As somebody with a keen interest in free speech issues, I’m naturally predisposed to skepticism when it comes to government censorship. The system we have in Australia serves two purposes; it provides information to consumers (“MA15+ – extreme nudity and wisecracking animals”) and protects Australians from morally inappropriate material, such as spanking or violent video games. The first job has some merit to it – I’ve often looked at the rating of a film myself to get a bit more information on what I’m about to watch, even if I’m hoping for a higher value. The second I don’t have much time for.

The classification system was conceived at a time when the media Australians consumed was shipped around as physical objects (books, magazines, video tapes) and doled out by gatekeepers charged with enforcing censorship laws (newsagents, movie theaters, video shops). Information could be regulated like alcohol or tobacco; no naughty magazine without ID. In that case, classification-based censorship is at least practical. What do we do in a world where all content is digital? Is there anything we can do?

I was recently involved in preparing EFA’s submission to the ALRC review on the classification system. In that submission, we argue that the classification system simply can’t be made to work in an all-digital world. To me, this isn’t a controversial statement. You are, after all, reading this in a web browser from which you can, in seconds, be watching movies that have never been rated by the classification board. Indeed, many of them wouldn’t be rated by the classification board if they did see them. They would be banned if they were on a DVD.

If the existence and access to all this freely available moral pollution has had a detrimental effect on society, it hasn’t outweighed the benefits that the internet has brought. If you’re using the web, you’re already living in an uncensored world; why don’t we just acknowledge it?

The submission doesn’t appear to be up on the ALRC’s submission page yet for some reason, but if you’re interested you can grab it from this link here.

Earlier in the year I also wrote a more readable article arguing the same thing, you can read that here at the ABC.

If you’re one of my fans (hi, Mum) you’ll have noticed I’ve been a bit quiet recently. Fortunately, I haven’t suffered organ failure of been taken hostage by jihadists. It’s just the usual story where a confluence of professional and extra-curricular obligations have curtailed my writing and blogging activities.

The upshot of my recent activity is a big change in direction, and one I’m very excited about. I’ve stepped down as EFA chair so I can enter the world of of federal politics on the staff of incoming senator Richard Di Natale. I begin when the new Senate starts on Friday, 1 July. As Senator Di Natale’s advisor I look forward to indulging my passion for policy and public debate, not only in the areas of technology and digital rights that I have been so vocal about in recent years, but in the much broader sphere, particularly Green politics.

I’ll no doubt be extremely busy in the near term coming up to speed on an exciting new job. As I lurk in Canberra, I look forward to reporting back on the successes of the Greens parliamentary team and giving some insight into how the

Courtesy Crikey, this correction from the New York Times is hilariously nerdy (I approve):

“An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in The Hobbit; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.)”

There’s little sign that the global copyright war will let up any time soon. Wherever you go, the content industries are working hard to secure stronger “protections” for intellectual property and tougher penalties against those who infringe against these protections. Given the forces they can bring to bear – an army of lobbyists and an ocean of cash – it’s not surprising that industry has won many of these battles.

Australia is one front in this war, and several notable skirmishes have occurred in recent times. The most significant has been a case in which the movie studios, represented by AFACT (the “Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft”) sued Australia’s third-largest ISP, iiNet, for authorising copyright infringement by allowing its users to download movies using BitTorrent.

Under Australian copyright law, a third party can be held accountable for a breach of copyright if they are found to have authorised the breach by “countenancing” it and providing the means to do so. This was tested in the courts in 1975 when a university was found liable for breaches of copyright because it provided a photocopier which students could use to make copies of books.

Bringing this suit against iiNet was a clear attempt to make ISPs liable for the content traversing their networks and is a probable first step on the road to introducing a graduated response mechanism to Australia. The ultimate outcome of the case will have enormous repercussions for the future of the industry and copyright law in Australia.

Fortunately, the signs have been positive so far. AFACT initially lost the case, with a heartening judgement by the trial judge, Justice Cowdroy, who even took AFACT to task for misleadingly using the word “theft” in their name. Justice Cowdroy found that the ISP had not authorised the infringement because they did not provide or operate BitTorrent; and even if they did, could fall back on the safe harbour provisions of the Copyright Act.

