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Copyright
Net neutrality
Digital rights management
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Doubleshot Expresso aims to bring together a community of passionate people for intelligent discussion on these issues and many others.  This community is designed to be as cohesive as possible, providing for each user a way to seamlessly discuss, and develop ideas with other users.

“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”
-Mahatma Gandhi

(page work in progress)

Free Software

“I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.”

-An excerpt from the GNU Manifesto, by Richard M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation

Free software means freedom of speech. Why is the culture surrounding software any different than that of books? I should be able to use a piece of software, without restrictions, just as I would buy a book without having to worry about the author sueing me for lending it to a friend. The whole culture surrounding books is one of sharing; I read a book, and lend it to someone else to read. Tell me you’ve never read a book that you’ve purchased or rented from a library, tell me you’ve never been given a book that use to be someone else’s, tell me you’ve never lent a book to someone else.

This sharing community exists with free software, and the programs built free of restrictions can benefit from the user’s experience. If a program is lacking a feature, anyone who wants it, can add it, then distribute the modified source code for others who want it. This happens all the time, think of Mozilla, GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org, VLC, The Gimp, Blender; All of them licensed under the GNU Public License, and all of them have been improved, version by version, by a community of users and programmers alike. This culture does not exist with non-free software. With Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, you won’t find the thousands of free plugins that make Firefox so popular, and you certainly won’t find the support that free and open-source programs enjoy in the form of mailing lists, forums, IRC chat, and websites. Non-free software comes packaged with one supporter, the company that made the software. You have no say in the changes that are made with every update, and all the updates comes from within the small circle of developers that support it, even if they aren’t very good at what they do.

Referring back to the the excerpt above, I want to remind you of this princple of “dividing and conquering”, as it applies to much more than software. Any profit-motivated idea will want to maximize profits, and so, in the commercial economy, sharing is generally looked down upon, because when someone shares a song, or a movie, or or a news clip, that translates into a lost sale. This is where copyright policy comes into play.

Copyright, Copyleft

Article 1, Section 8, United States Constitution:

“The Powers of Congress…”To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”

In 1998, The Copyright Act (of 1976) was amended to extend the amount of time an author could hold copyright of his or her works. That bill, the Copyright Term Extension Act, made it so copyright lasts the lifetime of the author, plus 70 years. That very same year, a piece of legislation called the Digital Millinium Copyright Act, or the DMCA, was passed into law. Section 1201 of the DMCA outlaws the circumvention of copy protection schemes except by government institutions, public libraries, and educational facilities. Effectively leaving the average consumer of digital media under the thumb of Big Content. You could buy your mp3 players, your DVD’s, and your music and videos, so long as you agree not to share the content with others or attempt to copy the content, or use it in a manner that it was not meant for, or circumvent the copy protection on it for the purposes of backing up your data to alternate devices. You don’t own the digital content you buy, you’re just licensed to use it, according to the terms of the license. You’re renting it.

The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2007, better known as the PRO-IP Act increased the statutory damages and penalties for infringement of copyright, and created a new executive branch called the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative(USIPER). This new executive branch has the right to seize any computer containing “infringing” content and they’ve international jurisdiction, so they can send copyright cops to other nations to assist in crackdowns.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a global trade agreement that is perhaps the scariest policy yet, because of it’s broad scope, and the fact that negotiations are secret. The European Commission, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, have all acknowledged participating in ACTA negotiations. A leaked document entitled “Discussion Paper on Possible Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” has some pretty terrifying proposals listed, including the authority for border customs authorities to sieze and destroy infringing content or devices that produce or contain infringing content. So if the TSA search’s your laptop at the Los Angeles International Airport, and they find a copy of Daemon Tools installed, they would have every right to destroy your laptop right there.

Today’s copyright policy is designed to treat the end-user as if they’re a criminal, guilty until proven innocent. It’s backwards policy that fights against “the Progress of Science and useful Arts” that the United States Constitution encourages.

Copyleft, is a solution to the problem. Publishing works under a copyleft license ensures that the Intellectual property remains free (free as in “free speech”) and those that would release modified versions of the works cannot make their version in violation of the license. So it’s middle ground. Copyleft allows the end-user to share and modify works, but because of the license, they cannot release a non-free version (thus keeping all works under copyleft, free). The GNU Public License and Creative Commons are examples of copyleft licenses. And you’ll notice the content on this site is licensed under an “Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported” Creative Commons license. You are free to distribute any work produced by my team and I, and you are free to make your own derivative works from it, as long as you give our team credit for the source, you do not use it for commercial(money-making) purposes, and you must license derivative works under the same license I have for the source.

