Michael Geist explains why he protest an American legislation 01/31/2012
Posted by Philippe_Leblanc in CMN3165, Media Industry.Tags: C-11, Media Industry, Michael geist, PIPA, SOPA, Toronto Star
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On January 17th, Michael Geist, a law professor and specialist in Internet and E-commerce law, protested the Stop Online Piracy Act(SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) by changing his website homepage to a dark page. This was part of an international protest against the United States legislation in which Wikipedia, Reddit and Craigslist participated.
The campaign was effective and the U.S. government decided to go back to the writing board to modify these Acts. It might be strange in this context to see a Canadian law professor protesting an American legislation. However I suggest reading Michael Geist’s article from the Toronto Star article published in the Toronto Star on January 18th in which he explains the reasons behind his actions. The SOPA/PIPA legislations would not only affect the United States, but Canada as well. He argues that since SOPA treats all “.com”, “.net”, and “.org” as domestic domain names for U.S law purposes. The ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) which distributes all IP addresses for the United States, Canada and other Caribbean countries is located in the U.S and under SOPA, any IP addresses distributed by this entity on U.S soil would be treated under this law. The effects of SOPA are both massive and extraterritorial since Canada’s Internet provider relies on ARIN for their IP address.
His article shows that the implications of SOPA on Canada. It would be foolish to ignore the effects of such legislation since they will affect our lives. Internet is a tool used by 79% of the Canadian population (according to Statistics Canada survey on Internet usage in May 2011) and each user will be affected by these laws. Wikipedia, Youtube, Reddit, and even WordPress would have been touched by this legislation. You could be affected by this without even knowing it yet. We must stay informed. Companies are lobbying to stop online piracy and they would be foolish not to. They want to keep their profit and online piracy is almost like stealing their product without paying for it. Corporations have interests to protect, and the government wants to implement laws to protect companies and stop criminal behavior. However, this is leading to laws which have severe repercussions on the average user of the Internet. Perhaps the solution is elsewhere and we must keep searching for a better way to deal with online piracy.
Geist also shed some light to a lesser extent on bill C-11, Canada’s own copyright bill. This bill will have enormous repercussions on the Internet as we know it today and the conservative government seems adamant in it’s position despite the negative public opinion towards the bill. Geist predicts more protest in the future. It’s hard to disagree with him.
Testing video embeding to WordPress 01/25/2012
Posted by Philippe_Leblanc in Uncategorized.add a comment
This is a simple attempt to embed a video in WordPress. This is fairly new to me and it might sound amusing to everyone who did this before. I decided to include an amusing video of Rowan Atkinson as Doctor Who.
Enjoy!
On Cory Doctorow’s “Lockdown” 01/21/2012
Posted by Philippe_Leblanc in CMN3165, Media Industry.Tags: CoryDoctorow, Lockdown, Media Industry, PIPA, SOPA
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It is a pretty interesting week for the internet. It seems that the online community won a battle against the Stop Online Piracy act and Protect Intellectual Property Act (or SOPA/PIPA). The New York Times has a remarkable and comprehensive article on the subject right here (Copyright and Internet Piracy) and the victory of the Internet supported by the Obama administration. I will not go in further details about this since there are multiple sources on the internet who gives detailed information about the protest and the bills themselves. I am mostly interested in an article by Cory Doctorow. Let’s take a look.
It is quite interesting to read Cory Doctorow’s crazy technological dystopian text “Lockdown” on what he describes will be “the coming war on general-purpose computer”. Especially since we know the protest worked and the bill is back on the drawing board. Even though I agree with most of what Doctorow is saying, I cannot fully endorse his point of view. He is a competent writer and it is difficult to disagree with his simple approach to the evolution of the Internet.
Doctorow starts by describing the different ways copyright protection was enacted over the years and the problems they caused. The problem, according to Doctorow, is that the methods implemented to stop the pirates didn’t work at first, and they won’t with SOPA. The way computers are working now makes it almost impossible to stop people from looking at what is happening in their computers when certain programs are running. For instance, you can pay for an mp3 file that is encrypted and can only be unencrypted under certain circumstance, but when it is unencrypted, how do you stop people from doing what they want with it? Doctorow’s argument is that at the moment, you can’t stop this. You cannot regulate the internet or a computer to do anything except what private corporations and government doesn’t want you to do. You can’t say “let’s have the internet so that it doesn’t run Bittorrent”. The laws that are trying to do this are fundamentally flawed and must address other issues if they want to succeed in stopping piracy. A complete re-working of the fundemental working of how computer operates would be required. Basically we would need to stop producing general purpose computers and producing appliances. A computer that only does one thing and not everything you can think of. A computer that toast bread only, not a computer that can toast bread and do 75,000 other things. Doctorow then announces the coming war on computer with it’s gazillion abilities because, one day, people will realize that this is the only to stop piracy. Limitations on the general-purpose computer is the next step after the copyright war.
As much as I agree with his text, he does not include an element that I think is fundamental to understanding the future of computing. Corporations who produces computer are enormous. Apple is the second most valuable corporation on earth (See article from Financial post) and unless they want to lose both credibility and money (which any normal corporations wants to avoid) they will fight these types of bill. Wikipedia, google, Microsoft, would theoretically all lose if other corporate interest wants to restrict them and the people of doing what they want with their computers. Blocking innovations and tampering with citizens who uses the internet the way they want (mostly legally). The people will fight, but the people is not alone in this. Lockdown completely downplays the companies who will fight these copyright bills on with the internet and computer users.
I’m not certain what role these corporations would play, but to omit them and portraying such a bleak future for general purpose computing seems silly. Doctorow seems to only describe abstract form of resistance while demonizing the companies and government who would want to impose such limitations on computers. I doubt that companies would allow themselves to be transformed by legislation without fighting it. They want to make computers because the people want computers. Other companies are already making appliances. we don’t want to buy appliances in computer forms.
I do suggest reading his article though. Apart from this point which really annoyed me, the article is extremely interesting. It might seem to go too far, but I don’t think his arguments are far-fetched.
To read Cory Doctorow’s Lockdown
In case you are in San Francisco, there is a stage play of Cory Doctorow “Little Brother“ playing in a theater near you.:
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