Introduction
Technical methods of interdicting illegal file sharing are routinely attacked by some privacy zealots as impractical, unworkable, insufficient, or susceptible of being technically defeated by endlessly innovative individuals with a desire to steal or profit from online theft. In short the argument is that any kind of IP blocking or filtering is not perfect and therefore should be abandoned.
We'd like to quote Kahlil Gibran on the subject of perfection:
Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection. Advance and do not fear the thorns in the path…
Another argument is that content filtering conflicts with defending privacy and the idea of net neutrality. Nonetheless, filtering is already widely in use. It seems to be only in the case of online IP theft, that those with privacy and neutrality concerns take great umbrage.
A Question:
If Google Can Filter Porn on Youtube, Why Not Unlicensed Music?
Our fundamental argument FOR filtering as a means of reducing online IP theft is two-fold;
- It is already being implemented in many different jurisdictions and for many different reasons and to reject it as at least a partial solution to online IP theft is opportunistic cherry picking.
- It is better to do something than nothing. As we note below, stopping all spam email will never happen, but current techniques stop some 98 to 99%. Similar results are probably possible in the area of online IP theft, but even if we stop only 50%, that's billions of dollars going into the pockets of working artists, songwriters, musicians, studio owners, recording engineers, publishers, etc. and NOT into the wallets of the vast cadre of website owners currently feeding off of the lifeblood of IP creators and owners.
How Filtering is Extensively Used
Content filtering is currently being done in a variety of jurisdictions for a variety of reasons, many of which are not very controversial. Below is a list of the main types of filtering.
Spam Email Filtering
For years, ISP's and email servers like Gmail, AOL, or Yahoo have used very sophisticated filters called "Blacklists" to block spam email. These generally operate by blocking IP addresses known to originate spam.
While controversy still surrounds internet spam filtering, its use is ubiquitous by ISPs and email hosts like Google's Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Google even provides a spam blocking solution to companies and individuals that use Google's commercial enterprise email product
Filtering Used to Comply With CALEA
Deep packet inspection filtering is used by ISPs to comply with CALEA. CALEA is the US government-ordered internet wire-tapping directive.
Filtering to Target & Deliver Ads
Google does this massively and every single second of every single day. If you are a Gmail user, you no doubt have seen the ads all over your email pages whose content aligns with key words in your emails. Google is electronically "reading" or "filtering" your mail to match what they know are keywords with their base of advertisers. Voila, you get ads.
Child Porn Filtering
There are situations where the privacy concerns of content filtering seem to outweigh public policy considerations. Exhibit 1 in this respect is the blocking of child pornography sites. Germany has actually recently enacted legislation1 to do this. Australia seems on its way to doing the same2. Efforts are even underway in the US to block "kiddie" porn sites3.
Pirate Site IP Blocking
Italy's Supreme Court recently ordered ISP blocking of The Pirate Bay, a Swedish BitTorrent indexing site4. In late 2009, the site's four founders were found guilty of massive copyright infringement, assessed muiti-million dollar fines and sentenced to a year in jail. The Italian case recognized all of that in it's finding. For the first time anywhere in the world that we are aware of, an ISP was legally forced to block an pirate IP address. Should that happen around the world, the online theft of intellectual property would pretty much stop in it's tracks and that is what this site is after and what we advocate.
Bogon Filtering
A "Bogon" is an IP address from within certain IP ranges, which IP ranges have been reserved (i.e., not in use) by the ""IANA" As these IP addresses should not be in use, many ISPs automatically block them5.
Voluntary Filtering
There are also many ways one can filter content voluntarily. Corporations routinely control what their employees can access on corporate computers, parents can purchase parental control software to control what sites their kids can surf, and many internet connection devices like routers allow one to filter content based upon offensive keywords or even by building a list of offensive website addresses. Virus blocking software is essentially filtering software.
Search Engine or Other Such Filtering
When filtering is done by an ISP or a major company like Google or Microsoft or Yahoo whose reach and impact over the internet is vast, it raises the whole question of what is referred to as "net neutrality." Click here to go to a discussion on this site of net neutrality and its implications with regard to stopping online theft of intellectual property.
Examples
Some Representative Groups Opposed to Filtering & Their Arguments
Filtering's Inherent Flaws
Filtering technologies, however, are prone to two simple inherent flaws: underblocking and overblocking. While technologies can be effective at blocking specific content such as high profile web sites, current technology is not able to accurately identify and target specific categorizes of content found on the billions of webpages and other Internet media including news groups, email lists, chat rooms and instant messaging. Underblocking refers to the failure of filtering to block access to all the content targeted for censorship. On the other hand, filtering technologies often block content they do not intend to block, also known as overblocking. Many blacklists are generated through a combination of manually designated web sites as well as automated searches and, thus, often contain websites that have been incorrectly classified. In addition, blunt filtering methods such as IP blocking can knock out large swaths of acceptable websites simply because they are hosted on the same IP address as a site with restricted content.
We are opposed to the Government implementing Internet filtering in New Zealand.
Filtering Doesn’t Work
- The filter can’t intercept encrypted web traffic (https). It’s not hard to change your website from non-secure http to secure https. And, if you do, the DIA filter server can’t intercept it.
- The filter can’t intercept the file sharing, email, chat, instant messaging or anything other than unencrypted web traffic. (Although it does intercept people accessing those services via websites.)
- Adding new entries to the filter is a manual process. When websites are so easy and quick to set up, we don’t see how it’s possible for them to do a good enough job to keep the filter list up to date enough.
- The filter will only be used by some ISPs. If a number of major ISPs don’t use the filter, is there any point in implementing it for the ones that do?
- A motivated person can easily get around the filter. It is relatively trivial for a motivated person to use tools freely available on the Internet to circumvent the filter.
A high-speed, or broadband, Internet connection is becoming a basic public necessity, just like water, gas or electricity. Free Press is working to promote policies to ensure all Americans have access to fast, affordable and open Internet. We're also fighting to save the Internet from big phone and cable companies that want to turn the information superhighway into their own private toll road. (Emphasis added.)
Conclusions
Those that objecting to filtering, also generally object in a myriad of other ways as well such as:
- Intellectual property rights are obsolete in today's world.
- P2P distribution is the new normal—deal with it record labels.
- You can't stop online piracy so you might as well accept it.
- The movie and music industries have been "heavy-handed" or tone deaf or are archaic.
In the end, no matter what argument IP owners make, they are rejected. Forget that the thing they love to do, and their livelihoods and lives, are being destroyed. Nobody takes that into account or seems to give a damn.
