WIRED:LAST WEEK, I referred to the settlement between Irish ISP Eircom and the Irish music industry body IRMA, whereby Eircom agreed to block the Pirate Bay from Irish Net users.
That prompted an email from Willie Kavanagh, the chairman of IRMA, and EMI Music Ireland. The top of it was marked all in capitals “NOT FOR PUBLICATION. FOR REFERENCE ONLY”, so I’ll forbear from quoting directly; I think I can reveal that Mr Kavanagh thinks I am misinformed. I will say that he asked if I’d got my facts from a press release, and kindly told me that if I got in touch, I might hear a more honest story than those who opposed him. He used a choice phrase for those opponents which I would quote if I could.
Let me first say I’m not in the habit of reading press releases from Mr Kavanagh’s opposition because (if I’m right in assuming who he views as his opponents), I spent much of the last decade “writing” their press releases. I worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for five years, an internet rights organisation whose initials Kavanagh’s colleagues once expanded to “Everything For Free”.
I founded the Open Rights Group, one of the grassroots organisations fighting to prevent the same kind of internet blocks in the UK that IRMA raised in Ireland.
These days I’ve stayed mostly out of these copyright battles. My day job now is more concerned with helping bloggers and online journalists who are censored, tortured or imprisoned. The stakes are higher, but it’s oddly a slightly less frustrating or stressful job.
Let me explain. In 2005, when Sony, the company currently negotiating for the music publishing chunk of EMI, stuck concealed software on their CD music albums in a ham-fisted attempt to “copy protect” them by preventing customers from transferring their purchased music onto their computers or MP3 players.
The software was what was known by computer security professionals as a “rootkit”. It installed itself silently on PCs. It was written in the same way as the viruses and trojans that infect people’s computers, and made it easier for others to attack customers. Sony had no idea what they’d done to their own artist’s fans. They justified it as a necessary step to fight piracy.
Eventually, Sony and EMI and all the rest abandoned these crazy attempts to copy protect their music. It was ultimately Steve Jobs, a technologist who could also speak the music industry’s language who persuaded them of the futility of DRM, and how it was destroying their own digital music market.
Ironic, because for years Jobs had used the copy controls the music labels had demanded to lock all of their businesses into the iPod platform, giving him a near-monopoly on online music sales. As we had also predicted.
As these fiascos progressed, I’d sit with one of the EFF lawyers, and watch him literally slap his forehead in frustration. He was a huge music fan, with a record collection of thousands of CDs, an investment of tens of thousands of dollars. He watched his favourite industry blundering around, running roughshod over people’s control of their own computers and the freedom of their networks, while doing little to prepare itself for a new digital age.
“If you gave me 15 minutes with heads of those companies,” he told me, “I swear I could explain to them how they’re shooting themselves in the foot.”
They never met us, of course (except when we sued them). Instead we wrote white papers explaining alternatives for the music business, and attempted to steer them away from their most damaging endeavours. In return, they assumed we were just the “free for everybody” brigade; an underworld of people who were constantly machinating against them for the lowest motives.
They portrayed those we defended as profiteers, like the commercial pirates who manufacture counterfeit CDs. They said we stood for an immoral generation who refused to pay for music.
As I left EFF, the story was we were all in the pay of companies like Google and the ISPs who were apparently bankrolling a fake grassroot campaign for their own ill-gotten broadband spoils.
Meanwhile, Mr Kavanagh and his colleagues now take ISPs to court to build an internet censorship infrastructure; a net infrastructure, I see in my new job, working against bloggers in Tunisia, in China, and Turkey.
Like the rootkit, they believe this system will never be used for dangerous ends. Like DRM, they believe that it will work as an effective roadblock to piracy.
I never saw the music industry as an evil opponent. They struck me as determined advocates for their business, who fundamentally misunderstood the wider side-effects of their actions, as well as the motives of those who might oppose them. The dictators I deal with these days, at least, know exactly what they’re doing to their societies. I don’t have to work to correct their misconceptions or spend hours agonising about how they might save themselves. I just help braver people then I clean up the mess they leave behind. I wonder who will do the same for Mr Kavanagh’s plans for the internet?
