting algorithm provided a wormhole from the walls of Plato's cave straight into your browser.
Up until now, all the arguments against regulating search results I've heard have turned on this notion of search results being untouched by human hands. The reason that an unflattering "sucks" site appears at the top the search for a company's name is that the offending site is "relevant" according to some infallible mathematics of significance. To order Google to rearrange its search results is like ordering a parachute company to change the constant it uses in calculating gravity.
I've always hated this argument. Google regularly "tweaks" its ranking algorithm to provide "better, more relevant" results. These tweaks' success are measured by how "right" they appear, both to Google and to its users. They are, in other words, judgments.
I think that the editorial right to exercise judgment is much more widely understood than the sacred infallibility of robotic sorting. I certainly support it more. But I wonder if Google appreciates that it will now have to confront people who are angry about their search rankings by saying, "I'm sorry, we just don't like you very much" instead of "I'm sorry, our equations put you where you belong." And oy, the libel headaches they're going to face.
Here's Timothy B Lee reporting at Ars Technica:
The authors argue that this selection process is no different, constitutionally speaking, from a newspaper editor selecting wire stories to run, a guidebook deciding which attractions to feature, or a parade organizer choosing which floats to include. The courts have ruled that all of these editorial processes are fully protected by the First Amendment.
Moreover, the paper argues, the courts have held that First Amendment rights generally trump antitrust law—something of increasing concern to a dominant company like Google. "Antitrust law cannot be used to require a speaker to include certain material in its speech product," Volokh and Falk write. They point to a 1945 case in which the courts found the Associated Press had violated antitrust laws, but stressed that its ruling did not "compel AP or its members to permit publication of anything which their 'reason' tells them should not be published." Newspaper editors have the right to decide which stories should be included in their newspapers and which ones make the front page. This suggests that Google has similarly wide discretion to decide which links and other content will appear, and in which order, in response to any given search query.
Here's a quote from the paper itself:
In this respect, each search engine’s editorial judgment is much like many other familiar editorial judgments:
* newspapers’ daily judgments about which wire service stories to run, and whether they are to go “above the fold”;
* newspapers’ periodic judgments about which op-ed columnists, lifestyle columnists, business columnists, or consumer product columnists are worth carrying regularly, and where their columns are to be placed;
* guidebooks’ judgments about which local attractions, museums, stores, and restaurants to mention, and how prominently to mention them;
* the judgment of sites such as DrudgeReport.com about which stories to link to, and in what order to list them.
All these speakers must decide: Out of the thousands of possible items that could be included, which to include, and how to arrange those that are included? Such editorial judgments may differ in certain ways: For example, a newspaper also includes the materials that its editors have selected and arranged, while the speech of DrudgeReport.com or a search engine consists almost entirely of the selected and arranged links to others’ material. But the judgments are all, at their core, editorial judgments about what users are likely to find interesting and valuable. And all these exercises of editorial judgment are fully protected by the First Amendment.
That is so even when a newspaper simply makes the judgment to cover some particular subject matter: For instance, when many newspapers published TV listings, they were free to choose to do so without regard to whether this choice undermined the market for TV Guide. Likewise, search engines are free to include and highlight their own listings of (for example) local review pages even though Yelp might prefer that the search engines instead rank Yelp’s information higher. And this First Amendment protection is even more clearly present when a speaker, such as Google, makes not just the one include-or-not editorial judgment, but rather many judgments about how to design the algorithms that produce and rank search results that — in Google’s opinion — are likely to be most useful to users.
Scholar: regulating Google results would violate First Amendment
By Cory Doctorow at 7:22 am Friday, May 4
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Riseup, a "progressive Internet organization" that operates an anonymous remailer had its servers seized by the FBI without notice two weeks ago. They installed a little CCTV camera after the seizure. On Wednesday, that camera recorded footage of the FBI putting the servers back.
