Building the Dutch wall

Recently a Dutch court summoned two Dutch Internet providers to stop providing access to The Pirate Bay, a torrent site hosted in Sweden. The case was brought to the court by Stichting BREIN, a Dutch organization which is mostly funded by the entertainment industry from Europe and the US. I am not a user of The Pirate Bay myself, so I had to check if my own provider was also forced to cut that site off, and it was. While this has no impact on my actual Internet use, this really, really bothers me.

Torrents are no more than short codes which identify a specific piece of data, shared over the Internet. The data itself is not necessarily hosted in one particular spot. Someone just starts hosting it and publishes a torrent, and then others grab the torrent and begin downloading the data. That way the data gets spread over the Net. As long as all the data chunks are available for download somewhere (not necessarily all in one place), anybody who gets the torrent can start downloading the data, and automatically becomes a provider of the data. The more people that are downloading the data, the easier and faster it can be acquired.

Torrents are actually a great and modern way to distribute data. Classic downloading requires the data to be offered in one spot. If many people are interested in getting the data, it will be slow to download, and probably cannot be accessed by most people who want it. Contrariwise, if accessed through a torrent, getting the data actually becomes faster when more people are downloading it. But since there is no central place for the data, if you seek a particular piece of data, what you need is a place that allows searching for an appropriate torrent. This is a service provided by sites such as The Pirate Bay.

Now, it is definitely true that The Pirate Bay is hosting torrents that allow the downloading of software, films, and music, owned by people or companies that do not allow their property to be spread around in this way. Whether or not that means that The Pirate Bay is doing something illegal is debatable: it is not actually hosting illegal materials, and neither is it required to check whether the torrents that it hosts are pointing at illegal materials. The Swedish courts don’t think it is doing anything illegal. Still, this is a grey area, and I can imagine that the owners of the materials do not like to see The Pirate Bay offer the means for Internet users to get easy access to their property. The question is: what can they do about it?

Could they try to get their property removed from the Internet? No, that is impossible under the torrent concept, as the property is stored in many places in many different chunks. Could they try to get the torrents removed or disabled? Again, that is impossible as the torrents themselves are very small files which can be found on thousands of places on the Net, most of which fall under judicial systems which are not interested in helping the property owners. Their only option is to try to limit Internet access in places that they have some control over. And that is exactly what happened in The Netherlands, when BREIN, on behalf of organizations as the MPAA and the Dutch BUMA/Stemra, sued two Internet providers and got a court order for getting these providers to cut off access to The Pirate Bay.

As I said, this bothers me. A major reason is that besides providing torrents for illegal materials, The Pirate Bay provides access to legal materials too. Cutting off The Pirate Bay completely is like me going into a shop and find that I can no longer buy a knife, because someone was murdered with a knife recently and now knives are no longer made available, despite all their useful applications. A second reason is that, regardless of how one views The Pirate Bay, the Internet providers that allow us to access The Pirate Bay are definitely not engaging in illegal activities. And still the court orders them to change their activities.

But what I find most disconcerting is that this move of Stichting BREIN is completely ineffective. The Pirate Bay is not the only torrent site; there are many, many more. And the two Internet providers they sued are not the only ones in The Netherlands, not even the biggest ones. And there are many channels besides torrents by which illegal materials spread around. My main worry is: BREIN knows all this. So why did they sue and why are they so happy with winning this case?

They are happy because it sets a precedent. They have now made Internet providers responsible for ensuring that their clients are not using the Internet for downloading materials that are owned by their financial backers. So now they have some control over what users can and cannot do on the Internet. I call this the Chinese Solution. In China, Internet access is very limited, as the government has final say about what content from foreign countries their citizens get access to. The Chinese Solution is what BREIN wants to implement in The Netherlands, with themselves (i.e., the companies that they represent) in the role of the government.

