Thank you for signing this petition. We appreciate your participation in the We the People platform on Whitehouse.gov. However, consistent with the We the People Terms of Participation and our responses to similar petitions in the past, the White House declines to comment on this petition because it requests a specific law enforcement action.

Or to put in another way, you can only petition the government if you’ve agreed to the Terms of Participation and don’t violate them – and requesting that the executive branch do their constitutional job is clearly a violation of those terms. Seriously! Read the Terms, you chumps, and stop bothering that poor man – he’s heard your complaint, and that’s all he’s required to do. Besides he’s too busy fighting the good fight for the people that matter – his Hollywood campaign donors!

OK, off my soap box – for a second, anyway. One of the measures I’ve put in place to deal with such nuisances is to implement blacklisting by user agent in htaccess files. It’s not the most effective way in the world to deal with bad-behaved bots, but it’s quick, easy, and deals with a large majority (80%+) of the spammers and script kiddies – the ones who aren’t smart or skilled enough to write their own bots, or to even change the user agent name to one that hasn’t been seen a gazillion times.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

This particular agent string – as I write this – is #16 on this list, as well as this one. In going through 2 1/2 years of logs from my old hosting, it’s apparent that no legitimate use of this agent string has ever been seen on any of the sites I manage, and obviously, it’s been caught in honey pots for years as well. The decision to blacklist this user agent was one of the easier ones to make. This particular rule has already stopped four bots (a lot for my sites!) in the first two days it was in use, including these two entries from the server logs:

174.143.89.144 - - [29/Jan/2012:17:12:41 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 380 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
174.143.89.144 - - [30/Jan/2012:17:43:07 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 380 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

A whois query shows that this address resolves to the BBB:

Council of Better Business Bureaus RSPC-1244493612054045 (NET-174-143-89-128-1) 174.143.89.128 - 174.143.89.159

I was aware that the BBB was running a bot that checked in on one of the sites I administer once a day, but I never gave much thought to the user agent this bot identifies itself with. What makes this interesting is that I remembered seeing that the BBB was a supporter the various “anti-piracy” measures in Congress. After doing a little searching, I found these two letters from the BBB to various members of Congress stating the BBB’s support of the SOPA and PROTECTIP bills. They are all generic form letters, with the name of the legislative bill and the congress critter’s names being changed as appropriate. However, the BBB did publish these to the world, and this is their official stance, so deconstructing what they say – especially in light of this bot – is only fair.

Rogue websites are often designed to deceive consumers into believing they are legitimate by misappropriating trademarks from respected businesses and entities – including the BBB – to foster trust with those who visit the sites.

Speaking of deceptions, why doesn’t the BBB label their bot as a bot that belongs to the BBB? What do they have to hide? As well, in faking this user agent, BBB has misappropriated and violated the Mozilla trademark, as well as several Microsoft trademarks. People in glass houses.

Moreover, consumers who share sensitive personal and financial information with these sites are also exposed to an increased risk of falling victim to other malicious online activity such as phishing scams, identity theft, or viruses.

In addition to jeopardizing consumer safety and protection, rogue websites impact the health of our national, state and local economies. According to a 2007 report for the Institute of Policy Innovation, copyright theft costs the U.S. economy more than 373,000 jobs that would otherwise have been created, as well as $58 billion in economic output and $3 billion in federal, state, and local tax revenues.

Scams such as these are already illegal. Is it really so difficult to understand that if the current laws aren’t enforced, further legislation isn’t going to make a difference? Apparently it is, since these fallacies are peddled by every shill expressing their support for these kinds of “solutions.” 373,000 jobs and $58 billion in economic output? And we’re supposed to believe those incredible numbers, with nothing more than a reference to an unnamed and unsourced report?!?

More importantly, the BBB is dreaming of a world they aren’t willing to work to make happen – at least not anything beyond lobbying efforts. Their bot only adds to the immense and wasteful noise caused by other bots. Some of those bots are used by site scrapers, who in turn create the rogue websites the BBB is complaining about. In short, the BBB is a part of the problem they’re demanding legislation to deal with.

