Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 16

Harassment Arrest Of Charlie Shrem Shows Dangerously Repressive U.S. Police System

Process of Law: This Sunday, BitInstant CEO Charlie Shrem was arrested at JFK airport for money laundering. Allegedly, he has sold $1M worth of bitcoin, which has later been used to buy illegal drugs. But that’s not what money laundering is. Not at all. This can only be described as a harassment arrest.

It becomes increasingly clear that the arrest of BitInstant CEO Charlie Shrem is a harassment arrest, intended to spread chilling effects, an arrest that has no judicial basis whatsoever but to demonstrate wielding of power by a repressive police system.

Charlie Shrem. (Wikipedia.)

Business Insider writes;

“Charlie Shrem has been arrested at JFK airport and charged with money laundering. …accused of selling over $1 million in bitcoins to Silk Road users, who would then use them to buy drugs and other illicit items.”

So what?

That’s not money laundering. That’s the exact opposite of money laundering. Money laundering is a well-defined concept; it’s when you take money that has been achieved through illegal means and give them a legitimate source, concealing the past of that particular piece of wealth.

What allegedly happened here was that Shrem sold one million USD worth of bitcoin to one or more individuals, and these means were later used in turn to purchase contraband from Silk Road, obviously without Shrem having any say about it. That’s neither criminal nor money laundering – when you sell an asset, whether a car, a house, or bitcoin, you’re not liable in the slightest if that asset is later exchanged for contraband by its new rightful owner. Nor are you in any way, shape or form required to act even if you know it’s been later exchanged for contraband by its new owner, and in particular, you’re not guilty of money laundering.

Money laundering is specifically when you take actions to turn black money into white, and not when you sell white money to somebody else and they turn it black without your consent. There’s so much wrong with this bullshit arrest on every conceivable level.

This is a harassment arrest apparently intended to intimidate and associate “bitcoin”, “silk road”, “drugs”, and “money laundering” with each other, and the community should take exactly none of this nonsense and this repression. At this point, it’s important to stand up for the bitcoin community and for Shrem against a harassment arrest.

Unfortunately, the plea bargain system of the United States may cause Shrem to confess to the crime just to not risk 25 years of jail. A system where you get the choice of 15 days in jail and guilty confession, scoring career points for the prosecutor, or risk 25 years but take your chances of an acquittal, is a system that has absolutely nothing to do with justice nor with law enforcement. There is supposed to be a conceptual difference between being charged with a felony and playing “Take the money, or open the box?”.

Note that I write “police system”, not “justice system”. The police system of the United States, from a due process perspective, is just barely qualified to issue parking tickets. And yet, it issues the death penalty. That causes hairs to rise on my arms.

Swedish Public Television Claims Copyright Publication Rights To Everybody’s Sports Photos If Posted On Twitter

Copyright Monopoly: Well, this is a new one. Swedish Public Television just posted legal terms and conditions as to what they are allowed to do when others are posting sports photos from the Winter Games in Sochi on Twitter. In terms of the worst copyright monopoly bullshit I’ve seen, this ranks pretty high.

Swedish Public Television, SVT – funded with public money – just posted a long page of legalese detailing all the publication rights they have when somebody posts photos from the Sotji winter games under a specific hashtag. There’s only one problem: it’s complete bullshit. They don’t get a shred of publication right, neither because somebody posts photos on Twitter, nor because they assert they have the rights to publish under copyright monopoly law.

As that page can be predicted to be removed, here’s documentation of the full image of the published webpage with asserted “terms and conditions”. (For the legally inclined, I have a formal journalistic license – utgivningsbevis – and this is proper reporting on abuse of power by powerholders.)

“Terms and conditions” asserted by SVT, the Swedish Public Television, when other people post images on Twitter

The “terms and conditions” posted read, in full:

When you post images under the hashtag #mittOS14 [Ed note: translates to "My olympic games '14"] in a response to our call, you give publication rights to SVT, and therefore, some terms and conditions apply. You can read about them here.

These terms and conditions apply when you, in response to a direct and specific call from us, share images you’ve taken as a private individual under the hashtag #mittos14:

You must have the complete rights to the images, that is, you’re the photographer and the images don’t contain any work protected by copyright or an achievement created/performed by somebody else. [Ed note: this is a rather odd condition for a sports photo, anyway, considering they typically depict achievements by somebody else]

That SVT has the right to use the images (within the boundaries for SVT’s operations, that is in TV shows, on svt.se, and on other platforms where people can take part of SVT’s offerings).

That SVT, in preparation for such use, may crop and edit the images without your permission.

That SVT’s usage rights extend in perpetuity.

That you accept that you’re not entitled to any compensation for the grant of publication rights.