Stichting BREIN has been able to force two Dutch Internet providers to remove access to The Pirate Bay. That is today. Tomorrow, they will identify one hundred more torrent sites, and with the precedent in hand, will force the providers to cut off access to those too. And then they will give the same order to other Dutch Internet providers, pointing out the precedent. Followed by expanding to the courts in other countries (through one of their sister organizations), as there is now a precedent in The Netherlands which they can refer to. Of course, during this process Internet users will still find ways to get access to torrents. Then it is time for BREIN’s next step: automatic control, at the Internet providers’ sites, of what users do on the Net: if they are downloading materials with torrents, they will be cut off automatically. Is that possible? Not only is it possible, it is technically easy to do. And after the torrents are gone, they will remove access to movies and music on the Net, unless provided by sites approved by Stichting BREIN. I have no idea how far BREIN will actually be allowed to go, but you can rest assured that they aren’t content with their first small victory — there is much more to come.

The Internet is a place of unlimited freedom. And unlimited freedom has its dark sides next to its shiny bright sides. There is no way to put a small limitation on that freedom which is effective in achieving the goal of removing one particular part from the Net. Thinking that you can stop users from downloading illegal materials by removing access to The Pirate Bay is the same as thinking that you can stop teenagers from looking at Internet porn by installing a CyberNanny. The only way to actually stop people from getting from the Internet what they want, is complete control over their access.

The choice is either total freedom, or a severely crippled Net, completely under the control of one organization, just like they have in China. It is clear that what BREIN wants in this respect is diametrically opposed to what Internet users want. But it is Cake or Death, there is no middle road.

Additional (May 10, 2012): As I predicted, Stichting BREIN has now sued the other Dutch Internet providers and got a court order for them to block The Pirate Bay too.

Protection racket

The abbreviation IP stands for “Intellectual Property”, and IP rights are government-granted, exclusive rights to exploit some intangible assets, such as music, art, and designs. Due to the ease by which digital material can be copied by computers and spread by means of the internet, IP rights have got quite some attention in recent years. So much, in fact, that a whole branch of lawyers has been bred to deal specifically with IP rights.

I am very much in favour of a system of IP rights. If someone creates a new and unique work, that person should be able to exploit the fruits of his efforts in a way that pleases him or her. If someone makes a successful design, and later finds someone else has copied that design and gains considerable profits from it, it is only just that the orginal creator shares in those profits or even can prohibit making the profits.

Individuals and companies have enjoyed the benefits of IP rights for quite some time. But the rise of the Internet seems to have struck fear in the hearts of many rights holders. Or rather, it seems that IP lawyers have seen it fit to strike such fear in the hearts of IP holders. Two cases:

Some time ago I had a website where on my “about” page I had a cartoon which I had copied from a book of cartoons. This cartoon was quite apt at describing me personally, and I liked it a lot. I knew that copying from a book is allowed if it is short and an adequate reference is made, so I added a caption to the cartoon, stating exactly from which book it was, and who the author was. At some point I received a so-called Cease & Desist (C&D) letter from the author’s lawyer, stating that I had illegally copied a cartoon, and that I should remove it immediately. I complied. However, I also wrote a nice email back stating that I was not going to act against the wishes of the author, but that I believed that I was actually in my rights in copying that one cartoon, and I thought that having that cartoon in that specific place would actually help the author in selling more books. Naturally, I did not receive an answer. I suspected, however, that this particular C&D letter was not sent on orders of the author, but by an over-zealous IP lawyer who had been hired to scan the whole Internet and threaten anyone who was “ripping off” the author. Frankly, I did not see how that lawyer would be worth his money by threatening me, as I certainly would not cost the author any sales.

The second case I wish to offer is a lot bigger. There is a great website about board games, called BoardGameGeek (BGG). This is a community site for and by board gamers, on which thousands upon thousands of games are reviewed, commented, discussed, and reported upon. It contains a wealth of material on every board game in existence. Now, a group of IP lawyers, on behalf of the game publisher Games Workshop (GW), has sent a C&D letter to the maintainers of BGG to remove any and all files on their games from the website.  The maintainers complied, and removed hundreds of files which supported the GW games. They removed helpsheets, user-created scenarios, and rule summaries. They removed everything that the community needed to enjoy the GW games.

