Kathlyn Clore

The French legislature passed the Hadopi bill yesterday.

According to EU Observer:

“French culture minister Frederic Mitterrand cheered the bill’s passage: ‘Artists will remember that we at last had the courage to break with the laissez-faire approach and protect their rights from people who want to turn the net into their libertarian utopia.’”

Yes, I hate the idea of the Internet as a libertarian utopia too.

Lame!

Here is a Google translation of the French Pirate Party’s response.

As lawmakers around the world return to their posts after summer holidays, expect to see renewed attempts to either pass or overturn restrictive media laws.

While compiling the EJC’s daily roundup of media news over the past weeks, several ongoing proposals and debates stood out. The following is a non-exhaustive roundup of proposed or recently passed laws that could either curtail public access to information and/or to cast a chilling effect on the production of various content:

EUROPE
Great Britain
The government has proposed a law to limit peer-to-peer filesharing. If detected, illegal downloaders would initially receive warning letters ordering them to stop. If they persist in downloading, enforcement officials could require Internet Service Providers to sever their Internet connection.

The proposal is strongly reminiscent of the failed Hadopi law in France.

France

Earlier this year, the French government prompted the ire of Internet activists when it attempted to pass the Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet, or Hadopi.

The law would have allowed French authorities to cut off Internet access to computers whose users were previously caught and warned about illegal downloading. It also addressed other matters, such as giving online media status similar to that enjoyed by printed media.

It did not pass France’s Constitutional Council, which demanded judicial oversight before Internet access was denied.

But officials have said they plan to re-introduce the bill in the upcoming session with some oversight built in.

Italy
The Alfano proposal, so called for its author, Angelino Alfano, the Minister of Justice, requires bloggers to edit posts about which a complaint of defamation is filed with the government – within 48 hours. Bloggers who refuse may be sued.

Italian bloggers went on strike in mid-July to protest the right-of-response law.

According to Global Post, the Alfano proposal has been approved by Parliament and is moving on for Senate approval.

Czech Republic

Lawmakers put the “Muzzle Law” into effect on 1 April. It criminalises the publication of material gathered from police wiretaps. The law is dangerous because it prevents, for example, police departments from giving journalists information about potentially corrupted investigations. The law also bans the press from releasing the names of victims of violent crimes.

The punishment for breaking the law, which Czech president Vaclav Klaus signed in mid-February, is a five-year term in prison and a fine of around 170,000 euro.

A group of Czech journalists led a campaign called Prison For Journalists, prompting a group of senators to challenge the muzzle law in court. Some stories say lawmakers are perhaps considering an amendment to the law.

Slovakia

In April, 2008, the Fico government passed the Press Act. Challenges to the law are expected in the latter half of 2009.

According to Reporters Without Borders, the ministry of culture is allowed, by way of the law’s Article 6, “direct control over the media on a number of issues seen as sensitive.” Anyone who makes a complaint to the government about defamation is granted a right to respond. Papers who do not grant the request are subject to fines.

The law also allows the ministry of culture to penalise 16 different forms of hate speech.

LATIN AMERICA

Venezuela

Starting in mid-July, Hugo Chavez’ government began taking more than 200 radio stations off the air. Both AM and FM frequencies came under fire.

Also, as the Economist reported, the government has plans to “restrict radio stations from sharing programming so that local broadcasters would no longer be able to relay national news programmes.”

During the same week, regional newspapers were threatened when “government delays in providing foreign currency needed to import paper,” Editor & Publisher reported.

The first week of August saw pro-Chavez activists barge into Globovision, an opposition TV network, and attack staff there.

It’s all leading up to attorney general Luisa Ortega Díaz’ proposed Media Crimes Law. The purpose of the law is to curtail freedom of expression, which Ortega Diaz says has of late been abused in Venezuela.

MIDDLE EAST

Iraq

In mid-August, active Iraqi academics, parliamentarians, booksellers and journalists gathered in Baghdad to protest a series of government measures meant to limit the amount of “immoral” information to which Iraqis have access.

The government is requiring Internet cafes to register with the government. And according to a recent New York Times report, “In July, a government committee recommended that the drafting of a law allowing for official Internet monitoring and the prosecution of violators be expedited.”
Banned material would include Facebook, pornography, negative materials on Islam and content about gambling, terrorism or drugs, the NYT reported.

Some books will also be banned.

Saudi Arabia

This state’s censorship of the Internet is well documented. But it managed to make headlines over the summer with its restrictive practices.

In early August, Saudi Arabia yanked a satellite TV station after it broadcast a show in which a host spoke candidly about sex.

A few weeks later, Saudi Arabia blocked the Twitter accounts of activists inside the kingdom.

One of them, Khaled al Nasser, told AFP that he “had sent tweets about several human rights cases that he and other lawyers are pursuing, most recently that of rights lawyer Sulaiman al-Rashudi, detained by police for two years without being charged or tried.

Nasser said the action on Twitter accounts could reflect CITC taking note of the use of Twitter by Iranian democracy activists to provide people inside and outside the country information on their protests in June and July.”

In coming months, the government may require websites to have a license to operate inside the kingdom and privatise more television stations.

