Spamwar's worst mistakes being recapitulated by the copyright wars
My latest Guardian column, "Copyright enforcers should learn lessons from the war on spam," looks at the fallout from the failed tactics of the spamwar and asks how the entertainment industry plans on doing any better trying the same tactics on an even grander and more savage scale:
Content-based filtersLink
These were pretty effective for a very brief period, but the spammers quickly outmanoeuvred them. The invention of word-salads (randomly cut/pasted statistically normal text harvested from the net), alphabetical substitutions, and other tricksy techniques have trumped the idea that you can fight spam just by prohibiting certain words, phrases or media.Unintended consequence: It's practically impossible to have an email conversation about Viagra, inheritances, medical conditions related to genitals, and a host of other subjects because of all the "helpful" filters still fighting last year's spam battle, diligently vaporising anyone who uses the forbidden words.
the latest
latest episodes
I never considered it before, but I'd hate to be the email admin for Pfizer or any of the other pharmaceutical companies ...
So, we've always been at war with Eastasia?
CD sales, DVD sales, even cable subscriptions will decline to zero with (legal or illegal) digital distribution. The internet is where copyright holders will need to make their money. Even an animal knows not to poop where it eats.
The war against spam has been a dismal failure
Whilst it's true that the ratio of spam to ham (real email) is typically of the order of 4:1, there are many setups that can do a a very good job of filtering spam from end-users inboxes, with very low false positives. Full disclosure, I work for a company in this field, however there are many Free software anti-spam set-ups that can do a very good job (and there are many companies and products in this market.) Admittedly you need to be a reasonably competent Linux / BSD sysadmin to set SpamAssassin up, but if that's not you and your ISP isn't employing such a person, you need to find a new ISP. Baysian filters have taken over all but the most simple-minded spam filters precisely because they do not do a simple-minded search for keywords like Viagra or Rolex and nuke any email containing those terms.
If the copyright wars recapitulate the spam wars, then the copyright mafia will win.
there is only one answer to spam
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/26/russian_spammer_killed/
I LIKE the spam. So much comedy in one inbox.
I once tried to poll my friends to see who got free text messaging, so I could figure out who to text all day long.
I decided to use a few internet catchphrases and creative misspellings so they'd know it wasn't urgent, and joked about how I would text them updates on where to buy the cheapest V1agra.
The email never actually made it to anyone.
Of course, looking back, I'm not sure that was a false positive. I wonder if I can get a spam filter that will censor my outgoing mail when I'm just being an idiot.
@7
"I wonder if I can get a spam filter that will censor my outgoing mail when I'm just being an idiot."
Such a product (successfully mass marketed to all) could save the world - or at least make it a much better place to live.
how about email buddies? Recovering alcoholics have people to lean on, why not send all your email through a trusted friend who in turn sends it on if it isn't insane? (another advantage to multiple personalities by the way)
I am disappointed that Microsoft stands idly by as ISP's effectively dismantle the features of Outlook.
In my business, I often receive emails from teams of 50+ people working on projects for global corporations. I cannot send REPLY ALL to such an email, because my ISP allows only 50 emails per hour.
For 15 years now, I have been sending information to a growing list of people who have said to me, "Please add my name to the mailing list for that information you send out." Simple, clean operation for years, using Outlook Mail Merge. Suddenly this spring all the emails get blocked, and then, just to add insult to injury, ALL email is blocked for one hour.
The solution the ISP recommends: Set up a website, give us access to it, require everyone to go to this website and opt in, and blah blah blah. It would seem weird to ask all these people I've been corresponding with for 15 years to suddenly jump through hoops. The terrorists have won.
Fight spam, fine. But if you are such a smart software engineer, figure out how to do it without taking away my legitimate business uses.
Cory's assertion, as I understand it, is that fighting bad behavior online (spam, copyright piracy) is essentially doomed, because it just degenerates into an arms race in which progressively-fiercer countermeasures increasingly hurt the innocent while doing little to resolve the problem.
In the case of spam, the innocent will get hurt anyway: untamed spam renders email (blog comments, Usenet, search engines etc) unusable; spam-countermeasures diminish utility and ease-of-use. Every way you look at this you lose.
