Hacktivist Judo: Musician Exploits New Spanish Law To Overwhelm System With Legitimate Infringement Complaints
from the you-want-infringement?-we'll-show-you-infringement dept
As Techdirt reported earlier this year, Spain's Sinde Law, designed to combat file sharing by blocking sites with allegedly infringing material, has an extremely complex history. It finally went into effect on 1 March, and was immediately met with a clever denial of service attack from a Spanish group with the self-explanatory name "Hackivistas". As TorrentFreak explains:They encouraged sites to link to a copyrighted track from the artist Eme Navarro, who’s a member of the music rights group SGAE, but critical of the Sinde law.As well as gumming up the legal machinery for a while, this action is designed to obtain some much-needed details about how the Sinde Law will work in practice:
While Navarro generally publishes his music under a Creative Commons license, he created an "all rights reserved" track specifically for the protest. Thanks to the hacktivist campaign hundreds of websites are now linking to this copyrighted song without permission, and Navarro reported a first batch of sites to the Ministry of Culture early this morning.
As a result, the commission tasked with reviewing all the requests will be overloaded with complaints. All the reported sites have to be processed on order of arrival, so the protest will significantly slow down this review process.
"Nobody knows how they will shut down websites. We suspect that they will ask Spanish companies hosting the websites to shut them down, and that Spanish service providers will block websites that are hosted outside of Spain."This is pretty extraordinary. How can the Spanish government claim any legitimacy for a law that was not only brought in at the behest of a foreign power, but was rammed through the legislative process in such a way that those most affected by it -- the Spanish people -- still have no idea how it will be implemented?
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Filed Under: copyright, denial of service, hactivism, sinde, spain
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now if you excuse me, I have to finish photoshopping modest burkas onto women in photographs on my website so they are compliant with Saudi law.
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Read very carefully now...
What they did was very simple...
They showed how stupid the law is.
The question I have is...
Will the government get to implement the law before the Spanish people vote the law out?
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Anyone will tell you that the best way to effect political change is to keep your head down and not make waves.
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At the behest of a foreign power?
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Re: At the behest of a foreign power?
Well the point of the story here is that at least one of their musicians isn't!
So the evidence is 1-0 against you so far...
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Re: At the behest of a foreign power?
Sciencemag: Identification of the Social and Cognitive Processes Underlying Human Cumulative Culture
Copying apparently is fundamental for the advance of the human race and some people think it is a bad thing.
If one minority of society is happy the other 99% is not.
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Re: At the behest of a foreign power?
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Re: At the behest of a foreign power?
i'm sure they are, especially since they're owned by the same corporations as yours are. So, why do you think their needs trump mine, and the rights of any other private citizen?
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Re: At the behest of a foreign power?
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Wow, framing unsuspecting people as a political act
It's just wrong to frame someone as part of a political protest. If you want to do civil disobedience, take the risks yourself. Framing someone is just wrong.
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Re: Wow, framing unsuspecting people as a political act
It's like 200 people with reefers walk up to a cop and say, "you gonna take us all in?"
Reading comprehension is your friend.
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Re: Re: Wow, framing unsuspecting people as a political act
I read it differently.
"Thanks to the hacktivist campaign hundreds of websites are now linking to this copyrighted song without permission."
The operative word is "without permission."
You can't (1) ask someone to link to something and (2) claim they don't have permission because the very act of (1) negates (2).
Now perhaps the sophistry club around here feels differently. Perhaps someone around here feels you can request something while not requesting it.
My reading continues to be that they're asking innocent folks to link to something and tricking them with some weird CC slight of hand. But who knows? Maybe you're right. And why don't you try that cop trick some time. Prove how clever you are.
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Re: Re: Re: Wow, framing unsuspecting people as a political act
Really? That's funny. Because whenever we talk about the blogs like Dajaz1 that were posting lots of material at the request of the artist, and yet got seized, you industry supporters have claimed that simply being emailed a track by a promoter with a request to post doesn't constitute legal permission. What a fascinating double standard you have going.
But that doesn't even matter here, because according to the article, the sites involved have chosen to participate with full knowledge of what's going on.
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he set it up for the purpose, got the Group, through non-official means, to encourage other people to link to it (and make them aware that he would be filing the relevant documents) possibly has the group coming back and telling him who/where to file against, too.
it's a bit of a legal song and dance, but it works, and the law it's dealing with is at least as nonsensical.
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Re: Wow, framing unsuspecting people as a political act
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Re: Re: Wow, framing unsuspecting people as a political act
i'm not sure 'soon' is quite the right word.
(it failed when it was pointed out how insane that was... and the public were made aware of that and objected.the result was massively toned down legislation that, from memory, would allow action to be taken in the event of Actual Terrorism, and otherwise do very little.)
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Re: Wow, framing unsuspecting people as a political act
everything else that I don't like is just terrorism and stoner college kids who need a jack boot in their ass.
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Re: Wow, framing unsuspecting people as a political act
Yet, Viacom sued Google over videos that Viacom uploaded themselves, and deliberately hid the fact that they were doing it. (By, for instance, ordering employees to upload at coffee shops under anonymous user names.)
I guess it's "wrong" to frame websites as part of a political protest, but when a company does it to increase their profit margins, you're A-OK with it.
Also, as others have pointed out, the websites themselves are in on it... Unlike the websites who would be taken down for user-generated content they don't know about under the proposed anti-piracy bills you support.
...Are you some sort of agent provocateur with an anti-copyright agenda? Because you couldn't make the copyright-maximalist side look worse if you tried.
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Actually, it's pretty dumb, protesting by being assholes. It's not positive. Rather, it appears to be trying to create another smoke screen for actual piracy.
I hope he gets locked up for it.
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All protests are for the sake of being an asshole you nitwit. How do you expect them to protest if they can't say things that make the other side feel bad?
I didn't know protesting was only something that's okay when they aren't saying things I disagree with.
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It's a protest not by protesting something, but instead by trying to fuck it up. It's petty and pretty much asshole play.
If you want to protest, protest. Don't just overload the system to try to hide your other piracy activities.
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That doesn't even make any sense.
"You can protest, but don't actually protest, because you might fuck something up and be an asshole"
But hey, if you want to respond, respond. Don't overload Techdirt's comment section with partially-lobotomized drivel.
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That's just stupid.
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"If you want to protest, protest - but don't protest."
Every single form of protest involves fucking up some system to some degree - even if it's as simple as shutting down a park for a demonstration, or a street for a march; or flooding a phone line with calls, or a mailbox with letters. Fucking up the system is, essentially, the very definition of protest.
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Retard.
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I suspect assuming as you offer no evidence of that or anything close to it. So, if all else fails it's smear time, right?
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DOJ issues special memorandum that "the government cannot do anything illegal" and fines every American $5,000 for housing "digital terrorism".
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Discrimination!
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http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/spanish-internet-community-unites-against-new-anti-p2p-m inister-of-culture/2009/04/08
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I'm looking forward to this
Think if we keep them offline for an entire year with continual takedowns, they might start to reconsider the intended "unintended consequences" to their censorship lobbying?
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Re: I'm looking forward to this
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