On April 18, 2012, a Riseup server located in MF/PL's colocation cabinet and managed by ECN, a progressive provider in Italy, was seized by the FBI. MF/PL found out about the seizure when Riseup reported that there was no response from the server. Technologists visited the server location and found that the machine had been removed.
The FBI is investigating bomb threats being made to facilities and people at the University of Pittsburgh and believed that one of the servers used to email these threats was an anonymous email server operated by ECN. "These servers have no logs or traces of who used them," MF/PL Director Jamie McClelland said. "Nothing useful could be gotten from this seizure but there is a concrete outcome: the seizure disrupted May First's work and disrupted the communications of hundreds of people who lawfully use that server for email and website services everyday."
Anonymous email servers keep no records of their users and are frequently used by activists, organizers and information sources world-wide.
FBI returns Riseup server to May First/People Link cabinet
(Thanks, Jacob!)
Runa from The Onion Router -- a privacy and anti-censorship tool used around the world -- writes, "We are looking for another dedicated core developer to join our team. Your job would be to work on all aspects of the main Tor network daemon and other open-source software. This would be a contractor position for 2012 (starting as soon as you're ready and with plenty of work to keep you busy), with the possibility of 2013 and beyond.
Please see the website for details and information on how to apply."
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 2:00 pm Friday, Apr 20
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Jeroen Vader, the owner of PasteBin (a service that provides a simple way to share blobs of text, originally popular for sharing code-fragments and error messages, now also very popular as an anonymous repository for leaked documents and manifestos, especially those affiliated with Anonymous) has revealed that he sometimes shares his server logs with law enforcement agencies, and sometimes censors the material posted by Pastebin's users. People acting under the Anonymous banner and the People's Liberation Front have responded by creating a PasteBin clone called AnonPaste, running a free/open zero-knowledge PasteBin implementation called ZeroBin. AnonPaste's administrators claim that they will not censor or cooperate with law-enforcement, though as far as I can tell, there is no facility in ZeroBin for auditing the admins' adherence to these promises (that is, they could be censor-happy snitches and it wouldn't be easy to learn this fact or prove it to third parties). ZeroBin does have a facility for encrypting the data between the browser and ZeroBin, which means that to the extent that ZeroBin is free from defects, and the hosts of a ZeroBin instance have not added malicious (or incompetent) modifications, ZeroBin's administrators can't know what content is being hosted there.
AnonPaste's admins expressed their intentions in a press-release posted to their own service (of course!):
And so the PLF and Anonymous have teamed up to offer a paste service truly free of all such nonsense. Here is a brief list of some of the features of AnonPaste: 1) No connection logs, period. 2) All pastes are encrypted BY THE BROWSER using 256 bit AES encryption. This means there is no usable paste data stored on the server for the authorities or anyone else to seize. 3) No moderation or censorship. Because the data on our servers is unreadable by us (or anyone), the responsibility for the legality or appropriateness of any paste is the sole responsibility of the person posting. So there will be no need for us to police this service, and in fact we don't even have the ability of deleting any particular paste. 4) No advertisements. This service will be totally user supported through donations. Links for this are available on the web site. Paste services have become very popular, and many people want to post controversial material. This is especially so for those involved in Information Activism. We feel that it is essential that everyone, and especially those in the movement - have a safe and secure paste service that they can trust with their valuable and often politically sensitive material. As always, we believe in the radical notion that information should be free. SIGNED -- Anonymous and the Staff of the Peoples Liberation Front
Megan Geuss of Ars Technica has more detail:
Indeed, without the possibility of deleting information, authorities might argue the site poses a threat to personal privacy and institutional operations. Vader told Ars, "Here at Pastebin.com we think freedom of speech is very important, but we do think there should be some form of content moderation, because people do abuse paste websites, and if there is really no delete option, this could cause major harm." He added that yesterday his site released a "My Alerts" feature, which allows people to track names or keywords on Pastebin, so if illegal information shows up they can submit a takedown request to Pastebin in a timely manner.
