Intellect or Insanity, Jonathan Klinger's Blog

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Israel is to attempt, again, to pass a bill that authorizes police officers to issue warrants to Internet service providers to block or restrict access to specific websites involved either in gambling, child pornography or copyright infringement. The bill itself proposes that such administrative procedures shall be clandestine and that court decisions shall be made ex-parte, where some of the court’s ruling will not be even disclosed to the owner of the website, and the court may hear and use inadmissible evidence.

In my opinion, one of the saddest things in a democracy is that powers with authority can change the rules after the game commenced. This is story with blocking of gambling sites, an experiment which began around 2010.

Fortunately, after a lot of hard work by the Israeli Internet Society, The District Court of Tel-Aviv quashed the block and ruled that the police had no authority to order Internet service providers to block access to certain sites or IP addresses (decision now on appeal, see the Hebrew original ruling at AA 45606-10-10 ISOC N. Shachar Ayalon).

However, Israel is famous for presenting bills that bypass constitutional rulings, and now wants to reassert this authority, without limitation, by presenting a new bill: The Bill for Restricting Uses for Preventing Crimes (Amendment – Restriction of Access to a Website and various revisions),2012 , (Google Translation).

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You can read a bit more about the bill at Oded Yaron’s article at Haaretz.com (behind a paywall). In general, the bill’s purpose is to circumvent the relevant court ruling and allow the police to block websites. In the district court ruling, the police’s authority to shut down gambling houses cannot apply to websites. However, the bill’s current wishes seem to be broader:

Had a certified police officer reasonable grounds for suspecting that the website is used to commit an offense specified in the Second Schedule [gambling, child pornography or copyright infringement - jk], and that there are reasonable grounds for concern that the website will continue to be used for committing a crime unless access is restricted, he may issue a warrant for Internet Service Providers to limit the access to that Web site; a warrant under this section may be issued even if the website also contains activity which is considered legal [or legitimate - jk] provided that the illegitimate activity is the main purpose of the website.

Now, as befits any modern legislation, justice it made but us not seen. Article 3 of the bill discusses execution of additional warrants, where everything shall be made ex-parte:

“material relating to the request to extend the validity of an administrative restriction or information based on which such request and any other material provided subject of the application process will be made to the judge only; material will be marked and returned to the police officer or authorized claimant (in this section the applicant) after examining “

But it’s not just that material will be ex-parte; in some cases, the ruling itself may be withheld from the appellant. “The court shall notify the owner or occupier and the police officer on its decisionunder this section, and it may determine that the decision, or parts of it, shall be confidential“.

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This means Israeli that citizens may find themselves in a situation where they are subject to a warrant which is confidential. In such case, They will not be able to challenge such an order, because the grounds for the decision will unlisted . Sounds interesting? Well, I remind you that when we discussed that Communication Metadata Law, which allows police to receive GPS data on phone and Internet subscribers and records of their phone calls, everything was made in confidential decisions (with no further judicial review on them). Therefore, do not know how the law is implemented, how these requests really served illegally, and how judicial review works.

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The bill itself is absurd if you understand the Internet: everybody knows that no matter what order blocking a given Web site, its validity is about as much as an order of Police fires in summer temperature does not exceed 25 degrees Celsius (or if you’re in the US, that it won’t snow on Christmas). I mean, okay, ISPs will restrict users from browsing, but that’s not actually something that works (proxy servers et all).

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But of course there’s the issue of the slippery slope. The original act, which is to be amended by the bill, gave a judge the authority to issue a warrant under careful review; however, the bill conveys this authority to a police officers.

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What about additional uses? Well, in order to pass the bill, the police began with abhorrent offenses considered: child pornography and gambling. Clearly, no one will oppose the authority to block such websites if he’s not a pedophile or a gambler. Well, not really. That’s why the phrase “Second Schedule” is used to described to offenses that are subject to this authority, in fact the bill asserts a short list of offenses, where the minister of justice can always add additional offenses. Once the bill is passed, no one can be certain that no additional offenses will enter there.

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The real danger here is practice: in the same week where we discovered that the military police apparently investigated a blogger which was exposed using the metadata act without respecting his journalistic immunity and confidentiality of sources, and on the same week as the non-democratic nations want to rule the internet through the ITU convention, Israel decides to publish this bill. And why? because Israel deems it ok to gamble all your money is the state lottery, but not right when you give money to foreign websites.

A recent Israel court ruling stated that linking to copyright infringing content does not constitute a direct copyright infringement (CA 567-08-09 ALIS – Association for the protection of cinematic works v. Rotter.net Ltd) was quite an interesting one. Alis, the Israeli equivalent of the MPAA sought a popular forum website, Rotter.net, in regards to user generated content in two of its popular forums: Downloads and Movies. Alis’ claim was that by providing links to infringing content, Rotter is liable for direct infringement.

The court recognized that notice and takedown is the correct way to handle user generated content and ruled that Rotter is not liable for any user generated content as long as it removes the infringing content promptly. By ruling this way, the court created the so requested connection between the recent Supreme Court ruling in CA 5977/07 Hebrew University v. Schoken (which dealt with the university’s liability for coursebooks distributed by students creating infringing content) and the virtual world (and in regards to notice and takedown under Israeli law, see RCA 1700/10 Avi Roy Dubitzky v. Liav Shapira, C 1559-/05 Hemda Gilad v. Netvision and C 64054/04 Al Hashulchan v. Ort).

However, the main issue with notice and takedown was the amount of actual knowledge the court required: The court determined that it is not enough that Rotter is reported that a specific forum has infringing content, but they have to have actual knowledge of any specific infringement. However, the court opened a latch for “bad forums”, meaning that a place where the service provider knew about a material amount of infringements it shall be liable to the forum’s activity. In the court’s words “the presumption is that the website’s owner is aware that he is assisting in the existence of direct infringements, and that such assistance is actual and material contribution to them. Therefore, the burden is on that website owner where a suspected forum exists to prove that the existence of the forum serves a legitimate purpose or that he was unaware of the infringing activity (and if so, he shall not be liable until he was notified that this is a “bad forum”“. Therefore, the court actually narrowed the service provider exemption from liability.

In the court’s opinion, “as a rule of thumb, we can determine that a closed forum, where in a specific time there are more than 10 links to infringing sites, and that the messages including links to infringing sites constitute more than a quarter of the substantial content of the forum (meaning, messages that are not information requests or responses to other messages), should be suspected as a “bad forum”“. Meaning, the court determines that a forum that has more than 10 infringing links, and when these links are more than a quarter of the content, even if the website owner had no actual knowledge, he may be liable. This ruling may be dangerous, and having being a district court one, we should put our fingers on the pulse to see how it goes in the future.

