to discuss the future of the internet i'm joined by daniel castro in washington he's a senior analyst with information technology and innovation foundation specializing in the information technology policy also in washington we have wayne rash he is a senior analyst for weeks labs and to new york we cross to jason metz only he is the gerald bail and professor of law at brooklyn law school all right gentlemen this is crosstalk that means you can jump in anytime you want and i very much encourage ok when and if i can go to you first to what degree should internet companies be involved share responsibility for curbing piracy in light of the law that is in front of the laws that are in front of congress right now. well i think internet companies have a responsibility to not knowingly participate in pirated information or information for which the copyright use is in question in other words if they know that something is being used illegally then they obviously should not allow it to be on

their sites but you know most internet sites don't have a way to know what's in there most of them simply act as what you might call giant receptacles of data and as a result they don't specifically look at what the content is unless somebody complains about it so they have a responsibility if they know that it's illegal but they may not know jason what do you think about that i mean to what degree should the internet companies be held responsible because if you're if you're a website like youtube i mean i've talked to people at you tube it is very very hard to police it because so many uploads going on through every hour and we're looking at and through the course of months and years it's a huge number of videos being put up and they and i can i know of a personal example where i asked to have something taken down and within an hour you tube did it. so you tube is an interesting case because it actually i mean it has the resources for you to do things that many other companies might not have so

you know that's one thing to keep in mind talking about you tube in terms of the current system that we have you tube is as you just suggested pretty responsive and we do have a system under current law that allows a copyright owner to notify youtube or another side that somebody has uploaded infringing content you tube has a largely automated process for reviewing that and it's able to take down material in response to that site in other words disable access to it pretty quickly in a matter of hours now there are a lot of complaints about perhaps too much content is being taken down but in terms of you tube itself. because it has the resources to do it because there is a process by which a notice can be sent a fairly straightforward notice by the copyright owner that system from the perspective of copyright owners i think works pretty well i mean some things do get through the gaps but you too i think is doing pretty good job and is doing it

because of fairly simple procedures and legislation the problem with soap is that it would radically change that system and impose much more burdensome requirements upon you tube and when you start talking about smaller sides small entities that don't have the same kinds of resources the costs could be could be tremendous danny what do you think about that i mean i mean they let me go to get me to daniel first but truly. yeah. the legislation that's being introduced is specifically not targeted at sites like you tube and that's kind of the whole point of this you tube isn't the problem and there are existing laws to deal with that and you tube is a very responsible actor in that sense the purpose of stop also hiring you explain the interest in the house of opposition to the infringers. jason you want to reply to that well you tube obviously doesn't. doesn't think that i mean yesterday we had

we had which was thursday in the united states we had the internet blackout day where the thousands of american based domestic internet companies including google facebook and other large entities opposing sopa on the grounds that they are very concerned about the potential burden and possible liabilities under the statute upon them these are pretty savvy entities so it's hard to explain if the sponsors of the bill. so certain that there is no risk to a company like you tube why there would be so much opposition. domestic technology companies mainstream technology companies like you to facebook boing boing all kinds of other entities that are really a staple part of the of the internet as we know it today only opposed to this

statute and they're not opposed to it just for ideological reasons because they see serious business consequences for it was them let's look at some of these kinds of consequences when i mean look we know a lot of a lot of the backing of these. legislation comes from the content industry particularly the film industry in music but why should the entire internet be changed to cater to their needs or is it because hollywood is being paying politicians on both sides of the aisle these politicians realize they have to they've taken the money now they have to follow through and a few of them actually realize they didn't read the legislation and they've backed away from the last forty eight hours i mean to what degree should the internet be changed for a small number of people here. well the internet should not be. basically dismantled from the way it works because of the fact that hollywood is scared of technology this is one of the problems is that what you've got here is a situation where you tube for example to use an obvious example because we've been

