The US Congress spent yesterday packing up and heading home for mid-term re-election campaigns, having failed its most important job — passing the annual budget. But even this deadlocked Congress is capable of doing what the Australian Labor Party cannot — pass a mandatory ISP-based Internet filter — and do so before the end of the year.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi will recall the current congress for a special lame-duck session later this year before newly elected representatives are sworn in, to pass last-minute reforms in case the Democrats lose power, as widely predicted in the polls. Among those reforms include a low-profile copyright proposal with bipartisan, almost unanimous support that just so happens to include censoring whole websites included on a government-run blacklist.
The Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (COICA) will blacklist sites that are “dedicated to infringing activities” regardless of where the site is hosted, with exceptions for commercially-oriented sites but not political speech. Originally planned as two blacklists, one controlled by the courts and one by the US Attorney General, the latter was dropped from the bill yesterday after ISPs raised early complaints.
Aaron Swartz from Progressive Change and Australian Peter Eckersley from Electronic Frontier Foundation began a petition campaign this week to fight the bill at demandprogress.org, garnering 100,000 signatures in two days.
“This bill is so broad it could even block completely legal sites like YouTube, just because enough other people use it for copyright infringement,” Swartz told Crikey. “But even if it was narrower than that, do we really want to make the internet in America less useful than the internet in, say, Canada? Sites that are illegal should be shut down, not censored.”
Eckersley was also concerned there was a power imbalance between the copyright owner bodies like the RIAA/MPAA and online storage sites like Rapidshare or Dropbox, “where you might store all your photos to send to grandma, and suddenly they’re gone” if the site gets slapped on the blacklist for a different user’s uploads.
A letter signed by 87 prominent internet engineers — including those who invented the technology that would enable the censorship — said the filter would undermine the credibility of the United States in its role as steward of key internet infrastructure: “In exchange for this, the bill will introduce censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’ ability to communicate.”
Congressional Democratic Party support for the bill could also cause embarrassment for the Obama administration. In January, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said countries that filter internet pages breach the UN’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights. That statement was thought to be in reference to Iran, Egypt and China, but also drew attention to Australia.
What separates the American proposal from the one pushed by Australian Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy is not just different intent — entertainment piracy versus “inappropriate material” — but political inevitability.
The bill was due to be raised today in the Senate Judiciary committee, where it has been co-sponsored by 14 of the 19 committee members, including a majority of both Democrats and Republicans, guaranteeing it will be recommended to the full Senate. Only strong opposition from the majority leader’s office could stall it now. That the bill’s author was the committee chairman, the liberal 70-year-old Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, suggests the party leadership has no significant qualms.
A spokeswoman for Senator Leahy said she couldn’t say whether the bill would reach a vote in November as the length of the lame-duck session was not yet confirmed, but it was their goal. No public hearing was necessary, she said, as witnesses had addressed the issue at hearings earlier in the year.
Swartz and Eckersley understand the power of the entertainment industry’s lobbyists in Washington, but saw sunlight as their most effective counter: “I think most Senators signed on to this bill thinking it was just another standard copyright bill,” Swartz said. “When the public outcry forces them to stop and take a look at the details, they’ll rethink their support.”
The timing of the bill introduction in the last few weeks of congress with public focus on the election, the pressure of a lame-duck session and the speed with which it was co-sponsored by a majority of committee suggests significantly planning and lobbying. The EFF was caught by surprise and has had to rush a public campaign in response.
The copyright content industry had been on the back foot after losing a major court case in Viacom versus YouTube in August. That case will be appealed to the Second Circuit and possibly the Supreme Court. If enacted this law would lower the burden for the content industry and allow courts to preemptively act against infringement.
“If this bill had been around five years ago, YouTube wouldn’t have existed,” Eckersley warned.
The slow public awareness of the bill contrasts markedly with the American cultural identity which fears government censorship so much it prohibited it as the first amendment to the constitution and engraved it on 22-metre-high marble on Pennsylvania Avenue symbolically connecting the White House to Capitol Hill.
A survey of the child p-rnography blacklists in Demark and Sweden has also provided sobering background on blacklist overreach: only 1.7% of the sites on the list actually contained the material the blacklist was intended to block.
Wave goodbye to the short couple of decades of freedom on the internet.
From here on, the Net will progressively be filtered into conforming blandness and bounded by corporate Legal Counsels’ demands. Eventually, it will end up with all the desirability and fun of a spreadsheet full of numbers.
This bill, in my view, is only about curbing of freedom of speech (notwitstanding that pesky first amendment i.e. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”; and the censoring of anyone who doesn’t buy into the government’s claptrap. The same applies here exactly because like all good dogs, we obey our masters and would follow the US blindly straight over the cliff.
Cynically I would suggest that the MSM is losing out to the internet and they are using their government buddies to put in the fix.
That the controlled media is having a ha ha hard time is of no concern to me. But is their responseto engineer a shut down of a large portion of the non MSM part of the internet via the onerous copyright and sedition laws attached to this piece of garbage?