The big question is “What does GW hope to accomplish?” Do they strive for more profits? Well, then this is not a good action to achieve that. Profits are gained by selling games and game materials. Games are sold to gamers, who are often part of gaming communities. This holds in particular for GW games, for which many communities exist. Such communities want and need the community-created materials which are no longer available. Will the members of these communities be happy with GW’s actions? Of course not. They are outraged. There is no doubt in my mind that GW lost many sales by sending these letters.

I can think of no good, business-related reason why GW would act this way. But they seem to think they made a good move here. The only reason I can think of is that they were approached by some IP lawyers, who, on the lookout for more business, made the publishers afraid by telling them they had discovered many of their “IP rights” up for grabs on the interwebs, and that they could help GW to mitigate the damage if GW would only pay some “protection money”.

It is not hard to alienate your customers, which is what GW has done. And they will have a hard time winning them over again. The only winners here are the IP lawyers.

It is good to have IP rights. And having rights means needing some protection for them. But it also means having the ability to graciously allow the world access to them. Not arbitrarily, but judiciously. If it helps you reach your goals, why not?

The decline of research

This post is concerned with something that is rather old news, but as the measure it discusses is going to be effectuated soon, it is still rather topical.

Since several years, the Netherlands has a minister of Education who is a scientist himself, and a pretty good one at that. His name is Ronald Plasterk, and for a long time he was a professor of molecular genetics and headed a research laboratory. When he took up his new job, I thought this would be a good thing as we would finally have a minister of Education who would understand what science really is about. And actually, up to a point I am quite happy with him in his current role. But one of his most influential choices does not strike me as very prudent.

Plasterk wants to spend more money on research, and I applaud that. The Dutch record of investing in scientific research is appalling. The problem is that Plasterk does not get any extra money for research: he has to make shifts in his budget. And he has decided to shift 100 million euros from the university budgets, the so-called “first-money stream”, to the NWO budget. NWO is the Dutch organization that gets to distribute money for scientific research.

The reasoning behind this move seems to be the following. At universities, professors and their assistants and associates have to spend about 50% of their time on research. So the universities get research money, which they spend on their “old staff”, thereby leaving insufficient money for new talents. NWO distributes money on the basis of refereed research plans. Therefore, NWO funding has a better chance to land in the hands of young, promising researchers who have good plans, as opposed to first-money stream funding. Of course, moving money from the first-money stream to NWO means that the universities have to lose some staff, and the remaining staff gets to spend less time on research on first-money stream funding. However, the universities can simply get the money they lost back again by submitting plans to NWO.

This all sounds nice, but there are two huge faults in the reasoning which is behind the plan. I thought someone who has a university background would realize that, but Plasterk might have been too preoccupied with his laboratory work to really get to know the problems that face universities today.

The first fault is recognizing that university budgets have been decreasing at about the same rate that student numbers have been increasing. The net effect is that while, indeed, 50% of the staff’s time should be spent on research, in practice the situation is that the staff only gets to work on research in their spare time. Virtually all research at universities is done by PhD students, who, for the most part, are paid by money that was received from NWO. So, the staff reduction caused by Plasterk’s shift of money actually directly affects the quality of education.

The second fault is recognizing that one has to invest a significant amount of time (and thus money) to write plans that are needed to get funding from NWO. All things being equal, every plan submitted to NWO has about 20-30% chance to be accepted. Writing a plan to get, say, a project of 300K euros approved might easily take three full weeks of work. With the acceptance rates of NWO that means that the staff has to spend something like one or two man-months for every 100K euros of research money. Basically, 10-20% of money is flushed away on writing and defending plans.

Naturally, one might say that a good plan is needed before research is started anyway, but frankly, my experience is that the scientific contents of a plan might be written in a few days, while the rest of the writing time is spent on making the non-scientific details of the plan as perfect as possible, to get a chance of getting it through the referee process. You see, a plan that is rated “very good” by referees has little chance of being accepted; a rating of “excellent” is basically a requirement. I even had the rather sickening experience that a plan of mine, which I spent two full months on, was rated “excellent” and judged by the final assessment committee as “should certainly get the money”, and then was rejected because it had to compete with just too many plans which got the same rating. An NWO employee told me once that the quality of your plan gets you half the way to the money, the rest is just plain luck.