discussing it could under the noise sopa is written be actually taken offline because somebody alleges that they've got copyrighted material on their site and decided this is the internet i believe that actually if you look at the legislation it's only directed to foreign infringing sites only for infringing sites so no gnostics no sign the united states could have action taken against it yeah but i the people you look at the managers of the evil you don't know where i was the exit of similar usually the answer to all of the d.n.a. that's blocking prisons which are about taking down sites so taking down sites is out of the bill because you know that's blocking the idea as blocking would of. blocking would have interfered with a whole bunch of security issues but the fact is is it is still aimed at sites that could be taken down because someone alleges without any real actual process that they've got copyrighted material there now here we are talking about taken down and it's not sure that you would have to get a court order first. yes you have to get

a court order which is simply not going to be said you need a court and you don't have to going to others ok jason jump in jason jump in you've got to go before a judge the government. what the government you know order to in order to require intermediaries to stop dealing with sites that the government is targeting does have to commence an action with the court. and it's a pretty fairly simple process you simply need to file the paperwork private entities in order to shot off funding payment processing by visa master card pay pal other private other entities that really the lifeblood of many of these sites. in order to shot down their transactions private entities don't have to go before any judge at all they simply have to send the notice within five days of five days

a very short period the recipient of the notice visa pay pal some other entity that is providing payment must disable transactions there's no judicial review before that happens there's no opportunity for the side to go for a judge and say that it's not true that we have infringing material this is completely contrary to how we normally regulate speech in the united states there's no other instance in the united states. because if you look at the way the system works right now by sending a letter off to you. you go ahead go ahead dan you know what i mean if i could just and if i could just if i could just somewhat up i mean well from what jason just said here there's no due process that's what he's saying when we look at these this legislation yes exactly you know that's just you know this is really because we're trying to do already have and i'm sure this is a service only when you go ahead with. these are these are companies that already

say in their terms of service that they will not do business with criminal with criminals they say in their terms of service that you can use for example we do with all of this we're going to there's no judgment or if there's no jobs on the economy for this woman i would say there's no jobs we're not going to be on the highways in those copyrights is i was doing any other illegal activity and when they learn about it they shut down those sites and they stop doing business with them so right now this actually increases the opportunities there's no jobs and i there's no doubt it's not as exciting as it goes before a judge ok when would you jump in on that one part the only people and i was trying to earlier go ahead with the the fact is this what we're trying to do is enforce u.s. copyright laws on foreign companies whose copyright laws may be different from ours and what we're saying is if you don't follow u.s. law in terms of copyrights then we have the right to shut you down and whether it's through withholding payment whether it's through a search engine you can't deliver results we're no longer have the best blocking

but the fact is is that you know this is what we're telling people is that you have to follow u.s. law regardless of what the law may be where you're physically located and that's part of the problem the other part of the problem is affectively is that's going through the decision of it is. you're objecting to the fact that people are trying to stop sites that are pirating american american intellectual property and it's not always just movies and music it's also physical goods that are counterfeit you know these are counterfeit drugs because there are also maybe a little written material that can i you know harm in france harm children harm adults this is serious there are serious consequences but it's one thing and there's one serious subject and i want to object to these sides but the the problem here the problem here is in terms of how you go about remedying the problem if there is a problem that should be remedied particularly if you're talking about a remedy that imposes very significant cost. on the rest of us i don't think the content industries have explained and this gets us back to really the very first

questions with which we started why it is the rest of us should suffer all of these very serious consequences in terms of the interruption to the structure of the internet in terms of the censorship of sites in order to protect the interest to me jason i'm going to have to jump any and gentlemen we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on protecting the internet today r.t. . and. this is claude. allen sing on the past present. mixing reality is nothingness.

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feeds now in the palm of your. question on the dot com. welcome back across all computable dealt to mind you were talking about the stop online piracy act. if i can return to you daniel it seems to me and correct me if you think i'm wrong they weren't using what we're using status quo. tools to fix a problem in this piracy on the internet but isn't it because the internet is uniquely different than other types of piracy that we should have a unique answer and that in the legislation is going through congress is really kind of backward looking and not forward looking could we get something that's more

