Polish Gov't Finally Admits It Deployed NSO Malware, Pretends Targeting Of Opposition Leaders Isn't Abusive

from the don't-be-shitty,-Poland dept

Poland -- like far too many countries -- has a Pegasus problem. The highly intrusive (and highly effective) phone malware sold by Israel's NSO Group for the ostensible purpose of tracking down terrorists and other deadly criminals has been observed (yet again) being deployed to track government critics and political opponents.

When Apple announced its lawsuit against NSO Group for targeting iPhone users, it also announced plans to notify users who had been targeted by NSO spyware. The first beneficiary of this notification program was a Polish prosecutor who was apparently targeted for trying to investigate election irregularities.

That initial notification opened the floodgates. The Polish government had access to the spyware and was deploying it for reasons entirely unrelated for the reasons it stated when purchasing it.

Several members of political opposition groups in Poland have produced evidence that they were hacked by Pegasus spyware, raising alarming questions about the Polish government’s use of the software.

[...]

The compromises were discovered by Citizen Lab, a spyware research group based at the University of Toronto, which has done extensive work on Pegasus.

[...]

In the Polish case, Citizen Lab also found evidence of spyware compromises targeting a lawyer representing Polish opposition groups and a prosecutor involved in a case against the ruling Law and Justice party. In both cases, traces of Pegasus spyware were found on the targets’ devices.

"Tip of the iceberg," as AFP reported (via MSN News):

Evidence of the hacking, which has become a major scandal in Poland, was reported by the Canada-based cyber-security watchdog Citizen Lab.

"We think this is just the tip of the iceberg and there'll be more discoveries to come," John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher with the group, told AFP.

"It's shocking and it looks very bad," he said. "Pegasus is a tool of dictators. Its use in these cases point to an authoritarian slide" in Poland.

Throughout this stream of revelations, the Polish government remained silent, apparently hoping the steady stream of news involving misuse by NSO customers would wash away interest in its misdeeds. Waiting it out didn't work. When the plan to ignore it failed, the government started lying.

When asked by the AP in December if Poland had purchased Pegasus, state security spokesman Stanislaw Zaryn would neither confirm nor deny it. However, many Kaczynski allies publicly cast doubt on suggestions of government Pegasus use.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called the Citizen Lab-AP findings “fake news” and suggested a foreign intelligence service could have done the spying — an idea dismissed by critics who said no other government would have any interest in the three Polish targets.

Deputy Defense Minister Wojciech Skurkiewicz in late December said “the Pegasus system is not in the possession of the Polish services. It is not used to track or surveil anyone in our country.”

All lies. And all exposed by non-government entities like Citizen Lab and Amnesty International -- both of which have uncovered plenty of device infections by NSO malware. Faced with undeniable evidence, the Polish government has finally admitted its possession of these hacking tools.

Poland’s most powerful politician has acknowledged that the country bought advanced spyware from the Israeli surveillance software maker NSO Group, but denied that it was being used to target his political opponents.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s ruling conservative party, Law and Justice, said in an interview that the secret services in many countries are using the Pegasus software to combat crime and corruption.

But this admission is accompanied by even more lies. Evidence shows the Polish government targeted opposition figures and investigators looking into a highly irregular, and completely botched election. The evidence is overwhelming but the ruling party is still trying to pretend this is all above-board.

“There is nothing here, no fact, except the hysteria of the opposition. There is no Pegasus case, no surveillance,” Kaczynski said. “No Pegasus, no services, no secretly obtained information played any role in the 2019 election campaign. They lost because they lost. They shouldn’t look for such excuses today.”

Maybe in this particular case the spying did not directly affect election results. But the software is not being used to target terrorists and criminals. It's being used to track opposition officials and investigators who are definitely the sort of people the malware was purchased to target. This is abuse and the government is taking a decidedly totalitarian tack by refusing to admit it engaged in, at the very least, highly questionable use of these hacking tools.

