Thinking about political parties, we think of behemoths, huge amalgamates of people and philosophies, preying on contemporary political events and social sentiments on their way to power. Power treated as an aim in and of itself, as the main reason and sense of the party’s existence. Political programmes of such huge organisations are usually gargantuan texts containing gigantic amounts of information on the official party line concerning seemingly every possible issue.

This causes problems. First of all, the machiavellian approach, want of complete, total power – as only by wielding it it is possible to push through with such complex system of ideas.

Secondly, this in practice bars the voters from making informed, rational decisions in the voting booth: how can they navigate in such a vast labyrinth of party programmes? And even if they could, they usually end up finding out they agree with social agenda of Party A, but only Party B has a sane economical one. Go and try to vote!

This, then, ends with a choice made on completely insubstantial grounds, either by subscribing to some populist agenda or hooking up on one of the many substitute topics (like gay marriage, that should by the way have been legalized a long time a go, under any of the proposed names; or abortion debate in which the level of informed, merit-based discussion is next to naught). That, or voting on a particular candidate that turned up in some form of a survey, “matching” candidate’s answers against voter’s views.

Is it finally time for Political Parties 2.0, then?

I believe so. It’s high time for single task parties, created with the aim of introducing a small set of well-defined, particular changes to reality (e.g. “reforming the copyright law to allow free of charge, legal, non-commercial sharing and remixing of culture”). Parties viewed from beginning till the very end as mere tools, not as aims in and of themselves; parties that seek and use many different methods of achieving their goals – as it’s possible to introduce change without entering the Parliament.

And, what’s as important – parties that are managed differently. Enough already with the parties of charismatic leaders that make almost all important decisions and push their own agendas using party members’ energy and time. Time for direct democracy, for example in the form of Liquid Democracy. We need parties that make decisions in maximally inclusive ways; ones that every member of has valid say, whom will vote according to party policy within the party “task” not because he has to, but because his true aim is, in fact, introducing this particular change in reality.

Such small, task-oriented parties also seem an interesting offer to those that feel that societies get too antagonised by the large, traditional political forces. They will more eagerly work together on issues that are not part of their particular “task”; possible they would also vote for what other task-oriented parties propose, as long as it’s not conflicting with their particular task.

To be able to avoid a task-oriented party becoming a traditional behemoth, such parties should also sport a clause in their statutes that would automagically dissolve them upon achieving their goals.

Today I would like to talk about hacking the system, but not a computer one. I do feel, you see, that the current political system (in, mind you, which I include media) is inherently hackable as far as introducing concrete, well-defined changes into reality is concerned; it can be done by political parties that do not even have to win any elections – as long as the issues at hand are clearly defined.

How? It’s easy.

Let’s try this on the example of copyright reform, which undoubtedly is dearly needed, and yet is not to be found (as far as I know) in any large party’s political programme. It’s a very visible issue lately (thanks to ACTA, but not only) that the general public has spoken out about quite loudly and clearly, yet no big political party seems to know how to go about it.

It should be enough, now, to simply create a political party which would have a single stated aim: change the copyright law. Such a party would have almost no chances of entering the Parliament; however, as it would be a political party, media would instantly get interested, and its name would spring up at an occasion where copyright reform, “piracy” and similar topics is discussed.

If such a party had a well-defined aim and actions that need to be undertaken to achieve it (i.e. which laws need to be changed, and how), and if it had well thought-through arguments those so-called “serious” parties would start to consider this small party a threat to at least some part of their political base. And while the chances of it entering the Parliament would still be close to nil, the “large” parties – fighting over every opinion poll point – would likely find it unacceptable.

The easiest way out of this conundrum for those large parties is, of course, copying – by simply incorporating the particular aim of this small party in their political programmes and preparing well their argumentation (for or against).

This, of course, will make the chances of entering the Parliament by the small party even smaller, but by now that’s irrelevant: the postulate has just entered big parties programmes; even more, by taking part in debates on the issue they themselves make it more prominent. And that’s exactly what the doctor ordered.

Because suddenly a topic that was completely absent from political debate is prominently featured in it, including getting into parties’ programmes. If the small party founders did their job well and the aim was well and clearly defined (which usually is not the case with the majority of political programme wording), it’s quite possible to hold the big parties accountable for it – still using the small party as the boogeyman when needed.

One of the moments that made RightsCon Rio great: instead of attending one of the lectures, I had a tough, intense discussion with Thor Halvorssen of and Paulo Rená on… well, on a few topics really, including where do fundamental/human rights come from (are they inherent to every single human being or are they a by-product of society) and whether or not corporations are becoming a threat to those rights on their own (without government “help” in this regard).

The former is a topic well trodden by many thinkers. The latter is what I would like to summarize here, as I deem it’s both important and timely.

The issue arose while discussing a different one (which is important by itself, and which I will cover soon). What the topic boils down to is this question:
Multinational corporations are behemoths, some have more money and hard assets than many governments; hence, power of those corporations is becoming less and less accountable to any society. Is this dangerous in and of itself, or only when such corporations “get in bed” with governments?

I am willing to concede that governments are inherently dangerous; I am willing to concede that the most evil that corporations did up until today was, as Thor put it, “when corporations were in bed with governments”. And I am willing to concede that the military monopoly, held by governments, is one of the most important reasons for that.

However, I am also deeply concerned that what we see here is the game changing before our very eyes. Corporations – which cannot be called the most ethical entities on this Earth – are now amassing more power than many governments, and some are already building their own armies. I feel it is probable that military monopoly will be broken soon.

A historical analogy¶

Polish history in the 17th and 18th century is a good analogy here.

Simplifying quite a bit – Polish nobility had vast personal liberties and had substantial say in government affairs for centuries. Over the years, magnates (the highest class of nobility) gathered more and more power in their (private) hands while Polish Army was mainly based on “pospolite ruszenie” – forces mobilised from Polish gentry.

At some point military power in disposal of several magnates was enough to challenge the military power of the King, by gradually claiming their sole rule and own laws over their territories. This led to the magnates-led nobility revolting against the government and internal struggles in the country.

Finally, it resulted in loss of independence and dismantling the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, once formidable force in Europe and the world, by bordering states.

Modern-day nobility¶

What is interesting is that we can see a very similar storm brewing today when it comes to multinational corporations.

They are, in fact, being treated like modern-day gentry. They have been granted vast privileges (corporate personhood, “money is speech” verdict in the US, etc.). They do have much say in governmental affairs (through lobbying, revolving door techniques and other means). Similarly to nobility, they cannot be imprisoned and court proceedings are slanted in their favour, if only because of huge legal teams and vast coffers they have at their disposal.

They amass more money and information, and hence power, than many governments. They have their own armies in the form of security agencies. And it’s not a government that knows how to build the newest jet fighter or the best rocket launcher – the corporations do.

They feel authorised to rule their “subjects” – employees and private clients – just as magnates ruled theirs; its the means that changed: now instead of decrees they issue Terms of Service, EULAs and internal regulations.

From this there is just a single small step to be made towards an overt corporatocracy. And already some corporations are asserting their own rule over certain areas. Just like Polish magnates did in the eve of internal troubles.

Danger ahead¶

Hence, I see the situation becoming extremely dangerous in two scenarios:

• either a corporation will gain powers that exceed powers of governments, including breaking the military monopoly, and then will use those powers to their own ends;
• or, maybe, the more power a corporation has, the more likely it becomes that it will “go to bed” with a government.

Either way, we end up in a situation in which it is the power of the corporation that is the extreme and immediate danger to our personal liberties and human rights. We need to be clear on that and acknowledge it.

Another follow-up after the RightsCon and OpenITP conferences in Rio – during OpenITP workshop session an interesting idea has been floated as an case-study in the Game Theory and Censorship working group:
if every (or most; or just many) HTTPS-enabled webservers on the Internet were configured as open proxies, this could provide invaluable additional layer of security and resilience for anti-censorship and anti-surveillance tools, like TOR; and would be very useful in and of itself.

As Lucas Dixon of Google Ideas pointed out, this idea was being discussed informally on and off during at least the last year or so.

I love the idea, and I believe it is worth some serious thought. Should this become reality, it would be close to impossibru to selectively censor the Internet, especially by oppressive regimes (like the USA or China), as to accomplish that they would need to effectively censor all HTTPS communication with all such HTTPS-enabled open proxies. I’d like to see the US censoring google.pl…

Good reasons¶

Imagine a world in which you could use any public-facing HTTPS server as an anonymous proxy just by telling your operating system or application to use it so. No need to set-up TOR and the traffic not only looks like valid HTTPS traffic, it actually is valid HTTPS traffic to a valid HTTPS host.

Because it’s end-to-end encrypted, censorship and surveillance tools have no way of distinguishing it from normal traffic to this particular website, save for a MITM attack (this does happen, but adds another layer of complexity and needed effort to the censor’s system). Surveillance is still possible via getting server logs from the proxy operator, but that’s much harder than simply listening-in all the time.

While the TOR project does a stellar job in obscuring their traffic so it’s hard to tell from HTTPS, a simple list of operating TOR nodes is enough to prove problematic – as China’s example shows. In this case it’s a legitimate website doing the proxying, hence a regime would have to actually block the website instead of trying to find TOR traffic and block that.

This would mean that the choice that a regime has is either to block the whole HTTPS Internet; invest in complicated MITM attacks (that either require a compromised CA, or are completely visible to users); or accept the fact that they cannot selectively censor the Internet anymore.

And do keep in mind that selective blocking and filtering is active in many western democracies, including Italy or Great Britain. This could prove an invaluable tool for Internet users from those countries too.

Bad excuses¶

Now, let’s try to poke holes in the notion, shall we?

Obviously the first and biggest problem that comes to mind is the NIMBY-esque statement of any server admin worth their salt:
I do not want my server’s IP showing up in some child-porn server’s logs, and am not at all interested in partaking in all the law enforcement fun fun fun related to that later.

Or put it a bit differently – there will be abusers, period.

Thankfully, we already have an example of such a situation, and I am talking, of course, about TOR exit nodes. Admins make the decision whether to run a TOR exit node on their servers with this very consideration in their minds, and many do decide to run it. There are two reasons for that:

• catering to the needs of dissidents and human rights activists in oppressive regimes is a honourable, humane thing to do, and the occasional abuser can be considered a poor excuse not to do it;
• we have logs to prove that it is not us that initiated the “unlawful” connection, and the more widespread the practice is, the better standing we have to explain that we cannot be held liable for what other people do with our service.

Both of those work for TOR, and I see no reason for them not to work in this case.

I think that this is the biggie, the rest are technicalities – i.e. how much bandwidth and processing power can you provide for the open proxy part of your server is a technical question every admin would have to answer for themselves.

So what about TOR?¶

In no way am I advocating doing the above instead of operating a TOR exit node or bridge; if you can run TOR, do! If not, HTTPS ubiquitous anonymous proxies is a complementary measure that helps in some scenarios.

It does not provide strong anonymity, so it doesn’t help much against surveillance (the logs are being kept by the proxy operators!) and thus cannot in any way be viewed as TOR replacement. From regular user’s point of view, however, it is easier to set-up and integrate with their browsing habits – it hence can cater to the needs of some of the users that found TOR too complicated to set-up and use, but still need a way to circumvent certain kinds of censorship.

For a while now I see a serious problem in the fact that many Free Software advocates, privacy activists, human rights defenders and generally important players in this technical-slash-fundamental-rights Internet community publish their short bursts of brilliance only on Twitter.

It’s problematic, because Twitter is a closed, proprietary and – most importantly – centralised social network that has even agreed to censor tweets under certain circumstances, and while I do applaud their policy of generally standing up for the user, I cannot in good conscience say it’s a good solution for us hacktivists (because things like these are the more likely to happen the more users use Twitter).

Now, I am painfully aware that getting all the cool kids to migrate from Twitter to a more libre and decentralised StatusNet-based services (like Identi.ca or Telecomix’s instance) is a pipe dream, at least for the time being – and while I would love to see that happening, I am not going to go taliban on that. Instead, I would like to focus on making StatusNet-based services more usable for Joe User.

And that means tackling the…

Network Effect¶

One of the main Joe’s hurdles with those libre microblogging sites is that, well, not many people are there. I do not completely agree with that (i.e. there is no @rms on Twitter), but I do see the problem.

It’s called the “network effect”. What it means is that, as far as communication networks/means are concerned, the more people use a given service, the more incentivised are other people to join it. That’s actually quite obvious – you want to use a communication medium that lets you, well, communicate with as many people as possible; hence you usually choose the one that has the most of your friends or people you’d like to hear from and talk to.

