Section 14

Technology continues to knock traditional ways of doing things out of the park. CricInfo 3D provides animations of cricket matches to viewers across the world. CricInfo sends out a tiny file to each of its viewers describing where the ball was bowled, what shot was played, where the ball ended up, and the like. The client software then visually renders the shot.

Sky Television, which has exclusive broadcast rights for the Cricket World Cup, claims that CricInfo is breaching their copyright.

Wisden, owner of CricInfo, rubbishes the claims saying that its data files are based on public domain information gathered by its staff.

It’s hard to see how Sky’s claim stacks up. While it has a legitimate interest in protecting its intellectual property, it’s outrageous to claim that it should be illegal to report - in your own words, or the technological equivalent - the results of a sports game.

Sky’s interest should be limited to the materials it has created, the broadcast video and commentary. The purpose of copyright is protect the value that the author has created in his own property, not to prevent others from creating other valuable products, and CricInfo should be applauded for their ingenuity.

Hat tip: Boing Boing.

America’s Child Online Protection Act was struck down as unconstitutional by Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. yesterday.

The law put the onus on web site operators rather than parents to keep minors from viewing “harmful” material.
What’s really noteworthy is this part of Judge Reed’s summation:

Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if (free speech) protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.

Absolutely right. Too many people are willing to throw away free speech to chase some less important, but seemingly more pressing, short-term goal.

If those who would discard free speech to pursue some triviality don’t realise the harm they’re causing then they’re not fit to hold power. If they do realise the harm they’re doing, they’re doubly unfit to hold power and should be disposed of double-quick.

Hat tip: Boing Boing.

Following Turkey’s lead, Thailand blocked access to YouTube over the weekend although it’s not clear why. It’s also not clear that the authorities knew what they were doing - access to “www.youtube.com” was blocked but just typing the address “youtube.com”, without the “www” part, got you through fine.

Hat tip: Boing Boing.

No Right Turn has the story of Ahmet Turk, co-leader of the Kurdish Democratic Society Party, who has been sent to prison for six months for referring to Kurdistan Workers Party leader Abdullah Öcalan as Mr Öcalan. Apparently “Mr” imples respect and hence Turk was found guilty of “supporting a criminal”.

But don’t think that you can stay out of jail just by disrespecting people out of habit. Oh no. Failing to respect the right people can get you into trouble as well.

Business Week reported yesterday that a Turkish court has ordered YouTube banned after a Greek YouTuber posted a video describing Kemal Atatürk and the Turkish people as homosexuals. Turk Telecom implemented the ban immediately. Boing Boing reports that somehow the ban only affected Internet Explorer users, Firefox could see the site without difficulty.

Boing Boing suggests that Tourism Turkey change their slogan. Perhaps, “Turkey welcomes you - as long as you keep your mouth shut.” They also provide a handy guide to getting round web censorship.

No Right Turn also reminds us that Turkey’s free speech record isn’t that hot in other areas either; for example, it’s illegal to mention the Armenian Genocide. If Turkey ever joins the EU they could have a tricky time working out which holocausts you must deny and which you must never.

UPDATE 10/03/07: The YouTube ban has been lifted.

Hat tips: No Right Turn and Boing Boing.

There have been a few stories about China on this blog - China and Google, China and Microsoft, Falun Gong - and it seems that they’ve noticed. China’s internet censoring technology, dubbed the Great Firewall of China, now blocks this site. You can test your own site at a “great firewall” test site. Are you as dangerous as a mongol horde?

Hat tip: Pacific Empire.

In the wake of the successful second reading of Sue Bradford’s amendment to the Crimes Act, which would outlaw smacking, CYFSWatch has entered the debate with a post describing a fantasised beating of the MP and suggesting she is “a worthy candidate for NZ’s first political assassination.”

The question is: does this post constitute something close enough to an act of force that it should be banned?

And the answer is no. Expressing violent fantasies doesn’t do much for CYFSWatch’s cause, given that they’re advoctaing on behalf of people who have had children removed by the state - parents who have probably been accused of abuse - but that doesn’t mean that their opinions should be illegal.

The fantasised beating is an attempt to explain the difference between smacking someone and beating them up, a key distinction that opponents of the anti-smacking bill feel is being glossed over. It’s written in a graphic manner but I don’t believe it constitutes a genuine threat. It is simply strong rhetoric.

Likewise, the supposed “death threat” is political commentary. Bradford’s position has roused strong emotions and this is an extreme expression of that. The writer does not threaten assassination, but simply calls Bradford “worthy” of assassination. How many people have made the same assertion about George W. Bush? There’s no evidence that the implied threat is anything more than hyperbole or that the writer has the means or intent to carry out a real attack.

