erroneous thoughts

Note: before starting the main point of this post, a pending clarification: in my previous post, I said that I was not sure of whether TPB guys were under the obligation of removing torrents to infringing content, when request to do so by the copyright owners. I’m still not sure, and I will not be reading Swedish law any time soon, but from European Directive 2000/31/EC, Article 12, number 3, it seems to me that yes, they can be compelled into removing torrents to infringing content, but only by a court, not by the copyright owners. I’m not aware of any previous court order to do so, so it seems that even in this matter the admins are not guilty.

OK, now let’s talk about intellectual imaginary property (IP). The first thing you should know about it, is that is not real. The second is that despite being, well, imaginary, it can have pretty serious (aka real) consequences: legal systems worldwide are introducing provisions that guarantee it. Now IP stems from copyright law, so in order to properly understand the former, you need to understand the latter.

Copyright is, first and foremost, a trade-off. It «gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation; after which time the work is said to enter the public domain» [1]. The idea was that economic benefits (read: money) could be drawn by the author from his work, that would inspire further work. After copyright expired, the works would go into the public domain, freely available to everyone. Copyright was thus, a very good trade-off: it inspired both the creation of original work, and at the same time made sure that it would eventually enter public domain. But copyright hasn’t existed since the dawn of time. The first thing resembling modern copyright law was the Statute of Anne, enacted in the United Kingdom in 1709, and works roughly as described above. Before that, or more accurately, before the printing press, there was little need for copyright of any sort. During the Middle Ages (in Europe), books were almost exclusively the privilege of the monasteries. Books were copied by hand, and making a copy took almost the same effort as writing the original. And then along came Gutenberg, and the printing press. All of a sudden it was possible to produce books a lot more cheaply than ever before. This changed things quite a bit. If before, the authors of books, like their counterparts in arts or music, would be sponsored for a patron, now it was possible to live from the writing per se. This made it possible for authors to write more books, more cheaply, to satisfy an increasing demand, owing mainly to the burgeois class. There was however, an underlying problem. Suppose a writer writes a book, and makes a deal with a publisher, to publish the book. What’s to stop another publisher from publishing the same book, and by doing so, taking a chunk (that could be quite big) of the profit from the author (and original publisher)? It was to solve this problem, the copyright laws came into being.

And this was a good scheme for a long time: the culture flourished, a process that still goes on today. But two things started to go wrong: first, the duration of copyright began being extended time after time, resulting in less and less works reaching the public domain. As an idiotic example of this, I call to the stand Mickey Mouse, created in 1928, and still under copyright protection(!!). But the other thing that completely changed the picture, were actually two other things: digital technology, and the internet. Before these two things, and ever since the printing press, publishing, whether books, or later music and movies, had such an high cost that only companies could afford to do it. But as explained above, companies would not do that without the protection of copyright. So the original justification for copyright prevailed until the end of the 90’s. From here on, digital technology and the internet made it stupidly simple (and effective, not to mention comically cheap) to distribute digital works: books, movies, music, software, anything that can be put into digital form. And this is great, except for a small problem: it renders to complete oblivion the old business model. I mean, you only need to buy one copy from the publisher, and from there on you (and everybody else with a computer) can do as many copies as you like. Not good (for the publishers I mean). Actually, evidence is now surfacing that for books, this may very well be a good thing. It is much much more comfortable to read a book in paper form, than to read one from screen. On the other hand, nobody likes to buy a book without an idea of what it is about, because you don’t want to buy a book you will not like to read. Simple solution: grab a digital copy of the book, read enough of it to be reasonably sure you’re going to like it, and then buy the paper version. And this seems to be working. But don’t take my word for it, take Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho’s word (and that’s just one example). Much worse are music and movies, because what the studios and record labels want to sell, is digital music and movies. And you only need one copy of those to supply the rest of the world. This creates the heck of a riddle: one the one hand you do keep movies and music being created, but on the other hand, the monopoly of distribution has irreversibly shifted from Hollywood’s hands into the hands of computer owners, who couldn’t care less about the profitability of the distribution business. Inspect the problem more closely, however, you’ll quickly think of a solution. Selling the movie after it is done is fiction, but what about getting the prospective audience to finance it, before actually doing it? Seems like a good solution: if you want us to do the movie, hand over the cash! After the movie is done, release for everyone to copy and see. But human beings, being, well, human, are not always fond of simple solutions, specially when risking monetary loss.