Unfortunately the content industry were not willing to let things be, and despite already losing one appeal so far are set to take the case to the High Court. Should iiNet eventually be found liable, it will precipitate a seismic shift in the way ISPs operate and could usher in an era of greater monitoring and punitive measures for alleged infringers. The industry are clearly hoping for a “three strikes” system. It’s unlikely this would affect industry revenues, but Australian internet users would surely suffer from this lack of due process.

One of the more ridiculous but high profile cases involves two well-known songs with Aussie themes. Larrikin Music vs EMI is a case in which, for once, a large music publisher is on the receiving end of an overreaching copyright claim. Larrikin is a small company that owns the copyright to a well-known folk song, “The Kookaburra Song”, which was composed in 1932 for a contest being held by the Victorian Guides. They claim that their song was plagiarised in the opening flute riff used in the 80′s classic, Men At Work’s “Down Under”.

(more…)

It was widely reported yesterday that Facebook have released some new security tools, including a reporting mechanism that allows kids to report an incident of bullying to a trusted adult. This initiative is parted of Facebook’s revamped Family Safety Center and came directly as a result of Facebook’s involvement with the White House Conference on Bullying Prevention.

It’s widely acknowledged that online bullying is a serious problem kids face today, and so reaction to the move has been largely positive, if mixed. On JJJ’s Hack program yesterday, QUT’s Marilyn Campbell suggested that the move was all well and good, but

I think that sometimes there’s a false sense of security when you have a kind of technological solution like this. Kids actually don’t tell adults, because one they don’t want the technology taken away from them, and two a lot of kids who have told an adult – the bullying actually gets worse. I would think that kids would think, “Ah, if we told an adult, the cyber-bullying actually could get worse.”

The program then followed up with a grab from me suggesting that that social networking may help kids build up resilience. I do think that, but I think some context is in order, and I’m not sure Dr Campbell’s assertion above may be borne out by the evidence.

A couple of weeks ago I attended an event around Child Protection and the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute and got to hear about some very interesting research lead by the LSE’s Professor Sonia Livingston, who has long been working in the area and is a director of the “EU Kids Online” project, which researches the online activities of European children. Their recent report, “Risks and Safety on the Internet“, surveyed 25,000 European kids and their parents about risky online behaviour such as exposure to sexual content, sexting, cyber-bulling and meeting online contacts in the real world.

The report’s findings around cyber-bulling are fascinating. Firstly, cyber-bulling is just a subset of bullying. While 19% of kids said they’d been bullied in the last 12 months, only 6% said this happened to them online.

Secondly, cyber bullying does seem to upset kids: Of those kids who were bullied online, about half (55%) said they were left either very upset or a fairly upset by the experience. However, a large majority (62%) reported that they “got over it right away”, and only 8% said it took them weeks or months to get over the experience.

Thirdly, and perhaps most encouragingly, kids aren’t keeping it to themselves. 77% of kids reported telling someone about it – friends and parents being the most common (52% and 42% respectively). The report notes that this might explain why parents, when surveyed, were generally pretty accurate in their assessments of whether their kids had experienced online bullying. This would seem to suggest that a “tell an adult” button might actually be something kids use. I think this is counter-intuitive, but a nice change.

Perhaps the numbers in Australia will differ greatly from Europe; we’ll have some indication soon, hopefully, as Prof. Livingston told me researchers at Edith Cowan University are conducting a smaller study here using the same questions. In the meantime, the thoroughness of this research means we shouldn’t discount it.

The most important thing to remember is that cyber-bullying is just bullying. Unlike some lawmakers, kids don’t see a firm distinction between the nasty comments they receive via IM and the ones they receive in the schoolyard. After all, the perpetrators are usually the same people. So looking for a technological solution is always going to be a band-aid at best. The internet is how we communicate these days, but does little to change the social dynamics of the schoolyard. That’s not something Facebook are going to be able to change.

Rather than excluding younger kids from social networking, the evidence would suggest the risks are balanced by the benefits and that any upset kids to experienced is by and large easy for them to shrug off. Allowing them to participate – and, yes, build up resilience – may do more to help them than shielding them from dangers that are often exaggerated in the minds of adults.

(more…)

Today’s glitch with Commonwealth Bank ATMs raised some questions about the reliability of our bank’s IT systems, and our dependence on technology. I made another appearance chatting on 2UE’s evening program about the issue. Have a listen here.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In January last year, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a landmark speech entitled “Remarks on Internet Freedom“. The speech was noteworthy for its clear and unambiguous rejection of all forms of censorship and network control. Coming on the heels of Iran’s presidential elections and Chinese cyber-attacks, it seemed the U.S. was drawing a principled line in the sand. They put their money where there mouths were, allocating millions in funding for projects to help the citizens of the world to circumvent government controls on freedom of speech.

