Rainblog

Yesterday, I wrote a post in which I suggested that we shouldn’t shed too many tears for Megaupload, and that the subsequent DDoS served no one - except the RIAA, the MPAA, and government agencies anxious to find an excuse to extend their interference in the Internet. I believe that the DDoS actually hurts the fight against SOPA and PIPA and empowers the special interests pushing for censorship.

While we’re on the subject, go read Umberto Eco’s “Striking at the Heart of the State”, which you can find in his essay collection “Travels in Hyperreality”. The gist, briefly summarized, is that terrorism - under which heading we can include retaliatory DDoS attacks - actually serves the cause of the autocratic states or multinational corporations it claims to fight. The damage inflicted by terrorist attacks is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but attacks allow ‘the authorities’ to introduce ever more draconian schemes of control and surveillance in the name of ‘fighting terrorism’. The true enemy of autocracy is democracy, not violent direct action.

That said, the Megaupload takedown serves as an illustration of everything that’s wrong with bills such as SOPA and PIPA. As well as pirates, Megaupload also served legitimate users, who have now lost access to their files - one of the inevitable side-effects predicted by opponents of the bills. Meanwhile, there are claims that you can still access Megaupload if you know the right IP address to use. Again, one of the objections raised was that the measures proposed would be easy to bypass, and that pirates - who are highly-motivated and technically-savvy - would be the first to do so. Looks like the anti-SOPA folks were right about that too.

The takedown also illustrates that the industry doesn’t even need SOPA: they’d like it, sure, but they shuttered Megaupload without too much difficulty. The record companies’ fight with Megaupload also featured a record company making fraudulent claims of ownership in order to censor something they didn’t like (the anti-SOPA movement called that one too), US government agencies acting as agents of the music/movie industry, and foreign governments doing the bidding of the US. In short, pretty much everything that opponents of this type of bought-and-paid-for legislation warned you about has turned out to be correct, and you can find it all illustrated by the Megaupload case.

I still don’t think that DDoS was a good idea, though.

Yesterday, many Internet sites participated in a one-day blackout in protest against the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The protests, combined with a letter-writing and phone-call campaign, apparently convinced several senators that there was real opposition to the poorly-conceived legislation. The bills, which had seemed unstoppable, suddenly look less of a certainty. It was almost as if the senators had realized for the first time that people who use or work on the Internet represent a real political constituency, made up of voters who are informed, articulate and organized, and who would have to be taken seriously.

Today, the Department of Justice shut down the Megaupload file locker and arrested several of its operators. In response, attackers allegedly from the Internet group Anonymous unleashed a wave of DDoS attacks, targeting the DoJ, the US Copyright Office, the MPAA, the RIAA and the websites of several major record labels.

Let’s think about the impact of that for a moment. While the website takedowns are probably annoying for the record companies and the industry associations, the attacks aren’t exactly a death-blow. On the other hand, in propaganda terms it’s a gift that the Big Content companies couldn’t have bought at any price. “Look,” they’ll say “this is what we’ve been telling you all along. These people are anti-social, extremists, terrorists. They commit criminal acts in defense of other criminals! This is why we need laws like PIPA and SOPA.”

I don’t believe that Megaupload is an entirely innocent victim. Pretty much any time I’ve seen a link to megaupload.com, there’s been pirated content at the end of it. I’ve seen a few exceptions - the service certainly has some legitimate users, who will be hurt by the takedown. Megaupload also removed at least some of illegal content on their site in response to complaints, but they did so knowing that there would always be more uploaded tomorrow and that the complaints would take time to come in. And I think they were fine with that, because their business model was based on getting people to upload and download stuff, and it wasn’t the legitimate content that drove the real traffic. This takedown may be just the latest round in an ongoing grudge match where the Big Money is playing as dirty as it knows how, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that the charges against Megaupload are without any substance.

“But the big corporations are wicked and greedy!” say the everything-should-be-free Torrent kiddies. No doubt, although whether that justifies you stealing from them for your own benefit is another question. At least Robin Hood gave to the poor, he didn’t just upload whatever he took to his iTunes library. More to the point, it isn’t just the big corporations who the pirates rob. My partner is a writer: all her work is now listed on ‘free ebook’ sites that host lists of links to electronic copies of her books on file lockers like Megaupload. Other writers, artists and software developers I know have had similar experiences. They aren’t Universal Records; they aren’t even Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling. They are people who work hard for very little money, and the pirates then come along and give their work away for free. That’s not exactly what I call sticking it to the Man.

Let me propose a simple rule. If you give away your work for free on the Internet, you’re a hero. If you give away someone else’s work for free on the Internet, you’re scum.

And if you build a business model on the back of other people’s work being given away, then you’re probably Megaupload, or one of a bunch of similar sites.

And if you rally to the ‘cause’ of something like Megaupload by participating in a DDoS attack that hands those big corporations you claim to hate a gigantic propaganda victory just at the point that they’ve suffered the first serious setback in their ongoing campaign to screw us all, about the nicest thing I can find to call you is ‘a dupe’.