Filed Under: malware, pegasus, poland, politics, spyware, surveillance
Companies: nso group

Polish Prosecutor First Beneficiary Of Apple's 'You've Been Hacked By NSO Spyware' Notification Program

from the anything-that-screws-with-NSO-and-its-customers-is-fine-with-me dept

Concurrent with Apple's announcement that it was suing Israeli tech company NSO Group over its iPhone exploits was its announcement that it would be notifying customers of suspected hacking attempts utilizing NSO's extremely powerful Pegasus malware.

Apple is notifying the small number of users that it discovered may have been targeted by FORCEDENTRY. Any time Apple discovers activity consistent with a state-sponsored spyware attack, Apple will notify the affected users in accordance with industry best practices.

Unlike Apple's lawsuit -- which might nudge the CFAA towards a more expansive interpretation of "unauthorized access" that could adversely affect security research -- this notification practice is undeniably good. It undercuts the abusive acts of state actors by giving their targets a heads up about phone hacking attempts.

This won't pose much of a problem for Apple, as it's out of the legal reach of most of NSO's customers. Even if foreign surveillance agencies did obtain the equivalent of a warrant to hack phones and intercept communications, any accompanying gag orders would be useless. We'll see how this disclosure process works out if a US-based government agency utilizes NSO malware -- something that seems even less likely now that the Commerce Department has blacklisted NSO.

The notification program has already paid off for one Polish government employee, who was recently informed by Apple she was targeted by NSO spyware. (h/t 9to5Mac)

Ewa Wrzosek is a prosecutor, a member of the Association of Prosecutors "Lex Super Omnia". She exposed herself to the authorities on April 23, 2020, when she initiated an investigation into the so-called "Envelope elections". On the same day, however, the investigation was taken from her and discontinued, and disciplinary proceedings were initiated against Wrzoski. Since then, the prosecutor has repeatedly criticized the changes in the Polish judiciary after 2015.

Yesterday evening, Ewa Wrzosek announced on Twitter that she had received a notification from Apple about a possible attack by state services on her iPhone using Pegasus.

The "Envelope Elections" were a hasty and apparently unlawful attempt to hold an election during the first few months of the COVID pandemic. Last May, the failed presidential election managed to rack up a hefty tab to be settled by Poland residents, but didn't actually result in the election of anyone.

Poland’s abandoned presidential election, which was scheduled for 10 May but took place without any voting, still generated high costs. Private broadcaster TVN has revealed that invoices issued in connection with the preparations amounted to almost 70 million zloty of costs for the state postal service, Poczta Polska.

The run-up to the planned election was fraught with chaos and controversy, as the Polish government pushed ahead with preparations for a fully postal vote before relevant legislation had been passed. Many local authorities refused to cooperate, on the basis that doing so without the law in place would be illegal.

Following this logistic and political failure (there was some speculation this process was fast tracked to give the incumbent president the best chance to win), Wrzosek began an investigation. That appears to have proven unpopular with the party controlling the Polish government. Given this history, it's not much of a leap to presume she's being targeted by her own government.

The twist is that the Polish government has never officially confirmed it has ever acquired NSO malware. But governments rarely discuss surveillance programs, especially their most controversial ones. However, there is a paper trail that suggests at least one government agency is in possession of NSO's most powerful surveillance tool.

For nine months, the Ministry of Finance has not been able to decide whether the Justice Fund, which is in the hands of the Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro, had the right to transfer PLN 25 million to the CBA for the purchase of a modern surveillance system, tvn24.pl learned.

The fact that the Central Anticorruption Bureau received money from this fund and allocated it to the purchase of the most modern surveillance system for telephones and computers was revealed on tvn24.pl almost exactly a year ago.

Now, reporters of the "Black on White" program suspect that the system bought by the anti-corruption service is probably the Israeli Pegasus. - This system was created to prevent terrorist attacks, kidnappings, human trafficking and drug smuggling - journalists from "Black and White" explained.

If so, there's a good chance the targeted phone is compromised. Wrzosek has asked for answers from the Minister of Justice, but she's unlikely to receive any acknowledgements or apologies. If it is what it looks like, the prosecutor is being targeted in retaliation for her attempted investigation by the same government she works for.

