My God, will they have to ban Tumblr?

The internet is for porn--unless you live in Egypt. Reuters reports that the nation's public prosecutor has announced that, in response to a 2009 court ruling, the nation is now required to block pornographic websites.

Somewhere, Rick Santorum just perked up his ears in interest.

Reuters says:

Prosecutor Abdel Maguid Mahmoud ordered government authorities "to take the necessary measures to block any corrupt or corrupting pornographic pictures or scenes inconsistent with the values ​​and traditions of the Egyptian people and the higher interests of the state."

Frankly, that could be anything from Kink.com to Victoria's Secret. And please note that he doesn't specify what those "necessary measures" are. Presumably the headache that is actual enforcement will fall to the country's poor telecommunications minister, who recently complained of the technical difficulties in enacting such a ban.

Maybe Mr. Mahmoud should've taken a moment to consider the example of America's war on weed. As the Electronic Freedom Frontier put it in a statement opposing the move, "Censorship circumvention software is about to become very popular in Egypt."

Just goes to show that government officials making ill-informed policies for the internet knows no borders.

After the vote, lead committee member and (and crusading ACTA opponent) David Martin explained that the document was simply too vague and the sanctions seemed disproportionate. Then he got a little grandiose, as parliamentarians have been known to do: "I'm glad that civil liberties won over," he said.

This isn't technically the end of A.C.T.A. Unlike in the U.S. Congress, where bills must make their way out of committee onto the floor for a formal vote, I.N.T.A. was merely deciding whether or not to recommend the treaty's passage. It'll still go up for a Parliament-wide vote in July. But the committee's decision carries a great deal of weight, and if rejected in that vote, it's curtains.

This prompts us to wonder what an Anon party looks like.

I suspect I spy copyrighted content. (screenshot)

As anybody in the music business can tell you, every crew needs a suit. And Pinterest just picked up a high-profile one to handle any legal issues that might crop up. Business Insider is reporting that the company has hired Michael Yang, Google deputy general counsel, to serve as as their head of legal. As BI points out, Mr. Yang has been the point man for many a controversy.

We suspect Pinterest didn't hire Mr. Yang merely to look over contracts, though. Anyone who's scrolled through Pinterest lately has probably noticed a lot of professional-looking content, and we're not talking about the images taken from catalogs, either. The main feed shows more than a few pictures that look an awful lot like copyrighted images

In recent months, the site has implemented some safety measures, like auto-attribution for Flickr images and making it possible for sites to disable pinning. Plus, the company also promises to take down any infringing images upon receiving a notice from copyright holders. But none of those measures entirely prevents a lawsuit, and then there's always the chance of SOPA-like legislation.

Yet another potential wrinkle is the possibility that users could be vulnerable to infringement lawsuits.  Back in February, one photographer/lawyer took a look at the terms of service and got so nervous she just nuked her pin boards. And it might  seem far-fetched now, but nobody who downloaded music in the early 2000s [looks around, shifty-eyed] thought that was a big deal, either.

(Source: Megaupload Mega song via Youtube)

Look, Megaupload wasn’t just a shady means for Kim Dotcom to acquire luxury cars, okay? Mr. Dotcom took a break from laying down tracks on his rap album to inform TorrentFreak that before the feds crashed the party, the company was planning a multi-billion-dollar IPO. Now, does that sound like a massive conspiracy to you?

TorrentFreak did a little digging and it seems there’s something to the claims. A corporate advisor named Richard Lim confirmed that he’d been tapped by Megaupload management to assist, and he says they were in talks with “a number” of potential Big Four auditors, as well as investment banks who might participate. He told them “most of the response was positive” and expressed skepticism that Megaupload could fairly be called a criminal enterprise:

They also knew full well that it would require a lot of scrutiny, due diligence and review of the operations, financials and overall business model of Megaupload not only by the auditors / accountants, lawyers for regulatory filings and IPO underwriters, but also the various regulatory agencies which govern the stock exchanges and public markets.

This does not fit with the ‘Mega-Conspiracy’ concept that Megaupload management is accused of, including that they knowingly and secretly conspired to do and hide criminal activities in Megaupload."

It's true that submitting to a top-down audit doesn't square our expectations for a company engaged in systematic wrongdoing. That said, we're not betting the Betabeat virtual farm that Megaupload thought that far ahead.

Ask this guy what happens when you cross the MPAA.

It’s going to take more than the Megaupload takedown to satisfy the copyright Rottweilers at the MPAA. Now they’re determined to convince the legal world that not just hosting, but embedding protected content is a form of direct infringement, says Ars Technica.

At issue: An internet pornography company, Flava Works, discovered its adult wares being shared on the video bookmarking site MyVidster. MyVidster wasn’t hosting the videos; they were merely embedded. Previous precedent suggests that, at worst, this would fall under the harder-to-enforce rules regarding secondary infringement, which carries lighter penalties. But last July, Judge John F. Grady ruled that MyVidster was engaging in a form of direct infringement. Google and Facebook and the Electronic Frontier Foundation quickly filed amicus briefs, calling for an overturn.

That’s where the MPAA jumped in with its own brief supporting the decision and asking that the court draw no distinction between the two acts. The organization, while magnanimously acknowledging that "there is nothing inherently insidious about embedded links," points outs that "this technique is very commonly used to operate infringing internet video sites." The brief continues:

Pirate sites can offer extensive libraries of popular copyrighted content without any hosting costs to store content, bandwidth costs to deliver the content, and of course licensing costs to legitimately acquire the content.

