Eeny meeny miny mo, catch an iPod user, don’t let him go…

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

The G8 is, for those who don’t know, an international undemocratic gestalt made up of the governments of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Together, they cook up new ways to manipulate and control people, trade, and money markets.

The G8 famously tell lies about how they’re going to tackle world poverty but then—after near enough promising on their mother’s graves—don’t do much at all other than make excuses. Now the G8 is cooking up draconian new copyright protection laws. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) between the US, EU, and Canada, will give border guards the right to seize our iPods and mobile phones whenever they suspect they contain illegal downloads.

Quite how they’d get their suspicions in the first place, we cannot begin to guess. The way you look, perhaps? After all, it works so well when it comes to finding terrorists at airports: as any Muslim who goes near one will tell you, particularly but not only in the US.

MP3s and other currently popular audio file formats to my knowledge cannot be distinguished as pirate copies unless they contain comments in the ID3 tags (where track name, album title, artist name, genre and other informational tidbits are stored) that indicate they were sourced from file-sharing sites or specific named pirates keen to publicise themselves among file-sharers.

This does happen. Illegally downloaded songs sometimes contain phrases such as ‘ripped by Neo124 2 share with U’ or ‘download other free songs and warez from…’ and other obvious statements. Ah, but wait: such obvious indicators of piracy can be easily deleted from the ID3 tags using nothing more esoteric than mainstream music applications like iTunes.

The tracks are in no way compromised by the deletion of comments or, for that matter, any other ID3 tag data.

It’s easy to identify legitimate downloads if they contain nasty Digital Rights Management (DRM) coding, which limits what devices and by which software your music can be played on. DRM-free tracks may also have been bought legally, though, having been marketed aggressively centred upon them being better quality. Conversion of your own CDs—known as ‘ripping’–so that you can put the hard copy music you paid for onto your digital devices, is commonplace.

It is impossible to use brutal and invasive stop-and-search tactics to pinpoint ‘clean’ pirate copies, DRM-free purchases, and CD rips, as having been illegally obtained. If a person has a large collection of music that is a mixture of pirated and purchased material, he or she can always say, when the wolves are at the door, that all their tracks that can’t be traced back to an online music store were copied from CDs which were disposed of, for any number of reasons, or lost in a burglary or fire or in a suitcase at an airport.

The last thing such a person would say is that they sold on their CDs after ripping them, because that would land them in trouble.

Some countries still don’t recognise your right in law to convert your CDs, that’s certainly true, but any government that sought to prosecute its citizens for converting CDs for their own personal use on iPods would have to be insane or a dictatorship where the people had few if any rights at all.

Ah. Treat everyone like criminals and occasionally you may actually catch one by chance during routine checks and 24-7 surveillance from the air, on the phones, in our cars, on the streets. Don’t doubt it. This is the plan for our future unless we find a way to work together to stop it. But it’s already begun. We even have surveillance of a kind going on in our homes: every Sky digibox tells the satellite broadcaster what we watch and when we watch it, allowing profiles to be built and marketing strategies developed. BT still plans to monitor every website its broadband customers visit, starting later this year in defiance of mass protest and laws currently in place. Of course, companies routinely break the law and get away with it—phone companies, banks, utility companies—and they are never pegged as criminals, never brought to book.

The only way to sometimes, not always, confirm someone has downloaded illegal pirated material is by tracking their Internet usage. But they can’t be precise nine times out of ten in saying which tracks were obtained illegally, and which weren’t. So the industry when prosecuting to date has resorted to guesswork. Still, guesswork is good enough, they believe, and so too does the G8: consumer privacy is further threatened by the ACTA because Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would be forced to hand over customer information on suspected file-sharers without any need for one of those nuisance barriers to conviction, otherwise known as a warrant.

But while the information gleaned might show file-sharing software used, it won’t confirm anything else.

Eeny meeny miny mo is increasingly a guiding principle and rule of law. It started with the raft of post-9/11 anti-terrorism legislation, of course. The rule of eeny meeny miny mo shouldn’t be underestimated—in the US it has led to many people finding themselves with no rights at all, stripped naked, and with their heads held under water at Guantanamo Bay. Those given the power can just point a finger, more or less, and you’re fucked. Sorry, who are the terrorists again? I got confused about, oh, seven years back…

This latest collusion between our political leaders and their corporate overlords is the wet dream of the music, games and video industries. It will lead to people of all ages, from children to senior citizens, finding themselves in court, guilty until proven innocent, facing huge legal fees and punitive fines issued that would undoubtedly be appealed against by the majority charged with them. We can be certain that injustice would be the order of the day, along with chaos and protests, from the arrest stage all the way through to sentencing.

We already see teenagers and their parents in the US being hit with fines of many thousands upon thousands of dollars, with the industry bodies crowing each time that the public are on their side, that the verdicts are just, that they will stop piracy by locking up your sons and daughters or, better from their perspective, financially crippling them for the rest of their lives. But the public is not on their side. The punishments never, to date, fit the crime.

Whatever we think of piracy, the compassionate among us find the cruelty and glee of media executives, when kids are found guilty of piracy and fined more than they will earn their entire lives, to be sickening, obscene, immoral and greedy. There are those idiotic few, however, for whom the mantra ‘if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear’ is the order of the day. But that belief is fucked up at its very foundation, for it ignores the fact that what may be legal today may no longer be so tomorrow. First they came for the Jews… Go read the poem, you’ll understand. I hope.

Alongside the establishment of a new international copyright law enforcement body, the deal being cobbled together by the G8 will also see ordinary police given the right to search your digital devices for stolen files, and will allow them to confiscate such devices. Front line security staff will be empowered to decide what content infringes on copyright laws, but again—how will they decide, how can they decide? In court, will it be a situation where the word of those people would be enough to send you down?

We know that every corporation on Earth would rather we had no rights at all. Rights are not conducive to the creation of a global bear market in which the big and strong crush the weak and small. Yet most of us instinctively know we have a right to expect protection from the corporate fascists, but our leaders instead choose to kiss their arses, cravenly reshaping our laws, line-by-line, month after month since 9/11, to benefit not people but big business. Why and how did this twisted collaboration come about? Your guess is as good as mine so long as it includes the words ‘power’ and ‘control’.

You think this is ‘just’ about iPods and piracy and copyright, that it doesn’t cut to the core of who we are and what shape society is forced to take? If you do, you’re very wrong.

The totalitarian high-technology regimes of science-fiction are no longer confined to books and films. They’re right here, right now: 1984, with its manipulative and oppressive governance masquerading as beneficence; Blade Runner, with its screwed-up weather systems, exhausted natural resources, all-pervasive advertising and extensive underclass; The Matrix, with its philosophical underpinning of the idea that people are bred by an unseen establishment power to be complacent lambs to the slaughter, fed false comforts and frameworks to live by which prevent them from even recognising that they are not free, that they are slaves to a vampiric system alien to, and hostile towards, nature.

Any of those scenarios seem familiar to you?