In any case, since I’m sick of dealing with all the noise that comes from that particular agent string, it will remain blacklisted. If the BBB wants to check that this particular client’s site is up or whatever the hell they do, they can damned well pay a human (preferably in the USA instead of Canada) to manually check it every day. Or they can stop their deception and rename it to something that accurately identifies itself as belonging to the BBB – as well as programming it to follow directives in robots.txt. Organizations like the BBB, RIAA, MPAA, and the US Chamber of Commerce need to either start acting with the moral standards they are demanding of the rest of the world, or shut the fuck up.

This behavior from the DOJ isn’t surprising, given the head honcho there lies like Judas about breaking laws to make new ones (and getting his own employees killed in the process). Nor has his boss in the White House demanded his resignation. The corruption starts at the top. The example is set there.

There’s nothing new in the executive branch’s wanton disregard of private property, the un-American dictum of “guilty until proven innocent”, nor the issues caused to businesses as a result of their pursuit of political agendas instead of justice. It’s just that the internet generation has never really noticed it until now, even though these kinds of actions are the very reason the EFF was founded.

It’s also not surprising that far more money – to the tune of $1.2 BILLION can – be “lost” by former governers/Goldman Sachs alumni, and the only people who care are the sorry sods who believed the scam enough to invest in it. Never mind that Corzine would have signed financial statements, which make him criminally liable for any funny accounting – he won’t serve any more time in jail than any of the CEO’s who were responsible for burying their companies with the subprime and derivatives mess.

But hey, I can’t pay for congress critters (much less any dictatorial president), so I’m left to express my frustrations on my little old blog here – and hopefully I won’t need to travel anywhere soon, because DHS might be monitoring blogs in addition to twitter.

Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

You can’t be more blatant with bribes and threats than this. However, it’s highly unlikely this petition will do any good – looking at this petition service on the White House’s site leaves one with the impression that it’s only been deployed as a PR exercise. Reading the terms makes me wonder if I should raise my hand and ask if I can go to the bathroom, instead of just doing so. And there’s already another petition on there to “Actually take these petitions seriously instead of just using them as an excuse to pretend you are listening.”

Nonetheless, there’s also a campaign demanding Congress return Dodd’s/Hollywood’s dirty money, and they’ve listed the MPAA “Dirty Dozen”:

Below is our list of the MPAA “Dirty Dozen” — the top recipients of the MPAA’s cash (data shows contributions from Q1 2009 to Q2 2011, and comes courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Explorer).
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) – $14,700
Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.) – $12,200
Sen. Harry Reid (Nev.) – $7,800
Rep. Howard Berman (Calif.) – $7,500
Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) – $5,500
Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) – $5,500
Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) – $5,000
Rep. Henry Waxman (Calif.) – $5,000
Rep. John Boehner (Ohio) – $4,900
Sen. Daniel Inouye (Hawaii) – $4,000
Rep. Colin Peterson (Minn.)  - $3,500
Rep. Melvin Watt (N.C.) – $2,500

Public Knowledge issued a statement that sums it up nicely:

“Public Knowledge welcomes constructive dialog with people from all affected sectors about issues surrounding copyright, the state of the movie industry and related concerns.  Cybersecurity experts, Internet engineers, venture capitalists, artists, entrepreneurs, human rights advocates, law professors, consumers and public-interest organizations, among others should be included.  They were shut out of the process for these bills.

“We suggest that in the meantime, if the MPAA is truly concerned about the jobs of truck drivers and others in the industry, then it can bring its overseas filming back to the U.S. and create more jobs.  It could stop holding states hostage for millions of dollars in subsidies that strained state budgets can’t afford while pushing special-interest bills through state legislatures.  While that happens, discussions could take place.”

A government memo saying a railway was hacked in a targeted attack was incorrect, according to a spokeswoman for the Association of American Railroads.

“There was no targeted computer-based attack on a railroad,” according to spokesman Holly Arthur. “The memo on which the story was based has numerous inaccuracies.”