If we, from the above terms and conditions, publish an image that you shared under #mittos14, it shall be made clear who took the photograph.

This is one of the worst heaps of copyright monopoly bullshit I’ve seen in a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of it as an activist. The Swedish Public Television – which prides itself on being by the people, for the people, independent of the government (which is mostly a complete fabrication, but frequently asserted anyway) – is out on very thin ice when they claim the rights to any and all images posted by somebody unknown to a third-party service under a specific hash tag.

The very thin layer of ice hangs on the clause “when you do this in a response to a direct and specific call from us”, being able to possibly claim something like work for hire and therefore entering a contract. But obviously, there are a ton of different reasons somebody may post images on Twitter, and that doesn’t relinquish their rights to those images, even if SVT would understandably like that to happen. The burden of proof for this superthin ice is on SVT in showing that a contract and agreement was mutually entered into, and that’s absolutely impossible to prove – and SVT’s legal team should definitely know this, especially given that they have had no contact with the party they’ve allegedly entered into a contract.

Further, the thin line hangs on the thread of the hashtag #mittos14, and SVT would have to argue that the only reason somebody would use that hashtag is because they had agreed to the terms and conditions. But that’s almost the complete opposite from how hashtags work: we typically use hashtags because we see other people use them, or because we make them up on the spot. It would be totally natural for somebody to post photos just by seeing other people do so, so that argument is ridiculously weak.

When somebody posts images on Twitter, that doesn’t give news agencies permission to use them at all. We have a legal precedent as to pretty much exactly this, when Agence France Presse tried to use a person’s photo on Twitter, asserting exactly that they had usage rights because it was “posted on Twitter”, and in the end, the verdict told AFP to pay $1.2 million in damages for that ridiculous stunt.

You never stop getting surprised – these are the organizations that fight the hardest to maintain the copyright monopoly, and then they attempt blatant abuses of it like this?

The ridiculous thing here isn’t that SVT wants to reshare good images. We all do that, dozens every day, usually in violation of the copyright monopoly – but we’re also highlighting how ridiculous the copyright monopoly is and working to change it through several parallel avenues of disruption. Here, the SVT is doing the exact opposite: they’re defending the copyright monopoly, and pretending and asserting that this is how it works, that they’re legally able to take anything they want and use it however they want merely by assertion. That would be comedy gold, if it weren’t for the abusiveness of the law and the public by a major powerholder funded by the public.

UPDATE: Following an escalating and well-deserved shitstorm, it appears that the SVT is now (11:30 UTC) in uncontrolled panic-backpedal mode: the page with asserted so-called “legal terms and conditions” is changing almost on a minute-by-minute basis.

The Toy-Hungry Multimillionaire Market That’s Completely Underserved

Cryptocurrency: In 2010 and 2011, a lot of geeks acquired something called bitcoin. It’s a novel form of currency that breaks all the rules you know and redefines currency as we know it. In 2011, this currency was worth mid-single digits per “coin”. Today, one such coin is worth upwards of a thousand US dollars, and newly-minted millionaire geeks are hungry for toys – but almost nobody’s selling.

A lot of geeks are sitting on a ton of money, and they’ve now had the value of that money appreciate enough to spend 1% of that wealth to cross off pretty much every item on their toy wishlists all at once, and pretend it’s Christmas.

The problem?

Way too few stores are selling. You have a bunch of geek multimillionaires out there who are hungry – no, famished – for toys, and all the toy stores tell them to take a hike, because they won’t accept the bitcoin worth millions and millions today.

In a way, that’s understandable. Any deviation from an established workflow at any business – retail included – means a ton of work, and in particular, you don’t mess around with your payment workflows. And accepting a new currency into a business? That’s not just a ton of work, that’s a ton of risk, too, even in the face of an underserved multimillionaire market.

The thing is, the money is real. You can accept it much easier than you accept credit cards, and at a much lower rate, getting your usual central-bank money deposited into your bank account the next day (instead of the next week, or next month, as is the case with credit cards). Also, there are no chargebacks – the currency and its payment system is designed to not have any. Bitpay is one company processing such payments, depositing the next day, and charging 1% per transaction or USD 30 per month and 0% per transaction. What’s your current payment processor charging for access to multimillionaire markets?

Again, the money is real. It’s just an uncommon type of money, but there are middlemen who solve that problem for access to this market.

Yesterday, there was news that you can now buy a lot of geek-related stuff in the United States with bitcoin, from the electronics store TigerDirect. That’s a marked improvement just over the course of a day – each first-mover has a chance to capture the market for their niche, but this market segment is still ridiculously underserved. First, geeks don’t just exist in the United States – I’m located in Europe and I will want to buy from stores located on the inside of European Union customs walls, because I hate customs red tape and 30-percent surcharges that happen otherwise. Second, what do geeks want?