Make no mistake, I think that NWO is doing an excellent job. When I did get plans approved I got money that could be spent on research for almost the full 100%. NWO only does the bare minimum of meddling in projects. The refereeing process is done well, and NWO is clearly enthusiastic about research.

However, NWO simply does not have sufficient budget to do their job properly. Currently it has to reject far too many good plans, on which too much writing time is spent that should have been invested in research. Supplying NWO with more money is therefore a good thing. But shifting it from university budgets will be counter-productive: in the end, there will be less money spent on scientific research, and university education will suffer from an even greater lack of staff.

Less coffee, more news

As representative of the “commissie-Brinkman”, CDA-politician Elco Brinkman proposed to cabinet-minister Plasterk of Media and Education that a special tax of 2 euros per year should be levied on Internet users (to be collected by the providers), in order to pay newspapers for the news that they make available on the Internet for free. Some of his arguments are that news costs money and at present Internet users can read news for free, the current situation harms the pluriformity of the press, and 2 euros is the price of a cup of coffee (i.e., Internet users should not start whining). Plasterk hesistates. And rightly so.

The proposal, while sounding reasonable at first, is in fact dangerous. Should it get passed, we are getting into an area where we do not want to be, namely an area in which the ancient, which should be stimulated to innovate to survive, is being kept alive on orders of the government by taxing the citizens.

Newspapers in their present form are harmed by the Internet. That is why most newspapers try to innovate, which is good. Trustworthy news on the Internet is mainly supplied by professionals. The question is how these professionals get paid for their work. A partial solution exists in advertising, which is moving more and more away from papers and magazines and towards the Internet. Advertising might not be a complete solution, but even if it is not, the remainder of the solution is not found in taxation. Here are some arguments why not.

First, news on the Internet is not free, as the Internet is not free. To get onto the Internet I need a computer (yearly cost of about 500 euros), an Internet subscription (yearly cost of about 200 euros), an iPhone (perhaps not a necessity, but I prefer to read the news on the train, yearly cost about 100 euros), and a mobile phone subscription (yearly cost about 200 euros).  So, you see, I already pay about 1000 euros per year to get onto the Internet.

Second, taxation of the Internet to pay for news is not fair towards (a) people who already pay for the news by having a newspaper subscription, and (b) people who do not use the Internet to read the news. “Internet user” is not equal to “Internet news reader”.

Third, in general people do not pay for the Internet to read news. They pay for the Internet for a myriad of reasons, but “reading the news” will not be high on most people’s lists. If I have to pay extra for news on the Internet, I should get the option to buy Internet without the news. I can assure you that that option will never exist.

Fourth, newspapers are a private business, not a government business. Private businesses which are destined to submerge should not be kept treading water by government means.

Fifth (and probably most important), there is the legitimate question where it will end. For instance, if you like to solve Sudokus (which I do not), you can get them for free on the Internet. This harms the publishers of puzzle books. If Internet users have to pay 2 euros per year when they are able to read news on the Internet, shouldn’t they also pay 10 eurocents per year for the ability to solve Sudokus on the Internet? And what about cooking recipes? Or encyclopedic information (I mean, who will buy an encyclopedia nowadays)? Or comics? Or, from another perspective, should the price of train tickets be increased, since there are free papers available for commuters, some of whom will definitely have cancelled their regular newspaper subscriptions because of this service?

No, newspapers should solve the problem of their finances on their own. They have shown that they are willing to do that. They also seem to acknowledge the need to change their business. If they need extra cash to do that (for instance for research on how to gain microfinances by having readers pay a cent or so for each article read), the government might award them a grant for that. Such a grant should come from the regular research budget, and not from extra taxation.

It is a positive thing that the government is concerned about maintaining a good news service for citizens. It is also good that it acknowledges the dangers of the Internet on the prolongation of the news services that we have now. But the thought that the problems can be solved by taxing Internet users for their ability to read news on the Internet is shortsighted, overly complicated, and harms innovation.