Occupy London bailiff drives into crowd of journalists while the police do nothing

Protestors in London attempted to take over an abandoned building and turn it into a bank of ideas. When they were evicted, one of the bailiffs who was being asked questions by journalists, suddenly jumped into his car and started driving at a crowd of protestors.

From http://www.bankofideas.org.uk/2012/01/30/302/

As the events were scaling down, at around 4am, one of the bailiffs who was being asked by journalists about the lack of identification, assaulted a photographer by punching him in the face, then got into his car and drove straight into a number of protesters and media at speed.
Having then taken a dead end, the bailiff ended up back in front of the media and protesters who tried to prevent him from leaving, at which point he accelerated into the crowd carrying one protester on his bonnet for 50 – 100 yards.

Throughout these incidents media and protesters requested the police take actions in regards to the crimes which were clearly being committed. At one point the police removed the keys from the driver of the car, only to return them to him, at which point he immediately accelerated into the crowd. The police actively cleared the path for an alleged criminal to leave a crime scene and refused to take crime reports from those that had been assaulted.

Forget SOPA & PIPA. ACTA is ten times worse and already on its way to being passed

Peter Mandelson: Proof as if it were needed of low life in high places

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an international trade agreement between the European Union, the United States, Australia, Canada, South Korea and Australia, which aims to enforce copyright and tackle the worldwide problem of counterfeited goods.

The proliferation of fake goods onto the international market, is partly thanks to the ready availability of near-good-enough gadgets and gizmos on eBay and other user generated trading sites, which masquerade as genuine items from big brand manufacturers.

From Dyson vacuum cleaners to the Apple iPad, every must-have item has its cheeper to produce cousin in the lucrative counterfeit industry. Often produced by exactly the same workers from the factories who produce the legitimate goods, $100 Rolex watches which look and feel like the real thing, but with essentially worthless inner workings, sit right alongside iPods with cloned operating systems which brick as soon as they are connected to iTunes.

There is no doubting that this is a huge problem. But the problem with ACTA, according to the Stop ACTA website, is that “[the treaty and all] negociations are done secretely. Leaked documents show that one of the major goal of the treaty is to force signatory countries into implementing anti file-sharing policies under the form of three-strikes schemes and net filtering practices.”

The British government have been pushing for ‘a three strikes and you’re out’ policy towards internet users who are found to have infringed copyright for some time. But all proposals so far have attempted to compel Internet Service Providers to police their users, by adopting monitoring methods which would prove extremely difficult to regulate and are wide open to abuse. For this reason, ISPs are largely against such measures. But it’s only a matter of time before an agreement is reached, which isolates them from legal liability.

For example, before leaving office, Peter Mandelson, the former New Labour MP and advisor to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who also served as a European Commissioner, introduced the Digital Economy Act, which “establishes a system of law which aims to first increase the ease of tracking down and suing persistent infringers, and after a minimum of one year permit the introduction of “technical measures” to reduce the quality of, or potentially terminate, those infringers’ Internet connections.” Or in plain English, if you do anything which they deem illegal (and therefore immoral?), they’ll make sure you never use the internet ever again.

Oleg Deripaska's yacht, where Peter Mandelson was amazed to discover that file sharing is a bigger threat to the UK economy than the wholesale closer of its manufacturing industry

Mandelson, or “Mandy” to his friends (who include record company billionaire David Geffen, the Rothschild family, numerous Russian oligarchs and other glitterati who earned all of their money fair and square) ushered in the Digital Economy Bill, literally in the closing hours of the last parliament, to eliminate any danger of parliamentarians, with their pesky “oversight” and “scrutiny” and “moral scruples” scuppering the chances of this not at all dodgy piece of legislation being passed.

ACTA now seeks to unify the policies of individual member states, with similar laws to the Digital Economy Bill, under one internationally recognised law. Read the deliberative draft of the proposals here: http://www.laquadrature.net/files/201001_acta.pdf

Recent events in the United States, when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) attempted to push through the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), and the massive on-line campaign which successfully delayed that heinous law from being passed, shows that when those of us who are directly and negatively impacted by bad legislation of this kind get together, we can prevent such laws from being passed; raising awareness in so doing, among our friends and family, who might not ordinarily pay attention to international politics, of the need to remain vigilant.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theory nut job to be concerned about the sinister and cynical power play which is being fought out between hugely well financed individuals and private corporations around the world. They’ve seen what is happening in the Middle East and how oppressed people, in the nations of the world who currently work for a fraction of the wages demanded in the West, are taking to the streets to say enough is enough.