From where did the court conclude the numbers? why didn’t he include the number of absolute postings in the website as a criteria (in contrast of forum messages), why didn’t it inquire whether opening a forum requires the owner’s consent? all these questions were irrelevant to the ruling and were not included in the court’s opinion.

However, this part of the ruling is not the material part, but only the part easy to understand. The important decision was in the question whether directly linking to an infringing content on another site constitutes as direct infringement. Here is the time and place to remember how copyright works: actually, there are specific actions where the copyright holder is the only person entitled to perform, and the rest of the actions are allowed. These are specified in clause 11 to the Copyright Act. One of these rights, in Israel, is making a work available to the public.

Alice tried to claim that linking is making a work available to the public, defined as “performing an action in a work so that people from the public may have access from a place and time of their choice”. However, the court rejected this claim and said: “creating a link which transfers the user directly to the infringing site (either to the homepage or an internal page) is not “making a work available” … First, creating the link is not “performing an action in a work”; second, the link, by itself eases people from the public to locate the infringing work, but it does not create the access. In other words, the work has already been made available by the infringing site and therefore linking to that site cannot be deemed as “making a work available”“.

The court determined that there is no actual direct infringement (but may allow contributory, secondary or vicarious ones) by linking, this is a blessed interpretation of the law, which was not always acknowledged by the court (it was, however, ruled so in 11-cv-20427 Disney v Hotfile).

The meaning of this ruling may be relevant, however, to other torts. For example, could a person being slandered in a website sue all people directly linking to it? It seems that in such case, this ruling goes in favor of the actual logic.

[Originally in Hebrew, here]

In about two weeks time, I’ll attend the Wikimania2011 Conference and discuss Cultural Fair Use, Political Narrative and Copyright; while this might sound as one big mashup, because there is no apparent connection between copyright and political narrative. The story of fair use, however, points us to why copyright, more than any other thing, has to do with Politics. The text of this lecture is somewhat derived from my research with Dr. Nimrod Kozlovski for Consumers International about Fair Use in Israel.

But first, a short story. One of my favorite TV shows is South Park. I’ve been watching them from 1997, and have been a fan of the authors and their opinions; when Trey Parker and Matt Stone described their approach towards copyright in their interview for Reason Magazine back in 2006 i was quite happy to find out their approach for copyright was that of a true artist, a wish to reach a wider audience. In a same manner, back in 2008 when they launched South Park Studios, a website to allow watching all their episodes through video streaming as well as remixing and sharing their content, I understood how much they were artists and how they were not just in it for the money.

In 2008, South Park paid tribute to the internet nation with an episode criticizing the Writer’s Guild of America’s Strike while paying tribute to some of the latest internet meme sensations such as the sneezing panda and the Star Wars Kid. One of the subjects of criticism was Samwell, whose video “What What (in the butt)” depicted an African American male pondering whether the viewers of the video wish to “do it in the butt” with him. The video was displayed in the popular YouTube site free of charge and received millions of views.

In the “Canada on Strike” episode, the four prepubescent characters in South Park wish to earn a quick buch from the internet and decide to film a viral video. The position Butters, one of the characters, in the same way as Samwell is in the video and make the unconceivable, take the already grotesque video and make it even more grotesque. This is basically why I love South Park so much: the interaction between extreme free speech and the ability to mock the already mocked to a grain gives them the ability to go on for so many shows. This is the video that Butters produced:

Samwell decided that South Park’s use of his “Work” constituted as copyright infringement and decided to sue Viacom for copyright infringement. Viacom decided to be the better person and instead of settling the case out of court (which would help it, as a copyright owner to fight others who make similar uses of its content) decided to try and use the affirmative Fair Use defense. This week, a Wisconsin federal judge dismissed the case, arguing that South Park’s use of the work was fair (read the full opinion of 10-CV-1013 Brownmark Films LLC, v. Comedy Partners). The court weighed in favor of what I try to call “Cultural Fair Use” which became somewhat popular recently, but is not actually in the general Fair Use exemptions.

For all you non-lawyers, fair use is a defense (codified in 17 USC 107 for those who use copyrighted works for causes such as “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research”. However, South Park’s use, in spite of the wish to be considered criticism, is not really criticism, but mockery or homage. South Park used Samwell’s work in order to criticize the viral videos altogether, not the work itself. In a similar case, where a famous Israeli Comic Book (or should I actually say “Graphic Novel”) cartoonist depicted Donald Duck in order to mock the Isreali Society, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that his use was not fair as the criticism was not on the work itself (RCA 2687/92 Geva v. Disney). Only recently, the lower courts acknowledged that other, cultural aspects of fair use in order to stretch society’s public domain and ability add some works of authorship to the public domain without the formal requirements of copyright terms, solely because such works have become works of the public due to popularity and demand.

The recent cultural fair use is based on folklore more than anything else. The basic elements are that once a work has exhausted its commercial value and became a part of popular culture, it may allow others to create additional social value by reusing the work. Such uses may be mashups, remixes or other uses which are not highly criticizing or transformative, but are without any impact on the actual market value.

[Here comes that part where if you read this prior to hearing my lecture you thanked me, because the crowd will be rickrolled]

A good example is Rickrolling, the phenomenon of baiting someone into clicking a link on the internet which leads to Rick Astley‘s “Never Gonna Give You Up” video, which is not as grotesque as Samwell’s “What What”, but is no less funny. People have used this song and attempted to add it into popular culture and other works as an homage to the internet nation; either by playing it instead of the end credits to Bill O’Rielly‘s show, paying tribute in an episode of the popular TV show Family Guy, using Barack Obama as the singer by mashing up his speeches or even a Stephen Hawking tribute to the song.

But putting Rick Astley‘s career aside, let’s discuss Government Works for a bit. The US, as well as other states, has a “Government Works” clause that determines that any work of authorship made by the state itself is not subject to copyright. Unlike the US, Israel does not have such clause. Therefore, a material part of Israel’s history is subject to copyright; meaning that the national photo archives and other government works such as reports of the Central Bureau of Statistics are subject to copyright. In such case, when Israeli nationals (and other nationals, actually) wish to use government works, they must either license them or find other sources.

This creates a burden, first of all because the Israeli government does not benefit from selling licenses. It is not one of its positions as a government nor is it a material source of profit. The government has set up its Press Office to allow dissemination of information freely from the government outwards and copyright restrictions seems to contradict Israel’s wish to disseminate its message.

During the 2010 term, Parliament Member Meir Sheetrit submitted a bill introduced by Wikipedia Israel, proposing that non-commercial use of government pictures shall be free of charge, as long as the use is with credit, and does not manipulate or alter the photos in any way. In an interview, Sheetrit stated that one of the reasons for the governmental opposition to the bill was the fear from use of the photos by organisations
which are hostile to Israel or wish to promote the opposing narrative.

The bill was prepared following a study by Creative Commons Israel and Wikimedia, which dealt with Crown Copyrights. The understanding and discussions were whether to apply fair use principles to these uses or to exempt them individually. The tension between personal uses and political uses was balanced by the Israeli ministry of justice, which drafted the bill for MK Sheetrit, and exempted non-commercial use only.

Interestingly enough, the definition of what is commercial and what is not has yet to be discussed. It is interesting to note that both the language of the bill and the language opposing the bill use copyright as censorship or impediments on free speech. The rationale behind the bill, at least as stated by MK Sheetrit, was to allow the dissemination of Israeli Hasbara (propaganda) and use of the Israeli imagery for free by bloggers, Wikipedia and other organisations who wish to use them in order to enrich their works. However, at least as stated by MK Sheetrit, the governmental opposition was based on the fear of use by hostile organisations. Both parties held an opinion that government works are a part of the discourse and that copyright may be used to prohibit others’ speech or to allow them to undertake one’s narrative. These rationales underplay the economical aspects of copyright, and deal with fair use in a different manner, which is the ability to silence political speech.

If, indeed, the only rationale for copyright in Israeli government works is political: to maintain the political narrative, then one material aspect, which is the commercial value of the work, has to be let aside when discussing government works. Let’s, for this cause, inspect the incentives behind copyright and see whether they apply for government works (based on the incentives described by Julie E, Cohen in Copyright as Property in the Post-Industrial Economy: A Research Agenda); the purpose of Copyright was to encourage new and original authorship, however, in Government Works, there is little originality, most Government Works are either documentary (formal photographs or official journals) or are the result of a research; and even if commercial uses were made using these works, then the Government shall continue to create.

Therefore, the incentives for Government Works do not exist in copyright. Now, what’s left is the apparatus of control, and this is actually what’s important in copyright nowadays, more than the economical incentives in Copyright, it seems that Governments, like artists, wish to keep the control of what others shall do with their works, therefore applying their political narrative through copyright.

Israel’s offer for a “Israel Friendly License” shows that we do have a problem: Israel wishes to enforce its political narrative through copyright, by granting a license to use its works solely for those who adhere to its standards. Because the Government does not work for-profit, we can learn, more than from any commercial entity, that fair use is required for criticism, because it is made exactly where people do not want others to use their intellectual property.

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About a month ago I blogged about the requirement to protect cloud storage users from the cloud service providers. I offered a mechanism to protect a person’s files from the cloud and gave Dropbox as an example. The reason I provided Dropbox as the example was both the simplicity of things, and that due to Dropbox’s architecture, I knew that the last month’s events are bound to happen. First, we found out that Dropbox did not protect end-users from the cloud and allowed law enforcement to access them, as a part of their privacy policy. Second, Dropbox misbehaved when terminating an open source file sharing project which based itself on a file sharing flaw in Dropbox, which was a feature, not a bug.

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In order to understand how the feature worked, you have to understand how Dropbox dealt with files, as a part of their service: Dropbox recognized files and their digital signatures, and when it saw that it already had a copy of the file, it used the existing copy instead of downloading it from the end-user’s computer. For example, if I wanted to put my (legally purchased) Justin Bieber MP3s in my Dropbox, then when connecting to the Internet, Dropbox would have recognized that it already has those files from another person (who, of course, legally purchased them) and just copied them to my cloud folder. This was not a bug, but a feature: it saved storage, bandwidth and computing power and it allowed users to thrive.

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However, it also allowed another thing: some people decided to use Dropbox to share files: all they needed to know in order to do so was to share the hash value of each file, where Dropbox did the rest: it took the files from the cloud and copied them to their computers. Of course, they could always create shared folders of pirate downloads and share them with the public, but the users decided to create a peer-to-peer system for cloud hosting. However, Dropbox did not like the idea at all and issued DMCA takedowns of the source code for the hack, called Dropship, calling the hosting companies that host the files (in this case, Dropbox itself) not to host it, as well as amended their services just to avoid such use.

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Dropship did not do anything illegal, it just did to Dropbox what AIMSter did to chat services a decade ago, When they found a security hole, which allowed you to copy files simply by knowing their Hash Value, Dropship showed the public the flaw with Dropbox, the fact that any person can copy any file from any other Dropbox without knowing anything but the Hash Value; this was not a feature anymore, it became a bug; where the only way to terminate the bug is actually to rewrite Dropbox with privacy by design.

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Dropbox came out as the lesser party. After enjoying a wave of great publicity and reaching 25,000,000 users without any marketing or advertisements, it seems that they jumped a bit too high. Freedom and flexibility were the main reasons to use Dropbox, as well as the lack of actual competition. However, once you know that your information is both insecure and constantly monitored, you feel less than safe in the cloud.

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Maybe it’s time to reconsider the whole cloud hosting model. Dropbox was great while it lasted, but it should go in the way of the dodo and find a more cooperative, interactive, friendly cloud storage service.

This Wednesday I’ll speak in CloudCon 2011, instead of a regulatory lecture, I decided to focus about a technological solution to a legal problem, which I believe might be elegant. I’d appreciate it if you could join me at CloudCon or just come over to say hi.

0. The Cloud and Your Information.
On the verge of the Age of Intelligent Machines, Cloud Computing brings a new era for data processing. The Cloud holds more and more information, where data owners and data subjects lose physical control over it. If the old-world model was that data was about the end-user was held by the service provider, which processed and brought the data to the end-user, the cloud model allows the service provider to hold the information for the end-user at the quarters of 3rd parties. For this brief lecture, we’ll use Dropbox as an example, but when Dropbox’s examples fail, we’ll move on to others. In brief, Dropbox is a storage service which remotely backups your information on Amazon’s S3 Servers automatically. When you Install Dropbox, you use at least one more CSP (Cloud Service Provider) and are subject to its terms.

1. Shared Hosting, Shared Computing, Shared Control [meaning: The Problem];
Now, who has control over your information? Dropbox’s privacy policy suggests that “Dropbox cooperates with government and law enforcement officials and private parties to enforce and comply with the law. We will disclose any information about you to government or law enforcement officials or private parties as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate to respond to claims and legal process“; also, Amazon S3′s privacy policy which states that “We release account and other personal information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law; enforce or apply our Conditions of Use and other agreements“. Meaning, both Amazon and Dropbox shall abide to law enforcement requests and provide information if a court says so. Generally speaking, this is a good thing.

Let’s take this into proportions, however: Let’s say that I produce Lemonade and have a trade secret: the recipe; I store it in my Dropbox folder, as i need to provide access to several employees and I want it to be backed up securely. Now, my biggest competitor wants to access my Lemonade recipe. He goes to court, and with a good attorney gets an Anton Piller Order (an order allowing him to seize my assets held by a third party before any legal process is in progress); the order is based on his claims that I stole the recipe and the court rules, ex-parte that Dropbox should grant him access to my files. This is done because my competitor’s claim was that Dropbox itself holds the files. Dropbox receives the order and does not know how to treat it: it is unable to understand whether I am the actual owner of the file or stole it, and has to provide the files to my competitor: an order is an order.

There are two material differences that come to mind between cases where I hold the information and where the ISP holds it, and such difference explain the problems of using cloud storage for such sensitive information: (1) If I held the material, the execution of each order had to be with knowledge of such order because the files were stored at my quarters and under my control [see, for example, RCA 1810/10 PCIC v. Kaplan, where a shared hosting provided was requested to reveal the email accounts of one of its users without their knowledge]; (2) The CSP has a rational indifference as to disclosing my information, as if it does not, it might incur liability. Israeli Courts ruled in several cases that active participation and interest in not removing content even after knowledge of infringement may incur liability [For example, C 176992/09 Eti Abramov v. Aviv Frenkel, C 32986/03 Buschmitz v. Refuah]. Therefore, the when you post information on the cloud, you are at risk that your information might be sought by other parties.

The question is whether it is technically possible to do so? meaning, could CSPs access your files? let’s say that, legally, Dropbox’s terms allow such use, and that other CSPs (such as google as providing email services) already ordered to reveal a user’s IP address (C 4854/07 Berlomenfeld v. Google) and disabled access to other accounts. Moreover, Dropbox (and let’s see Dropbox as an example) designed the architecture, it has the ability to recover my files and to recover my password, meaning that it can always bypass its internal security mechanisms.

2. Loss of Centralization;

Now, as we see it, when we discuss CSPs, we know that the control has to move from one centralized user to many distributed players, where each has the ability to disclose the information. At least prima facia, the CSP is considered as a 3rd party that either retains the information or processes it. In such cases, the Israeli Law, Technology and Information Authority has issued a draft set of regulations regarding processing by 3rd parties or outsourcing services.

Now, if I hold sensitive information on 3rd parties, and some of it is held on the cloud, then I have to make sure that my CSPs adhere to a privacy policy that protects my information. For example, if I am a lawyer, I have to notify Dropbox that I am one and that all my information is protected under an attorney-client privilege so that when they receive such Anton-Piller orders, they’ll refuse and defend me. Moreover, I have to make sure that my CSP shall not divulge any personal, private or sensitive information to any 3rd party either with or without my consent.

3. Protecting Yourself from Your CSP;
How can one protect himself from his CSP? Theoretically, there are a few suggestions for Encrypted Cloud Storage (for example, Kamara et al, “Cryptographic Cloud Storage“) which offer theoretical, yet to be implemented, method of encrypting information on the cloud. Generally speaking, their proposal is that “Before uploading data to the cloud, Alice uses the data processor to encrypt and encode the documents along with their metadata (tags, time, size, etc.), then she sends them into the cloud. When she wants to download some documents, Alice uses the TG to generate a token and a decryption key“.

Another technological option is to encrypt the virtual machine’s drive or to use encrypted file systems on cloud storage. Another option is to use an encryption software, such as TrueCrypt on your cloud storage service (such as Dropbox); however, such a solution may be problematic as Dropbox cannot access your filesystem and might have to back up your entire folder each time you change each and every one of your files.

A different approach may be to establish a secret sharing mechanism where the information may be distributed on several different clouds, each holding only a portion of the information (such as in Parakh et al, Recursive Secret Sharing for Distributed Storage and Information Hiding).

However,  these solutions are theoretical and have yet to be implemented by organizations or storage services as an integral part of their scope of services (maybe, apart from this one).

4. Solution[s];

Let’s discuss solutions as well. We need to form a strict set of rules of how to define a cloud system as privacy enabled. Our requirements are that the CSP shall allow: (1) seamless access to the set of files; (2) indexing and searching; (3) sharing parts of the information with 3rd parties; (4) reporting on each authorized and unauthorized access.

Mounting an encrypted virtual filesystem allows three out of the four: access, indexing and reporting. However, in order to share the information with 3rd parties, access to the filesystem has to be granted to the CSP (especially in order to allow sharing, see Y unqi Ye et al, Dependable and High Performance Cloud Storage). The other option is to encrypt each file differently (with different symmetric keys for each file so that no problems with sharing the files exist); however, such option shall not allow search and indexing (or require a central key database), therefore allowing three out of the four conditions.

Even if we assume that the encryption is symmetric, and that each sharespace between  users receives different symmetric keys, then we cannot define the solution as seamless, as in order to convert files from a privatespace to sharespace a client-side conversion of the files is required, as well as when files are copied from a private folder to the shared folder (also, a keyserver is required).

Let’s take, for the solution, Adi Shamir‘s secret sharing mechanism (Shamir, How to share a secret) and for the purpose of this solution define our efficient threshold as one (1) user. In such case, we define the shared folders with at least three cryptographic keys (one for the folder, to be shared with anyone, and one for each user) in such way, each user could read or write to the folder seamlessly, he could also index and search using his key (and the shared key), share the information with others (by adding another key).

Implementing secret sharing in such a case (which was yet to be tested) may allow enhanced privacy with the flexibility of sharing the information through networks and users.

5. Conclusions.

We have yet to implement a technological solution to a legal problem we might face in the near future. The much unrequired loss of control over data stored in the cloud, especially sensitive information, is inevitable nowadays due to current architecture, CPU and bandwidth limits and other problems.

However, theoretically and with a little hassle, an encryption based model may be implemented in order to allow storage of information on remote servers (i.e cloud) where the CSP cannot access the files but the end user may share such files with 3rd parties of his choice.

