WIRED:Pursuing the pirates will never solve the problem, writes DANNY O'BRIEN
FIVE YEARS AGO, Turkey enacted Law 5651, a bill that would lead to the country censoring thousands of websites. In the subsequent years, everything from YouTube and Farmville, porn sites and Richard Dawkins to Turkish local news,Google Maps and gay websites have been blocked.
The country has been criticised by the United Nation’s Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and by MEPs, who have expressed concern that internet filtering would preclude Turkey joining the EU. The censorship, British MEP Richard Howitt said, showed that “the battle for free speech is integral to the changes the country needs to make to uphold European and human rights law”.
The Turkish courts allowed their blockade to begin after videos alleged to be critical of the Turkish founder, Ataturk, were found on the site. But increasingly, rather than Turkey revoking its online censorship, it looks as though countries such as Ireland and Britain may be racing to catch up with it. The British courts this week decided that a clutch of British ISPs would be obliged to block the Swedish file-sharing site, the Pirate Bay.
Eircom agreed to filter the same site after a lawsuit by the Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma) led to an out-of-court agreement. Is blocking the Pirate Bay really equivalent to blocking the whole of YouTube?
It’s worth remembering that, after YouTube was bought by Google in 2006, the US media company Viacom sued Google for $1 billion, accusing YouTube of “massive intentional copyright infringement”.
At least in terms of whether the watching of infringing content goes on, YouTube is clearly a site where copyrighted material is watched without the authorisation of rights holders like Viacom. My guess is that more people watch clips of movies on YouTube than know that the Pirate Bay even exists.
So why not block YouTube?
Worse than such equivalencies – which to be fair, are somewhat strawman, given that the Pirate Bay’s intent is clearly to encourage infringement, and given Google’s compliance in taking down items known to be infringing copyright – are the arguments that will increasingly develop between countries.
Turkey feels anti-Ataturk websites are as dangerous a development as other country’s judiciaries believe infringing websites are. Many nations, such as China, view particular opinions as inherently destabilising and would argue that such questions of public order are worth the social costs of censorship.
The question for Ireland and Britain (and Belgium, and Finland, and Denmark, and Italy) is: what is the next move? Because it’s clear what the next move will be from the Pirate Bay and its supporters.
Circumventing the blocks put up by the ISPs is not difficult, and can be made much easier by the website’s active involvement. If the ISPs are blocking by domain name, the Pirate Bay can reserve another. If they are blocking by IP address, the organisation can obtain new IP addresses, or arrange for proxies.
In fact, the Pirate Bay and its relatives are close to excluding themselves from the entire transaction of finding content. The Pirate Bay no longer provides even files that point to where the real downloadable content is. Instead, it uses “magnet links”, which are simple web links that activate user software that can discover the files on the wider web with no further assistance.
A complete cache of the Pirate Bay’s magnet link collection is less than 90 megabytes. With this file, and a distributed set of regular updates, the Pirate Bay could disappear tomorrow and its users could continue to share without it.
These are the two escalations that the courts, the music industry and the ISPs are unable to factor into their actions.
The courts are attempting to make narrow judgments within the confines of the law, and are rightly unwilling to simply hand over a carte blanche power to the rights holders to block any site in any fashion.
The ISPs, similarly, do not want to be dragged into becoming the self-financing implementation tool of the entertainment industry’s wild goose chase in search of technological fixes. The copyright industry itself seems to believe that repeatedly pursuing the same set of litigatory strategies will solve their structural problems.
In Turkey, YouTube has been banned, intermittently, for more than five years. It remains one of the 10 most popular sites in the country. The blocking has meant headaches for ISPs, and those wishing to use the service, but has trained a population of millions in how to use censorship circumvention software. YouTube remains. Anti-Ataturk propaganda remains online; Richard Dawkins, gay Turks and Kurdish separatism remain.
Five years from now, the Pirate Bay may be gone, but its users will still be sharing, and the copyright industry’s problems with that will remain. All that will be new will be the fragile, unaccountable and global mechanism to punch websites offline.
Western politicians will be unable to wag their fingers at Turkey when their courts are doing as much blocking in their own states. Indeed, they may themselves begin looking for what sites they would like to see vanish from the web. What begins with the Pirate Bay will not end with the Pirate Bay.