In the case of copyright piracy, where the popular picture is that the victims are greedy corporations and 'ordinary folks' might actually get some benefit from it, there's a temptation for us to say "Let's not fight this battle." But there's some truth to the industry claims that piracy doesn't just hurt Daddy Musicbucks, but artists and even consumers as well, and there is room for the profit motive in creating and delivering entertainment.
I don't mind paying a fair price for entertainment; I do mind when the industry's battle to safeguard their cash cow spills over into my computer or my net connection and renders them unusable. The real question is, what's the alternative?
Ultimately, the responsibility may rest with those of us who don't want to see everything we can do now with personal computers and the Internet crippled in the interests of protecting the entertainment industry to come up with an alternative proposal, one compelling enough to stir the industry dinosaurs into accepting and adopting it. It's not enough to demonstrate the futility of trying to dam the river; we have to prove the utility of going with the flow.
Of course, spam is not sent using end-to-end encryption. If it were, little-to-nothing your ISP could do would take the load off your computer short of blocking all encrypted traffic - which they would immediately do. What, you wanted to buy something off eBay? use our encrypted SSL proxy server! One transaction per ten minutes, please.
Scunthorpe Problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_Problem
@11: Cory's assertion, as I understand it, is that fighting bad behavior online (spam, copyright piracy) is essentially doomed, because it just degenerates into an arms race in which progressively-fiercer countermeasures increasingly hurt the innocent while doing little to resolve the problem.
No, that's not the assertion. It's that these particular tactics have been shown ineffective in the field in a battle that's theoretically much easier to win (in the spamwar, practically everyone is on your side, in the copyfight, no one wants their communications "filtered"). Repeating those mistakes is stupid and wasteful and damaging to the body politic.
Just because hitting yourself in the head with a hammer doesn't stop copyright infringement doesn't mean you can't stop copyright infringement.
History is *filled* with exactly this kind of copyfight: the fights over sheet music, phonograms, radios, jukeboxes, cable, and VCRs all recapitulate the present copyfight, and they all had approximately the same solution:
* Don't worry about hand-to-hand, small-scale stuff
* Offer a legit deal at a price that most people opt into
* Take part of the profites from the above and enforce against the most egregious offenders
An enormous number of academics, economists, musicians, music execs, ISP execs, consumer rights advocates and other interested parties have proposed variations on the theme of "Offer people who download with P2P a cheap license that legitimizes the practice. Use 21st century auditing technology to divide up the money in a transparent and fair way. Argue about the details of 'fair' and 'transparent' and 'cheap' but stop arguing about whether you're going to stop copying on the Internet. You're not. You're just going to convince people that there is no peace to be had with the record industry and that will make the job of selling licenses in the future much, much harder."
Substitute "radio" for "P2P" and you have the blanket performance license for broadcasters that is in place in every radio station in the country. Substitute "record" for "P2P" and you have the mechanical compulsory license that legalized every single cover you've ever heard on a CD.
This isn't moon-talk. It isn't even complicated. It's the *industry standard*.
I think the parties interested in draconian copyright enforcement have a different option that they could learn from the spam fight: spam p2p networks and related search sites to the point that they become unusable. Heck, they could hire the email spammers to adapt their methods to p2p.
From the linked article:
The blacklists are maintained by groups whose identity is shrouded in secrecy ("to prevent retaliation from criminal spam syndicates") and operate at Star Chambers who convict their targets in secrecy, without the right of appeal or the ability to confront your accuser.
C'mon, Cory, you know better than to make a sweeping generalization for that. For every DNSbl out there operating "shrouded in secrecy... without the right of appeal" (APEWS and its ilk), there are multiple DNSbls that have open communication with listees (SpamCop) or easy requests for delisting (CBL).
This article is like the New Yorker cover. Cory can say it is a reasoned argument about what does and doesn't work. But what readers of the Guardian see is a equivalence between fighting SPAM and what the RIAA is doing. So this is in effect a strongly pro RIAA article (unless it's a pro SPAM article).