PIRACY

“The Case of Internet Piracy”

COM 327April 1, 2014

QUIZ!!

1. Writing on the early “pirates” of the film industry, Lessig notes that they moved to _____________ to escape the reach of Thomas Edison’s legal monopoly on film production. a) Hong Kongb) Torontoc) Californiad) online

2. What service does Lessig compare to early cable TV companies? “Cable companies were thus _______izing broadcasters’ content, but more egregiously than anything _______ ever did— ____ never charged for the content it enabled others to give away.” a) Napsterb) Facebookc) Googled) Netflix

3. “We could, for example, remind ourselves that for the first one hundred years of the American Republic, America did not honor _________”

a) the bro codeb) the founding fathers c) foreign copyrightsd) international ocean law

4. What “new” (at the time of his writing) technology does Lessig focus on in the latter half of Chapter 5? a) podcastingb) peer-to-peer file sharingc) music streamingd) Tinder

BONUSLessig, assessing the potential negative effects of file-sharing on the music industry, writes: “If every download were a lost sale—if every use of Kazaa “rob[bed] the author of [his] profit”—then the industry would have suffered a _____ percent drop in sales last year, not a 7 percent drop”

a) 8b) 100c) 1 milliond) 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

PLAN

1. Group presentation2. Anti-piracy tools: DRM & net “non-neutrality”3. A look at Aaron Swartz and his piracy

“Anti-piracy” tools #1

Digital Rights Management (DRM):• “digital locks” to restrict “unauthorized” use of hardware & software• enforced by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) of 1998

Examples?

• Bought an ebook from Amazon but can't read it on your ebook reader of choice? That's DRM.

• Bought a DVD or Blu-Ray but can't copy the video onto your portable media player? That's DRM.

• Bought a video-game but can't play it today because the manufacturer's "authentication servers" are off-line? That's DRM.

• Bought a smart-phone but can't use the applications or the service provider you want on it? That's DRM.

(https://www.eff.org/issues/drm)

Proponents of digital locks argue that they are necessary to prevent intellectual property from being stolen, just as physical locks are needed to prevent personal property from being stolen.

"It's like — you have a store, you want to be able to lock your door at night," says Danielle Parr, executive director of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada” (CBC.ca, The pros, cons, and future of DRM, August 7, 2009)

What’s the problem with this analogy?

Significantly, in 2000, a US appeals court found (in Universal City Studios, Inc v Reimerdes) that breaking DRM was illegal, even if you were trying to do something that would otherwise be legal. In other words, if your ebook has a restriction that stops you reading it on Wednesdays, you can't break that restriction, even if it would be otherwise legal to read the book on Wednesdays.http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2014/feb/05/digital-rights-management

Under the DMCA, it is illegal to circumvent DRM –

regardless of how restrictive DRM is

“Anti-piracy” tools #2

Net “non-neutrality”

“Network neutrality is best defined as a network design principle. The idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally. This allows the network to carry every form of information and support every kind of application.” (Tim Wu, Columbia law prof, 2008)

In practice: Internet Service Providers can’t restrict access to stuff they don’t want you to see / use / download

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/19/AR2007101900842.html

2007 2014

http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/14/technology/fcc-net-neutrality/

Implications- Service providers can set up ‘tiered’ access to particular content (“$4.99 extra for

Premium YouTube”; “$19.99 extra for blazing fast online gaming!” “$2.99 extra for unbroken Netflix!”)

- Service providers can choke access to content that their competitors sponsor

- Service providers can choke access to content that they don’t like (e.g. IP addresses that are critical of them, that offer alternative services, etc)

- Comcast / Time Warner merger – we will have less choice

Marx: - Capitalism loves monopolies, not competition- Capitalism loves to commodify things that

were originally common good

• Possibilities?

• Support the argument that the Internet (like the phone) is a public utility

• Remember that the Internet began as, and still is, a publicly-funded infrastructure

Aaron Swartz: “Internet Pirate”1986-2012

As a teenager, helped develop the technology behind:• Reddit• RSS• Creative Commons (with

Lawrence Lessig)

Arrested January 6, 2011, for downloading 4.8 million JSTOR articles from MIT servers

JSTOR (Journal Storage):• One of the leading subscription-based

storage houses for scientific publications

• Compiles (publicly-funded) research and makes it available to university libraries for an annual subscription fee

• Initially charged with breaking & entering, grand larceny & unauthorized access to a computer network

• State charges dropped in March 2012 • Federal charges for “computer fraud” and accessing a protected

computer introduced in September 2012• Max. 50 years in prison & $1 million in fines• JSTOR asked federal prosecutors to drop the case (they didn’t)• Swartz hung himself on January 11, 2013

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)

Highlights of the CFAA (among other things):• Formed in 1984 to combat “malicious” hacking (harm to economic

and/or political interests)• Bans “unauthorized access” to “protected” computers• Includes penalties for violations of Terms of Service

“when Swartz tried to download thousands of academic articles, he did so as an authorized guest user of the M.I.T. network. He didn’t actually “hack” or “break” into the network; he violated the terms of service for guests by downloading too much stuff”

Tim Wu, New Yorkerhttp://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/03/fixing-the-worst-law-in-technology-aaron-swartz-and-the-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAcEzhQ7oqA

WarGames (released in 1983):

No fewer than six different anti-hacking bills were introduced that year, and Congress convened its first hearings as soon as politicians returned from their summer recess. Rep. Dan Glickman, a Kansas Democrat, opened the proceedings by saying: "We're gonna show about four minutes from the movie 'WarGames,' which I think outlines the problem fairly clearly." A House committee report solemnly intoned: "'WarGames' showed a realistic representation of the automatic dialing and access capabilities of the personal computer.”http://www.cnet.com/news/from-wargames-to-aaron-swartz-how-u-s-anti-hacking-law-went-astray/

Swartz’s “Open Access Manifesto” (2008)

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends....

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

http://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt