Cyberspace and COICA

Cyberspace is bull, and everyone with half a brain knows it.

It simply doesn't exist. There is no actual space that could potentially contain actual objects or people. It's not another dimension you can just travel to; this isn't like frikking Tron. Cyberspace is nothing but a tired metaphor that simply will not die.

The reality is that when you go out onto the internet you don't go anywhere, any more than one of your friends is literally elsewhere when they are "on the phone." This wondrous machine we call the Internet is just a bunch of people interacting via horrifying, new communications devices, built right into the common computer. Cyberspace doesn't exist, because all the stuff that happens there actually happens right there in the computer in front of you, and others like it. The internet is just like the real world, too tiny to see, to vast to imagine, and too mundane to respect properly, because the internet is part of the world we live in.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of people out there who like to think that the internet is a real place, and that it has a different set of laws from the land of meat, plastic and wire. Not all of these people are criminals, at least not in the sense that people tend to think of internet criminals. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure the rules should be the same, whether you do something in person, by mail, or via the internet. There are some lawmakers who disagree.

The real piece of bullshit for today is in the war on piracy, or more precisely, the way it's being carried out. This is about, ICE seizing 82 domains, under a single court order, and refusing to say why, how or for whom.

There is no way that the judge who signed off on this made an informed decision regarding each and every one of those sites. Nobody would sign a court order closing 82 distinct brick and mortar book stores (or more closely chains of bookstores), because some suit says he's investigating the possibility that some of them are moving counterfeit books or pirated movies. That would be the height of insanity. It is insanity.

While I'd be glad to see Torrent Finder squirm (not because they aid pirates, but because they go about it in a sleazy way), I cannot condone these actions taken against them. Not only because are there reports of innocent file sharing sites, dedicated to the legal exchange of legal content (independent or hobbyist artists trading songs like DeviantArt users do with drawings), getting caught in the blast of this legal artillery strike, but because they should be prosecuted lawfully for their actual crimes. Accusations of piracy have become the new accusations of communism, and some people would like to see this turn into the same kind of media circus witch-hunt.

The war on piracy is a guerrilla war, the kind you have to win with hearts and minds instead of good AoE DPS, and as despicable as it is for pirates to use legitimate commerce as human shields, the moment the ICE rolls out the heavy ordinance they become another kind of villain. When two teams of bad guys go head to head, ordinary people like you and me get to be the collateral damage. As civilized people we can come up with a cleaner solution to this problem, that doesn't involve harassing innocent citizens and invading our civil liberties, just to inconvenience some pirates.

That's right, just to inconvenience them. Torrent Search was right back to sleazing up the internet within hours, with a four letter difference in their URL. Their ad revenue is still flowing, and they still get hits in Google searches that aren't looking for them. I hope those free music sharing hippies have the good sense to also not bother fighting this ineffectual legal attack, as I doubt they have the money to battle a court order.

This is a stupid, sloppy way of doing things, and that's important, because it's about to become the normal way of doing things. The EFF has the worst case scenarios outlined, and if nobody takes an interest in finding a better way, you can expect one, or all, of these scenarios to come true.

The internet needs to not be some lawless wilderness where no officer has jurisdiction, and the federal government needs to take the initiative, what with the network stretching across state lines. I just want the people who decide how this goes down to not be so stupid about it. I know, too much to ask.

These laws should be written carefully. We should slowly introduce minor regulations that help proper law enforcement enforce the existing laws, and not be afraid to repeal laws that aren't working out. This is new technology, and it's going to take experimentation to find the right set of rules. The right set of rules is intuitively linked to the set of rules that govern the rest of human interaction, and they will be enforced in the same way.

The internet needs laws, but the internet needs good laws that protect the people who use it and the companies they work for, not laws that cause fear of censorship and government harassment, while letting the guilty walk free. Things like DMCA (in effect) and COICA (in congress) are shoddy laws that will empower bad cops. I've lived in places where bad cops ran free, and that isn't the kind of place you want the internet to turn into, even if the internet isn't really a place.

It was the same way with every other scary new way for the people to exchange ideas. Printing presses, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, video games, etc. Terrified reactionaries take the first go, with book burnings and wire taps, and then it falls to the sane people of Earth to clean up their mess and regulate this strange new technology. There are a lot of people who like to think that we, as a society, have evolved past that sort of thing.

They are wrong.