Such a precedent would likely make sites think twice about even allowing embedding. Because who wants to be dragged out of a panic room in the middle of the night?

Rick Webb

So the troubling anti-piracy bills Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) are on the ropes, effectively dead. The celebrations have begun. It's exciting. What a great, proud week for the internet, for democracy, and for fighting against money in our politics. But that doesn't mean that we can let our guard down and overlook how the the bill's defenders glossed over how SOPA and PIPA could be used to target U.S. citizens.

I share concerns with people like developer Marco Ament and journalist MG Seigler that this is just one victory in a larger battle. Furthermore, I echo my friend (and former investee) Matt Galligan's comments that "I’d GLADLY pay for premium content but instead the only option I have is piracy." This week, I've been trying to finish up watching season 2 of Boardwalk Empire. I pay for HBO through Time Warner NY. Because I use a TiVo, rather than the crappy DVR Time Warner foists upon me, I am unable to watch Boardwalk Empire on On Demand. Time Warner has no HBO Go. I pay something like $60 a month for HBO and I still can't watch their shows.

(And I am appalled at MPAA head Chris Dodd's blatant statements about money in politics when he says "Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake." It's disgusting.)

All that being said, I find it curious that most of the chatter around the web on SOPA and PIPA was around the admittedly nefarious firewall technology to block foreign sites. Indeed, when defending the bill, the RIAA focused on jobs and overseas pirating sites. What they failed to mention is Section 201: "Streaming Of Copyrighted Works In Violation Of Criminal Law." This section is part of Part II of the bill, "Additional Enhancements to Combat Intellectual Property Theft." Despite its title, the section deals with all types of downloading and transmission of files. And it is not limited to owners of infringing sites. It applies to all Americans. RIAA almost never mentioned the elevation of downloading by American citizens to a criminal offense. If this bill was only about stopping overseas pirated sites, then why was Section 201 even in the bill, or at least why was it not limited to the operators of these sites?

To back up a bit, we have seen over the last 10 years or so a massive litigation effort by RIAA against people who download files. The effort has seen a multitude of complications, embarrassments, discovery of grey areas and incidents of mistaken identity. To put it simply, a computer is not a person, and RIAA has been in many instances lax in confirming who was actually using the computer. RIAA has, thus, brought lawsuits against parents of children, the elderly who do not know how to use their computers, people who don't even own computers and even dead people. It's been stressful and costly for many.

RIAA has pulled back on this, mainly due to the adverse PR fallout of the lawsuits. Part II of SOPA, of course, would have given them convenient cover. The civil suits were bad enough, but now RIAA sought to have the government do their dirty work for them. Previously, none of these parents or grandmothers were liable to go to jail. With SOPA, that would have no longer been the case. "How can you be upset about your grandmother? It's not us that's suing them, it's the government. Granny committed a federal offense." Read the bill.

(I should also mention I am the owner of a record label. Even in that capacity, RIAA is a joke. It does not speak for me, it does not care about small, independent record labels. Indeed, RIAA is often completely antithetical to the interests of content producers.)

Now, it's easy to think that the law only covers those who have done a ton of downloading. The numbers used in Section 201 are one or more works that retails for over $1,000 or isn't out commercially yet in the United States. One import CD or DVD and you would be in violation.

For works out already in the U.S., the number is 10 or more.  The problem here is that the bill makes no accommodation for the way that file sharing actually works. If you run BitTorrent, by default you are uploading as well as downloading. That's the way it works. It's not hard to accidentally share an entire folder of legitimately obtained music. Little bits and pieces of every album on a computer may have been uploaded. The law does not address this. If your kid or grandkid puts a BitTorrent app on your computer and leaves it running, you may well be breaking the law. Right now, you might end up with a civil suit. With SOPA, you might have ended up in jail.

Sure, the law also says "For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction, distribution, or public performance of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement of a copyright." That should protect you, right? How can we know? First, they do not exclude the presence of an application such as BitTorrent being on your computer, even though it may have legitimate use. It's not unreasonable to assume that could be used as evidence of will. Your bandwidth uses could also implicate you. Who knows. It's a wide open field. More worryingly, the criminal charge may well go to juries. Juries that may not know how any of this works.

It's not clear to me why any of this is needed. It's not clear to me why we need to make this even more draconian. A meme has been going around the internet: "Under SOPA, you could get 5 years for uploading a Michael Jackson song, one year more than the doctor who killed him." It sounds insane, but it is true.

On a recent segment of the Chris Hayes show, Mr. Hayes interviewed NBC Universal VP and General Counsel Rick Cotton. Mr. Cotton was bordering on abusive in his relentless insistence that anyone who read the bill would see that SOPA was targeting oversees sites. "What this legislation is addressing are websites, wholesale devoted to illegal activities that if they were in the United States would be subject to criminal prosecution and to shutdown. This legislation would not effect a single site in the United States.... And it is totally wrong to say that a single post or a SMALL amount of legitimate activity would be threatened by this legislation." Mr. Cotton completely failed to mention Part II of the bill, except by alluding, broadly, to Part II and implying you'll be fine. Mr. Cotton goes on to say "This legislation is devoted exclusively to foreign sites."

This is a lie. Cotton was willfully fudging, trying to say that out of all the websites, the legislation only applied to foreign ones. But an entire additional section of that bill referred to US citizens. And we should be wary.