innovative that works with companies instead of something that is so it seems to me that we're using a sledgehammer when we should be using a very fine surgical instrument to solve this problem. well you you do you do me a multi-pronged approach to attacking this issue is not can be solved by industry alone it's not only sold by government alone one thing that you can do is go after the economics of piracy you have to look and see how these sites are being run and where they're making their money and how they're drawing an audience so the way to cut that off is to cut off their sources of funding go after the networks go after the payment processor stop linking to the sites and this is really going after the worst of the worst the ford infringers that right now are outside of the jurisdiction the united states and we can't do anything about this is a way of saying if you're an american company and a court finds that. identifies a site as a rogue malicious site then as an american company you'll stop doing business with

them i think that's part of being a responsible player on the internet she said when you think about that if you leave just over arching it should be much more specific much more nuanced in dealing with this issue because it seems like it the way you want to talk about freedom of expression later is that it can be the way these laws are being proposed there's an enormous amount of abuse could be out there using these laws as you pointed out the first part of the program yes i mean you know a big part of the problem here is that we are relying upon assurances by copyright owners and particularly very wealthy copyright owners that they will act in a restrained way unfortunately the history of their behavior does not bear that out copyright owners routinely exaggerate the scope of their rights go after websites that are not infringing or are using content in a way that is protected by the fair use provisions of the us copyright act copyright in force when tools are often used just to shut down competition rather

than to pursue any legitimate copyright claim we shouldn't be dependent for a system of copyright in force that upon the copyright holder is acting in good faith which is. what so far is really built upon there are too many public costs in play both in the copyright system in general but particularly when you're talking about monkeying around with the internet and all of the implications for freedom of expression that come from censorship and so i think that you're quite right to suggest that a much more nuanced approach is appropriate here and i think we're going to get something like that i mean the sopa right now reminds me a bit of the italian cruise ship. that capsized recently and the captain abandoning the ship i mean the legislators sponsoring the bill are abandoning it as quickly as they can and its current version it has no chance of going through so i do think

and this is true in part because of pressure from the white house was which has expressed many. problems with the statute from its perspective so i think we are going to be going back to the table and going back to the table does i think meaning gauging in a serious way with technology companies they were not part of the legislative process in the same kind of serious way that they should be and i think that recent activities have demonstrated that they really have a strong position now they obviously have resources to to to lobby and to put forward their own views and all members of congress are going to really have to take account of that it's important though to keep in mind that the copyright owners and technology companies are only two sort of sets of stakeholders and we also have ordinary members the public and users of consumers of copyright material and so i would hope that any process going forward would be inclusive of them as

well we just have not had an inclusive process this is very interesting. in history and sideways if we had a way to go to win here i mean i think if you jason you bring up a very interesting point here i mean do you think you'd be in the industry wrote it in sent it over to congress because just as jason pointed out and i said early in the program and a lot of politicians in washington are walking away from it even though they used to be supporters i mean did they actually read it or did they listen to their constituents and did they listen to these technology companies for a change. i think what happened is two things one of which is i think we should make it abundantly clear to the people who are watching this program that both soap of the stop online piracy act and the protect i intellectual property act are both dead they are not going to go through either the cost of the house or the senate this year they will not be signed into law this year. so they are dead the chances of this becoming an actual issue this year are nonexistent however that does not

mean they will come back again sort of zombie like to. rise again and bother us all year from now so the issue is that the movie houses are the movie out of the movie producers the record producers have a lot of lobbyists and they managed to get a lot through that they wrote that gave them everything they wanted and because of the fact that they had some well paid lobbyists who were very effective they managed to get hearings and managed to get it as a proposed bill only one company was actually invited to testify at the hearings that was not from one of these groups and that was a that was a person from google who was invited to testify no other internet related company was invited to testify this it shows you that this bill was very one sided from the beginning and it's not surprising that it is now dead but the fact is it should ever been brought up in this case this way in the first place ok so the fact is is that i was going to dad was an assassin i was going to ask dan dan what's plan b.

