Spain and the copyrighted material protection (I): the scientific way
Some background information will be helpful to understand this blog entry. You can find some very scattered info here and there. To sum up, the current Spanish government seems to be planning to adopt some sort of legal measures to protect copyrighted material from been freely distributed on the internet.
From the very vague pieces of information the public opinion it’s been given, it seems that they have in mind some sort of agreement with the internet services provider’s from within the country, which relies on some kind of user’s traffic monitor. Most of the info about it, refers to monitoring “Peer to Peer(P2P)” communications and, if you listen to the associations in charge of watching over the music/cinema authors rights, you’ll soon find out that they demand the plain P2P penalization.
Let’s take a deep breath, shall we?
In this post I’m trying to go on the most scientific way I could manage to do. So no rants, no insults, no jokes… well just a few jokes, but I’m really trying to be damn serious here.
I’m not going to talk about or discuss in any way the necessity or not, of protecting the copyrighted material, the intellectual property and all that stuff. At least, not in this entry. I’m going to present this just as cold as an scientific experiment could be.
Well, the first thing the government seems to talk about is something pretty serious. Right now, in Spain, your comunications’ privacy (say telephone conversations, physic or electronic mail, etc) it’s assured by your constitutional right: your private communications remain private till some judge say so. When could this happen? Well, ideally, when a police investigation is being made and, provided some reasons and/or proofs, the security forces ask a judge for a special privilege to violate your rights for a limited amount of time and to investigate only about the same subject the law forces have asked for permission.
So, it isn’t monitoring everybody’s private communications on the internet just plain illegal? How on earth could you monitor every citizen without violating his presumption of innocence?
I’m not a lawyer, not even know much about laws. So, right know, this part of the problem it’s just out of my league.
But I know a little about computer systems, network protocols, monitoring and scalability. Not too much, that’s the truth, but just enough to get myself puzzled when I think about the technical challenge that’s supposed to be:
- Monitor the whole country traffic: which traffic? http? p2p? There’s a lot of different p2p protocols (bitorrent, p2ptv, kad, eDonkey, …)
- Know what exactly this information flow represents: is music? (which song?) photos?(from what/who?) video? some software program?(which one?)
- For every representative piece information (song, video, software program), the system has to know if it’s is breaking some kind of copyright.
Let’s have in mind we are talking about monitoring EVERYBODY. The first two points alone represents a huge technological endeavour. The third, right now, seems to me plain impossible without (a huge too) human intervention.
So, what I actually think it’s they aren’t going to do what I’ve just exposed. They’re going to do something worst.
