Aaron Schwartz' suicide: why was this computer whiz placed in solitary confinement even after his bail was processed?

Did MIT go too far in the Aaron Schwartz case?  Why are universities so secretive about their research?  Why did the Department of Justice go after Aaron so savagely?

Aaron Swartz's father: He'd be alive today if he was never arrested

By Laurie Segall  
CNN Money
June 27, 2014

In 2013, Internet activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz ended his life while facing up to 35 years in prison for hacking.

Swartz faced multiple charges for breaking and entering into an MIT wiring closet and downloading academic journals, including two counts of wire fraud and 11 counts of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Swartz, who was battling the court, also battled with depression. Prosecutors dropped the charges after his death.

I first met Swartz's father, Robert, last year as he explained his mission to fight for his son's memory by helping to change outdated laws. He wanted answers about why he lost his son.

His son's story is now the subject of a new documentary called "The Internet's Own Boy: The story of Aaron Swartz."...

Canadian Judge Says Google Must Remove Links Worldwide

 Is the golden age of the Internet over?  Will we need to go back to the printing press to share information?

Canadian Judge Says Google Must Remove Links Worldwide

By IAN AUSTEN

New York Times

June 19, 2014 

 

Google has argued that following a global order by a Canadian court to remove specific search results could put in into conflict with laws of other countries.

OTTAWA — Google will appeal a decision by a court in British Columbia that requires the company to remove specific search results worldwide. While the case stems from an intellectual property dispute between two small industrial equipment companies, some legal experts say that if the decision is upheld it could have far-reaching consequences for the Internet.

The temporary order, granted last Friday by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, emerged from protracted litigation between two companies which were once both closely connected. Equustek Solutions makes a device that allows industrial machines made by different manufacturers and that use different software to communicate with each other. Those products were marketed by another company, Datalink, which sold them under its name.

While the two companies almost merged at one point, relations soured in the middle of the last decade and they split. One result of that was the court finding that Datalink’s stole Equustek’s designs and engineering to create its own device, which it largely sells through the Internet.

Trying to block the sales of Datalink’s product, however, has not been easy despite a court order banning online sales in December 2012. Datalink’s owners appear to have left Canada and the location of its Web-based operation is unclear.

In an earlier court ruling, the court ruled in favor of Equustek Solutions and its principals. After that ruling, Google Canada began to voluntarily remove the Web address related to Datalink from searches made through Google.ca. But in last week’s decision, Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon found that Datalink swiftly set up new websites with slightly different addresses every time it was blocked from search results in Canada by Google.

“Websites can be generated automatically, resulting in an endless game of ‘whac-a-mole’ with the plaintiffs identifying new URLs and Google deleting them,” she wrote.

Her solution, unprecedented for Canada, was the interim injunction requiring Google to kill all Datalink search results worldwide.

If upheld and then emulated by courts in other countries, said Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, the Internet could go from being perceived as a lawless place to “one where all courts apply” setting up conflicts between nations on several issues, particularly freedom of expression.

“The judge recognizes that there is this global impact but doesn’t really want to deal with it,” said Professor Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet law. “Where this decision goes off the rails is when the court decides its order making power is limitless.”

Google Canada declined to comment beyond a short statement: “We’re disappointed in this ruling and will appeal this decision to the British Columbia Court of Appeals, B.C.’s highest court.”

Professor Geist said he was puzzled that the order involves Google and no other web search provider, like Bing, making the information still easily available.

And while he agreed that the court could, and probably should have, ordered these search results struck in Canada, he said that it overreached with its global order. It would have been more appropriate, Professor Geist said, if Equustek sought similar orders in each of the countries where Datalink does business. They are not likely very numerous. Court filings indicate that at its peak in 2005, Equustek only sold 672,000 of its devices.

For Professor Geist, the decision is troubling in two different respects. If the order stands, it would most likely put Google in the position of deciding itself which court orders it obeys and where it honors them.

At the same time, he asked how Canadians would feel if “the European Court of Justice looked to extend the right to be forgotten not just to Europe but to the rest of the world?” That ruling, released last month, requires all search providers’ European operations to remove links that people believe violate their online privacy.