So the publishing industry decided for another not so simple idea: if you make a book, you can sell a book, and the person it is sold to will not be able to copy it. The same goes for cars, clothes, etc, etc, and so they said, the same should go for digital content. And paved was the way that would lead to imaginary property. Through intense lobbying, content distribution companies started pressuring political authorities to criminalize «unauthorized distribution». Unauthorized by them, the «owners» of the content. First in the U.S., and then throughout the world, legal systems started to cave to Hollywood’s rambling. This causes a (big) host of problems, because information is not bound to matter in the same way that books and cars are. An example of this mess is trying to figure out the legality of offering digital content as a gift. Did that just sounded weird? That’s because digital content can’t be owned, so presenting it as a gift is awkward. But that’s not the only problem (nor the more serious, for that matter).

Merely integrating the concept of IP into law, causes the law to be completely detached from reality. And that’s very, very bad, because now you have a law that turns into a criminal almost every one that uses a computer for more than browsing the web (and even in this case, one cannot be sure, but I digress). And what is worse, younger generations, increasingly more savvy computer users, will look at these laws, see them for what they are (an utter nonsense, to avoid stronger wording), and decide to break them without much afterthought (if some at all). Which is hatching a disaster. John Locke wrote that: «Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins. » [2]. If there’s a situation when you can say that law has ended, I’d say that’s when it becomes so detached from reality, that it ends up making a criminal out of the vast majority of computer users. How that opens the path to tyranny is even easier to see: a law that makes a criminal out of almost everyone provides unwarranted leverage to any government, because it enables them to put anyone that they don’t like, for what ever reason, in jail, because (in all likelihood) that person is guilty of copyright infringement. We’re not in the “jail them at will” stage, but the “cut their home internet connection at will” looms dangerously close: something that just a few years ago seemed so unthinkable and far away as the «jail them at will» scenario seems now.

Yet, it all becomes so ridiculous when you just stop to consider the madness that lies at the base of the concept of IP. That information, something, in it very essence, immaterial, has to be subjected to same restrictions of the material world. Actually the situation now is even worse, because the IP concept has outgrown copyright, and IP encompasses not only copyright law, but also patents and trademarks. And that should be good enough reason to shun the expression “intellectual property” entirely, because it only adds confusion when discussing any one of the above three subjects.

But my main point to make here, is that what lies at the core of what is now called “intellectual property”, should be more accurately termed “imaginary property”, for while material creations (sculptures, paintings, books, CDs, DVDs, etc) are both authored and owned, the information they contain (the information in a book, the subject that has been painted or sculpted, the information in a CD or DVD) can be authored, but not owned. Information can be private, but never owned, because it cannot be stolen: if someone gets a hold of some private information, and then spreads it to the four corners of the Earth, that’s a violation of privacy: it deprives me of the fact that the information was private. But if someone gets a hold of something that I publicly shared, and then spreads it, by doing so, it does not deprive me of the original information. By pushing this IP crap forward, the content industry hopes to push the message that the rights granted by copyright are as intrinsic as (material) property rights are, instead of its “trade-off” nature. Which is an outright lie, and should be thus exposed as such.

When I idealized this post, I did not want to make it about copyright. But I guess it’s nearly impossible to talk about The Pirate Bay (TPB) without talking about copyright. As I previously wrote about, three administrators and one investor of TPB were put on trial for copyright infringement, and assisting in making copyright content available. As you probably know, the former charges were dropped by the second day of trial, and the four were found guilty of the latter. That is one of the things I want to talk about.

If the context of torrent trackers, “making copyright content available” means to provide links. No more, no less. In BitTorrent, the shared content, copyrighted or not, is stored on the users’ machines; the tracker (TPB in this case) merely contains a file that says this content is on that and that machine. The user (or more accurately, the user’s BitTorrent client, presumably in behalf of the user) then goes and downloads (i.e. copies) that information into the users’ computer). Compare this to how Google works: you search for a given keyword, and are presented with a set of results. Each of those results is a link, which says that the resource to where I point contains your keyword. If the pointed resource is copyrighted text, then that means you’ve just got a link from Google to a source of copyrighted material, that you can now copy at will.

It seems (and I would agree) that if TPB is guilty of assisting infringement, than so is Google. But there are at least two notorious differences between both, and I think those were the ones that really pushed the “guilty” verdict:

• First, Google indexes essentially, well, everything. TPB on the other hand only indexes torrent files. And, the argument goes, torrent files are usually used to shared music and videos and software, and etc, ergo, are more target and facilitating copyright infringement.
• Secondly, while Google will comply with requests (aka DMCA takedown notices, and the ilk) to remove links to copyrighted material, TPB openly mocks such requests, as well as the ones making them (besides taking no action at all to remove those torrent files, of course).