Problem here is that while users of different StatusNet instances can engage each other, as this de-centralised service (just like e-mail) allows different servers to communicate, Twitter is incompatible with them while still being the largest microblogging site today. This means that even if somebody wants to go libre and set-up a StatusNet account somewhere, they quickly find they still need Twitter to follow many of the people they are interested in following.

Of course, I don’t stand a chance in hell of convincing @BillGates to set-up a libre StatusNet account (not that I miss him dearly on the libre side of microblogging), but us hacktivists and human rights champions should know better, right?

The Plea¶

So here’s my plea: at least do not reinforce the network effect by publishing solely on Twitter. This is the least you can do and you don’t even need to go through hoops and loops, e.g. by publishing by hand on many different services or using a third party to do it for you – you can get the software to do just that. All you need is a StatusNet account.

It costs nothing; it doesn’t compromise your account in any way (as it doesn’t even give the StatusNet instance any write-access to your Twitter account); it helps people move from centralised service to a de-centralised one; it circumvents Twitter’s own geography-based censorship (once it’s on StatusNet, it’s not under Twitter’s control); and it gives access to your tweets to people that made a conscious decision to steer clear of corporate-owned, centralised communication platforms. What’s not to love!

Here’s what you do.

The How To¶

Turns out Twitter provides RSS feeds for each user timeline under the address:
https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/USERNAME.rss
where USERNAME is the Twitter handle; for instance, here’s @ioerror’s: https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/ioerror.rss.

StatusNet, on the other hand, can use RSS feeds as sources. That means you can tell your StatusNet (i.e. Identi.ca) account to publish whatever gets published on your Twitter account, automatically.

You can do that in your StatusNet service account settings. After logging-in to the web-interface of your StatusNet service of choice, go to Settings -> Mirroring, click “RSS or Atom feed”, paste your Twitter timeline RSS feed and click “Add feed”. Make sure that “Mirroring style” is “Repost the content under my account”.

That’s it. You are no longer an obstacle on the way to de-centralisation. Kudos.

Some might remember how a few years ago biggest Polish ISP mistakenly blocked GIMP’s website for their users.

Today I took part in a meeting on net neutrality, content blocking and privacy, within the framework of workshops run by Polish Ministry of Administration and Digitalization. The topic of informing on blocks engaged by the ISPs to protect their networks came up, obviously the ISPs are fighting tooth and nail against that.

I reminded the representatives present about how Telekomunikacja Polska (now owned by Orange) blocked GIMP’s website, and how such an information would be instrumental for server’s admins to solve the problem on their side or at least know what’s going on.

As a reply, Mr Tomasz Piłat, Orange rep, said the following:

And all 5 GIMP users were outraged

After which another Orange rep requested “some respect” towards their company.

UPDATE: the first version is now published on KDE-Look, enjoy.

Okay, so I have finally decided to write my first Plasmoid – you know, the KDE Plasma widget. No, I haven’t written it, yet. Yes, I know what I am going to write:
the best damn to-do list under the friggin’ sun!

So, what my ideal ToDo list will do? Basically, I am going to insolently rip-off BasKet Note Pads. Do you know BasKet? Well, you should. Best note-taking app I know.

More accurately, though, the minimal functionality would be:

• one-click tasks adding, a’la my current ToDo handler Task Timer;
• one-click starting/stopping timing of tasks, again inspired by Task Timer;
• task grouping/subtasks, as with notes in BasKet;
• drag-and-drop task ordering, including within groups;
• one-click deletion/marking as done, for efficiency all around.

After implementing that I will consider also:

• CalDAV/iCAL/vCAL sync with my calendars, for added joy;
• ability to connect to BasKet, because sometimes the full app would be much more convenient;
• tags, categories, including visual clues, so that a single glance of the plasmoid would pass all the needed info.

Obviously, I am still thinking what else could be done with that. Comments welcome, as always.

A note to English readers: wherever I could find English sources, I used them; however, many a time it was not possible, hence you will find many Polish links in this text.

To say that much was happening lately around ACTA in Poland is a huge understatement. During the last two months we went from being informed of planned ACTA signing, through street protests (spreading far beyond Poland), so-called “attacks” on Polish government websites, the signing itself, then attempts of returning to talks and finally – complete reversal of the official government stance and calling the treaty “passé”.