As Apple continues to notify users targeted by NSO malware, hopefully those targeted will continue to inform the rest of the world how the company's "for bad guys and terrorists ONLY" exploits are actually being used.

Filed Under: ewa wrzosek, malware, pegasus, poland, spyware
Companies: apple, nso group

Top EU Court's Adviser Regrettably Fails To Recommend Throwing Out Upload Filters, But Does Say They Should Block Only "Identical" Or "Equivalent" Copies

from the out-of-their-tiny-minds dept

One of the last hopes of getting the EU's terrible upload filters thrown out was an intriguing legal challenge brought by Poland at the region's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). As is usual in these cases, a preliminary opinion is offered by one of the CJEU's special advisers. It's not binding on the main court, but can offer interesting hints of what the final judgment might be. Unfortunately, in his analysis Advocate General Saugmandsgaard Øe recommends that the CJEU should dismiss the action brought by Poland (pdf), because in his view Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive is compatible with freedom of expression and information.

That's a huge disappointment, since many hoped he would unequivocally rule that upload filters breach fundamental rights. However, the Advocate General's opinion is by no means a complete disaster for users of online sharing services. He recognizes the right of people to make "legitimate use of protected subject matter." Specifically, that means people must be able to rely on the EU's exceptions and limitations to copyright. Moreover:

In order for that right to be effective, providers of such [online sharing] services are not allowed to preventively block all content reproducing the protected subject matter identified by the rightholders, including lawful content. It would not be sufficient for users to have the possibility, under a complaints and redress mechanism, to have their legitimate content re-uploaded after such preventive blocking.

This is a huge point. It means that copyright companies cannot demand that upload filters block every use of their material, since that would prevent legal transformative uses such as memes, parodies, commentary etc. Saugmandsgaard Øe concludes with the following observation to the CJEU:

Consequently, sharing service providers must only detect and block content that is 'identical' or 'equivalent' to the protected subject matter identified by the rightholders, that is to say content the unlawfulness of which may be regarded as manifest in the light of the information provided by the rightholders. By contrast, in all ambiguous situations -- short extracts from works included in longer content, 'transformative' works, etc. -- in which, in particular, the application of exceptions and limitations to copyright is reasonably foreseeable, the content concerned should not be the subject of a preventive blocking measure. The risk of 'over-blocking' is thus minimised. Rightholders will have to request the removal or blocking of the content in question by means of substantiated notifications, or even refer the matter to a court for a ruling on the lawfulness of the content and, in the event that it is unlawful, order its removal and blocking.

Crucially, this says that unless it is absolutely clear-cut that there is copyright infringement -- because an identical, or equivalent copy is uploaded -- user uploads must not be blocked by default. Instead, a more detailed complaint must be made by copyright holders, possibly involving a request for courts to rule on the legality of a transformative use. That's very far from what those pushing for upload filters want, and represents a major limitation on the latter.

It's an obvious compromise position, and as such could well be adopted by the CJEU when it hands down its definitive judgment at a later date. Saugmandsgaard Øe says that yes, upload filters are acceptable in the EU, but can only be used to block identical, or near-identical copies. In his full opinion, he also affirms strongly and repeatedly that other legal uses of copyright material must not be blocked by upload filters. And there's a nice sting in the tail of his analysis. In a Postscript, the Advocate General comments on the European Commission's recent "guidance" to national governments on how they should implement Article 17. As Techdirt noted last month, this guidance introduced a huge loophole that would let copyright companies "earmark" any upload that they claim "could cause significant economic harm", even if likely to be a legitimate use of protected subject matter. Earmarked uploads would lack key legal protections, and Saugmandsgaard Øe is having none of it:

If this is to be understood as meaning that those same providers should block content ex ante [in advance] simply on the basis of an assertion of a risk of significant economic harm by rightholders -- since the guidance does not contain any other criterion objectively limiting the 'earmarking' mechanism to specific cases -- even if that content is not manifestly infringing, I cannot agree with this, unless I alter all the considerations set out in this Opinion.

This is basically Advocate General-speak for "you must be out of your tiny minds".