It is now time to do the same to ACTA as we did to SOPA and PIPA. The last thing their plans, models and projections can predict, is what will happen when an informed and morally motivated public join together in one voice of opposition.

They don’t mind what we know, they mind when we act on what we know.

http://www.stopacta.info/helpstopacta

This isn’t about demanding the right to download stuff for free. This isn’t about being against everything our governments try to do, simply because they’re trying to do it. This is about saying NO MORE to private corporations writing our laws for us, with scant regard for due process and a rational informed debate.

No one wants to steal from musicians and filmmakers whose art and skill make possible the movies and music we love. But the current system of copyright and the laws which enforce it, by criminalising innocent users, while ignoring the organised criminals who infringe intellectual property on an industrial scale, extorts as much money from artists and content producers as it does the end user.

It is the copyright law which needs to change, not the way in which people who fall foul of it are prosecuted — particularly when the methods for pursuing casual offenders involve destroying our presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and handing over more and more of our rights to privacy than we already have.

http://www.stopacta.info/helpstopacta

Federal investigators in Virginia have closed down Megaupload.com

MegaUpload was the 13th most popular website on the internet

Just one day after the 24 hour blackout protests, by Wikipedia, reddit and hundreds of other websites against SOPA / PIPA legislation, which proposes to introduce wide reaching censorship laws on the internet, MegaUpload.com, one of the biggest file sharing sites in the world, has been closed down.

Virginia prosecutors have charged the site’s founders with $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. www.nytimes.com, torrentfreak.com, Google News

By “other content” perhaps they mean the terabytes of files professional filmmakers and musicians have uploaded, over the last 5 years, to perfectly legally use the website as it was intended to be used, to share files essential to the creative process, which can’t be attached to an email because of their size?

Or perhaps they are referring to the millions of images and video clips which photographers and journalists have uploaded, to legitimately use the web site as a place to securely send information to news bureaus around the world, in countries where exercising your freedom of speech is as dangerous as it’s becoming in the US?

Who can say? What we can be certain of, is this is just the beginning. Up next: Rapidshare, FileFreak, MediaFire, YouSendIt.. ..it’s all going to come crashing down. And when they’re done with them, they’ll go for YouTube and Vimeo, LiveLeak, GrooveShark and beyond — anywhere which the SOPA / PIPA legislation gives them the right to act with impunity. No oversight. No trial. Just censored and gone, quicker than you can say Winston Smith.

By the way, MegaUpload have (or had) a complaints procedure clearly marked on their front page, which anyone who believed the website was being used to share copyright content could use, to issue a DMCA take-down notice, which the website would then respond to by immediately removing the offending content.

But let’s not quibble about that. Let’s focus instead on the fact that, apart from the fact the complete contents of the WikiLeaks cables were also hosted on MegaUpload, and pages and pages of documentation proving the Bush administration knew months in advance of it breaking in the press that soldiers were abusing inmates of Iraqi prisons, MegaUpload was also used by a tiny minority of people to download music and artworks which you can’t go out and buy even if you wanted to. Yeah, that’s the REAL story here. God damned pirates!!

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Your government is in control. Go back to sleep. Here’s 37 channels of Top Gear reruns. You are free, to do as we tell you. Sieg Heil!!

SOPA and PIPA are just the beginning. Here’s what comes next

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed-if all records told the same tale-then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'" - George Orwell, 1984

The Stop Online Piracy Act and its sister legislation, the Protect IP Act, have been delayed until further consultation. But that doesn’t mean they are dead, it just means the politicians are awaiting further orders from their corporate owners.

Hence, Wikipedia, Google, Reddit and a huge list of other popular content sites (see http://sopastrike.com/ for a full list) are still going ahead with their planned day of protest, by blanking their web pages for 12 to 24 hours, commencing Jan. 18th, 2012.

But what comes next is of far greater importance than what has already happened. Because the upheaval and headline grabbing actions of those sites taking part in this day of action, are exactly the response to SOPA and PIPA the authors of this heinous legislation had hoped for. Phase two of their plan cannot succeed without our collective fascination eventually turning into frustration with those who attempt to keep the ball rolling. It is a strategic distraction, deliberately engineered to appear to be something it isn’t, by the very people who drafted SOPA and PIPA to begin with.