I’m looking for servers right now, just to look at myself. I’m sick and tired of the noise from my Dell PowerEdges, having put them on the balcony to get rid of the noise, and I want 128-meg or 256-meg octocore rackmount servers that don’t sound a whisper, silenced by enormous Noctua heatsinks or similar. This is off-trail stuff that still isn’t too odd to imagine somebody would want. To illustrate, I tried asking EndPCNoise.com if they accepted bitcoin for building such a server and didn’t even get a reply. That surprises me, and is illustrative of the situation at large.

Also, it goes beyond technical toys. Way so. Multimillionaire geeks with bitcoin are human beings and have just as diverse fields of interest as any other human beings – if anything, they tend to be more diverse than the average person, easily to the point of eccentricity. Again, for myself, I’ve been looking for camping and hiking gear for bitcoin – for buying inside the EU, nota bene. No joy.

There is a tremendous first-mover advantage here waiting to happen. If a market broker-portal like Ebay were to start processing payments in bitcoin, then that would be it – they would own this market, being able to serve the most odd and off-trail requests. But we’re not at that point. There are multimillionaires out there who want to buy your stuff, in the US, EU, and elsewhere, and they are asking you to accept their money.

It doesn’t matter that their bitcoin money looks unusual from euros or dollars. Somebody else can take care of that problem for you and give you access to this market, and as usual, “the firstest gets the mostest”. What are you waiting for?

Wages For Facebook? Maybe It’s Not So Crazy

Swarm Economy – Zacqary Adam Green: On the one hand, the “Wages for Facebook” manifesto currently sweeping the web was never meant to be taken literally. The idea that a free social networking service should pay its users for their “labor” is, at face value, ridiculous. But underneath the sensational language, there’s something to this notion of Facebook as an exploiter.

The premise of the boisterous, all-caps manifesto is laid out in its first paragraph:

THEY SAY IT’S FRIENDSHIP. WE SAY IT’S UNWAGED WORK. WITH EVERY LIKE, CHAT, TAG OR POKE OUR SUBJECTIVITY TURNS THEM A PROFIT. THEY CALL IT SHARING. WE CALL IT STEALING.

Well then. Stealing. Where have we heard that before, right? But further on in the text:

THE DIFFICULTIES AND AMBIGUITIES IN DISCUSSING WAGES FOR FACEBOOK STEM FROM THE REDUCTION OF WAGES FOR FACEBOOK TO A THING, A LUMP OF MONEY, INSTEAD OF VIEWING IT AS A POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE.

This is where it gets interesting.

The point of contention is that Facebook is collecting the data of its users, selling this to advertisers, and not sharing a cent of their massive profits with the users who generate that data. This is, arguably, unfair.

It’s not a situation that can be solved simply by “voting with your feet.” If you don’t like the deal you’re getting from Facebook, it’s not so easy to leave, because it’s become the de facto way that over a billion people interact online. For many people, quitting Facebook means cutting themselves off from their entire social circle. Or, as the text puts it:

TO DEMAND WAGES FOR FACEBOOK IS TO MAKE IT VISIBLE THAT OUR OPINIONS AND EMOTIONS HAVE ALL BEEN DISTORTED FOR A SPECIFIC FUNCTION ONLINE, AND THEN HAVE BEEN THROWN BACK AT US AS A MODEL TO WHICH WE SHOULD ALL CONFORM IF WE WANT TO BE ACCEPTED IN THIS SOCIETY.

Like a job, for example. Jobs are the model to which society asks us to conform, because if we don’t get a job, we can’t make money, and we can’t eat. Therefore, because Facebook is something we’re being forced into, the manifesto says we should be paid for it.

I never said its logic was perfect.

But let’s talk a little more about what Facebook is doing. Because through its illogic, what this “political perspective” points out is something our economy doesn’t really have the tools to deal with.

To use swarm terminology, Facebook is leeching. They’re taking something valuable from their swarm of users, benefiting from it, and then not giving anything back. This is definitely unfair. Individual users might not be unhappy with it or “feel” exploited, but exploitation isn’t always about your feelings — it’s a macroeconomic problem. When too many people go around leeching value instead of sharing and giving back, the balance of value gets tipped to favor a few leechers over everyone else. With the amount of wealth inequality in the world today, the last thing we can afford is more leeching.