then if both or dead. well you know i think if you look at the alternative bill that was introduced the open act. that was introduced by really the kind of opponents of so and. there's a lot of similarity between the two so where so. going after the ad networks going after the payment processors search engines and blocking sites through d.n.a.'s the open act just goes after the ad networks and it just goes after the payment processors and so there's actually a lot of agreement from both attack companies and from the content industries going after the ad networks and the payment processors is the right way forward so i would say it's dead i would say that provisions have been taken out about blocking that started this year you know that's really completely off the table whether or not search engines will be included is an open question but i think there is a lot of agreement that it's an important problem and the white house statement said something should be done this year so i would say that it's out of the

question to have action on it and i think it would be a fair compromise which is kind of the point of washington is to come together and find you know room for agreement and to say well least we can go and have bad networks and payment processors stop dealing with these known bad sides jason if i can ask you i mean it's going to go ahead way but go ahead you know it's not going to. act is going to pass this year either. not because it may not be a good idea because it's an election year and right now nobody in congress wants to have something which happened yesterday happen closer to the election it's just not going to it's just not going to fly you know after the election is over that's a different story but right now this whole issue is usually just is not so similar to what already does that i was introduced to you open bill in the house so you know i think they are moving forward with ok i want to change gears a little bit here just jason if i go to the only one i'd also ok go ahead jason jump in. i was going to say on the open act an important distinction is that there

is the there is the availability of independent review before any of the censorship actually happens which is something that i think is very important for protecting freedom of speech in which is one of the principal defects of so far in the protect id act one of the things that the white house has zero going on ok if i can ask you and i think was pretty impressive the seven thousand maybe more sites when i went dark on wednesday i mean what does that tell you about the power of the internet now i don't think we've ever seen anything quite like this before i mean is this. a new political force or at least force of consciousness that in society where we can find consensus on something when we have such political. gridlock in the united states. well i don't think gridlock is going to go anywhere but i do think that it shows that i do think that it shows that the internet community can work together to a common interest and i think that is what got the attention of congress i don't think

anybody in congress particularly cared that the sites themselves were dark but they did care about the fact that there is the ability of the internet community to work together to a common interest and that they believe strongly enough about this interest to do something which is. the way legislation works around here is really worth noting because quite frankly congress is pretty out of touch with things on the internet in general even now so name e-mail to your congressman is probably not going to receive the congressman it's going to get seen by some junior staffer who will simply mark what you said as a yes or a no or a want to or a two or something and they will then not pass it on anywhere so congress is not that in touch with the internet but they are going through their questioning and i don't see it as our in touch with the lobbyists jason you are just going to jump in there jason. yeah i was going to i was going to take a slightly more cynical assessment of what's happened in recent weeks and what we

have seen basically in terms of opposition to these to the legislation is a convergence of interests between technology companies like google and ordinary internet users and so and so you might look at that and say well ordinary people using the internet have now found political voice they're organized in a way that hasn't been true in the past i'm not sure the congress is listening to them i think congress and the white house are listening more to the technology companies and again it's not clear that the interests of the technology companies are reflective. points in time of the interests of ordinary consumers and so while the coalition is has been highly effective in this instance. we'll have to wait and see how things play out in the next round ok well looks like a little bit like occupy the internet here all right gentlemen we've run out of time fascinating discussion looks like we ended up on occupying the internet many

thanks to my guest today in washington and in new york and thanks to our viewers for watching us here are to see you next time and remember.

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strike back anonymous cripples major u.s. government and corporate websites in response to a crackdown on a file sharing service and pending anti-piracy laws in. syria braces for more mass protests but the opposition calls for nationwide rallies demanding the release of prisoners is claimed to be the latest step in the push for regime change. and a multi-billion pound battle between russian climbed tycoon to monitor more which fugitive mobile is also key in a london court finally approaches a conclusion. little.

lad from our studios in central moscow you're watching r t with me and he's. and now it's four pm here in the russian capital twelve pm in damascus syria but we didn't begin with america as a government and entertainment industry which has come under attack from a group of computer hackers known only as anonymous they took down web sites belonging to the f.b.i. department of justice and the universal music group but the group says its largest attack ever is in response to the shutting down of major file sharing service mega upload which is affected around fifty million galli users the web site's bosses have been arrested and are now facing prison sentences for copyright infringement american lawmakers are currently debating new bills to curb illegal downloading which have been attacked as an attempt to censor the internet thousands of web sites including which of video went black in protest this week.