The New York Times is reporting that the Immigration and Customs Service, a part of Homeland Security, has seized numerous sites accused of facilitating illegal sharing of music and movies through the internet.
This is just a quick diary, and if this has already been reported here, I apologize for the redundancy. I was headed to bed and saw this on the Huffington Post as I was plugging in my Phone to charge overnight.
The significance of this move, including its scale and close working relationship between Homeland Security and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) must be ominous to those denizens of cyber space who value both freedom of speech and the rule of law. More after the jump.
Of course, we all know that the RIAA has been engaged in a campaign of intimidation by filing multiple accusations of copyright infringement against thousands of internet users, often with very flimsy evidence. And despite a few setbacks, that campaign has successfully bankrupted teenagers and their parents for life, even when there is little or no evidence supporting the RIAA claims. They have also engaged in serving many thousands of random take-down notices, often of material that was not under copyright, or material whose copyright owners has granted permission for the posting and sharing of the material.
Thus far, the campaign has been witless, clumsy and even ineffective; but it has been legal. Copyright infringement is a civil offense, which means infringing a copyright makes one liable to being sued, and being required to pay restitution to the copyright holder for actual losses, and punitive damages up to $100,000 for each occurrence.
The twist, in this instance, is that the intervention of a federal law enforcement agency, doing the work of the RIAA, has escalated copyright infringement to a criminal offense. Further, there seems to have been little respect for the rule of law, as the domains were seized under warrants which were not served to the owners of the domains, or the servers, but to the ISP's who hosted the domains. Clearly, if property is seized without serving a warrant on the owner of the property, we have gone beyond the law and entered a zone where the siezure and closing of any internet site can be justified.
In particular, is the way in which the shutdown occurred. Homeland Security did not just shut down the sites; they used the Internets Domain Naming System, which translates domain names into the IP addresses computers use to locate sites, to redirect traffic from the closed sites to their own server showing a Homeland Security seizure notification. Again, this seems fairly new, since in the past sites would just disappear.
In fact, the present seizure has been executed in the manner that a new bill working its way through congress stipulates, rather than current law. The Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act, Sponsored by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, would seem to allow Homeland Security to seize and shutdown, Without Notice, any site on which the contents merely reflect political support for weakening current copyright law, or make the case for piracy.
Since these two examples are political speech, the ability of Homeland Security to take down sites at will opens the way to widespread censorship of ideas and political speech, as well as the interruption of sites actually engaged in selling or distributing pirated works.
Full Disclosure here: I've never been a fan or advocate of piracy, but I do think the recent changes to the copyright, trademark and patent laws have far overstepped their purpose; and I view the tactics of the RIAA, and now the ICE, to be beyond the pale of lawful action. Property disputes occur, but criminalizing those disputes elevates the corporate owners of copyright above the status of equal citizen, and allows judgment without trial by law enforcement agencies, on behalf of a commercial corporate entity. That's my opinion.
I'll also note that, as a holder of copyright over many photographic images, the recent changes have made it easier for large entities to enforce even shaky claims, and much hard for small artists, such as myself, to enforce our own copyrights.
The biggest concern here, of course, is what direction this will take, since political speech is now joining the ranks of banned activities; and how often the authorities will take unilateral action, without notification of those who own sites. The censorship power is becoming wider, easier to wield and more difficult to resist.
That, in itself, should concern everyone. So, however one feels of about piracy and file sharing, this may be a critical event that will forever change the way the internet is used, and the amount of freedom enjoyed by those using it.