Think about it. It’s frowned upon to profit from an open source project without sharing your improvements. It’s frowned upon to download a torrent without uploading anything back. And — believe it or not — it’s even frowned upon to get some digital media for free, truly enjoy it, while having money to spare and an easy way to donate to the creator and not a middleman, but then not to do so. (On a completely unrelated note, did you know there is a Flattr button at the bottom of every post on Falkvinge on Infopolicy?)

Unfortunately, our legal and monetary systems are incredibly bad at dealing with social mores.

Even though it’s unfair for Facebook to extract the theoretical concept of “value” from its users without giving back, even though it’s unfair for filesharers to receive theoretical “value” from creators without contributing anything to them, there is no reasonable way to solve these problems with the political and economic systems we have. It’s insane to grant monopolies on an idea and to lock away knowledge and culture, let alone to lock away people who violate the monopoly. It’s also insane to pay people for using Facebook.

Let’s also point out that to ask Facebook to share its profits with its users, when its profits come from advertisers, is to ask advertisers to pay the people to whom their advertising. Actually, I’d kind of enjoy that. But it’s ridiculous.

Politically, the most effective solution to the “unpaid Facebook labor” problem is the same as the “uncompensated artist” problem from filesharing: a universal basic income. Unfortunately, that’s it. There’s nothing more from a policy perspective that we can do to alleviate the inherent unfairness. It’s too problematic to force people to pay each other. What’s necessary is a cultural shift.

Back to the manifesto:

TO SAY THAT WE WANT MONEY FOR FACEBOOK IS THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS REFUSING TO DO IT, BECAUSE THE DEMAND FOR A WAGE MAKES OUR WORK VISIBLE, WHICH IS THE MOST INDISPENSABLE CONDITION TO BEGIN TO STRUGGLE AGAINST IT.…WE WANT TO CALL WORK WHAT IS WORK SO THAT EVENTUALLY WE MIGHT REDISCOVER WHAT FRIENDSHIP IS.

“Refusing to do it” isn’t just another tired “everyone stop using Facebook” plea that never seems to work because, well, all our friends are on Facebook. We do need to rediscover what friendship is, and that means moving into a culture where it’s considered unthinkable to leech. The relationship between Facebook and user is one of faceless corporation to faceless person. Neither one cares about the other. Neither one has any noticeable incentive to treat the other with any dignity, to share value, or to regard each other as anything more than a party to a transaction.

This is what I mean when I argue that artists are all street performers, and that creative industries are already donor-supported. Under the surface, the seed of a culture of sharing instead of truck, barter, and leeching lingers, but it’s kept from blossoming by a concrete layer of economic pretense poured and hardened on top, and only a cultural earthquake can break it down.

The irony of talking about pretense while using a metaphor like that is not lost on me.

Let’s Send Books To Anakata!

Activism: Anakata – Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, and an early technical assistant of WikiLeaks – is still held in Danish solitary confinement without much intellectual stimulus at all. I thought we could send some books to him, and I’m starting with sending one of my own.

In a Danish solitary confinement, Anakata has finally received access to his own books, which he has presumably read and re-read a number of times, already knowing them mostly by heart anyway since he’s a hacker extraordinaire. The one-percent sociopolitical elite has come down on this individual like a ton of bricks, from the thoroughly banana-republic corrupt Pirate Bay trial, via a very strange extradition from a country without such an agreement which just happened to coincide with a $40 million one-time extra foreign aid package, to the current months-on-end torturous solitary confinement.

If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a sign of the one-percent sociopolitical establishment throwing due process out the window in multidimensional corruption, in order to make an example out of an individual that pulled down their pants to enable a next generation of entrepreneurs to replace them.

And in a Danish solitary confinement, Anakata is bored out of his mind since months back. That’s unworthy. But at least we can do something here. I’m sending Anakata a book, one book, and I’m hoping many join me in this rather simple action.

It’s important that I’m not sending books because of what I think or don’t think of the facts in the current electronic trespassing case. That case is totally irrelevant in the big picture. I’m sending Anakata a book because he helped millions of people out of poverty into skilled craftsmanship by founding The Pirate Bay, giving the poor access to software kits and learning tools; because he drove innovation and consistently opposed censorship through that platform; and because he helped Wikileaks get off the ground in publishing the Collateral Murder video. Also, because he has been consistently hunted by the establishment to be made an example of through an entire sleeveful of dirty tricks and disregard for basic due process. “All for one, one for all.”

I’m sending a copy of my book Swarmwise. It may not be an overly technical book, but the point is that it’s something.

I’m sending a book to Anakata today, for all he’s done for us and for humanity. Will you join me?

