For those that don’t know about TPP, which is probably a large majority of the population, it’s a treaty being devised by the U.S. with eight other countries in the Pacific including Peru, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalem and Vietnam.

What many people consider to be the most dangerous thing about TPP is that the negotiations for it are being conducted in absolute secrecy. The public is not being allowed to be involved with the process of this all too important treaty.

WebProNews recently had the chance to speak with Sean Flynn, IP lecturer and director of the Information Justice Program at American University. He explained to us why the negotiations were being held in such secrecy.

The secrecy is being used to try to insulate the negotiation process from broader stakeholder and public input, and primarily is being driven by the USTR. What they are trying to avoid, of course, is broad attention to the many controversial provisions in the agreement which would draw criticism from citizens and businesses in the US and other negotiating countries, making reaching an agreement more difficult. This is because the norms USTR is pursuing are not broadly representative of the full scope of interests within the US or those represented in other countries. They primarily serve the big content industries and brand name pharmaceutical companies, which dominate the formal advising process that shapes the USTR positions. As the recent SOPA debate demonstrates, there are many more interests that need to be taken into account in intellectual property legislation.

Do you agree with Flynn? Are the TPP negotiations being held in secret to prevent public scrutiny and criticism? Let us know in the comments.

Let’s back up a little bit though. The negotiations are being held in secret, but we’ve known about TPP for a while now. We’re just being fed all the wrong info. The U.S. Trade Representative Web site details TPP as a great achievement for the economies of all the countries involved.

We are delighted to have achieved this milestone in our common vision to establish a comprehensive, next-generation regional agreement that liberalizes trade and investment and addresses new and traditional trade issues and 21st-century challenges. We are confident that this agreement will be a model for ambition for other free trade agreements in the future, forging close linkages among our economies, enhancing our competitiveness, benefitting our consumers and supporting the creation and retention of jobs, higher living standards, and the reduction of poverty in our countries.

Building on this achievement and on the successful work done so far, we have committed here in Honolulu to dedicate the resources necessary to conclude this landmark agreement as rapidly as possible. At the same time, we recognize that there are sensitive issues that vary for each country yet to be negotiated, and have agreed that together, we must find appropriate ways to address those issues in the context of a comprehensive and balanced package, taking into account the diversity of our levels of development. Therefore, we have instructed our negotiating teams to meet in early December of this year to continue their work and furthermore to schedule additional negotiating rounds for 2012.

We are gratified by the progress that we are now able to announce toward our ultimate goal of forging a pathway that will lead to free trade across the Pacific. We share a strong interest in expanding our current partnership of nine geographically and developmentally diverse countries to others across the region. As we move toward conclusion of an agreement, we have directed our negotiating teams to continue talks with other trans-Pacific partners that have expressed interest in joining the TPP in order to facilitate their future participation.

President Obama also backs TPP wholeheartedly claiming the same things that the USTR does. He goes over how it will “boost our economies, lowering barriers to trade and investment, increasing exports, and creating more jobs for our people.” He goes on to say that TPP creates a trade network that will be America’s fifth-largest trading partner.

From these statements, it seems like any other trade agreement. Nothing to see here, carry on. Even the Web site’s statement on intellectual property enforcement doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. It says that it’s looking for “an effective and balanced approach to intellectual property rights among the TPP countries.” It goes on to say that they are taking all the proposals of how IP rights should be enforced and considering all their options. This doesn’t actually sound that bad. Too bad last year’s draft of the IP chapter written by the U.S. was leaked online last year.

Knowledge Ecology International ran a quick rundown of the proposed changes to IP laws in TPP. They found that consumer protection was “weak or missing.” They point out three major problems with the wording of the bill last year that should have people concerned.

Overall, the USTR proposal for the TPP intellectual property chapter would:
(1) include a number of features that would lock-in as a global norm many controversial features of U.S. law, such as endless copyright terms.
(2) create new global norms that are contrary to U.S. legal traditions, such as those proposed to damages for infringement, the enforcement of patents against surgeons and other medical professional, rules concerning patents on biologic medicines, disclosure of information from ISPs, etc.
(3) undermine many proposed reforms of the patent and copyright system, such as, for example, proposed legislation to increase access to orphaned copyrighted works by limiting damages for infringement, or statutory exclusions of “non-industrial” patents such as those issued for business methods.

It’s important to note that this leak comes from late last year. The wording could have changed by now for better or for worse. We just don’t know. The absolute secrecy in which the meetings are being held prevent anybody from getting a clear picture on how things are going.