In its court submissions, Google argued that following a global order by a Canadian court could put in into conflict with laws of other countries. It cited a case where a French anti-racism group said that Yahoo had broken French law by allowing users to sell Nazi artifacts through its websites. A French court ordered Yahoo to block all access from France to Nazi artifact postings stored on its servers in the United States and fined the company about $15 million.

Yahoo voluntarily removed the material and then turned around and sued the anti-racism group in California, arguing that its First Amendment Rights to free expression had been violated. A federal judge sided with Yahoo in 2002. But that was set aside by an appeals court in 2006, which did not address the question of whether American Internet companies must honor rulings by foreign courts related to postings that are unlawful overseas but not in the United States.

Professor Geist said that Google would most likely ask the appeals court to put the injunction on hold until it reaches its decision, a process that could be lengthy. It is also possible that Google will be supported in its appeal by other Internet search companies.

Based on earlier Canadian cross border Internet cases, Professor Geist said he expected that the global order would be struck down.

“This judge has decided that she’s going to decide for the rest of the world,” he said, adding that it appears that the judge, seeing the size and power of Google, may have decided that “judges need powers that are equally large if they’re going to deal with it.”

New Media Rights will continue to defend Internet underdogs

Geek vs. Troll
Separating from UCAN, New Media Rights will continue to defend Internet underdogs
By Dave Maass
City Beat
Dec 05, 2012

There are some Internet questions that aren’t easy to answer online.

Let’s say you’re a citizen journalist who wakes up one morning to an alert from Google that, due to purported copyright infringement, it has removed one of your blog posts about a student in Scotland who’d been posing online as a Syrian lesbian to score a book deal. You know the copyright claim is crap, but what then?

“Yes, I’ll use the F-word: Frightening,” says gay-rights blogger Michael Petrelis, whose blog, The Petrelis Files, received such a “takedown notice” in August 2011. “To get that email from Google, I just knew, to keep my stress level down I was going to need expertise to challenge Google. Just saying that—‘challenging Google’—gives me tingles in a way. I’m a person with AIDS, struggling with disability in San Francisco, who now has to navigate Google’s rules.”

During the last decade-and-a-half, major online communities—most notably Google’s Blogger.com and You- Tube—have instituted a largely automatic, frustratingly bureaucratic system of censor-first self-regulation when it comes to alleged copyright infringement. It’s easily, and often, abused and tends to favor aggressive “trolls,” who use the system as a weapon. These trolls are sometimes corporate legal teams; other times, they’re just independent bullies seeking to block critical content from release.

“I think he saw me as an easy target,” Petrelis says of his troll. “He’s certainly intelligent, smarty-pants enough that he knew how to lodge the right kind of complaint with Google.”

After talking to attorneys at Harvard University’s Citizen Media Law Project, Petrelis was referred to a San Diego legal clinic, New Media Rights, whose executive director, Art Neill, personally talked him through the process and helped him file a successful counter-claim.

“For everybody who was exposing him as a fraud, [the faux Syrian] tried to get their sites taken down and their posts taken down using DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act],” Neill says. “I think one of the problems with those kind of small-scale copyright takedowns is, obviously, folks don’t have an attorney on call, and they’re sort of worried because they get nasty letters that say, ‘You’re going to owe $150,000 for infringement,’ and they’re, like, ‘Well, I don’t want to lose my house... so I’m not going to do anything; I’m just going to let the content bully win.’”

New Media Rights (NMR) is one of the few programs in the country that offer one-to-one, free legal assistance to Internet users and creators. Since 2005, NMR had been a program of the Utility Consumers’ Action Network (UCAN), the well-regarded public-interest watchdog group, but NMR separated this year as political infighting and alleged financial mismanagement brought UCAN to its knees. NMR has found a new nonprofit home at California Western School of Law and a new physical home at the Ansir Innovation Center in Kearny Mesa. Now, with a solid foundation, NMR is prepared to move forward in not only championing the rights of bloggers like Petrelis, but also musicians, filmmakers and programmers.

A two-lawyer operation working on a budget of less than $135,000— hardly a competitive salary for one corporate intellectual-property attorney—NMR now has the administrative resources of the university, as well as a stable of law students eager for legal-clinic experience. That was a big part of the sell for Cal Western.