Send a book to this address;

Mr. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg

c/o krimass JH Jørgensen

Politigården

DK-1567 København

DENMARK

Also, there’s the notable possibility that he’s not allowed to receive books from the outside. If so, do include a note that if this is the case, that the book should go to the jail library (“Koege’s Library”) instead, so he can request them from there – he needs author and title to do so. In order to do that, he must know what books have been sent, so he is able to request them from the library – he has no means of finding out what books have been sent otherwise. Please tweet author and title using hashtag #bookstoanakata, like this:

#bookstoanakata Rick Falkvinge - Swarmwise

…and I’ll enter them into the list below, and then Anakata’s mother @KSvartholm will forward the list on the next short visit, for Anakata to finally get some intellectual stimulus in months-long solitary confinement, whether it’s from books sent to him directly or requested from the jail library once he gets the list.

Books Sent So Far

Rick Falkvinge – Swarmwise

Tomas Sedlacek – Economics of Good and Evil

Outage Post Mortem

Metaposts: This site (and all other sites hosted on the same server park) have been offline for 72 hours. That’s completely unacceptable, of course, and the underlying fault still isn’t fixed. Here’s what happened.

At 08:45 UTC on January 14, I noticed that my server farm (including falkvinge.net and multiple other websites, as many as you can run on some thirty-odd servers), my main workstation, and the wi-fi in my place was offline. Scrambling to troubleshoot and checking piece by piece, it took me twelve minutes to arrive at the conclusion that my uplink provider was broken – the worst possible scenario, since it means I can’t fix it myself.

The last recorded activity on the server farm had taken place at 08:15 UTC. The event at 08:30 UTC had failed to connect upstream.

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this!

There was a good link to the upstream ISP, but nothing above the link level. I had a good 100Mbit full-duplex connection upstream, but my assigned gateway IP did not respond to pings from the perimeter firewall. Double-checking the physical uplink cable with a laptop (to make sure the switch or firewall weren’t broken) gave the same result.

No joy, no joy.

At this point, I fired up my mobile 4G broadband as a spare way out, so that I could at least communicate with the outside world via laptop and tablet, even if I had lost the ability to publish articles, thoughts, and ideas. (More on that insight in a later article.) I used that 4G connection to file an outage report with my ISP, and I was being quite specific in my troubleshooting (“this is how I know there’s an error, and these are the steps I’ve taken to make sure it’s not in my equipment. By the way, here’s my IP config.”). They wanted my mail address in that outage report. Good thinking, there.

Here’s my mail server, right outside the kitchen window.

Here’s my mail server. It’s on my balcony. Go right ahead and send me mail to here. By the way, please fix its upstream connectivity first. That will assist the mail in, you know, actually arriving at the server.

After nothing had happened for two hours, I decided to give the techs a voicecall as well. The first tech I spoke to was everything I had hoped for – I was prepared for “have you tried turning it off and on again”-level support, but they apparently saw from my outage report that I was past that level, and the first question was for the MAC address of my perimeter switch or firewall, so they could debug the link to a known endpoint. I was totally not prepared for that level of technical respect, but appreciated it.

However, the tech told me that this can take a while, that they’re submitting a fault ticket to the municipal broadband station and that they will take at least two days. This obviously wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Then, nothing happened for the rest of that day.

The second call to support – on Wednesday – was much less of a joy, where they started by telling me “but you’ve only been offline for a day?”. After I had detonated, explaining not very patiently that downtime is measured in seconds or minutes and not in days, essentially told me that it would take two to five days per round trip to the technical staff, and that he couldn’t care less if I was offline.

These are the times when I’m happy I have my rather large offline music collection, so I’m not totally dependent on Pandora.

I have a blog with a million visits a month, I need that bloody uplink, and this is what I get for fifteen years of continuous custom (yes, I’ve had that fiber uplink since 1999)?

What did they think I was going to do with four static, public IPv4 addresses – that I pay a monthly rent for, nota bene – for a consumer-grade connection? I was outraged, but I was just being stonewalled. I realized no amount of anger would change this person’s mind, and decided to settle for the day.

On Thursday January 16, I woke up with the uplink still down, and figured it would be up by lunch. No joy. Nothing happened at all. I realized that the “two to five business days” was actually intended as serious, and as Thursday’s business day came to a close, I realized that Friday may come and go as well, and if so, this already-unacceptable outage is going to last past the weekend.

The situation just isn’t okay by any measure. So I created a makeshift uplink from spare parts, one that isn’t intended for any kind of long-time use or stability, but one that will work until the primary uplink is restored. On Friday morning, I think I got most of it working, breaking pretty much every best practice in existence, but honoring “if it’s stupid but works, it ain’t stupid”.

If you can read this, then that makeshift uplink – using sort-of mobile 4G broadband, spare homemade antennas and firewall multi-uplink failover configurations – has worked.

