I am a right-wing libertarian. Something which probably isn't hard for many people to deduce from reading my writings, or listening to my podcast.
I'm a capitalist. I believe in free markets. I believe in small government. But there's a catch.
When corporations use either lobbyists or their employment footprint to influence or blackmail governments into adopting legislation which benefits their industry, at the expense of fairness to individuals, I have a serious problem.
Enter the case of Media Defender; a U.S.-based company, focused on disrupting piracy activities on the internet. Sounds like a well-intentioned business concept, until you look at how they go about doing what they do.
Over the Memorial Day weekend in the United States, a legitimate internet television site, known as Revision3, which produces original tech-centric programming, was knocked clean off the internet in a Denial of Service attack launched by Media Defender.
The reason?
Unbeknown to Revision3, their servers were being exploited by users of BitTorrent to seed links to online copyrighted material.
Now, understand, that Revision3's servers never actually contained any illegal, pirated materials. Their tracking servers were only being used as online compasses—if you will— which tell BitTorrent applications where to find pieces of the files that make up, say a movie or music file.
Having discovered this, Media Defender began a concerted campaign to flood Revision3's servers with bogus information, intended to corrupt the downloads of BitTorrent users.
On Friday, before the Memorial Day weekend, Revision3's staff was alerted to the misuse of their servers and immediately moved to close the security hole. While one would think this would bring an end to Media Defender's disruptive activities, they instead stepped up their attacks on Revision3 in response to closing the security hole.
You see, because Revision3 uses BitTorrent to distribute their own content, in order to reduce operating costs, which is completely legal and legitimate, they are forced to run what's known as a BitTorrent Tracking Server, in order to seed their content onto the internet.
The problem is, that Media Defender has decided they are against BitTorrent in all it's forms, and as such, took it upon themselves to launch a massive attack on Revision3 as a response to restricting access to their servers.
For the sum of the Memorial Day long weekend, due to a concerted assault of bandwidth from Media Defender, Revision3's entire computer network was brought to it's knees and crashed.
As a result, Revision3 lost upwards of $150,000 in revenue due to lost advertising and viewership.
Of course, this sounds like a criminal act, doesn't it? Well, not anymore.
You see, due to changes in U.S. law favoring copyright holders to enforce their copyrights by increasingly clandestine means, the FBI has informed Revision3 that what Media Defender did was only a "legal grey area".
Think about that for a second. A grey area.
If I took it upon myself, to attack Media Defender in a massive online attack, and take their servers off the internet, I would be arrested, pay a massive fine, and potentially go to jail.
But because Media Defender made a mistake, in the name of protecting copyright, US law is on their side.
Essentially, the RIAA and MPAA in the United States are licensed cyber terrorists, granted the legal authority to violate people's privacy rights, commit acts of cyber vandalism, deny consumers domain over their purchased property (such as the backing up of legally purchased CDs and DVDs), and so on and so forth.
When fairness of the application of law, and civil liberties come face-to-face with corporate interests, as a libertarian, civil liberties should always win.
A free market does not imply that a government exists in partnership with corporate interests. That is cronyism. Not capitalism.
A free market is about the right of the individual to spend their resources in the way which best represents their interest. Property rights solidify this principle.
While control over intellectual property in the information age presents many challenges for the producers of content, it is not acceptable for us to bend over backwards and sacrifice basic fairness in law on the mantle of preventing piracy.
In fact, if the Stephen Harper-led Conservative government implements it's treaty obligation to enact the Canadian version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act here in Canada, we will begin start to see incidents similar to the Media Defender-Revision3 case happening here.
That is not acceptable. Because, as this case demonstrates: even if you aren't doing anything wrong, you still have something to worry about.
I have no problem with the MPAA taking people to court for violating their copyrights as long as the MPAA and the individual or individuals accused are equal before the law. But this is not what such laws do. They give big businesses extraneous power to violate privacy, and commit acts of electronic sabotage and vandalism, such as with DRM solutions like AACS used on Blu-Ray discs (yes, they can remotely sabotage your Blu-Ray player if it doesn't meet their standards--preventing it from playing movies).
Why are governments leaning over backwards to allow for this?
If the Harper government proceeds with their plans to allow for this type of activity, then not only will I not vote for the Conservative Party (as is my current plan), but the party will be dead to me, as a cronyist, Liberal Party redux.
I'm very sorry to say Mike, but I don't think you are very right-wing. It seems to me that if you are going to come down against business, that you are coming down on the left. Plain and simple.
Totally agree. This is the kind of thing high-profile experts like Michael Geist (who holds a research chair at Ottawa U) has been warning about.
I agree, Mike, this is a point of Libertarian principle. I really like your angle on this. Liberty is liberty. DRM is a scourge that must be fought. If the owners of this content want to keep it secure, it is up to THEM to keep it that way. Public domain is public domain. The ramifications are huge. Keep the internet FREE.