gregory donovan's eportfolio (a syndication of cyberenviro.org)
Archive for DMCA
by gtdonovan on December 3, 2009 at 11:01 am · Filed under Database Industry, DMCA, DOJ, GAO, governance, informationalism, PACER, surveillance, Yahoo
On multiple fronts, the U.S. government is pumping up the database industry with large sums of public money. The notion that “public” government-surveillance and “private” corporate-surveillance are some how different is a useless distinction – they’re two sides of the same state-surveillance coin.
First, from The Hill:
This week, without much fanfare, the House is expected to approve a bill mandating that the Treasury Department create a real-time electronic database of information related to the bailout. And for data warehousing and analysis firms, the bill could lead to a hefty contract. At a September hearing, Stephen Horne, vice president at Dow Jones, testified that it could cost $50 million to create and run a database for the first year . . .
“We can track where any UPS package is at any time of day,” [Rep. Carolyn] Maloney told The Hill this week. “Why in the world can’t we track this information?”. . .
Dow Jones & Co., IBM and SAS Institute have all lobbied on the bill, according to congressional records. Teradata, an Ohio-based data analytics and warehousing firm, has been a prominent supporter of the bill.
Then, from Wired:
The federal court system charged the Department of Justice more than $4 million in 2009 for access to its electronic court filing system, which is composed entirely of documents in the public domain. . .
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts runs the search system known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER. PACER charges citizens, journalists, corporate lawyers and even the Attorney General $.08 per page to look at court filings in U.S. District Courts. The system pulled in nearly $50 million in 2006. The contract between the PACER office and the Justice Department began in 2002 with a charge of $800,000, which quickly rose to more than $4.2 million in 2009.
Wired also notes that the Justice Department had to sign a $5 million contract in 2005 with West Publishing to gain online access to court records since the U.S. Court system does not make their records available for bulk download:
West, and its competitor, Lexis Nexis, buy court data in bulk, reformat it and add proprietary citation codes. They then license the database of public documents at high rates to libraries, law firms and government agencies. Even the U.S. Court system pays West’s high license fees to access public court documents that West purchased from it.
[UPDATE 12.08.09: Yahoo’s “spy guide” and price list for user information published by Cryptome]
John Young has obtained and published documents on his website that details some of the digital surveillance policies of Yahoo, Verizon, AT$T, SBC, COX, and Sprint — among others. Most interesting, however, is Young’s publication of Yahoo’s Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement that describes the kinds of user information available to law enforcement and how much the company will charge the government for such information. While this ‘price list’ more or less confirms what a lot of people have suspected — that the border between big-business and big-government surveillance is a porous one — Yahoo’s reaction to its publication is truly revealing. Yahoo has issued a DMCA takedown notice to Cryptome, demanding the document be removed and arguing that its publication is (somehow) an act of copyright infringement.
Further, as Wired reported back on 12/01/09 before Cryptome published Yahoo’s Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement, Yahoo had been trying to prevent a FOIA request seeking information on how much Yahoo (among others) charge the government for user information. Yahoo opposed the FOIA request by claiming it would both “shock” and “confuse” their customers.
by gtdonovan on October 3, 2009 at 7:13 pm · Filed under censorship, DMCA, Google, governance, informationalism, methodology, Pirate Bay, semantic web
A reminder that Google doesn’t really search “the web,” just a relatively narrow slice of it. From Threat Level:
The homepage of Pirate Bay disappeared from Google’s search results Friday, after Google allegedly received a DMCA takedown notice targeting the site.
The move is unexpected because, while the Pirate Bay is rife with pirated material, the site’s spare landing page contains no content to speak of — just links, a logo and a search box. By law, DMCA notices are targeted to specific infringing content.
I increasingly hear the students I work with (and a good deal of the faculty) use Google as a synonym for the web, much as how Kleenex is has become another word for tissue. It’s similar with Googling and surfing (e.g. one might say “I was Googling David Bowie last night” when they were actually surfing Bowie fansites with little or no use of Google). Of course, no such equivalence exists — Google is a gated community. There is a boundary drawn between the regions of the web that Google (and other major search engines) will index, and the regions they won’t. What they don’t index, we likely don’t see.
That there is proprietary decision-making behind what information is — and is not — indexed, and that we — as a society — are increasingly loosing our ability to even recognize this indexing is a cause for great concern. Expecting Google to make their gate keeping an open and transparent process is ludicrous. Google is for profit, and dreaming up a contorted “free-market” rational for how it could be in Google’s best business interest to be transparent is a dead end. Google makes billions by controlling access to information, and they aren’t going to give that up. Why should they?
