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In our 617th issue:
NASA's successful landing on Mars of an SUV-sized
nuclear rover from a rocket-skycrane should have marked a high point in
collaborative accomplishments between humans and robots. But here on
Earth the situation was a bit more tense. That's because, just hours
after the celebrated touchdown, Vice Magazine's Motherboard blog broke
the news that one of NASA's official clips from the mission had been
pulled from YouTube, replaced with a notice from the video site
indicating that the "video contains content from Scripps Local News, who
has blocked it on copyright grounds."
Last week, news outlets reported that Facebook was
rejecting ads by advocacy groups working on marijuana policy reform.
Several versions of the Facebook ads were submitted by Students for
Sensible Drug Policy and Just Say Now, but were initially rejected.
After EFF and the ACLU of Northern California reached out to Facebook
about the issue, Facebook did the right thing and restored the ads.
Earlier this summer, we applauded Google for releasing
detailed stats about content removal requests from copyright holders.
Now that we know how they are going to use that data, we are less
enthusiastic. Google had announced that it would use copyright takedown
notices made under the DMCA as what it calls a "signal" on search
results. Specifically, those "signals" will demote certain websites in
search results.
EFF Updates
The U.S. Senate is currently debating a dangerous bill
that, if passed, would have broad consequences for press freedom and the
public's right to know. EFF asks senators to stand up for government
transparency and the First Amendment and vote it down. The bill's
provisions, buried in the annual Intelligence Authorization Act, are
intended to stop leaks of classified information to reporters—a premise
worrying in itself -- but it is written so sloppily it will also
severely impair government transparency and prevent the media from
reporting on national security issues.
A judge in Flava Works v. myVidster wholly rejected the
premise that embedding, linking to, or watching infringing videos
constitutes copyright infringement itself. In this case, Flava Works, a
video company that makes full-length videos available only behind a
paywall, sued MyVidster, a social video bookmarking site that allows
users to save videos to a profile and share pages containing embedded
videos with other users. The Court held people who download Flava Works
videos and then re-upload them to another server (thereby making a copy
of the video) may be infringers, but neither myVidster nor the users who
watch videos embedded on its site are engaging in or contributing to
infringement.
EFF has previously written about various troubling
provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) that is
being negotiated under wraps. One other major concern is that TPP seeks
to propagate the excessive copyright terms currently found in American
copyright legislation. These terms are detrimental to creativity and
innovation and only serve to benefit the major record and movie
production companies who lobbied for them in the U.S. Now starting with
the Pacific region, these exorbitant counterproductive terms could be
imposed on countries with more progressive copyright laws through the
force of the TPP.
LendInk, an innovative site dedicated to helping
readers share their legally purchased ebooks with one another, has
chosen to shut down in the face of legal intimidation. Despite the fact
that the site was apparently operating within the terms of service of
the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook, its hosting company
was targeted with "hundreds of threats," including cease-and-desist
letters.
In a welcome course correction, craigslist has removed
its short-lived provision that required users to grant it an exclusive
license to every post -- in other words granting them ownership. We were
unhappily surprised to see this click-through demand, but are glad to
see that craigslist has promptly removed it.
The idea behind copyright is simple -- it is supposed
to be a balance in the service of the public interest. There's a
trade-off: for accepting a restriction on certain speech, the public
benefits from the production of more new creative works each year. But
in fact, copyright policies almost universally lack the serious
cost-benefit analysis that must precede any evidence-based proposal. And
indeed, while the unintended costs are clear to anybody who has
observed abuse of, say, the DMCA takedown system, the evidence that
these policies create incentives -- or even prevent harm -- is less
forthcoming.
As we noted last June, the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO) Broadcast Treaty -- a restrictive copyright treaty
that aims to create and extend rights to signals of broadcasters and
webcasters, and possibly creates serious problems for freedom of
expression -- is back. Although it has been revamped, it still
incorporates the two most controversial proposals from the original
treaty text.
EFF believes that it is vitally important that fair use
and exceptions and limitations to copyright be protected in
international trade agreements. But the United States Trade
Representative (USTR) is putting Fair Use at risk with restrictive
language in the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement (TPP).
Should the police be allowed to warrantlessly collect
and index the DNA of people merely arrested for a crime, while they are
still cloaked in the presumption of innocence and have not been found
guilty of anything? Over and over again, we've warned courts throughout
the country the answer is no, and it now looks like judges are taking
notice, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
Recently-released documents show that the FBI has been
working since late 2011 with four states -- Michigan, Hawaii, Maryland,
and possibly Oregon -- to ramp up the Next Generation Identification
(NGI) Facial Recognition Program. When the program is fully deployed in
2014, the FBI expects its facial recognition database will contain at
least 12 million "searchable frontal photos."
A year ago this week, responding to planned protests
throughout the BART system, the transit authority cut off cell phone
service in four stations in downtown San Francisco. We were among many
to draw the connection between BART and Hosni Mubarak, former president
of Egypt, who was in the midst of disabling communication networks to
quell protests around the same time.
Citing extraordinary costs and scant results, a
high-level French official has announced intentions to defund Hadopi,
the government agency charged with shutting off Internet access of
individuals accused of repeat copyright infringement. Under the French
three strikes law, Internet subscribers whose connection is repeatedly
used to share copyrighted material may be disconnected from the Internet
and may even have to continue paying for the service. Defunding Hadopi
may mean that France won't be focusing on enforcing its three strikes
law anymore, but that's not enough. France needs to repeal the three
strikes law altogether.
In nearly every country there exists a contingent of
people that wish for a censored Internet, but the Jordanian government
has not heeded their calls -- that is, until recently. The Ministry of
Information and Communication Technology stated publicly that it was
working with an unnamed Australian company to develop a system for
filtering pornographic websites. Though, to their credit, the Ministry
responded to calls for censorship by offering free filtering software on
its website -- an excellent alternative to mandating national filtering
-- the action undertaken by the TRC is cause for alarm.
There is a chronic lack of material in formats
accessible to the world's visually impaired and print disabled citizens.
Visually impaired people face a "book famine" in which 95% of books
published in rich countries and 99% in poorer countries are never
converted into accessible formats such as audio, large print or braille.
The fastest way to address this famine is to change the copyright law:
create exceptions and limitations that permit shifting of content into
formats accessible to the blind, and allow cross-border exchange of
content in accessible formats.
We've seen many ridiculous lawsuits filed in recent
years aimed at improperly unmasking anonymous online speakers; however,
an action filed in the Northern District of California last month stands
out given its unusually high number of abusive elements (even for a
"John Doe" case).
miniLinks
A Washington Post report covers how sanctions against
Syria and Iran are preventing activists from getting crucial
communication and security technologies.
Tim Parks takes on copyright law and the creative world.
A man convicted of marijuana trafficking had no
reasonable expectation of privacy with the mobile phone he was using
when apprehended, a U.S. appeals court ruled.
Administrivia
ISSN 1062-9424
EFFector is a publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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Editor:
Adi Kamdar, Activist
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