ReadWriteWeb

A sizable chunk of Internet traffic went dark yesterday. No, I'm not talking about a SOPA protest. The #91 Web site on the entire Internet, Megaupload, was taken down after U.S. authorities executed a warrant to seize its Virginia-based servers and arrest four of its proprietors in New Zealand. To give you some perspective: On Google AdPlanner's scale, Walmart.com is #97. Social document sharing service Scribd.com is #90. Huffington Post is #86.

To pretend it's a revelation that Megaupload trafficked in illicit material is like Claude Rains being "shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" That said, its "front parlor," if you will, had many legitimate customers who had posted non-infringing files. So the big question that Colombia's NTN24 news anchor Mónica Fonseca* asked me was essentially, "What has happened to everyone's files?"

What keeps Internet service providers from being responsible for, and perhaps prosecuted for, the content trafficked over their networks is a provision of a law that Web advocates ironically opposed while it was being argued in 1998: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As long as ISPs do not take interest in the nature or technical breakdown of that content, then its creators and publishers can't hold them liable for intellectual property theft - this is the "safe harbor" provision.

That law isn't going away any time soon. Meanwhile, the recording and publishing industries - stymied by the ineffectiveness of prosecuting individual IP violators - know that the ISP is the one remaining place where they can attack the problem of IP theft. (Certainly they can't prosecute themselves and their own partners for ineffective security.)

We do this dance at least twice a year now, and we're starting to get the steps so well memorized that once we hear the familiar tune, we start stepping to the beat without a moment's thought. It's the Anti-piracy Shuffle, and one defining element of its choreography is that we always end up right where we started.

Here's how it goes: You can't run an Internet server that trafficks in illicit content to American clients, from American soil, without violating American law. Makes sense. The magic of the Internet lets someone in America run a server in another country, whose domain may be registered in yet another country, that sends illicit content to American downloaders. It's impossible to prosecute one downloader without prosecuting all of them, otherwise you run into the selective prosecution defense.

New exemptions have been added to the the Digital Millenimum Copyright Act (DMCA), a U.S. copyright law that criminalized attempts to bypass copyright, access control technologies or digital rights management (DRM) measures. The exemptions now provide protections for "fair use" in several different circumstances, the most notable of which is the (now legalized!) process of jailbreaking a phone, a popular activity among iPhone owners in particular.

Google just announced that a U.S. district court has granted the company's motion for summary judgment in Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. The court argued that YouTube is protected by the so-called "safe harbor" provision. Viacom first sued Google in 2007 and the court case continued to simmer ever since. Viacom accused YouTube of deliberately withholding filtering technologies and knowingly infringing on the company's copyright.

The music and movie industries have been on a quest to place blame ever since they realized they were losing sales to Internet piracy. The RIAA in the United States went as far as to sue and fine individual users for downloading songs on peer-to-peer services like Napster and Limewire, or websites like The Pirate Bay or SendSpace. Others went after the services themselves, and in most cases were successful, though many others still exist. Now, BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), the U.K.'s version of the RIAA, is going after the middle man, Google, by serving the search giant with a DMCA take-down notice.

Great news from Web hosting company Network Solutions this morning. A company representative tells us that Microsoft will withdraw the copyright complaint against long-time watchdog website Cryptome.org, and the site will be back online later today.

Yesterday Cryptome published a 22-page PDF called the "Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook". Cryptome publisher John Young said he believed the document showed "improper use of copyright to conceal [...] violations of trust toward its customers." The Electronic Frontier Foundation said Young was within his fair use rights, but the watchdog site was pulled offline none the less. After 14 years spent posting 40,000 sensitive documents, Cryptome is a legacy resource online. Its return is something to celebrate.

Due to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed by Microsoft, whistleblower website Cryptome [link to a backup version of the site] has been disabled by its ISP, Network Solutions.

The complaints were due to the fact that Cryptome published a 22-page Microsoft Global Criminal Spy Guide. Microsoft claimed copyright infringement, Cryptome's editor refused to budge, and the site was taken down this afternoon.

According to once-secret, now-leaked sections of the new, plurilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, global Internet users and ISPs might be in for a world of hurt in the near future.

A U.S.-drafted chapter on Internet use would require ISPs to police user-generated content, to cut off Internet access for copyright violators, and to remove content that is accused of copyright violation without any proof of actual violation. The chapter also completely prohibits DRM workarounds, even for archiving or retrieving one's own work. Read on for details and implications.

Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched a "Takedown Hall of Shame" for what it sees as egregious abuses of digital copyright regulations.

Traditionally the champions of Creative Commons and other, more open methods of IP protection and creative sharing of content online, EFF is now calling out a bevy of big-name media corporations to make examples of them for takedown abuse. According to the EFF blog, "Some of the web's most interesting content has been yanked from popular websites with bogus copyright claims or other spurious legal threats." Read on to see who made the list and why.