Now, for another angry phonecall to my ISP who still haven’t fixed my fiber connection as of 09:00 UTC on Friday Jan 17…

Censorship Triggers Liability: UK ISPs Need To Be Sued Way Out Into Atlantic

Infrastructure: Internet Service Providers in the United Kingdom have started censoring the Internet wholesale by default. This is a horrible transgression against the free exchange of ideas, cheered on by authoritarian politicians. However, there is an important weapon built into the legal framework against this kind of censorship, and it’s high time to use it in full scale.

To protect Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from legal liability for the information that travels in their wires, the United States has a concept called Common Carrier, and Europe has a similar concept called Mere Conduit. In essence, it means that as long as an ISP stays entirely transport-neutral, then it is not liable for anything transmitted through its wires, in pretty much the same way that a mailman is never responsible for the contents of a carried sealed letter.

However, this Mere Conduit shield doesn’t come for free. More specifically, as outlined in the European Union’s e-commerce directive, there are three strict conditions that must be met for the liability shield to kick in. In essence, it’s transport neutrality. Quoting from the Wikipedia article:

Where an information society service is provided that consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service, or the provision of access to a communication network, Member States shall ensure that the service provider is not liable for the information transmitted, on condition that the provider: (a) does not initiate the transmission; (b) does not select the receiver of the transmission; and (c) does not select or modify the information contained in the transmission.

Let’s look at the most relevant part once more, in the conditions required to not be liable for what you carry on your wires as an ISP:

does not select [...] the information contained in the transmission

Do you see what has happened here? With censorship, any censorship at the ISP level, that ISP starts selecting what information can be contained in the transmission and what information cannot. It doesn’t matter if it greenlights 99.9999% of requests or 99% or 50% or just 1% – anything short of the full one hundred per cent means that the ISP is sorting information into “allowed” or “disallowed” and therefore selecting the information contained in the transmission. Transport neutrality is an “on” or “off”, it doesn’t come in grayscales.

The UK ISPs have instituted a full-on censorship regime, where – unless you take active steps to circumvent or disable it – they are disallowing information from news sites like TorrentFreak (which is an absolutely horrible attack on the freedom of ideas). The United Kingdom is now actively sorting political ideas into allowed and disallowed, just as we said would happen from day one of this political censorship regime – for that’s what it is, and nothing else.

In doing so, UK ISPs have given up their Common Carrier and Mere Conduit liability shield.

I don’t think any ISP in the UK considered this effect, but the Mere Conduit legislation is and has been one of the strongest weapons we’ve had against censorship: any ISP that starts sorting the Internet into allowed and disallowed becomes liable. “Becomes liable”, as in becomes liable for all of it.

Any UK ISP taking part in the censorship regime is now legally liable for everything, everything, that goes through their wires.

They need to be punched as hard as the law will allow for hurting the open society to this degree. They need to get a ton of bricks dropped onto them.

The UK ISPs need to be sued for every single thing on the Internet. They are liable for it now, having thrown their liability shield aside to institute censorship. They need to be sued way out into the Atlantic as punishment for hurting the Net and their customers to this degree, each and every one of them.

Reminder 2: Hunt For File-Sharers Violates Fundamental Human Rights (Says The European Court Of Human Rights)

Copyright Monopoly: Happy Yule, everybody! In our series of reminders about important talkbacks, we’ve come to the reminder that the act of hunting for people who share culture and knowledge online violates their fundamental human rights, as doing so wiretaps private communications.

The hunt for people who share culture and knowledge online violates article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, the most important Bill-of-Rights on the planet, according to no other court than the highest court of the land, superseding Supreme Courts and Constitutions: The European Court of Human Rights.

(References to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is overseen by this Court, is written directly into many constitutions – including that of the European Union itself.)

In the case of Ashby Donald et co vs. France, the Court references Article 10, the right to freely seek and share information:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” (European Convention on Human Rights, art 10)

The court further found, in its first test ever on the subject matter, that the enforcement of the copyright monopoly online interferes (violates) this fundamental human right (my highlights):

For the first time in a judgment on the merits, the European Court of Human Rights has clarified that a conviction based on copyright law for illegally reproducing or publicly communicating copyright protected material can be regarded as an interference with the right of freedom of expression and information under Article 10 of the European Convention. Such interference must be in accordance with the three conditions enshrined in the second paragraph of Article 10 of the Convention. This means that a conviction or any other judicial decision based on copyright law, restricting a person’s or an organisation’s freedom of expression, must be pertinently motivated as being necessary in a democratic society, apart from being prescribed by law and pursuing a legitimate aim.