Around a month ago I went to court to discuss a case which I counsel with another attorney. The case was quite simple: The plaintiff claimed that the defendant, which we represented, took from its website the technical specifications of a gadget and copied it alongside a phrase describing the gadget. Altogether we represented three defendants which were sought by the same plaintiff (and there was a total of 20 defendants) for 100,000 ILS (~30,000 US$) each.

When arriving to the pre-trail, the plaintiff’s counsel explained to us (and to another counsel sitting on behalf of another defendant) that he is willing to settle, and there is a ongoing rate for settlement. The Judge, which was sympathetic for our interesting legal claims, that copyright could not be asserted on technical specifications, facts or ideas (PCA 8304/09 Bezeq v. Dapei Zahav, C 37759/07 Elisha Shochat v. Maariv), and that the phrase itself was lacking originality and too short to be copyrightable (Hebrew post of copyrighted tweets, CA (TA) 178/79 Hallinger v. Estheron, DR, 1980(2) 45) offered that we settle anyway. She claimed, righteously, that the settlement offer was low enough that it justifies settlement in order to avoid litigation.

And the judge was right: settling the case was lower than the cost of the lawyers in the process and would have been also lower than if it turned out that our clients were right and would have been granted attorney’s fees pursuant to dismissal of the case. Meaning that the copyright bully won: it won a nice sum for something he isn’t entitled to, just because the litigation cost was lower.

But this case is not rare when you look into copyrights: around once a week I’m addressed by persons who received notice due to publication of copyrighted images in their website (usually the same plaintiff by different attorneys), even though some of the cases were fair use, and others lacked any commercial value, the attorneys ask for sums which are a hundred times greater than the sum paid for the image in the free market. For example, Tess Scheflan sought Ynet, Israel’s biggest website (C 58032/07 Tess Scheflan v. Yedioth Internet) for publishing images she published originally on PicShare and was awarded 28,000 ILS, even though the image would have been bought, legally, for no more than a few hundred ILS.

And why was all this required as an introduction? In order to explain why The RIAA offer to Jammie Thomas to diminish their awards granted by half was a strategic move made to hurt users. Thomas is a single mother who was sought by the RIAA for publication of 17 songs through Kaaza. The court first decided that Thomas should pay 9,250$ per song as the jury of her peers found that Thomas made several songs available to the public and infringed the RIAA’s copyrights; but Thomas appealed the ruling.

In the Appeal the District Court ruled that making a work available to the public is not copyright infringement (06-1496 Thomas v. Capitol) and returned the case to the federal court for retrial. In the retrial, the jury ruled that Thomas actually was involved in wilful infringement and awarded the RIAA a sum of 1,920,000$ (04-CV-1497 Capitol v. Thomas).

Thomas appealed this ruling (again) and the district court ruled that the awards granted were unconscionable and exceed any sum a reasonable jury may award (04-cv-1497 Virgin Records of America v. Thomas). The District court conclusion was that the awards should be reduced from 80,000US$ per song to 2,250US$, three times the minimum damages to be awarded by a court; as as the damage was unclear, high awards aren’t adequate.

Even though the court ruled 54,000US$ in damages, the RIAA generously offered Thomas an offer she can’t refuse: remove and revoke the appeal, and we’ll request lower damages, to be donated to a worthy cause.

And why would Thomas decline the offer? she was in a similar situation like the defendants I represented; Her personal interest may rise substantially had she refrain from creating a precedent which will hurt copyright holders (and this isn’t the first time Thomas refused to settle). Thomas knows what we all knew: the RIAA sends threatening letters where they scare innocent file sharers with millions of dollars in damages, as in the case of Joel Tenenbaum who lost a case against the RIAA and as to pay 675,000$.

Now, you must understand that there are law offices which send pre-suit notices and take the same strategy; where claims for fair use, lack of liability, criticism and others arise, they’ll refuse to answer but will leave silently, just in order to avoid a precedent saying they cannot threat others and request outrageous sums for using images in blogs. We need public defendants, people who will go to court just for the sake of not bending when a copyright troll comes in and say the truth: we are facing bullies.

[Published in Hebrew]

Circumventing Amazon‘s Kindle Digital Restriction Management (DRM) earlier this week may be a small revolution and a new path into turning the human knowledge into something collective, distributional and more fair. The electronic readers, such as the Kindle, provide an alternative which is cheaper, efficient and comfortable to read books and convert them into a part of the new found culture. it is not a coincidence that Israeli publishers are trying to create their own electronic reader; they know that they may find themselves out of business if they remain in paper distribution; therefore, and following Amazon’s conduct when wiping books off its clients’ Kindle (and Ironically, it was George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty Four), a new need for ownership of technology came to effect.

Circumventing the copy-protection, of course, allows more than ever the sharing of books. If, over a year ago, I offered The Train Arrangement where books from the public domain would be printed and left it trains so that passengers would read them in their spare time; the conversion of books into commodities, even if making the books cheaper in value, allows making the books available to the public. (Thanks, Nati Davidi). In fact, creating a software that could link all these devices and make all the books, knowledge, literature and encyclopedias available and readable, will allow a distribution of knowledge and mobility of ideas.

The only question is whether the book publishers, which were fond of their readers up to now, will be hostile like the movie industry?

The research we conducted with Ynet News in regards to p2p throttling and DPI in Israel, which was (even after reading the criticism) most likely the most comprehensive in Israel, even though it needed more research. One of the results was a Parliamentary hearing by Meir Sheetrit, the chair of the Science & Technology Committee. The real question is what to do with it.

Daniel, one of the commentators in the Hebrew blog, claimed that a class action lawsuit could not be substantiated on contractual grounds. I disagree, but in spite of many calls and mails I received to launch a class-action, I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do. A class action may be filed according to the consumer protection act or based on other obligation. Allegedly, the ISPs obligation to net neutrality in their license (and see clause 5.4.1 to the general ISP license) and their obligations according to clause 29 to the Telecommunication Act are sufficient cause. The problem? The Class Action Act requires monetary damages, and there is more than one problem to prove it.

And what are things all about? If the cause of class action lawsuits is not to enrich the attorneys and plaintiff but to bring restitutional justice, then it will not be made; in the best case, a settlement would be made where the attorneys will receive 500K ILS and the plaintiff 1M ILS, where all the related clients will receive 10% bandwidth upgrades for a few months. Apart from that, even if different damages were made to different potential plaintiffs, there’s still place for class action lawsuits (OCR 31032/06 Shalom & Malka Fabrics v. Tel-Aviv). But what was the damage?