(Me on News 24 discussing the speech and the revolutions in the Middle East)

Yesterday Secretary Clinton revisited that theme, announcing the creation of an Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues and pledging a further $25 million for tools to combat censorship. However, while we heard another eloquent defence of the principle of freedom of speech in the online world, this foray is receiving a markedly cooler reception.

(more…)

In the last few days I’ve found myself agreeing with Stephen Conroy again – always an unsettling experience. This time it was over the Economist Intelligence Unit’s recent ranking of Government broadband policies. They are pretty biased towards free market solutions, and so a massive government intervention like the NBN is unlikely to get top marks. (3.4/5 ain’t that bad, really.)

I wrote about this for New Matilda which you can read here: Actually, We’re Not Paying More For Less

Late last year I testified before the Senate Environment and Communications committee inquiry into Protection of the privacy of Australians online. It was an interesting experience, and it’s also interesting to read oneself in Hansard afterwards (all the while resisting the urge to edit the document and rephrase things).

Here’s an extract where I have a go at Australian politicians and their poor history of internet regulation, and restate the idea that the internet is still a new frontier when it comes to law. I’m not sure about my “profanity happens” line – it does sum up the net rather well, but now it’s recorded forever in the Parliamentary archives.

CHAIR— All right, I will kick off. What is the reason for the ‘frontiers’ in the name Electronic Frontiers?

Mr Jacobs— We were founded in 1994 so at that time the intersection of the online world and public policy was a new frontier.

CHAIR— Let us go straight to that. It is now not a new frontier but—and you may have heard my question earlier—are we still, nonetheless, trying to apply offline policing and thinking online?

Mr Jacobs— I would say, generally, yes.

CHAIR— Examples?

Mr Jacobs— Censorship, for instance. Our censorship system is based upon classification. Work is submitted to the Classification Board, which decides which classification it fits into.

CHAIR— ‘Our’—do you mean your industry?

Mr Jacobs— I mean Australia’s.

CHAIR— Right.

Mr Jacobs— Now the government proposal to implement mandatory ISP filtering in Australia means they want to filter web pages based upon their classification—to wit, whether it would be refused classification or not. When a finite number of DVDs are being imported into the country every year—there are some thousands —it is possible to review them all in timely fashion and make a determination that is public. But when it comes to the web, which is international and dynamic and contains content upwards of a trillion pages, that is never going to work. However, that is the approach that the government is taking. We think we need to really go back to the drawing board and have a rethink about how that could be done.

CHAIR— Does your organisation think there is a way to get the policymakers to get with the program?

Mr Jacobs— Yes and no. Clearly, as policymakers tackle these issues and become more and more comfortable with how the internet works, the obviously silly proposals at least will become fewer. But that does not mean there are any easy answers. I am sometimes asked: ‘Well, if you can’t block these web pages this way, what can you do? What do you do when somebody goes onto Facebook and defaces a tribute page to a slain child with offensive material?’ I believe it was Senator Xenophon who suggested an internet ombudsman who could look into these sorts of things. That is not going to work, just because of the way the internet is. So what is the answer? How do you deal with that? Unfortunately, I have to say that maybe that is just the price we pay for the benefits that we reap from the internet.

CHAIR— So profanity happens occasionally.

Mr Jacobs— Profanity happens. Offensive behaviour and offensive material happen.

CHAIR— All right. That takes me to the next part of the same question. Is it part of your observation, then, that since the birth, I guess, of your organisation and the move to embrace technology we have in some way compromised what we might otherwise regard as our right, as individuals, to privacy?

Mr Jacobs— Not all of the encroachments on privacy have been the result of a failure of government policy, by any means.

CHAIR— No, it may well be as a result of an individual like me—

Mr Jacobs— That is right. I think it will be a part of the future landscape that privacy will be different from what it has been in the past, and there will be less of it. It is almost inevitable. We get huge benefits from giving up our privacy sometimes: the ability to use social networking or to use tools that take information about you and then give you a service in return based upon where you are, what you like or who your friends are. These are great. They have huge impacts on productivity. The number of people using Facebook attests to the fact that people really love that sort of thing. So it is going to be voluntary, in a large measure.