And InfoWeek notes that ZeroBin has not been stress-tested against the kinds of DDOS and other attacks that might threaten AnonPaste's operation and philosophy of anonymity. As of this afternoon, access to AnonPaste has been on-and-off, suggesting there are still many hurdles for the endeavor to function at all.
Anonymous builds its own Pastebin-like site
By Cory Doctorow at 3:50 pm Wednesday, Apr 18
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A coalition of US civil liberties organizations have declared this to be Stop Cyber Spying Week, with the goal of scuttling CISPA, the Internet spying bill that promotes web-censorship, bulk surveillance, and warrantless wiretapping by government and Internet companies, while turning over spying governance to the unaccountable, secretive NSA.
CISPA's supporters, notably CISPA sponsor Rep Mike Rogers (R-MI), have pooh-poohed the Internet's concerns, and say that the bill is a lock, and nothing we say can change Congress's mind (apparently, they've forgotten the lesson of SOPA). Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation replies with specific, Internet-breaking, out-of-control surveillance scenarios CISPA would create:
One of the scariest parts of CISPA is that the bill goes above and beyond information sharing. Its definitions allow for countermeasures to be taken by private entities, and we think these provisions are ripe for abuse. Indeed, the bill defines "cybersecurity purpose" as any threat related to safeguarding or protecting a network. As long as companies act in "good faith" for a cybersecurity purpose, they have leeway to protect against “efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy [a] system or network.” This opens the door for ISPs and other companies to perform aggressive countermeasures like dropping or altering packets, so long as this is used as part of scheme to identify cybersecurity threats. These countermeasures could put free speech in peril, and jeopardize the ordinary functioning of the Internet. This could also mean blocking websites, or disrupting privacy-enhancing technologies such as Tor. These countermeasures could even serve as a back door to enact policies unrelated to cybersecurity, such as disrupting p2p traffic.
Yes, CISPA Could Allow Companies to Filter or Block Internet Traffic
By Cory Doctorow at 2:19 pm Wednesday, Apr 18
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US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeated her view that the world's governments should respect Internet freedom, telling the Brasilia Open Government Summit that the world is dividing into "open" and "closed" societies characterized by their attitude towards net freedom. It's a laudable sentiment, but as they say, "We know you love freedom, we just wish you'd share." After all, America is one of the world's leading exporters of Internet censorship and surveillance laws (in the form of its intervention into copyright laws, as well as instigating unaccountable, secret copyright treaty negotiations like ACTA and TPP. They're also the world's leading exporter of Internet surveillance and censorship technology, thanks first to the US national requirement that telcoms companies buy equipment that allows for direct police surveillance, and the aggressive sale of this surveillance and control technology to the world's dictatorship by US firms.
Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the Open Government Partnership in Brasilia, she said countries could only become more secure and peaceful if they were open. "In the 21st century, the US is convinced that one of the most significant divisions between nations will be not between east or west, nor over religion, so much as between open and closed societies," she said.
"We believe those governments that hide from public view and dismiss ideas of openness and the aspirations of their people for greater freedom will find it increasingly difficult to create a secure society."
It's particularly galling that Secretary Clinton made these remarks even as the US Congress is poised to pass CISPA, which establishes a national US regime of censorship and warrantless surveillance.
Open or closed society is key dividing line of 21st century, says Hillary Clinton
(Image: Clinton Rally 90, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from kakissel's photostream)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:42 am Wednesday, Apr 18
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Iran's governing elite have been making noises for years now about the construction of a "Halal Internet," a kind of national intranet with its own email service, microblogging, search tools, etc. Now a leaked Persian-language "Request for Information" from the Research Institute for ICT in Tehran, which consults on technology for Iran's Ministry of ICT suggests that the plan has evolved into a more ambitious version of the existing national censorship regime. In Ars Technica, Cyrus Farivar analyzes the proposal:
Collin Anderson, the researcher who found the document, said this RFI shows an unexpected shortcoming of the Iranian government to capitalize on its own domestic ability and recent deals with Chinese telecom companies such as Huawei and ZTE.
