The sentencing of Anton Vickerman, the 38-year-old founder of Surfthechannel.com for conspiracy to defraud has opened up the debate on copyright once again – and it’s a debate that’s not going to go away any time soon. The question at the core seems to be one that goes to the heart of how we communicate online: the web depends on people being allowed to move back and forth, link and share. Paying for content seems to be anathema to this.
But, the counterargument goes, someone, somewhere, has to pay for all this stuff. The films and music into which people put huge amounts of effort cannot simply be endlessly shared and viewed without any return given to the creators.
This is not the universal view of creative people. Back in 2010, Simon Indelicate of independent label Corporate Records, told Index:
“The Record Industry has always exploited the expense involved in recording, promoting and distributing music to offer terrible, bankrupting deals to all but a vanishingly tiny minority of musicians. The Internet has nuked their business model by making these once scarce resources abundant – artists should be celebrating the opportunity this offers…[F]ilesharing has directly benefited me as a promotional tool.”
It could be argued that music is an exception in this model: people often “follow” bands in the same way they follow football clubs, displaying their loyalty by paying to download the records, buying the t-shirts and going to gigs. The film and TV industries do not really experience the same devotion.
We are left with a lot of questions: Are “traditional” creative industry models sustainable? Is posting links, even for profit, genuinely a breach of copyright? If so, what is the correct sanction? And what about those who download files? Is it desirable, or even realistic, to pursue every single downloader? There are free speech arguments on all sides of this debate, and Index will be exploring them in the coming weeks.
We’ve heard a lot about how the Olympics Games will take over London in the past few weeks: missile launchers on rooftops, non-approved chips banned from the Olympic site, protest threatened, Twitter accounts censored. But we must admit we hadn’t noticed the Olympic organisers attempts to change the way the entire internet works. Our attention has been drawn to the terms of use of the London 2012 website, which make it very clear under what circumstances you’re allowed link to the site:
Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, business, goods or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organisations (or our or their activities, products or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner. The use of our logo or any other Olympic or London 2012 Mark(s) as a link to the Site is not permitted. View our guidelines on Use of the Games’ Marks.
Got that? You’re only allowed link to the official site of the Olympics if you’re going to say nice things about the Olympics.
This obviously presents a problem. I really, really want to say that this is one of the silliest things I’ve read in my entire life, and that it demonstrates a level of control freakery that even the most hardened Olympisceptic could not have imagined. But the problem with that is that I’d be breaking the rules by linking to the page containing this information so that you could read it for yourself.
So I’m not going to say that. I’m going to say that this is a brilliant piece of brand management that’s not at all open to ridicule and scorn, and that’s it’s extremely unlikely that anyone would ever make a joke about this rule by linking to the Olympic site with language that could be “false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable”.
Why did the Today Programme invite Claire Perry MP to debate website blocking this morning? Aside from giving Perry an impression of authority on the internet that she does not command — the peg for the discussion was the high court ruling that ISPs block the music file-sharing site Pirate Bay. Perry is leading a campaign to make internet service providers (ISPs) responsible for access to pornography online. While both issues concern ISPs’ role as gatekeepers, conflating pornography (legal) with copyright infringement (illegal) dangerously muddies the argument – a point that the Internet Service Provider Association’s Nicholas Lansman attempted to make before being defeated by John Humphrys’ bluster.
Despite the government making it clear that it is not interested in introducing default filtering for pornographic websites in a response to Index on Censorship and other civil liberties groups in January, Claire Perry remains insistent that this is what is required. Her scaremongering report (“the whole history of human sexual perversion is only a few clicks away”) calls for network level “opt-in” to force ISPs to provide customers with a “clean internet feed as standard”. In other words, Perry would like the internet to be censored for everyone; in order to access “adult content”, customers would have to choose to receive it.
The first problem with this is – who decides what is adult content? The classification of pornography is a subjective issue: one man’s work of art is another man’s history of sexual perversion. All filtering systems will censor some aspects of culture as pornography. The researcher Seth Finkelstein was the first to decrypt blacklists of pornographic material back in 1995 and found that feminism, gay rights and sex education were all swept up by puritanical filters. It is not possible to filter pornography without interfering with our right to freedom of expression and our access to information.
The second problem is – that Perry and her supporters are calling for the censorship of legal material. This would set a dangerous precedent for censoring any material that we might personally find distasteful or offensive.
And the third problem is an issue that faces the high court as much as any parent who would like the responsibility for monitoring their children’s access to content taken out of their hands. If, as Perry’s report claims, children are now more “tech savvy” than their parents and know how to circumvent device filters, then they will find their way past network filters too.
The blunt tool of high court injunctions and crude filters can only offer limited protection – whether for copyright holders or anxious parents – at the high price of our access to information .
Arthur Kemp, the British National Party’s former foreign affairs spokesman and webmaster has forced several internet service providers (ISPs) to remove images of him apparently posing next to Nazi memorabilia from left wing and anti-fascist blogs. Kemp, originally from South Africa, claims the image is faked, and is being circulated maliciously by his ex-wife.
In his efforts to suppress the image, Kemp has employed a range of the tools available to the online censor, using takedown notices containing claims of copyright infringement and defamation.
Lotshasbeenwrittenhere about the perniciousness of takedown notices. To put it simply: internet service providers have neither the time, the money, nor the inclination to fight or even investigate every single takedown request; they know that if they refuse to remove material, they may find themselves liable for the content and any breach of law involved in hosting the content. And much as we may think it should be, it is not the job of ISPs to defend free speech. It is their job to provide a service and make money. In one notable case study, Oxford University researchers set up sites containing text from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and then complained, in the guise of an independent organisation representing Mill’s estate, about copyright breach to the various ISPs hosting the sites. The UK-based ISP immediately complied with the takedown request.
Kemp’s claims do raise some questions. Firstly, he alleges that publication of the image breaches his copyright; he also claims that the photograph was taken (and subsequently altered) by a friend. In the UK at least, the copyright therefore belongs to his friend and not to Kemp.
Kemp, in his message to the host of blog Harry’s Place, claimed in addition that the image was defamatory. This brings up a fascinating political and legal question: is it actually defamatory to associate a former member of the fascist British National Party and the far-right South African Conservative Party with Nazism? And if so, why not sue the friend he claims created the image or the ex-wife he accuses of circulating it, rather than blogs that oppose his politics?
Kemp could, perhaps, in an effort to support his claim that the photo is merely Nazi-based larks among far-right friends, produce the original photograph. He has yet to do so.
But exoneration is not normally the issue in this type of case. It’s more about attempting to shut down debate and intimidate opponents with legalese.