Bait and switch
In the 1950′s, the American economist Milton Friedman, along with his contemporaries in the Chicago School of Economics, devised a strategy for turning uncertainty in the markets to the advantage of those with the muscle to invest in what everyone else was running away from. At first, this theoretical strategy was of only minor academic interest to other economists; a thought experiment which no-one believed could work in the real world, because it depended upon the sort of fear and uncertainty which can easily lead to uncontrollable panic.

Today this strategy, known as The Shock Doctrine, is used by governments all over the world. Its transition, from an interesting theory to government policy, was made possible by successive American administrations, from Nixon to Obama, increasing the power of both the financial services industry and multinational corporations, by simultaneously decreasing the oversight and regulatory powers of the government over those same institutions. It was copied by everyone from Pinochet and Thatcher, to Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama, as eagerly as it was by Yeltsin, Putin, Blair and Cameron.

By deliberately creating fear, anyone selling a calming solution to those fears, becomes the dominant player — even if their strategy ultimately involves making ever riskier moves. Analogous to John Nash’s Game Theory, to succeed, Friedman’s doctrine is predicated upon the notion that in times of uncertainty, populations are easier to corral behind shifts in policy, which appear to be in their long term interest, despite that in the short term their effects are harsh. The cheat, is that the fear is artificially created, so that the long term ambition of those who claim to have a fix for that which they designed, can never be achieved. The carrot merely has to constantly descend further and further down the stick.

What the architects of the SOPA and PIPA legislation are ultimately hoping, is that by the time they are forced to abandon their initial proposals, the shock felt in the technology sector at having come so close to seeing their entire business model effectively made illegal will be so great, that it forces them into agreeing changes, introduced in the name of compromise, which in-fact go much further than the original proposals ever hoped to achieve.

Follow the money
Between them, Apple, Google and Amazon represent the end of the old ways of doing things. Apple controls the lion’s share of the most profitable parts of the music business: the distribution platform, the playback media and marketing. Google owns the tracks which the advertising train of the online economy runs on. And Amazon recently announced a move to a publishing model, buoyed by the success of its Kindle eReader device, which puts the sort of control into the hands of authors and content owners, which the traditional print industry simply cannot afford to do.

Hollywood knows the days of its business model are also numbered. 3D and IMAX might have drawn people back to the multiplexes to see the latest blockbuster, but not every movie can have a $200 million budget, and not every movie buff enjoys thin plots, centred around CGI explosions and plastic tits. That’s why the MPAA is going after the low hanging fruit of BitTorrent, which impacts most significantly, not on its latest releases, but its legacy assets. The fact which they cannot seem to fathom, despite that it is common knowledge among every 12 year old from Phoenix, Arizona to Pelton Fell, County Durham, is it’s simply easier and cheaper to download a BitTorrent of ‘The Girl Whose Nipples Speak Norwegian‘, than it is to pay £9.99 to wait three days for an easily scratched DVD to be delivered in the post, or as is the case with “legitimate” digital downloads, has been so badly crippled to prevent it from playing on specific devices, that it simply doesn’t meet its intended purpose.

So instead of embracing the distribution model everyone is already using, Hollywood resorts to type; if you can’t beat ‘em, sue ‘em. Their case to both the congress and house of representatives, that websites hosted outside the United States pose a serious threat to the American economy, perfectly demonstrates this backwards, xenophobic, money grabbing mentality. It essentially accuses anyone who voices concern over their wide reaching proposals as being part of the problem. When, in reality, they are the solution to a problem the studios themselves created, when instead of learning lessons from Napster, they sought to tighten their grip on a system no-one under the age of 40 understands, much less uses.

Brace yourself for phase two
In the coming weeks and months, you’re going to hear a lot of crazy talk about Johnny Foreigner “stealing our jobs” and “draining our economy”, because if there is one type of Shock Doctrine the American electorate respond to better than any other, it’s that which appears to come from overseas. The weakness in this argument, is it’s complete unadulterated bullshit — and more and more true Americans are beginning to realise it every day.

There was a time, not so long ago, when we European types were verbally beaten to within an inch of our lives for daring to so much as mention to our American friends, on-line, that they were being deceived on an industrial scale. From the manipulative lies which led to the illegal invasion of Iraq, to the warning signs about Obama’s true position on Israel, discussion forums and UseNet chat groups would ring out to the sound of self-congratulatory chest beating, as yet another Englishman was sent packing to chants of “USA! USA!”, as yet another hastily assembled, received opinion, know-nothing-and-proud-of-it reply thread, became lauded as if it were the modern day equivalent for the war of independence.