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Flickr images from users calamur, quecomunismo and albazi

So glad to listen to this radio report: Radio France Internationale

Laws like these, working through government monitoring groups and Internet Service Providers to block users who download copyrighted material without paying for it, seem preposterous.

The laws seem to infringe on privacy rights and be impossible to enforce correctly (for myriad technical reasons).

Myself, I always waffled on the issue of “illegal” downloading - until I moved to the Netherlands.

There I realized that major news content providers, like NBC, block bits of their content outside the United States. I was unable to watch, for example, the NBC coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China. That’s because NBC only had the rights to broadcast the Games in the U.S. Outside the U.S.; a Dutch TV station bought the rights to show the Games inside the Netherlands.

So I was unable to watch Michael Phelps on demand, or any of the womens’ soccer matches I would have like to have seen.

The other programming I was frustrated to be locked out of was streaming re-runs of Grey’s Anatomy. ABC makes the shows available on Fridays after the program airs Thursday evening. It’s about the only television program I watch regularly.

I could, though, legally buy Grey’s Anatomy on iTunes. In fact, I’ve bought about two whole seasons.

Then I realized, halfway through 2008, that if I wanted to save space on my hard drive and put my Grey’s episodes on CD, I was only able to save the raw information - not the actual shows. Apple did not (until recently) make it possible to burn the shows on to DVD for viewing away from the computer.

If I download the shows using torrent files, though, I can burn them on to a DVD and watch them on a television.

I realized then that this “illegal” downloading was more useful than paying for programs.

Also, as a journalist it is hard to have much sympathy for the major artists who complain about the money they’re losing because of illegal downloading. Google and other major sources co-opt the work of news reporters all the time!

And, give a thought to what author Paulo Cohelo thinks about this issue. Perhaps “illegal” downloading can spur sales.

For more: Global Voices Advocacy.

The divergent attitudes in two articles published this week - one from Time, one from Newsweek - on the future of newspaper business models and content strategies couldn’t paint a clearer picture of the radically

different outlooks of newsgatherers in the United States and Europe.

Yesterday’s Newsweek article Dubious New Models for News concludes that American newspapers are destined to muddled business models.

It finishes on this sentence:

“Capitalists in the news business are having to become even more creative. But they won’t find the grail of a new economic model for journalism because there wasn’t an old one.”

Gee, wow. I’m fired up. Really.

Basically, no new clarity or exciting ways forward will soon emerge… Because the old ways weren’t any good. Tre optimistic!

On the other hand, Time Magazine’s article Turning the Page: The News on Europe’s Newspapers, is bursting with examples of innovative products and practices from the Netherlands, Norway and England.

It concludes with a quote from Max Armanet, the editor of the French daily,

” ‘It’s my job to make people desire us — I am the editor in charge of Love. I can’t tell you whether we’ll be here in five years, but I can tell you it’s a passionate undertaking.’ Passion probably isn’t a bad place to start.”

Much better. Maybe what the Americans call the “old college try” is becoming more of “the old… University Try”?

Yesterday I edited a synopsis of a most disturbing bill working its way through the Italian legislature.

A center-right Italian senator from Sicily is backing a bill that would give the country’s Ministry

of the Interior the power to demand ISPs in Italy block sites which host content seen to incite or condone crime.

Facebook seems to be the primary target. The American social networking platform allows registered users to form fan groups around just about any idea. Among the most offending groups to these Italian lawmakers are groups honoring big-name Mafia bosses.

Unless Facebook would agree to take those groups down - and the Ministry of the Interior would indeed have to give sites like Facebook time to take down the offending content - the entire site would be blocked inside Italy.

Deleting entire websites because of a bit of offensive material seems an entirely arcane practice for 2009.

But the situation does for me beg the question: In today’s linked-up world, should multinational sites like Facebook (and, to be clear, while all websites have the potential to be multinational, few truly are) have to abide by the laws of countries other than the nation in which their servers sit? Which is to say,should a website based in the United States, like Facebook, have to regulate its content with Italian law in mind?

I’m reminded of a November, 2008, New York Times article about censorship at Google.

In the Republic of Turkey, a nation of 71 million people, it is illegal to insult Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He is the founder of modern Turkey.

Google, apparently, has dedicated the hours of many staffers to screening the contents of YouTube videos that are reported to violate Turkish law. The videos which Google decides are in clear violation of Turkish law are then blocked in Turkey.

The article chronicles similar cases in Europe. In France and Germany, for example, Google blocks Holocaust denial sites because it is illegal to deny the Shoah in those countries.

But is a California-based company like Google - or a Ministry of the Interior in Italy - the best body to decide what to censor?

Germany has a government agency whose responsibility it is to gather URLs of sites that host illegal content (content including hate speech, for example, would be illegal in Deutschland). Is this a better way to go? Why not get a judicial system involved? Or would that take too long, particularly when considering the warp speed that dominates the World Wide Web?

These questions become even more difficult - or perhaps just less relevant? - when considering the many initiatives to circumvent censorship. One of the best initiatives is the Tor project, which helps Internet users surf the web anonymously.