The court goes on to note that all three of these exception criteria were fulfilled in the case at hand, allowing an exception as a whole in this specific case to the fundamental human rights applicable. However, the partial finding – that the hunt for people sharing culture and knowledge online is a violation of their fundamental rights – is a watershed decision and an important talkback.

This is what stands at the heart of the debate on sharing culture and knowledge online, that you can’t sort legal private communications from illegal private communications without actually looking at them. In other words, you can’t enforce the copyright monopoly against file-sharers without wiretapping the entire internet.

That’s far too high a price to pay for maintaining an old distribution monopoly for an entertainment industry.

Reminder 1: Copyright Monopoly Infringement Isn’t Stealing (Says The US Supreme Court)

Copyright Monopoly: Over the Yule holidays, I’ll be running a series of reminders of some of the most useful talkbacks. We open with one of the more common ones: copyright industry lawyers tend to insist that violation of the copyright monopoly is “stealing”. But in the judicial field, lawyers always go by what the courts say, and the US Supreme Court says it isn’t.

Lawyers defending the copyright monopoly love to throw false analogies around, even when those analogies have been explicitly rejected by Supreme Courts. It would be an understatement to call this practice dishonest.

In the U.S. Supreme Court case Dowling vs United States, the Supreme Court explicitly valued whether copies could be regarded as stolen goods under the law, and held that they could not.

Instead, “interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: ‘[...] an infringer of the copyright.’”

There is absolutely no reason to accept this fallacy, especially not from a copyright industry lawyer, who should know better (and deserves getting that pointed out).

Now, even if the US Supreme Court had said something differently, it would still not be stealing from a philosophical, political, economical, or moral angle. The US Supreme Court adds the judicial angle to this, which is useful against lawyers and corporations, specifically.

UPDATE: As Mikael Nilsson points out in the comments, courts have even grown so tired of this false and dishonest rhetoric from the copyright industry that courts have explicitly banned the copyright industry from using “stealing” and similar words in their argumentation. While that wasn’t the Supreme Court, it still bears mentioning.

Next: Copyright monopoly enforcement in typical online cases violates fundamental human rights.

Good Midwinter Solstice! With A Kopimist Gospel

Kopimism – Christian Engström: Today is the midwinter solstice, and a fitting day to present a Kopimist Gospel. Kopimism is a new religion for atheists, agnostics, and believers in other religions who want a new perspective on their current faith.

Kopimism takes its starting point in the evolution of life on Earth, and embraces the scientific description of the world. But science alone does not tell the whole truth about this fantastic universe. Kopimism adds meaning and purpose to the scientific description of evolution, while still respecting science.

The word “gospel” means “message of joy” — good news, simply. This is A Kopimist Gospel, and it is a real message of joy.

Kopimism brings good news in many areas. First of all, it reconciles religion with science. The schism between science and religion that started to appear with Isaac Newton’s mechanistic model of the universe, and has widened ever since, is actually quite unnecessary.

Kopimism is based on the modern scientific world view. We think that Science is great, and mostly right in what it teaches. Kopimism is a law-abiding religion, so we respect the laws of nature. We don’t claim that we can walk on water, or that our prophets’ mothers are virgins. Why should they be?

But we take careful note of the fact that even if Science tells the truth and nothing but the truth (mostly), it doesn’t even claim to tell the whole truth. There are plenty of places where Science just gives the answer “undefined” or “random”. In each of these places, there could be hidden magic that neither we nor Science are aware of yet.

Accepting Science does not mean that we have to accept the universe as mechanistic, soulless and dead. The universe is big, complicated and weird enough for both science and magic to coexist in it. In fact, they almost certainly do. Kopimism suggests an answer to how science and magic can be made to fit together.

The Kopimist creation myth takes its beginning at the appearance of life on Earth:

In the beginning, the world was a stinking soup of ammonia, methane gas, and nasty toxic chemicals. The atmosphere was alight with flashes of pure energy. Something wanted to be born.

The first two sentences present the general scientific view of how conditions were on Earth at the time. Kopimism does not contradict science. If Science is happy with that description, then we are.

But the third sentence, “Something wanted to be born”, is of course an addition that goes beyond strict science. There is no hard scientific evidence that anything “wanted” anything at all on primordial Earth, four billion years ago.

But on the other hand, there is just as little hard scientific evidence that there wasn’t. Since Science makes no claim one way or the other, this is an example of a spot where we can open up for the possibility of magic without contradicting any of the laws of science.

Science and Religion can easily coexist in peace. All that Science has to do is show a bit of humility, and not claim to say more than it actually does. And all that Religion has to do is show a bit of common sense, and not insist on parlor trick miracles that quite obviously defy the laws of nature.

