Folk Demon

The Wall Street Journal is one of many news outlets reporting on the deal reached between major ISPs and the “creative” industry collective that is more appropriately known as the MAFIAA. The industry ran a racketeering operation recently, shaking down the ISPs to institute a six-strike system for suspected copyright infringers. For all the concerns about the government censoring the Internet like China or eroding any notion of due process, it doesn’t take any state action to make it happen.

Or perhaps that’s the problem: while we were all worrying over the FCC’s rulings last summer (myself included) and the Comcast decision re: net neutrality, it was state inaction – perhaps the only thing that Congress has excelled at over the past decade – that ultimately did us in.

I don’t care if this is hyperbole over nothing or if my legal understandings of the pertinent issues are misplaced here. This is asinine and should be illegal. It is anti-competitive and implements a quasi-judicial system that places the burden on the public in favor of conglomerates operating on outdated business models. It allows a third party not subject to the contract between the ISP and the consumer to impinge on that contract with no due process as to whether an infringement actually occurs. It will absolutely kill the digital public domain as users are afraid to share or traffic in legitimate PD content, out of fears it might be too close to something that Disney already stole from the Public Domain a century ago.

I can only hope that if so-called piracy is as rampant as the cretins behind the studios claim it is that enough people will get slammed by the new digital content inquisition that they have no choice but to drop their subscriptions (highly unlikely). The outflow of money is what made the MAFIAA take action, so it’s likely the only way to make the ISPs do the same.

On a more speculative level, I hope someone sends a voice conversation that is picked up by one of the deep packet inspectors/sniffers, opening up the corporations to felony charges of an illegal wire tap. That’d be sweet sweet revenge (of course, one could argue that the sharing of a song is an aural transfer under the Wiretap act, but that is a stretched argument). Like quantum theory’s Uncertainty Principal, where it is impossible to know both the location and speed of an electron without disturbing the particle’s fundamental nature, it is impossible to know the content of a packet before you inspect it without disturbing the right of privacy. A mere suspicion of wrongdoing is not enough to warrant an invasion of privacy by the state or private actors, so the proving of wrongdoing will not justify the invasion a posteriori. Yet this is how the MAFIAA enforces their rights with seeming immunity, if not by government fiat.

If we would not want the RIAA inspecting our mail for the contents of a CD we mail to our friends, then we should not accept the inspection of our packets either. The Post Office is a neutral facilitator of communications, and ISPs should operate by the same standards.

Unforunately, it seems as though the FCC is toothless in this matter, and Congress is more concerned with making sure Obama doesn’t get reelected than creating jobs, let alone actually doing anything else in the public interest. Now that the Shuttle flights are ending, we’ve got no means of escape. Sad, really.

/end rant