But it is easy to see that none of those stand closer examination, no matter how much pointless blabber you wrap around it. You cannot assume that BitTorrent will be used only to commit copyright infringement, because well, the protocol doesn’t care about that. Furthermore, if you consider that copyright was originally intended as an incentive to creators, to create more work that would eventually be added to the public domain, then the value of BitTorrent suddenly becomes clear: to allow the free exchange of that body of knowledge, art, music, movies, etc that some of us like to call culture. It is only when one starts to see copyright as some sort of inherent, timeless right (therefore applicable to all information), that one can justify such a bold claim as “BitTorrent is only used for copyright infringement”. But such was never the status of copyright, and should never be the status of copyright (a post will follow explaining why this so).

As to the mockery, and putting forth one last word regarding the status of copyright, I truly dread the day when that status becomes such that mocking it becomes, at best, a stigma, and at worst, unlawful. But this does suggest the TPB folks don’t really care about copyright (and honestly, who can blame them?). And the question now becomes: by not caring, and by doing so explicitly, should that count as “assisting copyright infringement”? The judge certainly seemed to think so. But the judge is wrong. To the best of my knowledge, TPB never forced anyone to commit copyright infringement. Rather when it was used to do so, was because 1) some user already decided to breach copyright (download), and 2) some other user did it before (upload). Users, not the admins. This leaves the question of their (TPB admins’) blatant refusal to remove torrent to copyrighted material. What the law says in this matter I am not sure of (but I will inform myself before writing the aforementioned next post). In any case, assuming the worse, which is, that the law says that the offending torrents should have been removed, than that’s the only thing they should be guilty of! One year in jail and a little under 3 million euros in fines for such a “crime” is absolutely preposterous.

Quando eu era miúdo, e vivia longe da metrópole que é Lisboa, cada vez que lá ia ficava sempre impressionado com a quantidade de auto-estradas que havia. Chegava a ser incomodativo: de cada vez que era preciso ir a parte alguma, lá se ia para a “auto-estrada”. É claro que na altura, eu apelidava de “auto-estrada” tudo o que tivesse mais do que uma via para cada sentido. E no entanto…

Volvidas quase duas décadas, é-me enviada esta maravilha:

[...] o Eurostat revela que Portugal é dos países da Europa com mais auto-estradas por habitante e densidade geográfica; e que a região de Lisboa e Vale do Tejo é a “campeã” da União Europeia neste item, convém parar para reflectir.

Os valores em causa para esse “item” são mostrados aqui.

Inspirado por estes dados, uma rápida google search revela que, entre autoestradas projectadas e construídas, Portugal tem nada mais nada menos do que 47 autoestradas! Nesta entrada na Wikipedia lê-se o seguinte:

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Portugal was the country with the greatest development in the motorway network in the European Union. It had 316 km of motorways in 1990 and the number increased to 1242 km by 1999 and 2100 by the end of 2007.

Não me interpretem mal. Muitas das autoestradas eram investimentos necessários para o país. Mas quando se chega ao cúmulo de ter várias … ehem, autoestradas com (literalmente!) meia dúzia de quilómetros (ou menos), talvez seja mesmo chegada a hora de parar para reflectir. Se a tanta autoestrada juntarmos a treta dos chips nas matrículas do automóveis, qualquer dia estamos a pagar portagens sempre que se andar de carro.

Muitas das autoestradas “de palmo e meio” são construídas com o objectivo de retirar trânsito ao centro das cidades. E é uma boa ideia, se não for levada ao extremo. Porque no extremo, está-se a incentivar a que mais gente leve o carro para o meio das cidades, porque agora já há melhores vias. Quando o que se devia incentivar era precisamente o contrário. Uma muito melhor maneira de diminuir o trânsito dentro das cidades, é criar alternativas ao transporte privado, das periferias, ou zonas residenciais para o centro das cidades. Mas na estrada tanto anda o transporte público como anda o carro. As linhas de comboio por sua vez já não padecem deste mal. Não estou a dizer que os comboios sejam a solução milagrosa, mas quando se chega a construir autoestradas de 5km…

Dá ideia que José Sócrates olha para as autoestradas como olhou para o Magalhães: quanto mais, e mais depressa, melhor. Mas tal como os computadores não são uma solução milagrosa para o ensino, do mesmo modo as autoestradas não são uma solução mágica para o desenvolvimento do país. No ensino, os computadores podem ser uma ferramenta valiosa, se usados como parte de uma estratégia bem definida. E na muito almejada estratégia para desenvolver o país, as autoestradas estão na mesma situação. Tendo em conta o número delas, já era bem altura de expandir os horizontes para lá do asfalto.

Agradeço ao Pedro Marques o ter-me enviado os links para o artigo do Expresso, e para a imagem

Another great TED talk:

The best and most “right to the point” explanation of how science works I’ve ever seen. Enjoy!