Asalto al coche (Robbery of the coach), by Francisco de Goya
Alec Ross, the US State Department innovation representative, had a disturbing new proposal to make at the Google Big Tent meeting last night at the Dublin OSCE meeting on Internet Freedom.
He said any and all attempts to legislate anti-piracy efforts should end -- as an ardent opponent of SOPA, he finds them all overbroad and flawed.
Instead, we should look for technological solutions to engineer copyright protection.
I couldn't have face-palmed harder if I tried.
The fact is, those of us who have been debating this hard for a decade know perfectly well that Silicon Valley will not engineer copyright protection. Oh, sure, there might be a Facebook block on a Pinterest copy-paste (which is hardly an engineered obstacle to copy because you can still use "print screen" of course, or control-C and paste into another application before hijacking the photo to Pinterest). Or there might even a DRM left on something like i-tunes. But there will not be any serious technological and engineered solution. No way.
Ross was indignant when I suggested he was being snowed by the geeks. They have absolutely no intention of disrupting the California business which works so well for ad revenue.
He says I'm wrong and that we'll have this in less than 10 years, even much sooner. I will be reminding him of this claim for the rest of his life, of course.
Of course, Cory Doctorow and the other copyleftists wouldn't concede this at all, but they're happy to say nothing while Alec goes on believing this and the engineers he talks to continue to string him along on this, because they in fact not only don't want any engineered solution, they know it is hard.
In fact, precisely because it's hard, you need policies and of course laws -- the rule of organic law, not code-as-law. But Doctorow of course doesn't cede this.
Doctorow quoted my nemesis John Perry Barlow, who said trying to remove copying from the Internet is like removing red dye from a pool -- it can't be done.
Of course, as Marshall McLuhan once put it in another context about the media and the global village, the problem is to "stay the dyer's hand". Indeed, on this context as well.
Naturally, you can get the red out by putting in a white cloth that absorbs the dye, or a filter that takes it out. And that's what states are doing and that's the debate. Of course you can have filters and the claims that they don't work 100 percent of the time needn't defeat the objective. But it's not filters that are really needed; the rule of law is needed.
"If you can see it, you can copy it," and of course we know about the analogue hole.
Even so, even as we speak, hundreds of thousands of DMCA takedown notices are streaming into Google and they are taking the content down -- within seven hours, even! And automated processes are functioning on Youtube. If I post a Second Life machinima that happens to pick up a song off an Internet radio station on in the background on the server, that soundtrack snippet will be captured by the automatic filtering system and I will soon get a notice telling me that I have posted infringing content -- and in Germany, people won't view my content. It may hang there for some days -- it will then be removed. Good!
Truly, it is not an issue of investing further in that elusive engineered solution. We've been through this in thousands of man-hours on the JIRA and the Linden office hours for a decade. Remember when the watermark was promised? Remember when the registration was promised? And you wouldn't want registration because it undermines the Bern Convention inherency of content. Obviously watermarks can be spoofed like any other seen thing.
The problem with conceding the engineered solution instead of the organic rule of law is that it accepts the proposition that everything in cyberspace -- which increasingly makes up a lot of our lives and someday will control much of them -- has a coded solution that coders can devise in an emulation and simulation of real life -- however flawed that simulation might be, and however binary its execution.
And that's an outcome that has to be fiercely rejected. It's not the case, as Doctorow kept hectoring, that governments always try to control every new media and then give up. The Internet isn't just media; it's the means of conveyance, it's a transportation system.
When the stagecoach routes and the railrways were invented, highway robbers plagued the passengers and the conductors.
Nobody said, "oh, highway robbery is new technology". Nobody said "don't get in the way of highway robbery innovation, you are a Luddite". Nobody said, if you didn't concede highway robbery, "you need a new business model".
Rather, they conceded that new technology was plagued by old problems of theft and violence and that they had to be arrested. The rail must go through. And it did, and highway robberies became scarce if not non-existent on trains. That's how we have to think of the Internet.
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