Net Neutrality

Network neutrality is essentially a policy of non-interventionism with regard to the flow of information through a network, particularly the World Wide Web. An ISP should never purposefully interfere with the free flow of content through it’s servers. They should be neutral.

The principles of net neutrality are not exclusive to the internet, in fact, this issue predates the internet and even the personal computer. It really begins in the early 1900’s, with the introduction of broadcast radio. Before commercialization, anyone who had the money to buy a radio could broadcast whatever they wanted, and the devices were marketed on that fact. But when people started to think that they could make commercial radio function through advertising, the content was essentially owned by advertisers(1).

By the mid 1930’s, NBC and CBS owned 97% of night time broadcasting, and by 1947, 97% of all radio broadcasts were affiliated with networks. A network radio station’s programming was based on marketing research conducted by advertisers to generate revenue; hardly an honest way to disseminate information. With the commercialization of radio came the allocation of it’s spectrum. The FCC, in consultation with the networks, allocated the radio spectrum so that only a very few (NBC, CBS, ABC) could get access to it. This was the end of free radio.

There was opposition though; David Sarnoff, widely credited for founding NBC, and General Manager of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), spoke out against radio’s commercialization. Instead favoring his idea of a “radio music box” that paid for programming through the manufacturer’s profits. Political opposition came in the form of then Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover. In 1922, during the first ever National Radio Conference, Hoover said that it was “inconcievable to allow so great a possibility of service to be drowned in advertising chatter.”

But it was.

This game’s a bit different with regard to the internet. The nature of the network is to copy information and then deploy it. Every bit transfered through the internet and displayed on your computer screen is a copy of the source, and the nature of the network allows anyone to make a copy of that copy, and then deploy it for others to make a copy of it. For instance, I have a copy of this essay stored on my flash drive, my internal hard drive, and my external hard drive, and then I upload a copy of it to the website, where you are free to copy and paste the article and store it on your own hard drive. Computers copy information by nature, and when you network a computer to another computer, and then to millions of computers, copying becomes rampant. This poses an interesting problem for Intellectual Property (IP) law (2).

Big Content companies have tried every trick in the book to prevent the public from infringing their IP rights, and it’s Big Content that threatens the free internet, just as the media conglomerates and ad agencies threatened free radio.

A classic example of a violation of net neutrality is Comcast’s packet forgery venture, which was revealed by research done by Comcast subscriber Rob Topolski, prompting an investigation by the Associated Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both of which corroborated Topolski’s findings. Comcast had been injecting RST packets (reset packets) into communications, effectively telling both ends of the connection to stop communicating. The primary target was file-sharing protocols like BitTorrent and Gnutella, but other applications were reportedly affected such as Lotus Notes and Windows Remote Desktop.

On July 25th, 2008, The FCC, under the authority of a 2005 Internet Policy statement, voted to punish Comcast for violating net neutrality. Here is an excerpt from the FCC Policy Statement 05-151:

…that providers of telecommunications for Internet access or Internet Protocol-enabled (IP-enabled) services are operated in a neutral manner. Moreover, to ensure that broadband networks are widely deployed, open, affordable, and accessible to all consumers, the
Commission adopts the following principles:

• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected
  nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of
  their choice.
• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected
  nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their
  choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.
• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected
  nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that
  do not harm the network.
• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected
  nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to competition among network providers,
  application and service providers, and content providers.

Maintaining a free and open internet is absolutely critical to ensure that everyone has a means of communicating with anyone. Like it or not, our entire society is shaped by the Internet’s ability to connect us with one another, and sharing information, without restrictions, is a right of the people, and we will not give it up to appease The Old Way.

(1)From Social Communication in Advertising By William Leiss, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally; pages 108-109:

“Individual Stations became dependent on the networks for material of sufficiently high-quality to draw audiences, and on the fast developing expertise of advertising agencies to secure a stable revenue base. National Broadcasting and national advertisers nicely reinforced each others interests.”

(2)For more information on the involvement of IP law in digital culture, read “Copyright, Copyleft”

More to come:

Digital Rights Management

Independent Media

Constitutional Government