It was an important, powerful and extremely interesting outburst of so-called Internets against something perceived to be a danger to the liberties and rights to use this great tool.

Hit Fits the Shan¶

First and foremost – none of participants to the memorable January meeting with the Ministry of Administration and Digitalisation expected what was going to happen.

On one hand, this is a statement of how trusting towards the government the NGOs had been (remembering the promise given on the 18th of May, 2011 that all works on ACTA shall be halted until all our questions are answered). On the other – a testament to just how completely ignorant of the importance of this treaty the ministries responsible for it in Poland – the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Ministry of Economy – had been.

After casually remarking on the fact of the planned signing in one week’s time (on the 26th of January), representatives of those ministries apparently intended to just move one to next items on the agenda.

Obviously, at this point there were no other items. Few seconds of complete silence followed: people from NGOs were trying to comprehend what exactly has just been said, while the host of the meeting, minister Igor Ostrowski, published a single tweet and sank into disbelief; representatives of the two responsible ministries themselves looked like rabbits caught in headlights, starting to slowly realise something bad is going to happen, but not really sure what and why…

Internets awaken¶

From this moment onwards everything has been happening with tempo that surprised everybody; after first information on planned signing surfaced, Polish Internet seethed with rage, just as it did two years before when ideas of network filtering and censorship surfaced (those have been dumped since). There were, however, important differences:

• many Polish Internet users, especially those more tech-savvy, followed the ACTA topic for years, hence the pressure and interest were already there;
• there were promises made by the government regarding the treaty and those were broken, so naturally people following the topic felt cheated;
• there was a concrete date set, in the nearest future, so time pressure was also there.

Additional crucial factor was provided by the SOPA/PIPA Blackout, ending mere hours before ACTA signing plans surfaced. The public was well informed about dangers stemming from those and similar attempts to curtail Internet sharing and was interested in the topic. ACTA became a natural continuation for the SOPA/PIPA topics present in Polish media for more than a week by then. And it was something that actually applied to Poland.

One important thing to remember is that Poles still do remember vividly the communism years, police state and censorship. And vehemently oppose any attempts of bringing them back in any form.

All this meant that the energy of the outburst was significantly higher than two years before. During just few hours, instead of open letters and on-line petitions that had been the prime tool back then, real people organising true street protests and manifestations started to appear. What is essential (and very interesting in and of itself), these were completely spontaneous, grass-roots activities, not associated with NGOs that had been bringing up the ACTA problem for years (like Panoptykon, ISOC, Modern Poland Foundation or Free and Open Source Software Foundation).

Ground rules¶

Instantly we understood that – being the NGOs involved in the ACTA topic for years – our job is to take upon ourselves the role of experts and rudimentary coordinators; simply put, we would not find the time to do anything besides that (and boy were we right, we were completely swamped with this work for more than a solid month). Our tasks from that point on were:

• providing know-how, information, documents, statements regarding ACTA and related topics;
• reacting to whatever was happening (sometimes the situation was literally changing by the hour), including providing coherent communiques for and via media;
• attempting to influence the individual protest organisers from all around Poland to keep their protests peaceful, on-topic, organised according to law of the land and as far as possible – coordinated in time.

Completely organically we understood we need a no-logo rule – no party, group or similar logos, banners, flags, etc. Just protesting together against a single cause, not promoting our respective organisations. This met with some dissent at first – not surprisingly many entities tried to pin their names to this huge commotion. We all understood perfectly, however, that once any political party or group attaches their name to this informal movement, it would spell failure: we would get tagged and pushed into old categories, and hence trivialised.

Sea of people¶

And then came the day of protests – tens of thousands of people in the whole country decided to face the -30°C temperatures to voice their critical opinion over the treaty.

There were no such protests in Poland at least since the 1980’s. They covered the whole country, including smaller towns; they were peaceful and on-topic; they all concerned a single issue, and all had the same slogans on banners and being shouted by the protesters; people from all possible political groups and affiliations took part, often side-by-side with whom they normally perceived as enemies, and heeding the no-logo rule; interestingly, politicians that tried to hook themselves with the protests – all failed miserably.

Thanks to excellent and coherent stance of the individual protest organisers it was possible to fend off politicization of the protests; that made it possible for very different groups of people – from right-wing activists to anarchists, and everything in between – to stand together, protesting hand-in-hand against a common cause. No one felt uninvited because of their political views. And that meant more people protesting together.