Many comments were written in wrath and required justice and a lawsuit. The problem, none of the commentators had any monetary damage. Is blocking a p2p download cause-worthy? Could those people come to the court in clean hands and explain to the judge what are the files they downloaded? Most likely, some lawyers’ will to be first just went up to their heads.

Of course, one should understand the difference between illegal file sharing and other interference that may occur in prioritizing VOIP traffic or blocking other services.

The people with the most to gain from this research, most likely, may be the Copyright Organizations. If we recap the discussions on the Electronic Commerce Bill around a year and a half ago, where the idea was that An ISP shall not be liable to acts committed by its users if it wasn’t aware of the activity and was not supposed to be aware, we understand the problem (See also Dubitsky v. Shabiro and MGM v. Grokster). Actually, ALIS, the Israeli equivalent of the MPAA could request the ISPs for damages, as they interfered with traffic and blocked. De-facto, this claim would not be far from the required legal conclusion: if the ISPs did not interfere with traffic, they were better of in regards to liability.

Therefore, if someone should sue the ISPs to bring restitutional justice, it should be the Copyright Holders. If they were actually harmed by file sharing (and I doubt they were), let them sue the ISPs and make them pay, understand and acknowledge that by blocking they inflicted liability on themselves. That way, and only that way, they’ll learn.

[Posted in Hebrew]

0. Abstract
Do Israeli Internet Service Providers throttle, delay or block peer-to-peer traffic? This question has been spreading in Israeli forums and file-sharing networks, and has introduced theories from attempts to sell enhanced Internet packages to copyright infringement monitoring. This research, which was conducted between April and September 2009, was meant to check whether the claim was true. Using simple free tools we decided to inspect the legality of DPI and traffic shaping in Israel and whether it exists.

Our findings were that there is direct and deliberate interference in P2P traffic by at least 2 out of the 3 major ISPs and that this interference exists by both P2P caching and P2P blocking. The tests, conducted by independent volunteers, were directed by myself and with the assistance of Ynet’s staff, who published a Hebrew summary.
1. Background:
Peer-to-peer (P2P) file transfer protocols have been in common use since the advent of networked computing, but their rising profile (as well as the controversy surrounding them) began with the introduction of P2P sharing of copyrighted materials. Initially used for sharing small music files and applications, P2P today is a legitimate and widely used system for the distribution of any electronic media, and multiple gigabyte files are commonly shared amongst users from around the world. Whilst some researches imply that there is a slight decrease in the growth of P2P (Allot, 2009), P2P is still the Killer Internet Application, responsible for 21% of the Average Mobile Traffic Cell and in charge of an estimate of 70% (ReadWriteWeb, 2006.12.06) of the global Internet traffic during 2006, accounting for around 25% on some networks (PlusNet, 2008.07.17), but according to more detailed reports, accounting for more than 50% of the network’s traffic (ipoQue, 2009, TorrentFreak 2009.02.18).

Peer to Peer traffic consists of illegal downloads of files, voice over IP calls, instant messaging and other decentralized communication. The element common to all P2P services is the lack of economical benefit to the ISP from the client’s use of P2P. According to recent studies, P2P users consume more traffic (Arstechnica, 2008.07.04), and when traffic caps are used Internet Service Providers (ISPs) benefit and earn more from P2P use (Arstechnica, 2008.05.07).
Since 2007, claims that Israeli ISPs are blocking P2P traffic have been spread all over the Israeli Web. More recently, a report by Vuze Inc, a popular service utilizing P2P in order to provide its users with high definition video content over the BitTorrent protocol found that all three major Israeli ISPs block P2P traffic to some degree . (8.13% for Smile012, 18.51%  for Bezeqint and 14.06% for Netvision). During 2009, complaints against the three major Israeli ISPs (inspected in our research) were brought to the media and were dismissed by the ISPs. Bezeq International claimed that it does not interfere with  P2P traffic and called the claims ‘baseless’ (Ynet, 2009.03.29), whereas a year earlier it claimed that it is the only company that does not block P2P (Ynet, 2007.12.05 ). Smile012 dismissed Torrentleech’s claims that it blocks P2P traffic (Ynet, 2008.01.24, Torrentleech FAQ) and Netvision-Barak dismissed the claim that it de-prioritizes P2P traffic, claiming that such activity was impossible, and were it possible, it would block all child-pornography and offensive content (Ynet, 2007.05.27). However, and even though such formal announcements were made, many reports on informal conversations with customer support representatives who have acknowledged the problem. Another recent report was that Bezeq International was actually amending .torrent files in order to add the Bezeq International Tracker and save on outbound bandwidth (Torrentfreak, 2009.04.19 ); However, Bezeq International’s CEO rejected the claim and stated to Amitai Ziv, from TheMarker that “I will not operate an illegal video library on my servers, even if my competitors do that” (TheMarker, 2009.08.05).
For example, a person claiming to be an ex-Netvision customer support representative claims that they block P2P traffic originating outside of Israel (BGU Forum, 2009.03.26 ), an informal and anonymous executive in one of Israel’s ISPs stated that due to excessive outbound traffic costs, ISPs block P2P traffic (Haaretz, 2008.05.06 ); however, until now there was no extensive research to inspect any of these claims.

1.1 Legal framework
Israeli ISPs operate under a specific license which requires them (Israel has 39 licensees, 2009 numbers, general license example) Clause 5.4.1 to the general license states that the License Holder’s activity shall not interfere with the free competition in the telecom market or harm the public interest. Moreover, clause 29 to the Israeli Telecommunication Act (1982) specifies that interfering or blocking of electronic communication over a public network is a criminal ofence. Therefore, even without any net-neutrality regulation (see, for example, Tal Zarsky’s 2009 lecture during the ISOC conference ), Israel has the appropriate regulation to interfere with attempts to prioritize network packets and to withhold other packets.

Recent letters from the Telecommunication Ministry’s CEO (CEO Letter, 2009.07.15) explicitly stated to all telecom providers to avoid interfering with all traffic and especially Skype (TheMarker 2009.07.15); whilst some ISPs claim otherwise and state that there is no legal obligation for network neutrality (Themarker 2009.07.27), Our belief is that under the current legal status, without prior explicit consent by the End-User, network neutrality must be imposed at the strictest form in order to ensure impunity from liability for End-Users’ file sharing (MGM v. Grokster). The Israeli draft for the Electronic Commerce Act (Government Bills, 2008.01.14) exempts ISPs from Caching if they had not modified the packets (Clause 9). Moreover, Clauses 7-10 exempt liability if, and only if, the ISP had not manipulated any packet.

