Howard Dean and Rush Holt Oppose SOPA

On Wednesday night I attended a fundraising event for Rush Holt, the Congressman representing central New Jersey. He's not my congressman, but as one of the few scientists in congress, he better represents many of my interests than the congressman representing my district. That guy has just been redistricted so he really doesn't represent me any more. As an added attraction, the event featured Howard Dean, the former DNC chairman and presidential candidate.

The reason I really wanted to attend the event was that I wanted to express my dismay at SOPA, the anti-intellectual-piracy proposal that would require the government to shoot internet machine guns at copyright cockroaches, with predictable results. I've previously written about how this law would affect libraries, both domestic and foreign.

The funny thing is that I had trouble discovering where Rep. Holt stood on the issue. I hoped that he would at least be sympathetic. So I arrived early to be sure to ask directly.

I waited my turn to get a photo taken,  introduced myself and said I thought SOPA was a terrible law. To my great relief, both Rep. Holt and Gov. Dean responded quickly that they were against SOPA, and that opposition to the bill was growing rapidly. Gov. Dean urged me to talk to his brother Jim, who heads "Democracy for America" (DFA) the grassroots political organization started by Howard after his presidential run ran out.

It turns out that DFA has begun to oppose SOPA without even publicizing what it's doing. Their tech guy, with the support of the Deans, moved their many domains away from GoDaddy over the holiday break. So if you want to support a progressive group that's walking the walk on SOPA opposition, DFA is a great option. They've not made a big deal of it, because they're not sure how to translate their opposition into action.

When it comes to paying attention to science and what it tells us about public policy, Rep. Holt is the real deal. He's also paying attention to the changing roles of libraries and libraries in today's educational environment. Yesterday he toured school libraries in New Jersey with IMLS director Susan Hildreth to promote the Strengthening Kids’ Interest in Learning and Libraries (SKILLs) Act, which he will soon introduce on the federal level. As I wrote last year, proper use of librarians in schools can have measurable impact on student achievement.

Howard Dean was the star of the evening, however. He spoke extemporaneously for about a half an hour and had the crowd cheering. He does have a problem with microphones, however. He gets so involved in what he talks about that any microphone amp in the vicinity goes into distortion. It was heartening to hear a national politician mention the SOPA controversy among all the other problems the nation faces.

For all the fears that SOPA is not getting proper attention in the mainstream media, its good to know there are some people in power who understand the issues.

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Foreign Libraries Will Be Infringing Sites Under SOPA

On January 1, "Public Domain Day", another year was added to the copyright gap between the US and the rest of the world. In most of the world, New Year's Day marked the end of copyright for works by authors who died in 1941. But not in the USA. Copying and distribution of gap works may be legal and unrestricted in most countries, but these activities are criminal acts of copyright infringement in the US, punishable by up to 10 years of prison.

One effect of SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (which almost means "garbage" in Swedish) is that the US Attorney General will be able to extend the effect of US copyright law to foreign web sites. For example, Project Gutenberg Australia (PGA) distributes electronic versions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which is still under copyright in the US. SOPA would allow the US Attorney General to make a determination that Project Gutenberg Australia, by allowing access from the US, is a "U.S. directed site" that would be subject to forfeiture by the Attorney General for acts prohibited under section 2319 of the U.S. Criminal Code (ongoing copyright infringement), if it were based in the US.

If Project Gutenberg Australia persisted in its criminal activity, SOPA would allow the Attorney General to force internet service providers in the US to block access to the PGA domain. It would also allow the Justice Department to force Google and other US-based search engines to remove PGA links from its search results for the US. It could force Wikipedia to remove links to PGA. Most damaging to PG Australia, it would allow Justice to cut off PGA's revenue from Google's advertising services.

As libraries around the world move aggressively into the digital environment, they will de-emphasize the cataloguing of printed objects in favor of delivery of electronic content, especially public-domain and public-commons content that can be delivered without per-copy fees. They will run up against the same copyright extraterritorial issues exhibited today by Project Gutenberg Australia. If SOPA is enacted as currently written and our system of perpetual copyright persists, we can assume that most of the world libraries will sooner or later be blacklisted from the American internet. And the real bad-guy sites will easily circumvent the blacklist.

