Locked-out

”The Challenge for the foreseeable future is to create new openings, new possibilities, new temporalities and spaces within which life may assert its insistence on an ethico-aesthetic existence”

Geert Lovink in The Principle of Notworking 2005.

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Locked-out.

For my Bachelor Thesis I did a literary research on computation and Internet regulations. Curious why media theorists mostly investigate how users get locked in to the Internet, I decided to take a different approach. I theorized a critical view on the foreseeable future after general-use Internet regulations. With this research I tried to answer the question what the consequences are when you get locked out of the Internet in this contemporary Internet culture. For instance: if you infringe on copyrights.

In the Netherlands you could join the discussion on copyright, but if actions were taken such as blocking websites and giving fines to citizens, for example in the US, Dutch Internet consumers of shared content would hardly notice it because these rulings did not apply to them. Since the ruling of the Dutch Supreme court in the case of BREIN (anti-piracy) versus Ziggo and XS4ALL (Dutch’s internet providers) on January 11^th 2012 this has all changed. In short this ruling means that Ziggo and XS4ALL have to block websites that provide a way to share content to prevent illegal sharing of copyright documents such as music and films. Specifically websites like Piratebay and related websites who share Bittorrent content. In this quote there is a translation of the Dutch ruling on BREIN versus Ziggo and XS4ALL:

“In this procedure the court speaks on the case BREIN versus Ziggo and XS4ALL because these providers offer a service (Internet access) according to BREIN that a number of subscribers use to exchange media files via The Pirate Bay and thus infringe copyrights. The court follows BREIN therein. The court considers it proven that approximately 30% of the subscribers of Ziggo and 4.5% of subscribers to XS4ALL recently have exchanged music, movies or games via The Pirate Bay. Due to the nature of the so-called BitTorrent protocol that is used, the court assumes that only those subscribers who have downloaded files, but also uploaded and thus have infringed copyright. The infringement by subscribers justifies the opinion of the court in this case to block The Pirate Bay by Ziggo and XS4ALL” (Rechtspraak.nl).

Because of this Supreme Court Ruling BREIN can now apply a list to Ziggo and XS4ALL with websites that have to be blocked according to BREIN. What I found specifically interesting in this context is that copyright originates from approximately 1450 when Johannes Guttenberg thinks of a way to copy all books at high speed by using letters as stamps in a way that you can rearrange them so you can get different pages. That is the first step into the copyright discussion, the moment we were able to copy different books on a large scale. And we are still having a same similar discussion.

Sure artist should get rights to their artwork, and yes I do think they should get paid for the art they create. Only how to establish this is not the question at hand. My interest for my thesis was what this Dutch Supreme Court ruling means for my open use of the Internet in the Netherlands. Can we still speak of Web 2.0 when these networks are limited or even eliminated? To investigate the hypothetical effects of this ruling I took a critical look at Eduroam, the University of Groningen network. Eduroam is a hotspot, a wireless access point which students can use when they log in with their student number and password. Because I am not a law student I confined this research to a literature review of the outcome of BREIN versus Ziggo and XS4ALL on 12 January 2012 and the user regulations applied by the Rijks Universiteit Groningen (RUG). I theorized a hypothetical picture of how these Internet regulations could affect my use of the Internet. This is done by use of the critical Internet theory, the theory of Cory Doctorow on the war on general-purpose computing and what Bits Of Freedom, (influential civil rights movement and BREIN’s counterpart) is trying to accomplish. I did not investigate the functionality of Internet or Eduroam but comprehended the hypothetical effects these regulations have on my day-to-day use of Internet and Eduroam.

The development of Internet, the internet 2.0 or Web 2.0, in which everybody knows everything about everyone by the social sharing on websites like Facebook, Twitter and Blogs is the reason there is now a war going on subjects like the open use of Internet, sharing and copyright infringement. The Internet is no longer a top-down device. Everybody with an Internet connection can participate. Mobile devices share apps with computers to keep information interconnected and in sync. But also the way people connect on the Internet trough hotspots in places as Universities and coffee shops has changed the use of Internet (Smartmobs 2002, Culture of Internet 1997).

Internet is everywhere all the time. According to Friedrich Kittler there even is a media discourse in which we as humans communicate trough the use of codes. The one who makes the code has the power. On that note (with a notable leap from one to the other) we can be compared to technique and as such one could compare the theory of Kittler with the theory of Cory Doctorow as I explain in more detail in chapter 3 of my thesis. I emphasize the importance of the theory of Kittler but to stay close to the topic of hypothetical effects of the copyright law for myself I used the theory on computation as is theorized by Cory Doctorow. Following this critical Internet theory, the theory as Doctorow explains the war on computation as you can see in the youtube video, I conclude that when you are a free-minded general Internet user you will get locked out of the future. Unless we stop extreme regulations like the example I used from BREIN.

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