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Filed Under: advocate general, cjeu, copyright, copyright directive, poland, upload filters

Poland's Bid To Get Upload Filters Taken Out Of The EU Copyright Directive Suddenly Looks Much More Hopeful

from the biter-bit dept

As readers of Techdirt will remember, one of the biggest defeats for users of the Internet -- and for online freedom of expression -- was the passage of the EU Copyright Directive last year. The law was passed using a fundamentally dishonest argument that it did not require upload filters, because they weren't explicitly mentioned in the text. As a result, supporters of the legislation claimed, platforms would be free to use other technologies that did not threaten freedom of speech in the way that automated upload filters would do. However, as soon as the law was passed, countries like France said that the only way to implement Article 17 (originally Article 13) was through upload filters, and copyright companies started pushing for legal memes to be blocked because they now admitted that upload filters were "practically unworkable".

This dishonesty may come back to bite supporters of the law. Techdirt reported last August that Poland submitted a formal request for upload filters to be removed from the final text. The EU's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has just held a public hearing on this case, and as the detailed report by Paul Keller makes abundantly clear, there are lots of reason to be hopeful that Article 17's upload filters are in trouble from a legal point of view.

The hearing was structured around four questions. Principally, the CJEU wanted to know whether Article 17 meant that upload filters were mandatory. This is a crucial question because the court has found in the past that a general obligation to monitor all user uploads for illegal activities violates the fundamental rights of Internet users and platform operators. This is why proponents of the law insisted that upload filters were not mandatory, but simply one technology that could be applied. In her commentary on the public hearing, the former Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda summarizes Poland's answer to the CJEU's question as follows:

Poland argued that while Article 17 does not explicitly prescribe the use of upload filters, no alternatives are available to platforms to fulfil their obligations under Article 17(4). In a similar vein, [CJEU] Advocate General Saugmandsgaard Øe asked Parliament and Council whether a person who is required to travel from Luxembourg to Brussels within two hours can really be considered to have a choice between driving and walking. Poland also correctly pointed out that the alternatives presented by the European institutions, such as fingerprinting, hashing, watermarking, Artificial Intelligence or keyword search, all constitute alternative methods of filtering, but not alternatives to filtering.

This is the point that every expert has been making for years: there are no viable alternatives to upload filters, which means that Article 17 necessarily imposes a general monitoring requirement, something that is not permitted under current EU law. The fact that the Advocate General Øe, who will release his own recommendations on the case early next year, made his comment about the lack of any practical alternative to upload filters is highly significant. During the hearing, representatives of the French and Spanish governments claimed that this doesn't matter, for the following remarkable reason:

The right to intellectual property should be prioritized over freedom of expression in cases of uncertainty over the legality of user uploads, because the economic damage to copyright-holders from leaving infringements online even for a short period of time would outweigh the damage to freedom of expression of users whose legal uploads may get blocked.

The argument here seems to be that as soon as even a single illegal copy is placed online, it will be copied rapidly and spread around the Internet. But this line of reasoning undermines itself. If placing a single illegal copy online for even a short time really is enough for it to be shared widely, then it only requires a copy to be placed on a site outside the EU's reach for copies to spread around the entire Internet anyway -- because copying is so easy -- which makes the speed of the takedown within the EU irrelevant. As Reda emphasizes, the balance of different competing rights is going to be central to the CJEU's considerations, and it is not just freedom of expression that Article 17 threatens:

Aside from the intellectual property of rightsholders and the freedom of expression and information of users, other fundamental rights need to be taken into account, most notably the freedom to conduct a business of platform operators. Article 17 leaves few guarantees for the freedom to conduct a business, by introducing extremely broad obligations on platform operators, while only limiting those obligations through a general reference to the principle of proportionality.

That is, it's not just online users who will suffer because of the unavoidable use of upload filters, businesses will too. And there's another, more subtle issue, that the CJEU will consider, which is whether the EU lawmakers have done a good enough job in terms of establishing the necessary minimum safeguards against the the violation of fundamental rights by upload filters:

While the proponents of Article 17 considered that the safeguards included in it are sufficient, such as the complaint and redress mechanism and the obligation to leave legitimate uses unaffected, Poland argued that the EU legislator had deliberately passed on these difficult questions to the national legislators and ultimately the platforms, in an effort to sidestep politically sensitive issues.