Then came the occupy movement. Suddenly, Americans realised they weren’t alone in their disgust at the way a tiny minority of their countrymen portrayed them. From Portland to Pittsburgh, ordinary people with ordinary lives, began to see that, far from being in the minority with their yearning for journalism by journalists as opposed to celebrities, and music by musicians as opposed to DJs, and books written by writers, as opposed to critics, they were in the majority — and that together they could change things forever.

SOPA / PIPA is the opening salvo against that shared belief. They are coming for our freedom of information. And until we learn to stop reacting in the pre-programmed, knee-jerk way their doctrine is specifically designed to provoke us into, they’ll keep getting what they want and taking whatever they like.

Write to congress now!
http://sopastrike.com/strike/
Not In The US? Petition The State Department:
http://americancensorship.org/modal/state-dept-petition/index.html

Cory Doctorow explains SOPA and the war on personal computers

What is SOPA and why we can and should stop it

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a piece of legislation currently before the House Judiciary Committee, in the United States House of Representatives. It builds on the similar PRO-IP Act and the corresponding Protect IP Act of 2008.

Simply put, SOPA and Protect IP are a kill switch for any content on the internet which might be uncomfortable for politicians or the private corporations who own them. It is being billed as legislation which would end, or seriously impact upon the illegal distribution of music and movies, via Peer to Peer networks. But in reality, it allows any private corporation to remove anything they want removed from the internet with total impunity.

This is not some conspiracy theory, mustered up by stoned teenagers. Nor is it a leftwing or rightwing, liberal or conservative “thing”. It is something which is happening now and it really does affect everyone, including you. Yes you, who thinks you’re OK, because once in a while you pay for something on iTunes or Netflix. It’s not about the actual media you consume, it’s about the way in which that media is distributed.

The appearance given to this legislation; that it is going through a “consultation process”, is a total facade, which wouldn’t you know it, the corporations who would benefit from it the most aren’t reporting on their news networks. In reality, the changes to the law and to the United States constitution itself, which it affects, have already begun to be enforced.

Most of the people in the House of Representatives who will officially pass this into law have no idea what it is and are being used as nothing more than a glorified rubber stamp. While this has become a familiar story by now, in common with many other such moves by corporate America to usurp the government by the people for the people to suite their own ends, this once again has massive repercussions for those of us living outside of the US, as well as those trapped within its borders.

Alicia Keys: A pirate

In late 2011, the popular file sharing website Megaupload published a promotional video featuring musicians like Kanye West, Snoop Dogg and Alicia Keys singing the praises of their service.

Megaupload’s primary purpose is to solve a perennial problem when working with large documents, such as .aiff and .wav uncompressed audio files. It allows large attachments to be sent from one user to another without using email. Most email services only allow 20 or 30 megabytes of attachments to any one message, and the average .aiff of a 4 minute music track is about 1 gigabyte. For technical reasons, to do with the transfer protocols which are used to route email across the internet, this tends to make sending large attachments unreliable and slow.

Megaupload gets around this problem and is, therefore, ideal for musicians who want to send many high resolution takes of their performances, perhaps from their home studio, to any one of the artists who are collaborating on the track with them, all around the world.

On December 9th, 2011, “The Mega Song” was removed from YouTube following a take-down request from Universal Music Group (UMG), despite that they did not own the copyright on any of the material used in the music video. Universal claimed that this was “pursuant to the UMG-YouTube agreement,” which gives UMG “the right to block or remove user-posted videos through YouTube’s Content Management System based on a number of contractually specified criteria.” But YouTube denied that any such agreement with UMG was in place and subsequently reinstated the video.

UMG and other media giants, clearly want to paint services like Megaupload in the role of the bad guy, just because a handful of their users post copyrighted content to their website. But Megaupload actively remove media from their servers which breaches copyright all the time. Plus, it’s not possible to search for filenames posted to Megaupload, so it’s not as if they’re offering a catalogue of media, and screaming free-for-all.

All Megaupload provides, is an A to B file transfer service. So because UMG and other media giants are incapable of competing with them, they simply seek to change the law so that they are the ones who decide how their rivals operate.

