DPI

Why Mash-up Matters

/ Christopher Parsons

livemashupdj[Note: this is an early draft of the first section of a paper I’m working on, presently loosely titled “Mash-up Meets Deep Packet Inspection: Culture, solutions, and the demand for transparency”. Other sections will follow as I draft them. I’ve adopted this format based on positive reactions to my similar drafting process last year on ‘Who Gives a Tweet About Privacy?‘ Comments welcome. I’ve excluded full bibliographic information, but retained enough that you can find my sources. Text has been copied and pasted from a word processing document; this may result in some links being broken *cough* footnotes links *cough*]

I’m composing the beginning of this article to the sounds of Girl Talk’s ‘Like This’ from his Feed the Animals album. His artistic technique is to take very short samples from a variety of artists – twenty-nine samples are taken in the three minutes and twenty-one seconds of ‘Like This’ – and remix the work to create entirely new songs.[i] He isn’t a DJ but a self-described musician of the digital era, and when his work was presented to Marybeth Peters of the US Registrar of Copyrights she recognized that his music was amazing. She also recognized it was likely illegal, and the fact that his own creativity clearly imbued his creations offered no defense against copyright infringement: “You can’t argue your creativity when it’s based on other people’s stuff.”[ii] This position is mirrored by Barry Slotnick, head of the intellectual property litigation group at Loeb & Loeb, who has stated that “[w]hat you can’t do is substitute someone else’s creativity for your own.”[iii] Girl Talk’s work is recognized as amazing and creative, even by defenders and advocates of the present copyright regime, but is still questionably legal (at best). Feed the Animals is a popular album that pulls together anthems of pop culture, and its artist has been used as a defender of copyright reform movements,[iv] but it is only one item in a rapidly developing and emerging ‘mash-up’ culture that draws together existing cultural artifacts to in the creation of a recombinant digital culture.

Continue reading →

Dispelling FUD: Iran and ISP Surveillance

/ Christopher Parsons / 8 Comments

Since the election of incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the world has witnessed considerable political tension in Iran. Protests over the questionable electoral results, beatings and deaths of political protestors, recurring protests by Iranians associated with the Green Revolution, and transmissions of information amongst civil- and global-actors have been broadcast using contemporary communications systems. Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and mobile phone video has enabled Iranians to coordinate, broadcast, and receive information. The existence of Web 2.0 infrastructure has set the conditions under which the Green Revolution operates.

The Iranian government quickly recognized the power of cheap social coordination technologies and, in response, drastically reduced the capacity of national Internet links – the government, in effect, closed the nation’s Internet faucet, which greatly reduced how quickly data could be transmitted to, and received from, the ‘net as a whole. This claim is substantiated by Arbor Networks’ (Internet) border reports, which demonstrate how, immediately after the presidential election, there was a plummet in the data traffic entering and exiting the nation. (It should be noted that Arbor is a prominent supplier of Deep Packet Inspection equipment.)

Prior to trying to dispel the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) surrounding the contemporary Iranian ISP-surveillance system that is regularly propagated by the media, I need to give a bit of context on the telecommunications structure in Iran.

Continue reading →

Some Blogroll Love

/ Christopher Parsons

Closeconnections

I tend to (almost exclusively) access key websites related to my research and personal interests through RSS feeds. As a result of using Google Reader to collate new content, I rarely actually see the blogrolls and suggested links that are provided by those key websites that I grab content from on a daily basis. Given that I’m sure many people read this site almost exclusively through RSS, I wanted to prepare a short piece that highlights just some of the key blogs and websites that I turn to on a regular basis in the hopes that readers might find some cool and interesting new sources of information they’d otherwise never come across. As a hat tip, this post is largely inspired by Rebecca Bollwitt‘s “The Missing Link” that considers (as of 2008) the changing characters of link lists and blogrolls.

AR.m-ato.me

Aya Walraven is a digital media and internet enthusiast who primarily works in video, web, and emerging technologies. A self-appointed internet-culture historian and archivist, she studies and documents mobile technologies and online behavior, particularly in Japanese youth and anonymous communities.