The other trick used by supporters of the Copyright Directive to get it approved -- leaving to national governments and individual companies the impossible task of reconciling upload filters with freedom of expression -- may also count against Article 17 when the CJEU rules on whether it is valid. Moreover:

The case before the Court has far-reaching implications beyond the realm of copyright law, as similar sector-specific legislation is being considered in other areas, and the European Commission is in the process of drafting horizontal legislation on content moderation.

In other words, what seemed at the time like a desperate last attempt by Poland to stop the awful upload filters, with little hope of succeeding, now looks to have a decent chance because of the important general issues it raises -- something explored at greater length in a new study written by Reda and others (pdf). That's not to say that Article 17's upload filters are dead, but it seems like the underhand methods used to force this legislation through could turn out to be their downfall.

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Filed Under: article 17, cjeu, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, poland, upload filters

It's On: Details Emerge Of Polish Government's Formal Request For Top EU Court To Throw Out Upload Filters

from the worth-a-try dept

Earlier this year, Techdirt wrote about an intriguing tweet from the account of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland, which announced: "Tomorrow #Poland brings action against copyright directive to CJEU". The hashtags for the tweet made clear what Poland was worried about: "#Article13 #Article17". However, at that time, no details were forthcoming about this potentially important legal move. It was disappointing that nothing more has been heard about this unexpected development since then -- until now. A notice on the Official Journal of the European Union includes the following: "Case C-401/19: Action brought on 24 May 2019 -- Republic of Poland v European Parliament and Council of the European Union". The corresponding entry indicates that the Polish government believes that the upload filters required by Article 13/17 represent an "infringement of the right to freedom of expression and information" guaranteed by Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union:

The Republic of Poland claims specifically that the imposition on online content-sharing service providers of the obligation to make best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information (point (b) of Article 17(4) of [EU Copyright] Directive 2019/790) and the imposition on online content-sharing service providers of the obligation to make best efforts to prevent the future uploads of protected works or other subject-matter for which the rightsholders have lodged a sufficiently substantiated notice (point (c), in fine, of Article 17(4) of Directive 2019/790) make it necessary for the service providers -- in order to avoid liability -- to carry out prior automatic verification (filtering) of content uploaded online by users, and therefore make it necessary to introduce preventive control mechanisms. Such mechanisms undermine the essence of the right to freedom of expression and information and do not comply with the requirement that limitations imposed on that right be proportional and necessary.

Nothing new there, of course -- it's what Techdirt and many others pointed out repeatedly before the Directive was passed. But what is significant is that this time it is the Polish government that is making this statement, and in a complaint to the EU's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). As a previous post explained, some are of the view that the key importance of Poland's legal action is that it requires the CJEU to consider the questions raised. That will necessarily include whether upload filters are "proportional and necessary" as a response to the uploading of unauthorized copies by members of the public.

As to the remedies, the Polish government ideally wants points (b) and (c) of the following section of Article 13/17 cancelled:

If no authorisation is granted, online content-sharing service providers shall be liable for unauthorised acts of communication to the public, including making available to the public, of copyright-protected works and other subject matter, unless the service providers demonstrate that they have:

(a) made best efforts to obtain an authorisation, and

(b) made, in accordance with high industry standards of professional diligence, best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information; and in any event

(c) acted expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice from the rightholders, to disable access to, or to remove from their websites, the notified works or other subject matter, and made best efforts to prevent their future uploads in accordance with point (b).

If, however, the CJEU decides it is not possible to excise just those parts, the Polish government has a fallback position: it asks for Article 13/17 to be annulled in its entirely. It's too early to say whether Poland's request stands any chance of being granted. But it would certainly be rather fun watching the copyright industry go into meltdown if it saw all its lobbying for upload filters undone at a stroke.