Asked if there was an “untargeted” incident that disrupted train service nonetheless, Arthur declined to comment, leaving the public in the dark about what exactly was right and wrong in the memo.

I don’t think it’s just the public who is in the dark – and I’m not talking about the railways!

“Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved”
—Andre Malraux

I’m not sure how true this is – think of the many ways different religions have been used to influence and control cultures (including music, art, and the written word) throughout history.

Regardless, the future that the music industry envisions, as well as the one pictured by software patent trolls, is one where anyone who is not approved by their system will not only be deprived of culture, but they will even be deprived from participating in any legitimate economy. In short, one where culture is used to further slavery and impoverishment in the name of enriching a few assholes. It’s human nature that the people whose power is threatened by disruptive technologies should try and minimize that threat so they can keep their influence and wealth. It’s a farce that the government of the USA, which was instituted under a constitution written with such aspects of human nature in mind, is participating in bringing about such a future, while claiming – with completely straight faces – that they’re doing it protect individual rights.

The FBI has caused incalculable damage, far in excess of the losses claimed by the content lobbies, in a fruitless attempt to prevent access to the media content hosted on Megaupload, some of which they claim to have been infringing copyright under US law.

…

The widespread damage caused by the sudden closure of Megaupload is unjustified and completely disproportionate to the aim intended. For this reason Pirates of Catalonia, in collaboration with Pirate Parties International and other Pirate Parties [including the Pirate Party of the United Kingdom], have begun investigating these potential breaches of law and will facilitate submission of complaints against the US authorities in as many countries as possible, to ensure a positive and just result.

Congratulations to the FBI and ICE on a job well done. If this results in a lawsuit against the USA, then who pays for that? Oh, right, the taxpayer – the ones the government claims to be protecting jobs and income from with this very action as their justification for these kinds of unlawful actions.

In approximately April 2006, members of the Mega Conspiracy copied videos directly from Youtube.com to make them available on Megavideo.com.

So? Were these copied videos copyrighted and the licensing ignored, were the licenses followed, or were they in the public domain?

On or about August 31, 2006, VAN DER KOLK sent an e-mail to an associate entitled “lol”. Attached to the message was a screenshot of a Megaupload.com file download page for the file “Alcohol 120 1.9.5 3105complete.rar” with a description of “Alcohol 120, con crack!!!! By ChaOtiX!”. The copyrighted software “Alcohol 120” is a CD/DVD burning software program sold by www.alcohol-soft.com.

The last time I checked, it wasn’t illegal to possess CD/DVD burning software. More germane to this investigation, did they actually use it to make unlicensed copies and distribute them? Or, was this email possibly even a joke? Again, there’s no context given.

On or about November 13, 2006, VAN DER KOLK sent an e-mail to another individual that contained 100 Megaupload.com links to infringing copies of copyrighted musical recordings by the artist Armin van Buuren.

But why did he send them? And who did he send them to? For all I know, he sent them to an individual at a recording company to verify they were infringing. Or maybe he was pirating them. Again, no context is given to tell.

And on and on and on, for 72 pages. It’s amazing the government’s case is so slipshod after they’ve apparently been collecting and sifting through email from megaupload for years. That long-term surveillance suggests a fairly high priority was given this case. Unless they’re hiding a ton of documents, or the emails are much worse then the indictment suggests, the D.O.J. is going to have a hard time proving their claims of racketeering and laundering. Given that, it’s stunning that New Zealand (who took a NZ$10 million bribe for granting Dotcom citizenship there – maybe they were pressured like Spain was) arrested him and several other members of the company, seized everything, and are preparing to extradite them all to the U.S.A. I’m sure these aren’t nice people, and they’ve probably committed some offense or other. However, no trial has been held, extradition hasn’t even occurred yet – no due process has been followed to the end! All of those assets were seized merely on the accusation of the U.S. government.

The hell with the arguments of infringement vs. theft. This is exactly the kind of nightmare scenario that many people have predicted SOPA/PIPA would bring about: an entire site taken down, instead of just the infringing content. And it’s already happening before the legislation has been voted on. (It’s actually been going on since at least June 2010). An entire site has been shut down wholesale, many people have lost legitimate content, and the effect is already having a chilling effect on all file-sharing sites, no matter their perceived legitimacy by Hollywood – which gives further strength to arguments about the current “intellectual property” regime having chilling effects on innovation.