The Swedish word "sopa" is not really used as a singular noun. As a verb, it means "to sweep". The plural "sopor" is the stuff you sweep up. "Sopa bort" is what should be done with SOPA.

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2011: The Year the eBook Wars Broke Out

Open war is upon us, whether we would have it or not. These incidents in 2011  seemed like twitter-inflamed kerfuffles as we lived through them, but with the perspective of time, we can see they were preludes to a fight to the death.

1. Harper-Collins and Overdrive Stop Pretending

In a year or two, libraries may consider the Harper Collins limit of 26 circulations of a list price ebook through Overdrive to be a relative bargain, as all of the other large publishers will withdraw from "pretend-its-print" ebook licensing.

2. Amazon occupies Overdrive

Libraries mostly welcomed the possibility to lend their Overdrive ebooks to patrons with Kindles. Libraries are fundamentally service-oriented institutions and ebooks on Kindle is what the users wanted. But at what cost? Do the traditional library values of privacy go right out the door? Do libraries realize that patrons gone to Amazon might not come back?

3. The Penguin Strikes Back

The big publishers have watched Amazon's market power grow and see a future of slavery to an internet commerce master. Only Penguin allowed hostilities to break out, however, as the Amazon occupation of Overdrive broke the penguin's back. The target of opportunity was library lending. Evidently Penguin decided that a frontal assault on Amazon would be suicidal.

4. Prime Pretends to be a Library

Amazon added ebook borrowing features to their Amazon Prime service, revealing it as Amazon's answer to Netflix, and without even thinking about it, as a service that could eventually compete directly with public libraries. Now we see why Amazon wanted to get in on that library thing.

5. Publishers Decide Google is a Lesser Evil

Publishers looked back on the halcyon days when Google Books seemed poised to establish a new world order for ebooks with nostalgia. A separate, anticlimactic settlement between Google and the Association of American Publishers appears to be in the offing. It's Amazon that they're afraid of now.

6. Authors Lob Legal Grenades at Hathitrust

Spurned by the publishers in their joint crusade against the Google heathens, the Authors Guild decided that Hathitrust might be a less formidable opponent. And indeed it was, the lawsuit exposed a number of copyright blunders by the library cooperative. But the Guild's suit seemed hasty and ill-contrived. This sort of thing happens in wartime.

7. Amazon Obliterates Borders.

Although Borders was tactically weak in many ways, it was Amazon and the rise of ebooks that killed it strategically. Barnes and Noble, if it survives, won't look anything like the book marketing machine that it is today.

8. Libraries Muster the Resistance

The emergence of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as a rallying point for libraries' continuing presence in the cultural life of America was a surprise, as it went against the prevailing tea-party currents for smaller government and increased reliance on the private sector. It's not clear how the symbolic presence of a library in Zuccotti Park could point the way to a digital future, but many things that have not yet come to pass are shrouded in darkness.

9. Anti-Piracy Hysteria Threatens Freedom Loving Citizens

The powerful publishing and media industries, in a paroxysm of inept do-something-ism, seem to have convinced Congress that it would be a good thing if the intenet could be censored for copyright infringement. Sadly, the solution they've fixed on, SOPA, will be ineffective against unlicensed content and will put the Justice Department smack in the middle of our nation's information infrastructure. Carpet bombing never ends well.

There's hope.

I have learned that whenever it seems that you're falling into the abyss, you must reach for a rope. There is always a rope.

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SOPA Could Put Common Library Software in the Soup

The "Stop Online Piracy Act", or SOPA, is promoted as something that will... stop online piracy. So I was a bit surprised when I learned how it's supposed to work. A key provision of SOPA will shut down "notorious" websites by setting up a national web filter based on domain names. I'm sure the pirates had a great laugh about that one. They'll be the ones benefiting while the rest of us figure out how to avoid collateral damage. Members of Congress should consult the nearest available 14-year-old on the ease of web filter evasion: school teachers in my town routinely access their filter-blocked Facebook accounts by asking students to show them how it's done.