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Filed Under: article 13, article 17, blocking, censorship machines, cjeu, copyright, copyright directive, filtering, poland, upload filters

Polish Government's Legal Challenge To EU Copyright Directive's Article 13/17 Remains Shrouded In Mystery, But Details May Not Matter

from the never-say-never dept

The awful Article 13/17 of the EU's Copyright Directive only seems to have passed thanks to some MEPs voting for it by mistake. But the European Parliament was not the only arm of the European Union where there was strong resistance to the awful ideas contained in the upload filter proposal. Some individual governments were also against aspects of the law. For example, right at the end of the legislative process, in April 2019, no less than seven EU nations expressed their serious concerns. One of them was Poland, which issued a joint statement (pdf) with the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy and Finland, including the following:

We believe that the Directive in its current form is a step back for the Digital Single Market rather than a step forward.

Most notably we regret that the Directive does not strike the right balance between the protection of right holders and the interests of EU citizens and companies. It therefore risks to hinder innovation rather than promote it and to have a negative impact the competitiveness of the European Digital Single Market.

Furthermore, we feel that the Directive lacks legal clarity, will lead to legal uncertainty for many stakeholders concerned and may encroach upon EU citizens' rights.

We therefore cannot express our consent with the proposed text of the Directive.

Unfortunately, in the final vote, these countries were outvoted by the other EU Member States, and the Directive was passed. However, it seems that is not the end of the story. On May 23, the official Twitter account of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland tweeted as follows, re-stating the points made in the joint statement:

Tomorrow #Poland brings action against copyright directive to CJEU. Here's why. #Article13 #Article17 #ACTA2

Why is Poland concerned about the Copyright Directive?

The directive does not ensure a balance between the protection of right holders and the interests of EU citizens & EU enterprises.

The directive does not ensure legal clarity, fostering legal uncertainty for stakeholders and endangering the rights of EU citizens.

It could have a negative impact on the competitiveness of the European digital single market.

There is a risk that it will hinder innovations instead of promoting them.

Those criticisms are made even more pointed by the reference to ACTA -- the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that Polish citizens played an important part in helping to defeat in 2012. Using the hashtag #ACTA2 is a clear attempt to frame the Copyright Directive as more of the same bad stuff -- with the hope that it will suffer the same fate.

And yet despite that tantalizing tweet, the Polish government failed to provide any more details about what exactly its legal challenge against the Copyright Directive at the EU's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, (CJEU), involved. We do know that the complaint has been submitted, because the action has been assigned an official case number, C-401/19, but with all the fields containing placeholders at the time of writing.

Tomasz Targosz, from the Institute of Intellectual Property Law, Jagiellonian University Kraków, has written an interesting post on the Kluwer Copyright Blog about the Polish move. In it, he provides invaluable information about the political context for this unexpected development. He points out that the failure to publish the official complaint may indicate that the argument it employs is weak, and unlikely to stand up to expert scrutiny. But Targosz goes on to make the following important point:

No matter how the complaint is argued in terms of the legal quality of reasoning, it may be effective as long as there are no obvious formal errors. The issue at stake will garner so much attention that the arguments the Court will have to consider will go way beyond the initial complaint. We can expect numerous and voluminous publications, position papers, etc., spelling out all the legally relevant factors (especially as so much has been already said). The complaint can therefore be compared to lighting the fuse. Whether any explosion will result from it is not certain, but sometimes even a tiny spark suffices.

That is, it seems likely that now that the formal complaint process has begun, the CJEU will be duty-bound to consider in depth all the issues raised. This will therefore provide a fresh opportunity for people to make the familiar arguments about why the Copyright Directive is so flawed, especially its implicit requirement for upload filters. Moreover, this time it is not fickle and highly partial politicians that will be deciding, but the staid and rather more independent senior judges of the CJEU. As we've seen in the past, they have no hesitation is overturning at a stroke pivotal EU laws that have taken years to draft and pass. Although it's impossible to predict what the CJEU will rule on this matter, it certainly seems that there is still hope that some or all of the Copyright Directive could still be thrown out. For those who feared it was all over, never say never.

