Christian Wöhrl has produced a German translation of my 28C3 talk, The Coming War on General Purpose Computing. Thanks, Christian!

Here’s the video of my keynote last night at the 28C3, the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, entitled “The coming war on general computation.”

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to “secure” anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

Update: Here’s a transcript, courtesy of Joshua Wise.

Update: Christian Wöhrl has produced a German translation, too.

The coming war on general computation

My latest Guardian column, “The pirates of YouTube,” documents how multinational copyright-holding companies have laid false claim to public domain videos on YouTube — videos posted by the nonprofit FedFlix organization, which liberates public domain government-produced videos and makes them available to the world. These videos were produced at public expense and no one can claim to own them, but multinationals from CBS to Discovery Communications have done just that, getting YouTube to place ads on the video that deliver income to their coffers. What’s more, their false copyright claims could lead to the suspension of FedFlix’s YouTube account under Google’s rules for its copyright policing system. This system, ContentID, sets out penalties for “repeat offenders” who generate too many copyright claims — but offers no corresponding penalties for rightsholders who make too many false claims of ownership.

Malamud’s 146-page report from FedFlix to the Archivist of the United States documents claims that companies such as NBC Universal, al-Jazeera, and Discovery Communications have used ContentID to claim title to FedFlix videos on YouTube. Some music royalty collecting societies have claimed infringements in “silent movies”.

These companies’ claims – there are hundreds of them – have the potential to generate black marks on FedFlix’s YouTube account, and these black marks could lead to automated punishment from YouTube. Accounts that generate claims can be suspended or deleted, or lose the right to mark videos as being available as Creative Commons or public domain files.

YouTube offers very little help for FedFlix. ContentID’s dispute resolution mechanism allows FedFlix to contest these claims under only three circumstances: first, ContentID has generated a false match (that is, the video isn’t what ContentID thinks it is); second, the uploader has the right to the file, as demonstrated by written permission from its proprietor; or third, the use is acceptable under the US doctrine of fair use, or its counterpart in other laws, fair dealing.

The pirates of YouTube

My latest Publishers Weekly column is “Copyrights vs. Human Rights.” In honor of Human Rights Day on Dec 10, I’ve written a piece on publishing’s shameful support of SOPA, a law that will punish the online services that are so key to coordinating and publicizing human rights struggles around the world.

The U.N. characterizes access to the Internet as a human right, and government research in the U.K. and in the U.S. shows the enormous humanitarian benefits of network access for poor and vulnerable families: better nutrition, education, and jobs; more social mobility and opportunity; and civic and political engagement. Yet the services that provide the bulk of these benefits—search engines, Web hosts, and online service providers like Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter, Wikipedia, and YouTube—could never satisfy the requirements set out in SOPA. The only way for these platforms to satisfy SOPA would be to all but shut off the public’s ability to contribute and to throttle free expression for all but those entities that can afford to pay a lawyer to certify that their uploaded material will not attract a copyright complaint.

Another group of important entities that could never satisfy SOPA are the civic-minded hackers and security researchers scrambling to improve the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). In 2011, the DNS was attacked several times, including a breach attributed to the Iranian secret police, which used forged certificates to allow them to impersonate governments, banks, and online e-mail providers like Gmail and Hotmail. If passed, SOPA would ban the production or dissemination of tools that could subvert its blocks, and that would include tools the world’s technologists are creating specifically to help defeat government censorship and surveillance. Many of these efforts and tools are actually funded by the U.S. government, and some, like the Onion Router (TOR), are used by U.S. armed forces intelligence services as well as struggling Arab Spring revolutionaries.

Cory Doctorow: Copyrights vs. Human Rights

I’m coming to Zurich next week to do a series of high-school lectures in connection with the German edition of Little Brother, and while I’m in town, I’ve scheduled a free lecture, organised by local free culture and Creative Commons activists. It’s at 8PM on December 6, at the Kunstraum Walcheturm. Hope to see you there!