Continue reading →

Will Copyright Kill eHealth?

/ Christopher Parsons

bodyworldsThere is a metric ton of cash that’s being poured into eHealth initiatives, and to date it doesn’t appear that governments are recognizing the relationship between copyright law and eHealth. That makes a lot of sense in some ways – when most of us think ‘medicine’ and ‘doctor’ we think about privacy as one of, if not the, key issues (while, other than hopefully curing whatever is making us ill!). In this light, we wonder about the security of databases, the willingness of healthcare providers to limit access to records, and so forth. People in Canada are worried enough about privacy that, on the Ontario Government’s eHealth Ontario site, ‘Privacy and Security‘ are front and center as a main link on their homepage. When we turn to British Columbia’s October 23, 2009 Heath Sector Information Management/Information Technology Strategy and search for ‘privacy’ we see that the term appears on 18 of the report’s 55 pages. Moving over to the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner’s May 2, 2006 presentation on health information and electronic health records we, again, see emphases on the privacy and security concerns that must be posed alongside any movement to massively digitize the healthcare infrastructure.

What we see less of in the eHealth debate are the prevalent dangers accompanying threats to cut citizens off of the ‘net as a consequence of copyright infringement. It’s this issue that I want to briefly dwell on today, in part to start ramping up some thoughts on the wide-ranging effects of three-strikes laws that are starting to be adopted and/or seriously discussed in various jurisdictions around the world.

Continue reading →

Virgin Media to Monitor Copyright Infringement

/ Christopher Parsons / 6 Comments

truthliesandbroadbandLate last week The Register reported that Virgin Media is going to be trialling Detica’s Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) appliances to measure the levels of copyright-infringing file sharing that is occurring along Virgin Media’s networks. It’s important to note a few things right up front:

  1. I have a request in to the company manufacturing these appliances, Detica, and have been promised responses to my questions. In light of this, I’m not accusing Detica or Virgin Media of engaging in any ‘privacy invasive’ uses of DPI, at least not at the moment.
  2. The information that I’ll drawing on is, largely, from a consultation paper that Detica presented in late September of 2009.
  3. This post is largely meant as a ‘let’s calm down, and wait to hear about the technology’s details’ before suggesting that a massive campaign be mounted against what might be a relatively innocuous surveillance technology.

With that stated…

Detica describes themselves as a “business and technology consultancy specialising in helping clients collect, manage and exploit information to reveal actionable intelligence. As the digital revolution causes massive amounts of data to converge with a new generation of threats, many of our clients see this as one of their greatest challenges.” Their CView DPI system is meant to let ISPs better identify the amount of copyright infringing work that is coursing across their networks, in an effort to give ISPs better metrics as well as to determine whether arrangements between ISPs and content providers has a significant, measurable effect on the transfer of copyright infringing files.

Continue reading →

The Business of Infringing Content

/ Christopher Parsons

CreepycopyrightinfringementWhen people are about to download content from the ‘net that is copywritten, many often ask ‘will I get caught doing this?’ For many, the response is ‘no’ and then continue to download that episode of Seinfeld or whatever. Given that there are so many people downloading, and that record companies in the US have claimed to have abandoned filing new lawsuits against individuals, then things (in North America) appear to be getting better.

At issue, however, is that filing lawsuits is big money, and in Europe especially it looks like Digiprotect has moved in to assume first-mover advantage. Digiprotect gets “the legal rights from the companies to distribute these movies to stores, and with these rights we can sue illegal downloaders. Then we take legal action in every country possible, concentrating on the places where such action will be profitable” (Source). They avoid demanding too much money from infringers, on the basis that few judges like the idea of imposing million dollar fines on individuals – usually opting for suits demanding in the vicinity of 500 Euros. This amount of money ‘teaches’ individuals and provides enough money to keep the employees paid. No staff member has a fixed salary – they are paid according to the ‘cases’ that are won. The actual method of determining the financial burdens are based on the business expenses, profit, and money to be distributed to artists. In effect, the company sets up a honeypot and then sues whomever it is profitable to sue.

Continue reading →