Huawai said late last year it was pulling out of Iran. ZTE, meanwhile, has previously sold millions of dollars of telecom and surveillance equipment to the Islamic Republic.
"I believe this clearly demonstrates that the Iranian government does not intend on cutting off access to the external Internet time soon," Anderson told Ars on Tuesday, explaining that the acquisition of a censorship system would not be necessary if Iran was trying to create a highly restricted whitelist or completely cut itself off from the Internet.
"This might suggest that the government has not been able to acquire the services of foreign companies for planning and optimizing an infrastructure," he added.
"This is surprising for those, including me, who believe that much of the censorship software and hardware was being developed internally. The RFI seems to imply the desire to move beyond blacklisting sites and keywords, to a more intelligent system of detecting and blocking ‘immoral’ content, such as pornographic or culturally offensive material."
I'm in the middle of reading Rebecca McKinnon's Consent of the Networked, which is probably the best single book on the subject I've read to date (review coming soon). McKinnon's analysis of Iran and other Middle-Eastern dictatorships is that they're stuck playing catch-up relative to China, and will have a hard time replicating China's strategy of combining censorship with floods of pro-government astroturfers and popular national alternatives to services like Facebook and Twitter, because Iranians have already widely adopted the "western" technologies and would aggressively circumvent national blocks for non-political reasons, providing cover for political dissidents.
Security researcher unearths plans for Iran's halal Internet
(Image: Internet censorship/blocking, Iran, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 39967291@N04's photostream)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:50 am Saturday, Apr 14
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As London ramps up for the 2012 Olympics, a dystopian regime of policing and censorship on behalf of the games' sponsors is coming online. A special squad of "brand police" will have the power to force pubs to take down signs advertising "watch the games on our TV," to sticker over the brand-names of products at games venues where those products were made by companies other than the games' sponsors, to send takedown notices to YouTube and Facebook if attendees at the games have the audacity to post their personal images for their friends to see, and more. What's more, these rules are not merely civil laws, but criminal ones, so violating the sanctity of an Olympic sponsor could end up with prison time for Londoners.
Esther Addley documents the extent of London's corporatism for The Guardian:
"It is certainly very tough legislation," says Paul Jordan, a partner and marketing specialist at law firm Bristows, which is advising both official sponsors and non-sponsoring businesses on the new laws. "Every major brand in the world would give their eye teeth to have [a piece of legislation] like this. One can imagine something like a Google or a Microsoft would be delighted to have some very special recognition of their brand in the way that clearly the IOC has."
As well as introducing an additional layer of protection around the word "Olympics", the five-rings symbol and the Games' mottoes, the major change of the legislation is to outlaw unauthorised "association". This bars non-sponsors from employing images or wording that might suggest too close a link with the Games. Expressions likely to be considered a breach of the rules would include any two of the following list: "Games, Two Thousand and Twelve, 2012, Twenty-Twelve".
Using one of those words with London, medals, sponsors, summer, gold, silver or bronze is another likely breach. The two-word rule is not fixed, however: an event called the "Great Exhibition 2012" was threatened with legal action last year under the Act over its use of "2012" (Locog later withdrew its objection).
The London Olympic bid insisted that these restrictions were necessary to get the sponsors, and of course, they were bidding against other cities who were also making promises to police their residents' free speech and personal expression. Each games' sponsor doubles down on the previous games' restrictions and surveillance, which suggests that by 2020, the winning bid will include a promise to imprison all non-attendees for the duration of the games, and permanently tattoo sponsors' logos on the faces and chests of all ticket-buyers.
Olympics 2012: branding 'police' to protect sponsors' exclusive rights
By Cory Doctorow at 2:59 pm Tuesday, Apr 10
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CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (H.R. 3523), is a successor, of sorts, to the loathesome SOPA legislative proposal, which was shot down in flames earlier this year. EFF's chilling analysis of the bill shows how it could be used to give copyright enforcers carte blanche to spy on Internet users and censoring the Internet (it would also give these powers to companies and governments who'd been embarrassed by sites like Wikileaks).