Neill says the idea for NMR began while he was at law school in 2004. A musician on the side, he was looking for ways to blend his interests. Meanwhile, social media was beginning to show its potential. “Certainly, this generation of students coming into law school have a great deal of personal experience with this,” Associate Dean for Academic Affairs William Aceves says. “I think for students to be able to learn more about how the law regulates their communication, their email usage, their Internet usage, their Facebook and Twitter accounts, I think that’s particularly interesting to them, and also gives them a chance to actually enhance their skills set with substantive law by working on real cases with real clients.”

“I realized that all of that stuff implicates the law,” he says. “I realized that there’s millions of folks that are just going to need to have more awareness of the laws they’re interacting with when they share content, when they’re out there speaking on the web.”

After graduation, Neill found a receptive outlet at UCAN and its then-director, Michael Shames, who’d begun to field calls from local businesses and artists on web matters.

“The musicians, the artists, they’re all wandering through this sort of Internet wilderness that has developed,” Shames says. “The rules, the laws are not clear, and they’re not clearly enforced. So, creating New Media Rights was the means by which we could sort of try to bring order and provide some degree of sheriffing to what otherwise was a Wild West frontier, and, to this day, still is.”

Shaun Spalding and Art Neill are the dynamic duo at New Media Rights.

Scrolling through his database, Neill counts hundreds of individuals who’ve been helped, including the high-profile case of Canadian-American pop-culture critic Anita Sarkeesian, founder of Feminist Frequency, whose music-video-style commentary on video-game characters, “Too Many Dicks,” was inexplicably removed from YouTube in early 2011. But Neill says that roughly 30 percent of NMR’s interactions are with locals, whether it’s helping freelance artproject manager Susan Myrland recapture a personal website that had been taken over by spammers or representing a San Diego app developer when his word game for Android devices was removed from the online store after Hasbro filed a complaint.

In that case, Neill went head-to head with the corporation’s legal team, explaining in detail how the game didn’t infringe on Scrabble. Hasbro backed down, but some of the damage was already done.

“A few weeks after they had withdrawn their DMCA notice, they actually launched Scrabble on the Android platform,” says David Almilli, CEO of Second Breakfast Studios. “I’m not sure if it was a tactic to disrupt my ecosystem to make their app look like a better player on the Android market, but I had a good number of users using Wordsmith, and it actually dropped significantly during that month of down time.”

Much of NMR’s work is geared toward preventive lawyering—that is, educating media creators to prepare in advance so they don’t need an attorney later. This is particularly important when an artist or writer intends to publish something they foresee could invite pushback.

Trolls “are going to find that one thing and that’s what’s going to give you a lot of problems,” says NMR’s other staff attorney, Shaun Spalding. “General resources can’t help with that. I’m pretty happy I’m able to use how much I know about board games, movies, video games for an actual purpose of helping someone else, and not just for doing well in trivia contests.”

NMR regularly receives grants for outreach through the California Consumer Protection Foundation and was recently awarded an $18,200 grant from city of San Diego’s Small Business Enhancement Program to work with 30 local businesses and host a series of workshops. The organization is also prolific in producing instructional web videos, including its 120-part “LAGD” (Legal Assistance for Game Developers) series, which features interviews with popular game designers, such as Edmund McMillen of Super Meat Boy (a central figure in the 2012 documentary Indie Game). NMR is crowd-funding now for “Season 2” of LAGD.

Then there’s NMR’s policy work. Neill and Spalding are gearing up for a battle over the implementation of a small-claims-court system for copyright infringement cases. At the end of November, Neill provided testimony at a U.S. Copyright Office hearing on the concept, which he says may not be a bad thing, but, done haphazardly, could be catastrophic.

“There’s a lot folks at the table saying, ‘Hey, we want to be able to sue Internet users, and we want to be able to sue people for copyright infringement,’ but there’s not a lot of people saying, ‘Well, wait, what are the consequences of that?’” Neill says. “Should these folks have the right to defend themselves? Shouldn’t they have representation? Aren’t there going to be a lot of dolphins caught in the tuna net, getting screwed in this process? [We’re there] to make sure there’s due process, that the process is fair, and this isn’t just some new way where large media companies or copyright holders can simply steamroll the little guy.”