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Filed Under: article 13, article 17, cjeu, eu, eu copyright directive, poland

MEPs Realizing How Bad Article 13 Could Be, Begin To Back Away From EU Copyright Directive

from the but-more-is-needed dept

The online protests around the terrible Article 11 and Article 13 only began yesterday. This weekend there are expected to be significant in-person protests as well, leading up to the big vote next week. Already the protests are having an impact. MEP Julia Reda passes on the news from Polish MEP Michal Boni that the major Polish political party, Civic Platform (or Platforma) has said they will not vote for the EU Copyright Directive if it contains Article 13:

That's a big win for the internet, and people should go thank Boni for that. However, many others in the EU Parliament have not yet said how they will vote and need to hear from people in the EU. The future of the internet -- and whether it's an open platform for all, or a closed platform for gatekeepers, depends on it.

Filed Under: article 13, censorship, civic platform, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, filters, michal boni, platforma, poland

Some EU Nations Still Haven't Implemented The 2013 Marrakesh Treaty For The Blind

from the copyright-trumps-compassion dept

The annals of copyright are littered with acts of extraordinary stupidity and selfishness on the part of the publishers, recording industry and film studios. But few can match the refusal by the publishing industry to make it easier for the blind to gain access to reading material that would otherwise be blocked by copyright laws. Indeed, the fact that it took so long for what came to be known as the Marrakesh Treaty to be adopted is a shameful testimony to the publishing industry's belief that copyright maximalism is more important than the rights of the visually impaired. As James Love, Director of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), wrote in 2013, when the treaty was finally adopted:

It difficult to comprehend why this treaty generated so much opposition from publishers and patent holders, and why it took five years to achieve this result. As we celebrate and savor this moment, we should thank all of those who resisted the constant calls to lower expectations and accept an outcome far less important than what was achieved today.

Even once the treaty was agreed, the publishing industry continued to fight against making it easier for the visually impaired to enjoy better access to books. In 2016, Techdirt reported that the Association of American Publishers was still lobbying to water down the US ratification package. Fortunately, as an international treaty, the Marrakesh Treaty came into force around the world anyway, despite the US foot-dragging.

Thanks to heavy lobbying by the region's publishers, the EU has been just as bad. It only formally ratified the Marrakesh Treaty in October of this year. As an article on the IPKat blog explains, the EU has the authority to sign and ratify treaties on behalf of the EU Member States, but it then requires the treaty to be implemented in national law:

In this case, the EU asked that national legislators reform their domestic copyright law by transposing the 2017/1564 Directive of 13 September 2017. The Directive requires that all necessary national measures be implemented by 12 October 2018. Not all member states complied by this deadline, whereby the EU Commission introduced infringement procedures against them for non-compliance. The list of the non-compliant countries is as follows:

Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Finland, France, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, UK

The IPKat post points out that some of the countries listed there, such as the UK and France, have in fact introduced exceptions to copyright to enable the making of accessible copies to the visually impaired. It's still a bit of mystery why they are on the list:

At the moment, the Commission has not published details regarding the claimed non-compliance by the countries listed. We cannot assume that the non-compliance proceedings were launched because the countries failed to introduce the exceptions in full, because countries can also be sanctioned if the scope of the exception implemented is too broad, so much so that it is disproportionately harmful to the interest of rightsholders. So we will have to wait and see what part of the implementation was deemed not up to scratch by the Commission.

As that indicates, it's possible that some of the countries mentioned are being criticized for non-compliance because they were too generous to the visually impaired. If it turns out that industry lobbyists are behind this, it would be yet another astonishing demonstration of selfishness from publishers whose behavior in connection with the Marrakesh Treaty has been nothing short of disgusting.