Megaupload offers a service people want to use. It’s convenient and it’s free. If and when Megaupload decided to monetize their services, it would pose a real threat to the existing distribution model which the media giants are clinging onto for dear life; an erosion of their grip on music and movies which started way back when Apple iTunes first began to offer a legit alternative to Napster.

The failure of the media giants to catch up, yet again, poses the real possibility that, this time, in an attempt to crush their opposition, they might break the entire internet.

Now, to anyone who followed the Shawn Karon debacle the Megaupload / YouTube story isn’t really news. YouTube’s take-down request procedure has long been open to abuse, because it presumes that the claimant is telling the truth about owning a particular video clip, which someone else is using without permission, before asking the claimant to present any proof of their ownership.

YouTube’s hands are somewhat tied, because as the law currently stands, if indeed the claimant did own the rights to the content they have requested be removed and YouTube continued to allow it to be hosted on their site nonetheless, Google, YouTube’s owners, would become liable for any losses incurred as a result of their failure to comply with the take-down request.

But instead of fixing the existing laws, so YouTube and other similar services have their position clarified, the music and movie industry are instead to force draconian legislation through which would effectively allow them to flip the switch on anything they deem unsuitable, without having to ask nicely or explain why — and, theoretically, it wouldn’t just be the offending video clip which was removed, it would be the entire YouTube website. Read that last line again, until it sinks in just how dangerous this legislation really is.

How the internet works:
When you type a website name into the address box, or open a bookmark or click a link, your web browser asks your Internet Service Provider to send data to your computer which relates to that website’s name. Website names are technically knowns as Domains and the computers at your Internet Service Provider which negotiate this transaction on your behalf, are called Domain Name Servers. If you turn off the Domain Name Server that tells your web browser what to draw in the screen, when you visit a website, you effectively censor that website’s content.

This is the method used by the Chinese government to silence people who want to learn about the massacre at Tiananmen Square, for example. Google, for a while, went along with this Chinese government request, on the Chinese language version of their search results, but later refused to comply and consequently had to shut-up operations in the world’s fastest growing economy.

Such moral leadership in the technology sector isn’t as rare as your inner cynic might at first fear. Most of the websites which are, today, household names, just 5 years ago were the startups of young entrepreneurs who dared to imagine that they could change the world though ethical business practices which don’t just pay lip service to human rights and free speech, but actively protect and encourage other businesses who do the same.

It may well be a trite and perhaps even a little hammy or naive utopian vision, destined to be crushed under the wheels of reality, but in the belief that a better world might emerge from the co-ordinated efforts of internet users around the world, many companies have publicly opposed SOPA and Protect IP and lobbied to have it blocked.

Unfortunately there has also been a fair smattering of companies who have endorsed it; most notably Microsoft and GoDaddy — the latter being a Domain Name Registrar who, wouldn’t you know it, under the terms of the proposal they helped draft, would be exempt from having their domain names blocked. Indeed, thanks to GoDaddy.com’s endorsement of SOPA and Protect IP, a number of high profile websites, including Wikipedia, have switched to other DNS providers in public protest.

The upshot:
The worry, is that this legislation might be a genuine attempt to stop online piracy, whose unintended effects, would be to silence people who are critical of a particularly powerful lobby – like the oil and gas industry, or financial services for example.

We have to ask, what if the Megaupload video, instead of being a harmless musical promotion of a website, was footage of protestors being beaten with clubs, by private security contractors, outside an oil refinery which leaks toxins into the atmosphere, because it operates in a territory where politicians have been bought off and the workers and locals are too poor to be allowed a voice?

What if Universal Music Group, in the belief that they are entitled to protect their content with such vigour, that they inadvertently make it possible for someone running for President of the United States, to literally disconnect anyone who uses the internet to blog about their taking kickbacks from big tobacco?

Simply put, this is the kill switch large corporations and the corrupt politicians they own have been waiting for, since the internet was first introduced. We must fight it.

Mozilla, makers of the Firefox web browser and the foundation which has spearheaded a number of game changing open source initiatives in the past, has an excellent page of information on how US citizens can contact their political representatives and explain to them why it is important they actually read the legislation they’re being told to vote on, by their corporate sponsors.

https://donate.mozilla.org/page/s/SOPA?source=sopa_page

Please do all you can to spread the word about this. Here is a huge list of links, with which to inform yourself and other people about the ramifications of SOPA:

http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/search?q=sopa&sort=top&restrict_sr=on

Please share them on Facebook, twitter and other social media websites, so that together we can stop these ridiculous and dangerous laws from passing.