An unintended consequence of this political diversity on the streets was that neither politicians nor media had a clue how to describe the movement, how to narrate about it nor categorize it. In no way did it fit the traditional ways of describing protests in Poland. That also worked in our advantage. It turned out that neither media nor politicians are able to handle truly grass-roots, spontaneous initiatives focused on particular issues, functioning over (or away from!) the usual political and social divides.

Government websites get popular¶

This inability to tag the protesters ended as soon as government websites got “popular” – as that is how the government spokesman at first described DDoS action by Anonymous. As soon as government officials understood their mistake, instantly they took the opportunity and started describing the anti-ACTA movement as “hackers, terrorists”, “attacking” government websites.

It was so very convenient for the government as it made it possible to portray the protests in unfavourable way and gave the perfect excuse to discard valid objections of hundreds of thousands Poles:

We will not succumb to blackmail.

Immediately we saw that coming and tried contacting Anonymous in order to try and convince them to halt the attacks. To our surprise, it was effective.

Still, the “blackmail” excuse has been already used and ACTA got signed by the Polish ambassador on 26th of January.

Protests, however, continued – and mainstream media started publishing opinion polls regarding them.

Let’s talk¶

Apparently, that was finally something the government took notice of. Suddenly it became apparent that we’re not some “anonymous Internet users”, but living, breathing citizens, voicing our objections regarding something the government decided to do. We stopped being seen as some kids with a computer, “pirates”, “hackers”; the government was starting to see that there are Voters in our ranks. And that made a world of difference.

The government switched into damage control mode and started frantically seeking ways of “establishing a dialogue” – in other words something we called for for years… Also, Polish Ombudsman in her statement regarding the situation, called upon Polish universities to organise debates on the topic.

We decided to organise our own event, to meet each other, get as many of the people involved in a single place and share the know-how, giving protest organisers tools and information needed to be effective in what they were doing. So we organised the Improvised Free Internet Congress.

At this point the government already seemed desperate. A single day before the Congress (Friday evening!) we received invitations to a debate with the Prime Minister and ministers, planned for… the following Monday. This might have been a cunning move aimed at not allowing us to respond (media are slow on weekends), or a desperate attempt to relieve the tension as soon as possible. The fact that minister Boni unexpectedly (a single hour in advance) announced his coming to the Congress suggests the latter.

Naturally, one of the main (and of course by far the hardest) tasks at hand at the Congress was formulating an answer to the invitation to the Monday debate. Finally we realised that in light of sending out invitations on Friday evening and taking into account how well over a year of talks about ACTA with the government worked for us, only a single answer was proper: decline.

We decided, however, to take part via electronic means – especially when we were able to convince the organiser of the debate (Ministry of Administration and Digitalisation) to include, apart from a bit unfortunate choice of Twitter and Facebook (closed, private, corporate networks), also good old standardised IRC (a dedicated, moderated channel was set-up on Telecomix servers).

The debate lasted over 7 hours straight (which, of course, meant a lot of comedy-grade material). Nevertheless, it seemed that the government started treating the ACTA topic really seriously.

PM Tusk admits a mistake¶

And finally on Friday, the 17th day of February, 2012, Prime Minister Donald Tusk admitted he was wrong. This took us completely by surprise, but curiously the most surprised seemed to be the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage – as only the day before they sent out a document defending ACTA. They were so surprised, in fact, that they apparently cancelled their representative’s participation in ACTA debate planned for the following Monday (but announced before PM’s decision reversal).

We have much to discuss¶

This debate was quite important, as it was the first of the university-organised ACTA debates, postulated by the Ombudsman that took place after PM’s change of heart. Instead of ACTA, then, we debated on copyright reform.

This trend continued throughout all university-organised ACTA debates. This way, a bit by luck, a discussion on a dearly-needed copyright reform started in Poland. And this time, the government appears to take active part in it.

Thanks to Asimov Foundation and the great people from the Budapest Hackerspace I had the chance to participate – along with a small Polish copyright reform dream-team – in the V4 Paradigm Shift in Copyright workshop.

All in all, two days of heavy thinking on copyright reform with a group of people from all of the Visegrad Four countries.