Rerouting domain names to alternate IP addresses is pretty easy to do, and can be very useful as well. One type of software used to accomplish this is called a "proxy server". It's called that because it acts as your web browser's proxy in requesting files from a web site. For example, after connecting to a proxy server in Stockholm, my requests for web pages would appear to issue from a computer in Sweden instead of from my computer in New Jersey.

Libraries often use proxy servers to simplify IP authentication of their networks to digital information providers. When an academic library buys access to a database, for example, they'll give the IP address of their proxy-server to the database provider, which then puts the IP address on an "allow" list. Then everyone at the school accesses the database through the address of the proxy server. In effect, those proxy-authenticated users circumvent the IP address-based filter that blocks unauthorized users.

Passage of SOPA would inevitably spawn the creation of a network of proxy servers hosted in countries that reject filtering of the internet. Users in the US could then connect transparently to  blocked sites by connecting through a constantly shifting network of proxy servers. The key to that connection would be a Proxy Auto-config, or PAC file- essentially a mini DNS file installed in the user's web browser software.

SOPA contains provisions that allow the US Attorney General to

bring an action for injunctive relief against any entity that knowingly and willfully provides or offers to provide a product or service designed or marketed for the circumvention or bypassing of [domain name blocking] and taken in response to a court order issued pursuant to this subsection, to enjoin such entity from interfering with the order by continuing to provide or offer to provide such product or service.

Proxy servers meet the condition of being designed to route around filters and therefore fall into the category of services that could be subject to injunctive action under SOPA. The proxy servers most frequently used in libraries are OCLC's EZProxy and the open-source software known as SQUID, but there are many others in use.

In particular, SQUID makes use of PAC files, and thus could be vulnerable if the Justice Department decides that PAC files make it too easy to evade SOPA blockages. Conceivably, the Justice department could force browser developers to omit support for PAC files, or perhaps to restrict their transmission.

Similar concerns about important software have been raised by Jim Fruchterman on behalf of Benetech, a non-profit that among other things, provides ebooks to the reading disabled. Benetech is also one of the largest developers of software for human rights activists around the world. They operate TOR servers designed to foster anonymous communications. On Beneblog, Fruchterman worries that Benetech services could be impacted by SOPA. In response, a commenter signing in as "Copyright Alliance" argues that such action would be unlikely because "The State Department is strongly committed to advancing both Internet freedom and the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights on the Internet." Too bad it's the Justice Department that gets to decide which services constitute circumvention.

I don't think that libraries will have their proxy servers taken away anytime soon, even if SOPA is enacted. But it's likely that the widespread development of SOPA-circumventing infrastructure would degrade the ability of rights holders to find and prosecute copyright violators. Knowledge of the actual locations of unauthorized files would by hidden offshore in distributed proxy servers, completely out of the reach of US law enforcement. The "file lockers" of today would dissolve into ungraspable bit vapors, and the online piracy problem would just get worse and worse.

There are many ways to address the online piracy problem- too many to list in this post. My own company is working on a piracy-neutering business model for ebooks. I don't know enough to evaluate the possible effectiveness of the payment and advertising network components of SOPA. But it appears to me that from the technical point of view, the internet filter component of SOPA will be a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth, boil and bubble.

Notes:

1. @amac has a good post on SOPA's scope issues, as well as links to other articles.
2. I focus here on SOPA, but there are similar issues with PROTECT IP, as described by Steve Crocker and 4 other prominent internet engineers.
3. The Crocker paper describes a number of other ways that domain name filtering might be circumvented. These include using replacing .hosts files on the user's computer (similar to PAC file installation) and switching the user to using a non-filtered DNS server. Apparently this is done transparently by some types of computer malware. This can only end badly.

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