Super cynically one might even suggest that no government likes dissidents and any and all means to remove them from the landscape in a bloodless strike is going to appeal.. The kiddie porn bit has always been a furphy in my view as demonstrated with the Sweden and Danish results noted in this article.
When the dozy US populous wakes up, if ever, they are gonna get cranky but the people pushing this crap aren’t banking on that happening any time soon.
I can however, see one positive thing in all this – anyone who censors both the mind controlled and mindless crap that passes for entertainment is no problem with me but as one who believes in individual freedoms, I wont be supporting it. One man’s meat is always another man’s dogfood..But you can bet that won’t be the stuff that disappears without trace.
Maybe the Greens could really justify their existence for once by making sure this never happens here.
I think it’s clear the Australian filter is dead in its current form. Whatever Senator Conroy’s enthusiasm, it doesn’t have the support of enough parties to pass the senate, before or after the change in July next year. Labor bosses would never consider a double dissolution election over a policy targeted solely at placating Christian groups.
However, if the US filter becomes law then that could spark a quite legitimate policy review on the Australian Liberal side. Piracy, not the ill-defined and poorly sold ‘inappropriate material’, could be the bogey-man that leads to a filter in Australia.
Fighting the internet censorship lobby is like fighting a multi-headed hydra. Knock off one excuse for censoring and another pops up. Strike down the threat in one jurisdiction and it’s back again in another…
Clearly powerful interests converge to seek restrictions of the free interent. The ‘Christian Lobby’ was the initial fall-guy, but that wore thin (apart from anything else, too many genbuine Christians spoke out about censorship). Now compulsory government censorship is being sold via the ‘copyright protection’ angle.
The plain truth is that throughout the ‘Anglosphere’ (and beyond), inordinately powerful criminal elements and vast, interlocking ‘intelligence’ interests both enjoy absurd amounts of unaccountable power. This is often used for utterly villanous purposes – if you doubt this, please Google ‘Building What’ and follow the links.
Covering up this criminal activity is a lot more difficult in the era of internet mass-use. Hence the repeated attempts to ‘fix’ the ‘problem’ (not ‘our’ problem, but theirs).
I think this also provides an explanation why advocacy groupings with dubious motives, which mobilize populist sentiment but lack genuine internal democracy, have effectively gone cold on the internet filter issue in Australia.
For instance, it would have been easy for Get Up to go for the jugular on this after the Coalition’s brave rejection of the mandatory internet censorship during the election campaign. Get Up has the profile, the intelligent talking heads with mass media access, the ability to make direct contact with senior politicians etc.
But it didn’t bother, claiming the measure is effectively dead. This is what Get Up tweeted me on the 27th September in response for pleas that it tries to kill off the filter NOW, given the currently promising configuration of the House of Reps:
“@SydWalker as Labor doesn’t have enough support to pass it through parliament, no big plans atm, but we’re monitoring for new developments!”
The push for mandatory internet censorship in Australia is far from dead, as Harley Dennett very useful article clearly shows.
A year or so ago, Get Up received substantial donations direct from the public to fight the internet censorship campaign. The most noticable thing that came out of that was a silly TV ad (remember ‘Sensordyne’?) with an anti-Iran take home message.
In recent weeks, Get Up spokespeople like Simon Sheikh have spent most (all?) of their telecom-related airtime spruiking for the NBN.
It’s a reminder why why traditional community organisations with democratic decision-making, for all their difficulties, are more reliable and authentic representatives of their consituencies in the long run.
A temporary reprieve in the USA?
From the Daily Kos, Oct 1st 2010 (same day Harley Dennett’s article was published here)
“Yesterday’s diary, Internet Engineers tell the Senate to Back Off!, was about the very dangerous Internet Censorship and Copyright Bill [COICA] and the opposition to it by 87 leading Internet Engineers. As a matter of fact, there has been a lot of opposition to it, some of it generate here at DKos. Today I have the happy task of announcing that the Senate Judiciary Committee won’t be considering this disaster until after the mid-term elections at the earliest…”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/10/1/1170/40720
Here are the key extracts from politico.com:
SENATE JUDICIARY IP HEARING POSTPONED – A markup on SJC Chairman Leahy’s IP infringement bill was postponed late Wednesday, as staffers anticipated the chamber would finish legislative work and adjourn for recess before the hearing could commence. The change in plans should delight some of the bill’s critics, at least, who expressed concern that the legislation was moving forward quickly.
IN THE MEANTIME: LEAHY OFFERS TWEAKS – Circulating this week is a proposed manager’s amendment to the bill that addresses at least some stakeholders’ initial concerns. Among the proposed edits, the amendment would drop the bill’s provision for a listing of websites suspected of IP infringement that have not yet been served court orders, revise a series of key term definitions and offer limited protection to ad networks.
http://dyn.politico.com/members/forums/thread.cfm?catid=24&subcatid=78&threadid=4573014
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The last para is interesting. It suggests some transparency of process is potentially acceptable to the promoters of the US legislative proposal. A marked contrast with Conroy’s filter.