Moreover, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) as executed by several of the Israeli ISPs, may be considered illegal wiretapping, as it is defined in the Israeli Wiretapping Act, as “Listening to another person’s conversation, interception or copying of another person’s conversation, and all with an apparatus”; DPI may also be considered Interfering with Computer Data under the Computer Act or illegal entry to computer information. DPI occurs when an apparatus listens to the End-Users’ packets, inspects their content and according to their content manipulates them or passes them to their destination. Unlike regular routing, that only “reads” the target address and sends the packet to its destination, DPI manipulates the packet, without the End-Users’ explicit consent and may be considered illegal. The Israeli Courts continuously ruled that inspecting one’s traffic and personal files consists as a crime under the Computer Act (CA 1126/06 Lerman v. State, where Lerman installed a Trojan horse; C 40206/06 State v. Pilosof). In Pilosof, the District Court of Tel-Aviv ruled that “Inspecting the Email message in the electronic range should be made with a broad perspective on the email’s traffic from its dispatch until its arrival to its destination, therefore, intercepting a message on the ISP’s computer is “real time” interception whilst the data is transferred and prior to the termination of computer communication (…) Accepting the state’s view might lead to an unwanted result where the ISP may not be prohibited from copying and reading the messages intended for his clients, as the intrusion occurs on his computers”.

Therefore, while traffic manipulation may inflict liability on ISPs when they manipulate traffic knowingly that such traffic is copyright infringing (even if manipulation means slowing down), we believe that it is illegal for Israeli ISPs to manipulate traffic.

1.2 Comcast’s FCC ruling.
Unlike Israel, the US struggle for network neutrality and against file sharing throttling began in the early 2000s (Tim Wu: Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination ) and has been brought to the attention of the FCC, which ruled that its role is to preserve the open nature of the Internet (FCC 2005 ). However, only in 2008, after Comcast, the 2nd largest ISP in the US was caught throttling P2P traffic (Gigaom 2008.07.11 ), the FCC had to examine whether blocking (or delaying) P2P traffic was in accordance with US regulation.

The FCC’s ruling (FCC, 2008 ) stated that Comcast may not limit or delay any peer to peer traffic, claiming that it was unlawful intervention in competition and against the public interest: “This practice is not “minimally intrusive” but invasive and outright discriminatory. Comcast admits that it interferes with about ten percent of uploading peer-to-peer TCP connections, and independent evidence shows that Comcast’s interference may be even more prevalent. In a test of over a thousand networks over the course of more than a million machine-hours, Vuze found that the peer-to-peer TCP connections of Comcast customers were interrupted more consistently and more persistently than those of any other provider’s customers. Similarly, independent evidence suggests that Comcast may have interfered with forty if not seventy-five percent of all such connections in certain communities” (…) “On its face, Comcast’s interference with peer-to-peer protocols appears to contravene the federal policy of “[promoting] the continued development of the Internet” because that interference impedes consumers from “[running] applications . . . of their choice,” rather than those favored by Comcast, and that interference limits consumers’ ability “to access the lawful Internet content of their choice,” including the video programming made available by vendors like Vuze. Comcast’s selective interference also appears to discourage the “development of technologies” — such as peer-to-peer technologies — that “maximize user control over what information is received by individuals . .. who use the Internet” because that interference (again) impedes consumers from “run[ning] applications . . . of their choice,” rather than those favoured by Comcast”.

The question now is whether Israeli ISPs do limit or even block traffic (where the delaying of packets equals blocking, see Comcast Ruling, pp. 26-27) and whether the Israeli regulator interferes with such activity. Moreover, as Israel has an oligopoly of three ISPs with no actual competition (further aggravated by a duopoly of Network Service Providers in Bezeq and Hot), there may be a case for antitrust inquries and not only inquries by the Telecommunication ministry.

2. The Test

In order to examine whether P2P traffic was blocked, we began the experiment with two tools developed by other parties. The first is the open-source Switzerland tool, developed by the EFF. “Switzerland is an open source, command-line software tool designed to detect the modification or injection of packets of data by ISPs. Switzerland detects changes made by software tools believed to be in use by ISPs such as Sandvine and AudibleMagic, advertising systems like FairEagle, and various censorship systems. Although currently intended for use by technically sophisticated Internet users, development plans aim to make the tool increasingly easy to use” (EFF, 2008). Switzerland was released following the FCC ruling and was the tool that the EFF used in order to prove the claim that Comcast was indeed throttling P2P traffic (TorrentFreak, 2008 ).

We also used Glasnost, which is partially supported by Google and the Max Planck Institute. Glastnost is a part of Measurement Labs and  is an independent java client, running within a browser. Prior to our inspection, Glasnost found that Israeli ISPs are not throttling traffic. In its report, only 3 out of 971 tests were blocked, and out of 17 different ISPs measured in Israel, only 3 blocked P2P. However, these results do not include throttling or shaping. Therefore, we began our experiment without any additional Information.
2.1 EFF’s Switzerland
While we were unable to review the Switzerland logs, mostly due to our failure to coordinate between volunteers’ time to run the scripts, Switzerland assisted us in finding some interesting conclusions. We left a server to seed a .torrent file of a public domain video; our volunteers downloaded and uploaded the file again and again, looking for potential interference by the ISP or RST packets. We were unable to produce any substantial results or conclusions regarding traffic, mostly due to Switzerland’s interface.

However, after a massive number of attempts, we found out that another user is seeding our torrent, from the IP address 212.235.15.36 and not from the libTorrent Client we used (screenshot, screenshot ). We found a mention of such IP address in an Israeli Hardware forum describing it as one of Netvision’s caching servers  (HWZone, 2009). While the IP address is associated with Netvision, we were able to authenticate that a similar IP address is being used in eMule caching (img src) and that 212.235.x.x, which was used in other conversations, are owned by Netvision (whois data). While this is not throttling with user packets, it is considered a severe interference with communication privacy and may be considered intercepting private conversations.

We believe that additional research is required to authenticate whether such activity is taking place in additional ISPs and whether this ISP is caching additional files. Moreover, such caching has severely tampered with our ability to inspect bandwidth throttling, as our inspection of speed was irrelevant once the .torrent and the file were cached on the ISP level.

We also encountered a strange download from a cTorrent download from 213.174.157.6 (screenshot), where we could find slight affiliation with IP addresses that are affiliated with CheckTOR, a company that’s meant to assist copyright holders (Checktor).