A more important issue that also falls under the jurisdiction of I.C.E. is counterfeit drugs. 60 Minutes did a story about this growing problem. In it, David Elder, from the F.D.A, said their resources haven’t been able to keep up with the increase in volume of counterfeit drugs coming into the country through the mail.

“We don’t have the authority to actually destroy this on site. This product could very well come back into the country through a different mail facility. Maybe it gets through, maybe it gets stopped.”

“But they’re banking on one of these times, you’re going to miss.”

“Yeah. I think they are.”

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said “40% of drugs taken in this country come from other countries. 80% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients in drugs takin in this country actually come from other countries.” The show then discussed Heparin, which once had one of it’s ingredients that comes from China replaced with a counterfeit ingredient. That resulted in over 80 deaths just in the USA. “Drug companies say they already have their own systems in place to protect their supply chains”. Yet “the company [that makes Heparin] told [60 Minutes] in a letter that the counterfeit ingredient so closely mimicked heperin that it was able to evade the quality control systems and regulatory oversight of more than a dozen companies and nearly a dozen countries.”

Now, I’m no fan of China, especially with their human rights record. But consider this: among the leaked wikileaks was one about Apple’s late attempts at dealing with piracy in China. The article described China’s priorities when it came to fighting various piracy and counterfeiting rings:

Chinese officials readily cooperated with pharmaceutical companies on their raids, but that hasn’t translated to software, as Microsoft has discovered, or electronics, as Apple is learning, said Nachum, the professor. Whereas a defective pill could cause sickness or death, a shoddy iPod has less dire consequences.

Our government has the wrong set of priorities: Instead of regulating the biggest pirates (the bankers) and the worst pirates (counterfeit prescription drug makers), they surveil an internet file-sharing company for years, on the say-so of the entertainment industry, and abuse all due process in their attempts to save $500 million in lost potential profits. Apparently, that $500 million is more important than justice for those 80 people’s lives, or preventing another incident like the one that killed them.

Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we’ll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn’t about copyright, because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century-long conflict…

But the reality is, copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it’s not taken seriously…

The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and the PC, that copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish, and not a war. Why would other sectors nurse grudges against computers? Well, because the world we live in today is made of computers. We don’t have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in; we don’t have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers; a 3D printer is not a device, it’s a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it’s a general-purpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software…

The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial, when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered reality will create…

…[2011] was the year in which we saw the debut of open sourced shape files for converting AR-15s to full automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for gene sequencing…The trajectory of 3D printing will most certainly raise real grievances, from solid state meth labs, to ceramic knives.

And it doesn’t take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers…Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place — “can’t you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

The video of Cory Doctorow’s speech is also available at boingboing. The content of Joshua Wise’s transcript is licensed CC Attribution here, and available here.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for
the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person
to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures
in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call
Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.
There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like
Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they
circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works,
without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the
studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations – it’s all based on being
able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.
If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing
other peoples rules.

I’ve heard this story about Hollywood avoiding Edison’s patents, though I’ve never seen any sources for the story. It wouldn’t surprise me, as Edison lost a ton of money over his life to people who violated his copyrights and patents. And while I’m in complete agreement over their stance on SOPA (and all similar stupid legislation that Congress pushes every single session), I have to take issue with this part of their statement:

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech.
We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws
should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The founding fathers of the USA believed that governments should be instituted to protect individual rights. Writing laws that “serve the public” instead of protecting individuals is a big reason we are here now. Until we get over this flawed belief that’s common to all modern “liberal” democracies that the public good outweighs individual rights, legislation like SOPA is inevitable, because it provides any special interest the argument to be made, while they lobby their legislature, that their group benefits the public more than their competitors. Which will, regardless of the special interest group flapping it’s gums, always result in stupidity like this:

SOPA Penalties