In my humble opinion the most important result of the workshop was meeting all the people away from keyboard, in real life, and getting a birds-eye view on copyright situation in all the V4 countries. We did not dream of finding the perfect solution to copyright problems in digital era just yet; we did, however, verify and reality-check our respective ideas against situation in the rest of the countries, and the ideas of the rest of the activists.

One very important thing is that we all agreed we need to work on the language. Currently the discussion around copyright continues to use a language imposed by one of the sides. This does not bode well for the ability to find good solutions, as it slants the playing field in one direction.

Hence, we have started to create a very rudimentary dictionary.

The most crucial thing here is the fact that “intellectual property” term is completely unacceptable. Neither anything it supposedly describes is bona fide “property” (being in fact time-limited monopolies), nor does lumping them together make any sense. Simply put, copyright, trademark laws and patents are completely different and should be treated separately in discussions. Trying to talk about them together only complicates things and blurs the situation (no doubt, an effect welcomed by the proponents of the term).

An additional important positive result of taking part in the thing was for me the possibility to finally talk a bit with Amelia Andersdotter. Brain-scratching discussion on how privatisation of infrastructure creates new problems for those striving to uphold personal rights and freedoms in the Internet. I will probably get back to this topic.

The Internet is a very young invention – its precursor, ARPANET, was created in the early 70s. Most of Internet phenomena we partake in and tools we use are much younger. First social networks, for example, were created in the nineties, however the boom for the came only in the first decade of the 21st century.

That means, basically, that we do not know how to use them. Simply put, we had no time to learn.

People, naturally, are trying to work in the new reality, in new situations, with new technology by analogy to situations and technologies they know. Only after such practical attempts (often lasting for years) does the understanding of how the new tool differs from the old and well known ones arise. And with that – new regulations, new customs ordering up the use of such new technology.

Car Analogy¶

When first “automobiles” showed up, they were treated more or less as carriages, a technology known for ages. It soon, however, turned out that cars are much faster and hence much more dangerous; this lead to new customs and laws, and a whole new culture of using cars, that accounted for the “otherness” of this new tool and new reality.

At first, part of the regulations was absurd. For instance, red flag laws stating that each “mechanical carriage” should be preceded by a person with a flag or lantern, warning about machine’s approach. With time, though, people learned how to use cars, and how to regulate its use – and the new tool gradually stopped being new.

Finally, the tool became familiar, cars are now an ordinary part of everyday life; we all more or less know and understand the rules – like having to look around while crossing the street or using seatbelts while in a car. Some of such rules entered common knowledge and customs; some were made into laws. In general we all know how to behave in a world with cars – something our grandparents knew not.

Information Superhighway¶

With Internet, social media and the rest of the information technologies (called quite recently – unsurprisingly – “new technologies”), we are in a similar situation to our forefathers in the first years of motorisation. The technology changed, and it changed our reality. We do not know and are unable to foresee all consequences of our actions in the virtual space. Rules, the culture of using the Internet and laws pertaining to it – are only being created.

In many ways our situation is actually much worse. Technology changes much faster than these few decades ago; this means that it’s much harder to catch up with cultural changes, with customs and regulations. It gets even worse: possible ill effects of our inability to foresee all consequences of certain actions are significantly delayed and not as spectacular, as consequences of not noticing a car approaching (although not always).

Hence, it’s harder for us to notice such ill effects, take them into account and verify or change our customs, our internet hygiene. If consequences of my bad decision turn out only 5 years from now on some job interview I fail due to some pictures from a party, published 2 years ago – during these 7 years I am unaware of the fact that putting those pictures on-line was a mistake. And there is a huge chance I will make this mistake many, many times during this time.

Not only does the technology change faster than ever, we are reacting to those changes (through making changes to our customs, culture, laws) slower than before. This is extremely dangerous – but we will make notice of it 5 or 10 years from now, when today’s teens will be trying to get their first jobs, while their prospective employers will verify them with the help from Uncle Google and Big Brother Facebook.

Red flags¶

This is precisely the reason why some organisations and people (including myself) are warning about giving up privacy (of which citizens are not always aware), about giving our personal data and private communication away to corporations and centralized networks.

It is, of course, possible that we are overreacting – like the proponents of “red flag” laws. However, it is often better to be a bit overcautious – so that we’re not all engulfed in technocomplacency and blind fascination over new technologies.