Category: Politics

What’s in a Search Result?

Ukranians faced off riot police yesterday in Independence Square, a tense scene that ended peacefully for now, with police forces withdrawing.  The protests are sparked by anger over president Viktor Yanukovich’s apparent stonewalling on signing a trade deal with the EU that would further emancipate the fledgling democracy from its former Soviet occupiers.  The pact would bring badly needed investment into the nearly-bankrupt country of 46 million and help break the stranglehold Russia has on its industrial sector as the sole supplier of natural gas.  Meanwhile, what are Americans and other citizens who enjoy diverse economies quibbling about?  What movies are available online of course.

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My colleague at Vox Indie, Ellen Seidler brought it to my attention that a Google search for “movie piracy” will presently bring up as the second result an October 15th article written by Timothy B. Lee, a libertarian with views generally hostile toward copyrights.  Lee offers yet another variation on the message “piracy is a reaction against industry failure” by pointing to a handful of top movies that are supposedly unavailable to stream or purchase online through paid services yet. Although the central fact is exaggerated — some of the movies cited are available — Lee unblushingly quotes fellow libertarian and team leader of Piracydata.org, Jerry Brito, thus:

“The MPAA is complaining that Google leads people to infringing links, but what’s the alternative?” The movies that are available on file-sharing sites, he says, are “very rarely available for legal acquisition.”

Oh the humanity!  What is the alternative indeed?  What will my long-suffering fellow countrymen do of an evening if they cannot find a recently released movie on demand? Are they to risk carpal tunnel searching aimlessly?  Or watch something else, like maybe a film with an older release date?  Or (perish the thought) read something????  What is the point of living in a free and culturally diverse society?  What is this, Ukraine??

If you’re an American, everything about this search result should worry you, and everything it’s communicating should embarrass you. As for the worrisome part, if you read Ellen Seidler’s post about Lee and Brito and the Mercatus Center, the information-control process looks like this:  a user types in a broad search term like “movie piracy,” Google ensures that this pro-piracy article is the number two result, and the body of the article promotes the agenda of from an organization that is heavily funded by anti-labor, anti-civil-liberties forces like the Koch Brothers.   As many of us keep saying, the anti-copyright agenda is effectively an anti-fair-trade, anti-labor, anti-collective-bargaining agenda disguised as a pro-liberty agenda, and that brings us to the part that should embarrass you.  Because this message only works if you the user really believe that instant, round-the-clock access to all content is a right tantamount to a civil liberty.   If you honestly believe that, read about Ukraine this week. This is a nation hungry for a diverse economy, and I’ll bet the Ukranians would dearly enjoy a rich IP sector modeled after countries like the U.S., where artists are rewarded instead of, you know, jailed.  By contrast, people like Lee and Brito sound a hell of a lot like my kids complaining that there’s nothing to watch on television.

Google Backs Right Wing? No kidding.

Y’know how some of us keep saying the Silicon Valley agenda is not progressive and that it’s anti-copyright (think labor rights) positions are not in any way about YOU the users of its wondrous TUBES?  Well, welcome to the real face of Google, which may start to look a lot more like a portrait of Grover Norquist than its progressive supporters might have hoped.  Here’s an excerpt from this article at truth-out.org on Google’s funding for right wing organizations:

“Heritage Action, the tea-party styled political advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, is perhaps the most surprising recipient of Google’s largesse.

More than any other group working to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Heritage Action pushed for a sustained government shutdown in the fall of 2013, taking the country to the brink of a potentially catastrophic debt default.

Laying the ground for that strategy, Heritage Action held a nine-city “Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour” in August 2013, providing a platform for Texas Senator Ted Cruz to address crowds of cheering tea party supporters.”

 

Who’s Afraid of the TPP?

Ever heard of the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Okay, if you’re an internet issues follower, then yes, you’ve heard of these international trade negotiations still underway.  If you’re one of the other 180 or so million adult Americans, you probably haven’t.  And that works out to be very convenient for the self-proclaimed protectors of Internet freedom, if you’re inclined to believe the Obama Administration is chomping at the bit to whittle away your First Amendment rights at the behest of Hollywood movie moguls.  WikiLeaks just leaked what its editors seem to think is a damming excerpt from the trade agreement, and Mr. Assange has warned:

 “If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.”

Ordinarily, that much hyperbole from the mouth of someone as transparently self-serving as Assange is its own weakness, but we’re about to see the blogosphere swell with headlines warning that the TPP is just like SOPA! Beware!  The fact that the leaked excerpt is already out of date notwithstanding, we can agree without even seeing current drafts that the agreement-in-progress does have one thing in common with SOPA:   it won’t affect your rights one wit.  Since the US began Fair Trade Agreements in 2000, not a single one has effected a change in US IP law. And without a change to US law (and by the way SOPA didn’t change domestic law either), how exactly is my dancing in the crosshairs, as Julian Assange insists?  I mean my dancing sucks, but I don’t think the USTR gives a damn.

Let’s be clear, the internet industry lobbies for and tries to sell the public a world view in which all activity online exists outside any law; and there is no way they’re not going to gin up fear over any trade agreement that covers intellectual property. And there won’t be any trade agreements that don’t include intellectual property because, so far anyway, IP is big business, quite possibly a business where you work right now. Meanwhile, Julian Assange maintains his apparent relevance by selling a lot of smoke and claiming there’s always a fire.

In all seriousness, any citizen so inclined should certainly pay close attention to these or any other trade negotiations and do so through less hyperventilating sources. I prefer other soporifics, but we all have our tastes.  One thing that will not, however, be keeping me up is a concern that the USTR is presently engaged in chilling my or my children’s or my neighbor’s right to free expression.  And you know why?  Because free speech can’t be taken away as easily as certain self interests would have you believe.  Dostoyevsky was executed by firing squad*, and we still read Dostoyevsky.  Tell me a trade agreement unfairly favors a multi-national over a small business, and I’m listening, but tell me it threatens my right of free expression?  Let ‘em try.

* No he wasn’t. See comment from Musician below and my response. I think the larger point is the same. I could have made any number of choices — Lorca executed, Wilde jailed, Solzhenitsyn imprisoned, etc. — but Dostoyevsky’s execution here is greatly exaggerated.