Should genuine violent intent become apparent, a line will have been crossed from thought to action and preventative action will be required by the Police. Until then no action should be taken against the writer and Bradford should carry on with her job as a parliamentarian uncowed.

UPDATE 11:00am: CYFSWatch is gone - shut down by Google. The Watching CYFS site is still active but doesn’t contain all of the CYFSWatch posts.

UPDATE 23/2/07: CYFSWatch is back, this time hosted by WordPress, but the old posts have not been restored. I wonder whether they can stay inside the WordPress terms of service or whether the Ministry of Social Development’s crack legal team will carry the day.

UPDATE 1/03/07: The WordPress site has disappeared, saying that the authors have deleted it. In a post at a new Blogger blog, the authors claim they didn’t delete the WordPress site and have asked WordPress what happened.

UPDATE 3/03/07: They’re back, this time with their own domain.

December last year saw the welcome death of Turkmenistan’s comic tyrant Saparmurat Niyazov. In typical tinpot style the incoming president, Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedow, was elected with a massive majority against no opposition party candidates. So far, so bad.

The new president is, surprisingly, off to an excellent start. Within a week of formally taking power, Berdimuhammedow has legalised Internet access in Turkmenistan and the capital, Ashkabat, has its first Internet cafes. Internet cafe owners report that there are no restrictions on sites that may be visited.

This is huge. Despite the fact that Internet access costs NZ$6 an hour, which is way out of the reach of ordinary Turkmen, the fact that the world’s information is now allowed into the country unrestricted is an enormous change for the better. If information is genuinely unrestricted then, in this respect, Turkmenistan may now be freer than China, France, or New Zealand.

Hat tip: Liberty Scott.

Cuba, one of the least connected countries in the world, where less than 2% of people have access to the Internet, on Monday blamed the United States embargo for its restrictive laws.

[Cuban Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes] defended Cuba’s “rational and efficient” use of the Internet, which puts computers in schools and government computer clubs while prohibiting home connections for most citizens and blocking many sites with anti-government material.

Valdes, clearly in two minds about the Internet, described it as “one of the tools for global extermination” but then said it was necessary to “advance down the path of development”.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) countered:

It would anyway have been astonishing if a country that has no independent radio or TV station or newspaper did allow unrestricted access to the Internet. We await the creation of a better Internet connection via Venezuela, as the minister announced, and we will then see if the government finally allows its citizens access to an uncensored Internet.

In its October report on the Internet in Cuba, RSF noted that

[The U.S. embargo] may indeed explain the slowness of the Cuban Internet and the endless lines outside Internet cafes. But in no way does it justify the system of control and surveillance that has been put in place by the authorities. In a country where the media are under the government’s thumb, preventing independent reports and information from circulating online has naturally become a priority.

The regime also ensures that there is no Internet access for its political opponents and independent journalists, for whom reaching news media abroad is an ordeal. The government also counts on self-censorship. In Cuba, you can get a 20-year prison sentence for writing a few “counter-revolutionary” articles for foreign websites, and a five-year one just for connecting with the Internet in an illegal manner. Few people dare to defy the state censorship and take such a risk.

Given that it’s the excuse that’s used for everything that’s wrong with Cuba, I would love to see the U.S. lift the embargo and accelerate the Cuban dictatorship’s collision with the open world.

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Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, giving the keynote address at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s New Vision, spoke about the implications for freedom of speech as the next billion Internet users come online.

He suggests that one of the big impacts will be that people discover that their governments are not treating them very well. This will be especially true where those governments have previously kept a tight rein on information. The biggie, which Schmidt doesn’t answer, is what happens then?

Addressing a further question, Schmidt discussed the prospects for a dictator trying to control information available on the Internet:

Hat tip: Passport.

It’s started.

After two weeks of “working 24/7 to get the site shut down” the Ministry of Social Development has convinced Google to remove (as far as I know) a single post from CYFSWatch. The censored post accuses named Child, Youth and Family staff of murdering a child, contrary to a coroner’s finding that is disputed by the parents.
With the threat of censorship, an insurance policy has appeared in the form of Watching CYFS - a repost of a swag of CYFSWatch material with a different blogging host.

With the cost of publishing down to zero, government censors could work 24/7 for eternity and still achieve nothing.

The CYFSWatch affair and the Ministry of Social Development’s flailing around trying to decide how to deal with the threat of people expressing themselves with a new technology (and the Prime Minister’s frothing last year about “right-wing bloggers”) brings to mind an earlier time when authorities grappled with a new technology in a similarly ham-fisted manner.

Rodney A. Smolla describes what happened in his book Free Speech in an Open Society (ch.11):

Censorship was logistically simple for the Roman censors and Church until Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450. Handwritten books were laboriously produced by a small number of persons under the strict control of authority; there was no opportunity for the mass distribution of printed material challenging the orthodoxy.