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Filed Under: belgium, blind, copyright, eu, finland, france, germany, greece, italy, marrakesh treaty, poland, publishers, uk

Guy Arrested Over KickassTorrents Blocked From Talking To His US Attorney

from the due-process? dept

Just a few weeks ago, we had lawyer Ira Rothken on our podcast (it's a really great episode, so check it out if you haven't heard it yet). Rothken has been involved in lots of big copyright cases, but is probably most well-known these days as Kim Dotcom's US lawyer. In that episode we talked a lot about the Kim Dotcom situation, but also spent a fair amount of time on the case of Artem Vaulin, who was arrested in Poland for running the search engine KickassTorrents. The US is seeking to extradite him to stand trial in Illinois. On the podcast, Rothken expressed some concerns that he hadn't been able to speak directly to Vaulin and noted that he was working on it.

Nearly a month has passed, and it appears that officials are still blocking Vaulin from communicating with Rothken. TorrentFreak has the story:

Even though nearly two months have passed, the alleged KickassTorrents owner still hasn’t been allowed to meet with his U.S. defense team. A clear due process violation, according to Rothken.

“We still have not had an opportunity, nor have we been granted access, to meet with Artem Vaulin in prison in Poland. So we now believe that this has ripened into an international due process problem.

“We believe that Artem’s rights are now being impacted with his inability to communicate with U.S. counsel,” Rothken tells TF.

Vaulin is allowed to meet with his Polish lawyer, but since the charges against him are in the US, under US law, and the key issue involves extradition to the US, it's ridiculous that he's unable to consult with a US lawyer.

“There’s no way that there could be a fair trial in the United States, or a fair extradition process, without Artem being able to have access to U.S. counsel, to learn his rights, to be able to galvanize the evidence, and to do so in a robust and expedient manner,”

It seems quite bizarre that Vaulin is being denied access to his lawyer. Once again, as with the Dotcom case, it feels like a situation where officials are purposely stacking the deck against the person they're accusing, doing everything possible to make sure that they're pressured into cutting a deal, rather than actually being able to fight for their rights.

Filed Under: artem vaulin, copyright, due process, ira rothken, poland
Companies: kickass torrents

Polish Authorities Demand British Law Enforcement Interrogate Tor Exit Node Operator About Information He Doesn't Have

from the colossal-waste-of-time-and-effort dept

As numerous posts on Techdirt attest, the authorities really don't like Tor, even though the Onion routing system was developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, not some terrorist hacker group. The latest jurisdiction to misunderstand how Tor works is Poland, as this report on Motherboard explains:

Polish authorities have requested British law enforcement to interrogate the node operator because of a 2014 forum post supposedly insulting the ex-mayor of a small Polish town; apparently an illegal act in Poland.

Specifically:

A letter from the District Public Prosecutor's Office in Bialystok, Poland, to the UK Home Office points to Article 212, paragraph 2 of the Polish Penal Code, which says, in sum, that characterising someone else in such a way that might "degrade them in public opinion or expose them to the loss of confidence necessary to occupy a given position […] is subject to a fine or the penalty of limitation of liberty."

The Tor exit node used by the person who allegedly wrote the problematic post is run by Thomas White, better known as TheCthulhu on Twitter, where his bio reads:

Technology and privacy activist. Hidden service dev. Turkey-certified terrorist. Radical giver of no shits.

It will therefore come as no surprise that White is unsympathetic to the request by the District Public Prosecutor's Office in Bialystok. Even better, he has posted part of his statement in reply to that request, which is well-worth reading. White points out that the Polish law in question seems to violate Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, further enshrined as Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. He says that he accepts the ex-mayor in question may have found a statement about him to be humiliating or offending, but adds:

I have many times felt offended where his political party have made derogatory remarks concerning the LGBT community for example, or where his complaint is an attempt to trample upon the rights of others. The difference is that I seem to have the mental capacity to take the opinions of others on board and reason my views with them to make my points.

White concludes pretty much as you might hope and expect:

I can only reaffirm my position that I have no intention of assisting with the request from the Polish authorities

Of course, the great thing about Tor is that White couldn't help the Polish authorities even he wanted to, since he was just operating the exit node, and knows nothing about the origin of the Tor traffic he facilitates. The sooner governments learn this basic fact, the sooner they can stop wasting time and resources trying to extract information from people that don't have it.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: law enforcement, poland, thecthulhu, thomas white, tor, tor exit node, uk