But what if there were non-profit, or even for profit, search engines that focused on identifying and indexing all the information Google (et al) isn’t? At a minimum, having such options might at least make people conscious of the fact that the web is bigger than Google suggests.
by gtdonovan on August 26, 2009 at 2:16 pm · Filed under Apple, censorship, DMCA, EFF, hacking, iphone, participation, piracy, privacy, property, security, surveillance
According to Apple, jailbreaking your iPhone violates Apple’s license agreement, constitutes copyright infringement – and – is a threat to national security. Meet the new weapon of mass destruction: the hacked iPhone. Just like Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, the iPhone of Mass Destruction is more red herring than reality. In a nation obsessed with security, particularly cybersecurity, the attempt by Apple (and AT&T) to frame a hacked iPhone as a security threat raises important questions of social reproduction, particularly among youth.
Apple made this argument to the U.S. Copyright Office in response to a request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that the U.S. Librarian of Congress grant an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that would clearly define jailbreaking as legal (under certain conditions). Back in 2006 the Librarian of Congress granted six 3-year exemptions to the DMCA, the fifth of which stated:
Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.
This expiring exemption was widely understood to legalize the act of jailbreaking for otherwise legal, personal, and non-profit purposes. However, now that the EFF is seeking a similar exemption, Apple is going further than previous arguments (i.e. jailbreaking violates your license agreement) and is now arguing that jailbreaking results in copyright infringement and could compromise national security. This continues the meme, advanced by corporations and governments alike, that “loose code” is a threat to security in the informational age – thus, equating piracy and hacking with insecurity in order to rationalize monopolistic business practices. The very same business practices that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, warned would lead to “vertical integration” between the medium and content. As Wired’s Threat Level points out:
This also explains why Apple rejected the official Google Voice App for the iPhone this week. We thought it was because Google Voice posed a threat to AT&T’s exclusivity deal with Apple. Now we know it threatened national security. At stake for Apple is the closed business model it has enjoyed since 2007, when the iPhone debuted. More than 30 million phones have been sold. Apple has told the Copyright Office that its locked-down platform is what made the iPhone’s success possible
Here are 3 key excerpts from Apple’s statement to the U.S. Copyright Office:
- Jailbreaking does violate a license agreement between Apple and the purchaser of an iPhone. All purchasers of iPhones must accept the terms and conditions of the iPhone Software License Agreement (“IPSLA”) at the time of purchase of the iPhone (and any later updates of the software)…
- Jailbreaking constitutes copyright infringement. Because jailbreaking involves unauthorized modifications to Apple’s copyrighted bootloader and OS programs, it is a violation of 17 U.S.C. § 106(1) & (2)…
- Because jailbreaking makes hacking of the BBP software much easier, jailbreaking affords an avenue for hackers to accomplish a number of undesirable things on the network… For example, a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data. In short, taking control of the BBP software would be much the equivalent of getting inside the firewall of a corporate computer – to potentially catastrophic result. (emphasis added)
And 2 key excerpts from EFF’s statement to the U.S. Copyright Office:
- Jailbreaking an iPhone in order to run lawfully obtained software does not constitute copyright infringement. Nothing in the Apple iPhone Software License Agreement changes this conclusion. As explained in our original submission, any reproductions made in the course of jailbreaking an iPhone are privileged by both Section 117 and the fair use doctrine.
- With respect to the application of Section 117 to jailbreaking, the Librarian will have to evaluate whether an iPhone owner is the “owner of a copy” of the Apple firmware that is delivered with and operates the device. In addition, the Librarian will have to evaluate whether the process of jailbreaking the iPhone involves an “adaptation” that falls within the scope of Section 117. (emphasis added)
In our article, Cookie Monsters: Seeing Young People’s Hacking as Creative Practice, Cindi Katz and I spoke at length about jailbreaking (and hacking more broadly) as a form of play — as a creative practice that helps young people to better understand and control their technological environments. To help make our case, we profiled AriX — the then 13-year-old iPhone hacker and developer of the ijailbreak application:
In an article entitled “Hacking: The New Child’s Play?” posted on an IT security website, AriX is associated with a list of young crackers who have engaged in malicious and clearly criminal activities. With the subtitle “Researchers worry as teens and pre-teens play an increasing role in illegal online exploits,” the piece makes no distinction between the hacking of AriX and the reported computer crimes of the other youth profiled, even though the latter’s activities included derailing trains in the Polish city Lodz and stealing considerable sums of money from people’s bank accounts (Wilson 2008). The distinction between these activities and hacking like AriX’s is clear. But even at that, the U.S. Librarian of Congress granted six exemptions to the DMCA in 2006…
If Apple gets its way, young hackers like AriX would be considered criminals — and any attempt to rework the copy of a software program that they legally own would be considered illegal at best and a threat to national security as worst. Creating a generation of people who are forced by law to simply take technology “at interface value” (as Sherry Turkle likes to say) is a recipe for disaster. I wonder how many mechanics or engineers our society would have produced during the industrial age if a generation of young people were told it was illegal to tinker with a car or bike that they legally owned? Would Bill Gates or Steve Jobs have even existed (at least as we know them) if they weren’t allowed to tinker with the various technologies they interacted with during their youth? Copyright laws were created to ensure creativity – not to ensure the power of certain governments or corporations.