It is no accident that shortly after Gutenberg invented the printing press, official authorities invented the first censorship bureau. In 1485, only thirty-five years after Gutenberg made mass dissemination of the written word a technological possibility, the archbishop of Mainz - the city where Gutenberg lived - created an office of the censor. The precedent took hold.

In 1493 the Venice Inquisition issued the first list of banned books; in 1559 the Church established the Librorum Prohibitorum, or Index of Banned Books, binding on Roman Catholics (and thus virtually the entire population of Europe). The Index was administered by the Office of the Inquisition, which continued to operate in France as late as 1774 and in Spain as late as 1834. (Today there is no Inquisition, but there is still an Index, though the Church now regards it as advisory only.)

Governments around the world reacted similarly to Gutenberg’s new technology. Censorship was instituted in Germany in 1529. The British monarch in 1559 chartered the Stationers’ Company and limited the right to print to the Stationers’ Guild, thereby hoping to check seditious and heretical speech. A series of British licensing laws were passed on the Stationers’ model, provoking John Milton to write his famous tract on free expression, the Areopagitica.

Governments and the Church burned books and heretics alike, but to no avail. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment followed. Smolla continues:

It is futile and foolish to enact our fears into law; law cannot and should not attempt to hold back the enormous tides of technical creativity that are altering the world around us. But we are challenged to manage these changes; to take into account how technologies alter the way in which we communicate, and thus necessarily affect our rules of freedom of speech; to understand how technologies may alter even the relationship of the individual to the state, and thus affect our thinking about how to ensure basic protection for civil liberties.

To repeat a Karl Marx quote I was reminded of today: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. So, come on, just try and stop this new technology. I’ll be watching. And laughing.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has admitted that bowing to Chinese requests to censor search results was a mistake.

Google, whose motto is famously “Don’t be evil”, colluded with the Chinese Government in their construction of “The Great Firewall of China” by filtering Google’s search results to remove references to topics such as Falun Gong and the Tianenmen Square massacre.

Brin, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, said that he regretted the decision to censor because the company’s reputation had suffered in America and Europe.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch notes,

I’m glad that these remarks were made somewhat informally and without massaging from Google PR. It is a rare glimpse into the heart of an organization struggling with coming to terms with its own power, still only a few years old. But if Google wants to stay in the good graces of the smug western crowds, they need to say they regret working with the Chinese government because that government is evil, not because it turned out to be “a net negative” business decision.

Ministry of Social Development (of which Child, Youth and Family - CYF - is a part) CEO Peter Hughes’ decision to try and censor the CYFSWatch blog has badly backfired.

As of Friday afternoon, the site is still up and running. Google has so far stood firm - talking to the NZ Herald, Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand said,

We only remove content from a blog if it expressly violates the terms of service or if ordered to do so by a court order.

And public interest is huge. No one would ever have heard of this site if Hughes hadn’t launched his doomed censorship campaign.

As an indicator of how much interest there is in this now, traffic to this blog has more than doubled since I posted on the topic on Wednesday lunchtime. The top ten search queries landing here at the moment are:

1. cyfswatch
2. cyfs blog
3. cyf blog
4. cyf name and shame
5. cyfs watch
6. cyfswatch blog
7. name and shame
8. cyf
9. cyf watch
10. cyfswatch new zealand

and so on into at least the top thirty.

I would refer Hughes to my previous post on Scarcity and ‘psychological reactance’, which pointed out that censorship not only makes people far more interested in the information under threat, but also makes them more inclined to believe it.

Lindsay Mitchell is reporting (UPDATE: So is NZPA and the NZ Herald) that Ministry of Social Development CEO Peter Hughes has “instructed lawyers to work 24/7 doing whatever they have to, to shut down the CYFS Watch blogsite.”

CYFSWatch is a controversial new blog that is attempting to hold Child, Youth and Family staff accountable for their allegedly destructive actions by publishing ‘name-and-shame’ articles about the individuals involved in various cases.

CYF is likely to be under pressure from the PSA, its staff’s union, to do something about the site (UPDATE: PSA press release), which is threatening to publish the personal details of CYF staff including photographs and home addresses.

If the allegations made on the site are true then the authors have every right to publish them, however “robust” you might find their methods. If not, the answer is not for an arm of the government to shut down the site but to sue the authors for libel although, given their anonymity, that could prove difficult.

It will be interesting to see what CYF does here and, if it comes down to it, whether Google (Blogger’s owner) will do the government’s dirty work and censor the site. Given the nature of the Internet, any information that is censored will no doubt just pop up somewhere else.

UPDATE: Around the blogs:
Not PC: When bureaucrats attack
Kiwiblog: The CYFSWATCH Blog
No Right Turn: No freedom to criticise CYFS