Google, online content and government censorship

Today's headlines reveal that Google is alarmed over increasing government requests to censor online content. Do you have cause to worry?

The first thing I do in the morning is go online and read the news. Most days I read up on the latest sporting results and the headlines on the utter failure of the Spanish economy. However, when I wake up to this sort of news it's like shooting caffeine straight into my veins.

In its latest Transparency Report, Google claims that governments, both foreign and domestic, have increased their request for the search engine giant to remove blog posts and videos. Aside from removing content, the requests also asked Google to hand over user information. Amazingly, the requests were made mostly at the behest of western democratic governments.

This would all be well and fine if the content were solely related to terrorist activities and copyright infringement but this is not always the case. The Independent, a British newspaper, states that "Google says it increasingly fields requests from government agencies trying to use their power to suppress political opinions and other material they don't like. That comment may have been aimed at the US, where police prosecutors, courts and other government agencies submitted 187 requests to remove content from July through December last year, more than doubling from 92 requests from January through June."

The Voice of America further states that "the latest report goes on to detail a noticeable increase in the number of governments requesting material be taken down or blocked not for legal reasons per se, but more for image purposes."

Here's a sampling of the Transparency Report:

Germany - A court order resulted in the removal of 898 search results that linked to forums and blogs containing statements about a government agency and one of its employees that the court determined were not credible.

Canada - We received a request from the Passport Canada office to remove a YouTube video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. We did not comply with this request.

Spain - We received 14 requests from the Spanish Data Protection Authority to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and sites referencing individuals and public figures. The Spanish Data Protection Authority also ordered the removal of three blogs published on Blogger and three videos hosted on YouTube. We did not comply with these requests.

United States - We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove a blog because of a post that allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity. We did not comply with this request, which we have categorized in this Report as a defamation request.

We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove 1,400 YouTube videos for alleged harassment. We did not comply with this request. Separately, we received a request from a different local law enforcement agency to remove five user accounts that allegedly contained threatening and/or harassing content. We terminated four of the accounts, which resulted in the removal of approximately 300 videos, but did not remove the remaining account with 54 videos.

We received a court order to remove 218 search results that linked to allegedly defamatory websites. We removed 25% of the results cited in the request.

The number of content removal requests we received increased by 103% compared to the previous reporting period.

Freedom of expression
The question then is, does free speech exist? For those of us living in western democracies, the answer would be an unequivocal "yes," but if and only if you tow the government zeitgeist.

I lived in the U.S. for over five years while going to school, and in all that time I never felt that I was living in the "land of the free." To me, freedom in the U.S. was always an illusion. Instead, it felt like an Orwellian nightmare police state. The U.S. will have their citizens believe they are free only if they buy their brand of freedom, which is to say fear. By instilling fear, the government controls the people, how they think and what they think. Look for example what happened in Iraq. The government fed its people a bunch of lies, sprinkled it with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and impending terrorist attacks, and justified the subsequent invasion.

Time's Man of the Year
For me, the clearest example of this "controlled" freedom of the press happened back in 2001.

Every year Time magazine selects a Man of the Year or, as it is now known, Person of the Year. The only criteria set by the editors of Time to determine who or what receives the recognition is a person, group, idea or object that "for better or for worse, has done the most to influence the events of the year." As such, Time had previously selected Hitler, Stalin and Ayatollah Khomeini as Person of the Year.

In 2001, the choice was clear: Osama bin Laden. However, prior to the release of the issue, Time conducted a survey among readers in the mid-west. The reaction was foreseeable: the choice of Osama bin Laden was seen as deplorable and would have antagonized its readers, possibly damaging the magazine's and the Group's revenues.

Time's official statement was the following: "Though we spent hours contemplating the pros and cons of naming Osama bin Laden, it ultimately became easy to dismiss him," said managing editor Jim Kelly. "He is not a larger-than-life figure with broad historical sweep...he is smaller than life, a garden variety terrorist whose evil plan succeeded beyond his highest hopes."

In the end, time named Rudolph Giuliani as Person of the Year and in so doing compromised its journalistic integrity. Eleven years on, the world still lives under the shadow of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Where has Rudolph Giuliani been all these years?

Whatever justification Jim Kelly gave, Time sold out to crass commercialism and threw its principles out the window. And it is for this simple reason I have not bought a Time magazine since 2001. I cannot subscribe to a news company that claims to be impartial when in fact it is not.

So, is there freedom of expression? Absolutely...just tow the government line and live an illusion.

My mind is my voice; my laptop its vocalizer - Javi Brias

Megaupload: piracy or business savvy?

The Megaupload case has created worldwide interest due to its ramifications. The outcome of this case could determine the future of file sharing, not only on a wholesale basis but on a personal level as well.

I've been following the Megaupload case with great interest and was going to start this post yesterday but decided to wait for the outcome of Dotcom's bail hearing, which we now know has been denied.

Beyond the criminal aspects of this case which have yet to be proven, there's something very unsettling about this whole media circus because its akin to a schoolyard bully marking his ground and demanding tribute.

This story is not about justice, it's about disrespect. It's about the street corner drug dealer not paying the Don his due. When Big Content says Megaupload is guilty of piracy, they're not really concerned that people are illegally downloading copyrighted content from the site. They're enraged that Dotcom is making money off their labor and he's not paying them a cent. And that's the whole point. It's a question of money and not justice.

For decades the Hollywood bigwigs have languorously sat behind huge oak desks smoking illegally obtained Cuban Cohibas while their media output produced millions in earnings. In the process, the media moguls have become complacent believing their goose would lay golden eggs forever.

Enter the young upstart. Seeing the complacency of Mr. Hollywood's ways, he decides to rattle his goose's gilded cage. And that's got the media moguls fuming. Still, this isn't the first time this has happened.

One of the earliest copyright infringement cases using new technologies is the Betamax Case (Sony vs. Universal) of 1984. Basically, the Supreme Court held that Sony, maker of VCRs, "was not liable for creating a technology that some customers may use for copyright infringing purposes, so long as the technology is capable of substantial non-infringing uses. In other words, where a technology has many uses, the public cannot be denied the lawful uses just because some (or many or most) may use the product to infringe copyrights." Sound familiar? Clearly, based on the latter statement, we have a precedent for the legality of file sharing sites.

But there's more. I mentioned the complacency of media moguls and their current business model. A recent global study by Social Science Research Center, and backed by Canada's International Development Research Center, seems to agree. Following several years of independent investigation in six emerging economies, the report, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, concludes that piracy is chiefly a product of market failure, not a legal one.

Simply stated, nature abhors a vacuum. Innovators saw a market opportunity which Hollywood has largely dismissed or is still trying to assimilate. I put my own case as an example. I like many of the American TV series and like to watch them as soon as they come out. However, living in Europe I often have to wait a year or two before the current season is aired. And that's assuming the show I'm interested in is picked up by local networks. To top it off, by the time the show is aired, it's dubbed. So, I tried logging into Hulu.com and other similar sites to watch the shows online. However, these services are not allowed to operate over IP addresses outside the U.S. I've even written them stating that I would be willing to pay a monthly fee to access their content but current contractual constraints prohibit them from providing their service overseas. There are many people like me all over the world and we are largely ignored. So what's a person to do?

I don't know who's right or who's wrong and, quite frankly, I don't care because I know innovation will win out in the long run. Innovation is an unstoppable force and Hollywood its unmovable object. This is a wake up call for Hollywood. Sooner or later they are going to have to accept market innovation and design new ways of delivering content to users. They may even have to make a deal with the devil himself.