Patrick Ruffini, political strategist, author, and President of Engage, a digital agency in Washington, DC, discusses his latest book with coauthors David Segal and David Moon: Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet. Ruffini covers the history behind SOPA, its implications for Internet freedom, the “Internet blackout” in January of 2012, and how the threat of SOPA united activists, technology companies, and the broader Internet community.

Download

Related Links

• Patrick Ruffini, Engage
• Patrick Ruffini, Huffington Post
• Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet, Goodreads

I reviewed the Veoh case for DRMWatch recently:

The user-generated video site Veoh achieved a victory in court on August 27th when California District Judge Howard Lloyd ruled that it was entitled to the protection of the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions. Veoh was accused of copyright infringement by IO Group, a maker of adult films…

Like eBay v. Tiffany, another case in which one might trumpet a tech-side win… the tech gets at least some protection from liability. But only in a context in which the tech is already taking substantial steps to help the plaintiff trademark/copyright owner with their enforcement problem, steps that would have been hard to conceive of a decade ago, and that many would have grandly declared to be too ambitious and too invasive for online services to attempt. Prediction: the case law is now much more mature, but the business side is just getting started. More and fancier filtering to come.

It’s funny and scary how many of our grand ideas about justice, rights, freedom, fairness and property come down to what we can become accustomed too.  Bad, in the sense that one can easily lose the customary baselines against which freedom is measured in a generation or so. Good, in the sense that one is not limited to identify freedom with just one historic mythical Golden Age; a free society has somewhat more leeway.

I’m fond of paradoxes these days. Tedious things. Almost as annoying to other people, I am sure, as those characters (you know who you are) who make puns all the time.

My recent comments on a developers experiment in combatting software piracy, posted here.

And an absolutely brilliant adventure in free speech marital event planning, here (OT).

Recently for DRMWatch I commented on the Court of Appeals ruling that Cablevision’s remote digital video recorder service did not directly violated copyright. The Court, however, did raise the possibility of indirect liability.

One possibility–perhaps the most sensible outcome–to avoid further litigation, Cablevision will negotiate a license allowing the new service–and content will offer a reasonable price, because their victory on indirect liability grounds is not by any means assured. Indirect liability depends on their being direct liability, and this takes us back into the realm of the Supreme Court’s decision in Sony-in which the Court ruled that time-shifting was a fair use. This is probably not territory that content is all that anxious to revisit, although Sony does leave them some wiggle room. (There is also a problem in the law… some theories of liability depend on whether the performance is “public” or “private,” and this distinction, while useful enough at a time when the only means to serve a mass market was to serve everybody at the same time from the same copy (a concert played in a crowded theatre, for example), is no longer particularly coherent). At the other end of the possibility range is the stupid outcome. There are no further negotiations; content sues, doesn’t have their heart in proving direct liability, and loses. Every manner of remote copying facility for everything springs into being, undermining not only content production but also Cablevision’s service, licensed or otherwise. And then there is more compulsory licensing, which no one likes. Unlikely? Yes, but stupid enough to be real!

Another recent case worth note is eBay v. Tiffany. Another widely trumpeted victory for the Internet in which the result is not quite so one-sided as a bare recitation of the holding suggests.

Enjoy.