Under the proposed legislation, a company that protects itself or other companies against “cybersecurity threats” can “use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property” of the company under threat. But because “us[ing] cybersecurity systems” is incredibly vague, it could be interpreted to mean monitoring email, filtering content, or even blocking access to sites. A company acting on a “cybersecurity threat” would be able to bypass all existing laws, including laws prohibiting telcos from routinely monitoring communications, so long as it acted in “good faith.”
The broad language around what constitutes a cybersecurity threat leaves the door wide open for abuse. For example, the bill defines “cyber threat intelligence” and “cybersecurity purpose” to include “theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.”
Yes, intellectual property. It’s a little piece of SOPA wrapped up in a bill that’s supposedly designed to facilitate detection of and defense against cybersecurity threats. The language is so vague that an ISP could use it to monitor communications of subscribers for potential infringement of intellectual property. An ISP could even interpret this bill as allowing them to block accounts believed to be infringing, block access to websites like The Pirate Bay believed to carry infringing content, or take other measures provided they claimed it was motivated by cybersecurity concerns.
There's a DemandProgress petition against CISPA (DemandProgress was one of the leaders of the SOPA fight).
By Cory Doctorow at 2:47 pm Friday, Mar 9
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Looking for Lenny is a new documentary about Lenny Bruce and the way that free speech issues still resonate today. It's packed with comedy/spoken word legends talking about Bruce, from Robin Williams to Phyllis Diller, Mort Sahl, and Henry Rollins.
Looking for Lenny
(Thanks, Dustin!)
Michael Geist sez, "Open Media, which launched the most successful Canadian online petition in history on usage based billing, is now encouraging people to speak out on copyright reform. The group makes it easy to speak out against SOPA-style reforms, harms to fair dealing, and unduly restrictive digital lock rules.
This is the last chance for Canadians to be heard with the final committee changes coming on Monday."
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 1:44 pm Thursday, Mar 8
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Last week, I wrote about the controversy entailed by the R-rating the MPAA has given to the documentary Bully, effectively putting it outside the reach of most of the young people it addresses. Now the film censor board in British Columbia has given the film an all-ages PG rating, calling the MPAA's judgment into question.
“Last night, I learned of the B.C. board’s decision to grant Bully a PG-rating. I am thrilled that kids of all ages can now join their parents, teachers, social work advocates and leaders to bring about change for this deeply important cause,” Hirsch said Wednesday in a statement.
'Bully' Doc Gets PG-Rating in Canada, Despite MPAA's R-Rating Stateside
(Thanks, Antinous!)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:12 am Thursday, Mar 8
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The ACLU has brought suit against the Minnewaska (Minnesota) Area Schools and Pope County over invasions of students' privacy relating to a pair of incidents. In the first incident, a 12-year-old student was disciplined for complaining on Facebook that she "hated" a hall monitor who was "mean" (the school characterized this as "bullying"). In the second instance, a sheriff's deputy and school administrators required the student to turn over her Facebook password after her boyfriend's mother complained that the student and her boyfriend had been talking about sex on the social network.
In both instances, the student used her own, off-school computer to make the contentious remarks, after school hours.
The ACLU claimed a sheriff's deputy was present at the time, but there was no warrant. The group claimed this violated the girl's right to privacy and right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.
"She was intimidated, frightened, humiliated and sobbing while school administrators were scouring her private communications," attorney Wally Hilke said in a statement. "These adults traumatized this minor without any regard for her rights."
The girl's mother filed the lawsuit on her daughter's behalf.
Apart from unspecified damages, the suit seeks a court order "restrain[ing] school officials from attempts to regulate or discipline students based on speech made outside of school hours and off school property."
ACLU sues Minnewaska schools, Pope Co. Sheriff's Office over student Facebook incidents
(via /.)