2.2 Glasnost Results
We ran Glasnost from different computers and different ISPs, on different occasions and even through random WiFi hotspots, in order to inspect interference with BitTorrent traffic. Glasnost operates in the following manner: it inspects the connection in four different transfers: BitTorrent upload and download over a standard BitTorrent port and over a non-standard port, and TCP upload and download over a standard BitTorrent port and non-standard port. By comparing the TCP and BitTorrent results, information as to whether deep packet inspection occurs, as it prioritizes traffic according to protocol, and by comparing standard to non-standard port information whether port preference occurs.

We conducted at least 8 inspections per ISP and logged them. We compared the results and analyzed them, and our findings were as follows:

2.2.1 Netvision:
Netvision probably operates both deep packet inspection, which we already mentioned when we found that it may cache popular torrents. Our findings where that in standard port uploads, the average ratio of BitTorrent to TCP was 70%, and on non-standard ports it was 81%; however, aggregated ratios (the aggregate of all the upload speeds and download speeds) were 52% on standard ports and 59% on non-standard ports.  In downloads, we encountered similar results, providing an average BT/TCP ratio of 58% on standard ports and 50% on non-standard ports and an aggregate value of 50% on standard ports and 27% non-standard ports.

2.2.2 Bezeq International:
Bezeq International’s results were inconclusive, and because of one inspection, where BitTorrent traffic was 12 times faster than TCP on an upload, the results were inexplicable. Therefore, we omitted this inspection as it was off the standard deviation. Moreover, Bezeqint’s results were inconclusive and could be due to standard deviation in the statistical margin of error, in general, Bezeqint’s BitTorrent traffic was faster than TCP traffic. Our findings where that in standard port uploads, the average ratio of BitTorrent to TCP was 105%, and on non-standard ports it was 69%; aggregated ratios were 104% on standard ports and 52% on non-standard ports.  In downloads, however, the average BT/TCP ratio was 147% on standard ports and 130% on non-standard ports. However, the aggregate download ratio had a value of 137% on standard ports and 36% on non-standard ports. This was caused due to several tests where the ratio on non-standard download ports was below 10%. In these cases, we believe that it may be due to momentary errors and not due to intentional interference.

We can only conclude that uploads on non-standard ports had any discrepancies, and therefore believe that no actual throttling was made.

2.2.3 Internet Zahav / Smile012
Internet Zahav’s results were the hardest to obtain. Nevertheless, we found strong indication of traffic shaping. The amount of results omitted due to blocking of BitTorrent ports was material, and was sufficient to show that some P2P traffic throttling occurs. Moreover, the number of results show zero kilobytes as download speed indicate that some shaping or throttling may be practised during certain hours.

Our findings were that in standard port uploads, the average ratio of BitTorrent to TCP was 81%, and on non-standard ports it was 107%; aggregated ratios were 77% on standard ports and 103% on non-standard ports.  In downloads, we encountered similar results, providing an average BT/TCP ratio of 74% on standard ports and 118% on non-standard ports and an aggregate value of 90% on standard ports and 80% on non-standard ports.

These results indicate that throttling occurs only on standard ports, and on non-standard ports no throttling is inflicted on traffic. This may be due to either DPI or non-DPI interference.

2.2.4 Table:

Indication of low BT/TCP ratio shows DPI or throttling of TCP, differences between standard and non-standard ports show potential throttling based on ports.

3. Conclusions
Our findings are that at least 2 of the 3 major ISPs perform manipulation on traffic, and especially peer-to-peer traffic. We were able to show that deep packet inspection and P2P-caching is performed by at least one ISP and that another one probably operates some kind of preference on specific ports.

We believe that P2P-caching is the most troublesome of all activities and that it should be inspected by the regulatory authorities. Moreover, we believe that further research is required to show actual use of restricting technologies and the use of RST packets or other mechanisms. While we could not determine which technologies are being used, we believe that the use of such technologies could be used to block competition, free-speech and allow wiretapping of voice over ip conversations. The use of preferring technologies should be regarded as restriction of access and be stopped.

0.

By the order of the court, the formal Defendants 2-3, the Israeli ISPs, have blocked access to the Defendant’s website, Ynet, following it’s publication of slandering content claiming that Plaintiff engaged in sexual activity with a herd of sick sheep. The Publication, made by an anonymous commenter, was taken down. However, according to the plaintiff, a man with great reputation, the system’s internal architecture enables comments including slander, and therefore, until blocked, it must be shut down.

1.
This how a redundant article may appear in one of the Israeli News Sites in a year or so, after they do not go out against wrongfully decided court decisions such as OCR 3485/08 NM v. Eli Amar. The Decision, given two weeks ago and published today on Ynet determines that Israeli Internet Service Providers shall block access to a website enabling users to engage in file-sharing, since it, allegedly, provides likes to torrents. (See also, C 167/07 NMC v. Amar)

2.
This is not the only decision with exists in the current era. New Sound Interactive, requested that Israeli ISPs block access to PaNet, a website which allegedly infringes its copyright. These requests came to Israel after a busy month in fighting world censorship. First of all, a Danish court ordered a Danish ISP to block access to the popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay (what only increased its traffic); Later on, access was blocked from WikiLeaks when a temporary injunction was given against the domain registrar, which was only remove following intervention from the EFF and ACLU.

3.
And what is so problematic with the Court’s decision? first of all, it has no legal grounds (the decision itself was given like in the Wikileaks case, with the Defendant’s consent). Not the Israeli Copyright Order nor the civil torts act or the Copyright Act acknowledge an Injunction blocking Users from accessing a website in this level, as the users are not a party to the process nor is the ISP a hosting provider. The ISP is simply granting access to a website which only provides links for users to use in file sharing programs. The Users themselves chose to infringe copyright. (and until today no court decision was given claiming links to files stored elsewhere deem as liability for copyright infringement).

4.
The real problem is the problem cause. If until now we faced chosen censorship which enables voluntary censorship (meaning that we may chose to prevent blocking), this blocking is involuntary and absolute. Copyright infringing sites are first, of course, as their plaintiffs have financial interests here.

5.
[Unfortunately] there is no organisation claiming to block child pornography sites in the name of child protection nor is there any extreme Jewish group calling to block nazi websites. The real reason file sharing sites were first is the major financial gain from censoring it. Today it’s file sharing, tomorrow? all the internet ports of a file sharing websites.These are, unfortunately the great problems of the web
: Child pornography, gambling and copyright infringement. What do they have in common? we all know. The same people whose name would be hurt will seek injunctive relief later on, and slowly all the websites will be taken down Censorship may be obsolete, as there is no need for internet without free speech.

6.
This is a fight for our freedom. This is my war.

(Originally published in Hebrew) (Please Digg this story)