The Kopimist faith accepts Science’s description of the evolution of life on Earth. Instead of trying to fight that description, as some religious fundamentalists (mostly Christian) do, we are inspired by it and want to learn from it.

Looking at the history of evolution, including the evolution that human societies have experienced, we identify four Fundamental Principles that we think are worth highlighting. These are the four Kopimist K’s: Creativity, Copying, Collaboration, and Quality.

The four Fundamental Principles are inspired by observation of the history of evolution. As is fitting for a religion, we not only present a tale of how we think life on Earth originated, we also try to learn something from it.

We identify Copying and Collaboration by observing how important these two principles have been in the formation of life on Earth. We see the same pattern of Copying and Collaboration when proteins learn to multiply and start collaborating to build cells, as when cells that have multiplied start collaborating to build more complex organisms, like ourselves.

We identify Quality as a more or less necessary force in the process of evolution, to explain why things have generally moved towards the better, after all.

And we identify Creativity as an equally necessary driving force behind the evolution of the universe, to explain why we didn’t get stuck forever in some ecologically stable but ultimately boring state of blue and green algae soup.

The four Kopimist K’s together provide a theological framework is consistent with Science and partly based on observation, but which still has room for spiritual concepts.

Thanks to Quality, we have a reason to feel optimistic about the future, even though we have no way of knowing what it will actually look like. And because we see Creativity as a natural force that is present everywhere in the universe at all levels, we have reason to look forward to a future that is exciting an fun as well.

All of this without breaking a single Law of Nature.

There is no Creator God in the description of Kopimism presented in this Gospel. Instead, we think that the scientific description of evolution together with the four Kopimist fundamental principles are sufficient to explain the marvel of our existence.

But even if we reject the idea of God as the Creator, this does not rule out that there could be other Gods. This is an issue that is deliberately left open by this Kopimist Gospel. Therefore, this Gospel can be used in two ways.

In itself, this Gospel is a stand-alone atheistic or agnostic world view that is based on science, but adds some spiritual meaning to the scientific description.

But this Kopimist Gospel can also serve as a reasonable creation myth and foundation for new cults and religions that want to include one or more Gods, but do not want or need that God as the Creator.

In support of such a religious belief system, we have noted the fact that Science never claims to tell the whole truth, and that there are spots of chaos and unpredictability all over today’s scientific theories.

It may be that the activity in these spots is just random, as some believe. But it may also be that these are the spots where concepts like the the Soul, Free Will, or even God can be inserted into the description of the world without violating any of the laws of science.

This Kopimist Gospel deliberately leaves the issue of a God open. But there could be other Kopimist Gospels that give different answers to that question.

Getting down from the high metaphysical mountain tops, we can use the Four Kopimist K’s to get guidance in our everyday life.

From the principles of Creativity, Copying, Collaboration, and Quality, it turns out that we can quite naturally and directly derive a moral system, which happens to look just like we would want as freedom oriented humanists.

We want as much freedom for the individual as possible, to give her the greatest chance to express Creativity. We see sex in all its forms as something natural and positive, and as a tribute to the principle of Copying. We recognize that to live together in a society, we must respect each other’s freedoms, and must strive to create a good climate for Collaboration. And we trust people to make their own choices and get it right more often than not, since we are all guided by the force of Quality.

There is nothing new or surprising in this moral code. It is just normal modern freedom oriented humanism. But the fact that it is so easy to go directly from the Four Kopimist K’s to the moral system we would have wanted anyway, that is a pleasant surprise. It is of course not conclusive proof in itself, but it is an indication that we may have made a quite sensible choice in Fundamental Principles in the Four Kopimist K’s.

We can also use the framework of Creativity, Copying, Collaboration, and Quality to suggest appropriate rituals for use in the Kopimist church, from wild fertility rites to quiet meditation.

When we turn to the issue of religious holidays, we see that there is a quite natural mapping from the Four K’s to the four seasons. This is another good sign that we are on the right track. We can celebrate the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes, each to remind us of one of the Four K’s.

We do not yet have a full set of Kopimist rituals for all occasions and tastes, but we have a foundation to build on. Kopimism values diversity. Ideally, there will be many different churches and belief systems that can elaborate the foundation presented in this Kopimist Gospel in different directions.

Today, December 21, 2013, is Midwinter Solstice Day. It is a fitting day to present a Kopimist Gospel, a message of joy.

Science and religion can coexist, and we are living in a creative universe filled with magic, miracles, and beauty. There are forces that guide the creation towards the interesting and good, so we dare to feel safe in the trust that creates the world.

This is a Kopimist Gospel.

Good Midwinter Solstice 2013!

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Read A Kopimist Gospel — Book 1: The Creation

CC-BY-NC Christian Engström