What do we want to be?

The fight to secure copyrights on the internet will always be an ongoing one, but the most recent dilemma is that being faced in the UK with the proposed Digital Economy Bill that has just recently seen a number of amendments that are cause for concern (to say the least).

The bill was previously under fire for offering unlimited power when dealing with copyright infringement on the internet – without any future need for consent of Parliament.  Thankfully, this aspect of the bill has been voted down; but only to be replaced by amendments which are of equal concern.

The amendments deal with two things specifically.  Firstly, the ability for the high court to issue an injunction against websites that host a large amount of copyrighted material (of which there is no better example than the ever-popular YouTube); and secondly, a call for the banning of private web-lockers that allow storage and sharing of files too large to send via email.

The two articles from the Guardian website that I have linked to above give a good overview of what is occurring here, and why we should be concerned, so I won’t go into too much more detail about this new assault on our civil liberties.  However, it is worth repeating the quote from Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group; who rightly states that: “This would open the door to a massive imbalance of power in favour of large copyright holding companies. Individuals and small businesses would be open to massive ‘copyright attacks’ that could shut them down, just by the threat of action”.

This is the problem, that these laws will be abused just as they have in the past through gross exploitation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States of America.   Countless false take-down notices have been filed in the name of the DMCA, and the problem is that they work.  Sites and content gets taken down or restricted by hosting companies and service providers before any attempt to discover whether or not the claim is a valid one – it is a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ system, and for the most part there aren’t many of us that can afford to be proven innocent.  For a more thorough overview of the legal implications of this bill as currently worded, I highly recommend this post by Lilian Edwards.

Why should we really be concerned?  Because power is being handed over to large multi-national corporations, destroying the ability for individuals and smaller companies to flourish in the online environment.  Not only this, but other amendments are attacking our rights to privacy on the internet under the guise that we might be using such privacy for copyright infringement – I’m sorry, but does this sound completely absurd to anybody else?

I fear that what is occurring here is a common problem when it comes to legislation regarding internet technology – the people passing the bills don’t have any real idea what they are doing.  They are ignorant of the issues involved and are basing their decisions on the opinions of lobby groups and vested interests coming from the very industries these laws will benefit.  There is little regard for alternative voices and opposition; and the best we get is one evil offered up as a solution against another evil.  Well guess what?  They’re both still evil.

The real issue here is that these laws are so ridiculously all-encompassing that they cannot possibly be upheld, which begs the question why they should be implemented in the first place.  The other problem is that the manner in which these laws will likely be used, based on how such things have happened in the past, means that they will often be counter to concepts such as liberty and democracy.  The internet is one of the few true bastions of these two ideals – and you better believe that items such as the Digital Economy Bill are an attempt to take away these sanctuaries of free human expression.  If not now, they will be used as such at some point in the future upon implementation.

In the guise of protecting episodes of television sitcoms or the latest manufactured pop music money-spinner we are at risk of steering society towards totalitarianism – but not just of the fascist government kind.  This form of totalitarianism comes from the multi-nationals, the conglomerate corporations that can only exist because we as a global society have become dependant upon them.  Democratic government – true representation of the people – is being subverted through ignorance and political bullying, and all in the name of the almighty dollar.

I’m not advocating the right to infringe copyright, don’t get me wrong.  What I am advocating is that we don’t walk blindly towards totalitarianism purely for the sake of corporate profit – for what else is that but a Faustian deal with the devil that will, if we are not diligent, undermine the very freedoms and civil liberties that we have fought for over millennia.  We already have in place laws and capabilities to fight against copyright infringement – so use them rather than implementing ludicrously wide-reaching and undemocratic new systems that offer little more than the opportunity to chip away at our civil liberties and bully us into submission.

I’ve put up a few posts recently that revolve around multi-national technology giant Google, both for positive and negative reasons, and today’s news has once again brought the company right into the ethical spotlight.  An Italian judge has convicted three Google executives and given each a six-month suspended sentence because of a video of an autistic boy being bullied that was uploaded onto Google’s video service in 2006.

At the time, the clip led to criminal convictions for those involved in the creation and dissemination of the video; however this recent conviction has led to a flurry of debate and discourse over the very nature of the internet and who should be held ultimately accountable for uploaded content.

On the one hand there are those that argue that Google should be held accountable for providing a platform, and in particular that they should have responded much more quickly to complaints about the video clip which took two months to be taken down.  Proponents of this side of the argument are also quick to point out that business models and the corporate interests of companies such as Google should not be allowed to override ethical boundaries of human decency – and in this area they certainly seem to have a valid point.

The other side of this debate are arguing very strongly that this verdict – if upheld on appeal – threatens to damage the very core principals of the internet and undermine the tool for freedom of expression that it has become.  In my opinion, convicting Google executives in this manner (individuals who, it must be added, were not even aware of the video until after it was removed) is akin to convicting the manufacturers of the video camera used to film the bullying.

It isn’t just as easy as saying that Google, or other companies who provide user-created content services on the internet, must work harder to ensure that all uploaded content meets legal and ethical requirements.  The sheer amount of data uploaded has long since surpassed any amount that could possibly be monitored by the companies themselves – which is the very reason why the idea of having users flag content as inappropriate is so ubiquitous.  It just isn’t feasible to have all content examined before being made public.

Of course, Italian authorities are no strangers to battles with internet expression; and there have been clear signs over the past few years that many within the Italian government and other positions of authority would like to see some limitations placed upon just how free expression is on the internet.  China is notorious for their censorship and prosecution of those who wish to speak out against their government online.

However, I do think that it is very unlikely that, should this conviction be upheld, there will be any wide-reaching impact on a fundamental level.  But it could still set a precedent which would make online businesses and services much more difficult to run, which ultimately would damage the very fabric of the internet as we now know it.

In the end, this recent ruling seems to revolve around the time lag between the content being uploaded and then subsequently removed.  European law is very clear that internet hosting providers cannot be held accountable for content uploaded onto their services by individual users – at least not without very clear evidence that the provider was explicitly aware of and therefore culpable for the contents continued distribution.

This seems to be yet another debate that has arisen out of a very deep misunderstanding of the manner in which the internet as a medium of expression operates, and how companies that provide hosting services are able to react to inappropriate content.  Hopefully any misunderstandings will be cleared in later appeals and this particular case won’t have long lasting effects on our freedom of expression – but then, maybe we take such freedom so for granted that we are unable to envisage the many instances where it may be used to further corporate agendas over the rights of individuals.

Let us know what you think – which side of this debate do you find yourself on?  Should there even be sides, or are the issues involved just to complex to label simply as a battle surrounding ‘freedom of expression’?  Are there ethical arguments as to why this conviction should be upheld?