No free speech for animal rights Web sites. Yet another chilling tale of corporate misuse of the DMCA. Which, for reasons I will soon explain, got me thinking about HTTP and port 80.
You see, every corporation I know of has a firewall. It would be suicide not to. You can’t go around leaving every computer in your organization open to the internet; that’s insane. You want to keep stuff out, but you also want to keep stuff in. Things that your employees have, things they say, things they do. The firewall works both ways.
But they always leave port 80 wide open. Incoming and outgoing. It’s a narrow little wedge.
What do people want to do on the internet? Communicate with each other. Share ideas. Share files. Touch each other from afar. How can we do that through a firewall? Through the only open port. IM clients all have a “I am behind a firewall” option, which uses port 80 by default, and in many cases scrounges for other open ports. XML-RPC is intentionally designed to tunnel remote procedure calls through port 80. Why? Because it’s universal, and it’s simple, and it’s open. Napster worked through a firewall. The current crop of file sharing tools do too. And products like Groove tunnel executable code through port 80. This is not what port 80 was supposed to be, but this is what it’s turned into. we’ve turned a narrow tunnel into a wide-open highway. This is not the end; it’s only the beginning.
Now, what do corporations want? To make money. To control things, when control of those things allows them to make money. To shut people up, when those people are stopping them or threatening to stop them from making money. And how can they do that? They can’t just going around doing anything they want. Most companies I know of do not, for instance, go around selling drugs or prostitutes, even though drugs and prostitution are extremely lucrative, because we have laws against that sort of thing. Good laws. Laws that encourage the sort of behavior we want to encourage and discourage the other stuff. Not all of them are clear-cut as a firewall, and certainly the anti-drug laws have gotten completely out of whack in the past decade, but in general we’ve maintained a reasonable balance on a wide variety of topics.
Until now.
Now there’s a wedge in that firewall. An open port. The DMCA.
It used to be that a corporation, when confronted with protesters with a web site, could ignore them, or listen to them, or try to co-opt them, or explicitly market against them. They could do lots of things, but they could not do the most efficient thing, which is to silence them. Case after case has upheld the right of protesters to do all kinds of inconvenient things, for instance registering domain names that included the company’s name (witness all the “companyxyzsucks.com” sites) or were otherwise strikingly similar to the company name or brand. Case after case has upheld the right to speak your mind in lots of different ways, anywhere from written satire to organized live worldwide protest. The societal firewall in action.
And one by one, these rights are being taken away. One by one, corporations are finding the open port they need to silence their enemies. Once your ISP receives a letter stating that you have violated a company’s copyright, the ISP must take you offline. From the article: “If the client whose Web site has been shut down provides a counter-notification swearing under penalty of perjury that it believes the site not to be a copyright violation, then the site can be reinstated by the ISP, such as Envirolink, but not before 10 working days and no later than 14 working days have passed.” That’s right; a company can buy 10 days of your silence with nothing more than a written letter.
Other cases of corporate abuse are well-known in hacker circles. Dmitri Sklyarov. Richard Felten. This is not what the DMCA was supposed to do, but this is what it has become. We’ve turned a narrow tunnel into a wide-open highway.
[This article was edited on February 6, 2003, to correct some typos and add a sentence about the anti-drug laws.]
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