Going back to Sean Flynn, he and his colleagues caught wind of negotiations happening in West Hollywood this past week. He organized a luncheon to discuss TPP while the negotiations were going on to perhaps broker some kind of cooperation between the negotiators and IP rights specialists. As expected, it didn’t go as planned, here’s Flynn’s take on it:

Several weeks ago, global internet policy and health groups became aware that there would be an unannounced meeting of TPP negotiators this week in LA at the Sofitel in West Hollywood. Upon being informed, American University and the Computers and Communications Industry Association booked a conference room in the hotel for the first morning of the negotiation to offer a policy briefing to negotiators on concerns some experts have with a U.S. intellectual property proposal that has been leaked to the public. About an hour after the briefing was advertised to all delegations, including the host USTR, we received a cancellation of our venue by the hotel. The cancelation by Sophie Jones, Event Sales Manager, Sofitel Los Angeles stated:

“I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news but unfortunately we will not be able to move forward with your luncheon for Tuesday January 31st. It was brought to my attention that we have a confidential group in house and we will not be allowing any other groups in the meeting space that day. Again, my apologies for the late notice. Hopefully we can work together in the near future.”

After receiving the cancellation, some individuals called the hotel and were able to book a room for a claimed private event not related to the TPP. Apparently only TPP-related events were banned from the hotel at the request of an unidentified party. USTR is serving as the host of this meeting.

The film industry did not have similar problems. Not only were they informed about the TPP negotiation, but were given the opportunity to host an evening tour 20th Century Fox Studies the night before negotiations began, led by a representative of the studio’s government relations office.

The public interest briefing did ultimately take place, after being moved to a restaurant across the street from the main venue. The groups also held a public briefing at USC School of Law, a webcast and documents for which are available at: http://infojustice.org/archives/7511.

It’s obvious that the government wants public disclosure kept to a minimum. Unfortunately, it didn’t exactly happen that way. During the day of the negotiations, there were protestors outside the hotel making a stink about TPP. Thankfully, Anonymous provided pictures of the protests through imgur.

All of this begs the question of how TPP is any worse than its predecessors. We asked that very same question of Flynn:

After several leaks of ACTA text and the ensuing public outcry, especially over the internet enforcement provisions, the ACTA text improved somewhat. But one can see from the leaked TPP texts that provisions from earlier ACTA versions on issues such as internet service liability, creating a new global DMCA take down regime, and criminal enforcement for non-commercial file sharing, have entered the US proposal for TPP. There are also many provisions in the US proposal that could require alterations of US law. And the general trajectory of the US proposal remains similar to ACTA – it is all about strengthening, lengthening and increasing the aggressiveness of the enforcement of intellectual property rights, with no effort to export the balancing provisions of US law, like fair use, that have been central drivers for innovation on the internet and the protection of free speech. It is a very one-sided proposal.

The U.S. International Trade Commission, which is about as unbiased as you can get in the U.S. government, issued a report on TPP in October of last year. It outlines the problems facing the treaty and what provisions might prove to be the most controversial. Which provision is the most controversial in their eyes? You guessed it – the IP chapter.

Highly controversial; affects especially pharmaceuticals and information technology. Exporters seek provisions beyond TRIPS, such as accession to WIPO treaties. Resistance from importers, competitive producers, national health systems, NGOs. Developing countries may want to regulate bio-prospecting.

The most controversial part, however, in many opinions is the proposed copyright of buffers. For those unaware, a buffer is a small piece of data created in a computer before it plays any kind of file. While under current copyright law, a music label can claim to own the data in the MP3 for a song. These new laws would let them also claim copyright on the data buffer that was created when a user played the file. It’s worth noting that a buffer vanishes after a few seconds of creation. Think about that for a second – every single piece of data on your computer, no matter how small or inconsequential it is, would have a copyright applied to it.

After seeing all the evidence and hearing from both sides, do you agree with Flynn? Or is TPP being made out to be worse than it actually is? Let us know in the comments.

In the end, we may be all overreacting. The wording of the provisions in the current treaty could have changed for the better. The only problem is that it’s highly unlikely. The entertainment industry’s pockets are deep and they want to make sure that they have control of the media for the foreseeable future.

It’s important to note that these treaties don’t only hurt the Internet; they affect physical trade and global relations as well. While the Internet regulation part is important, we have to keep in mind the repercussions outside of our digital playground. I would implore anybody interested to read the ITC’s report on TPP and the leak of the IP chapter to form their own opinion on it.

If you’re in agreement that TPP is no good, what can you do? It’s obvious that the powers that be want as little public involvement as possible. Well, for what it’s worth, there is a submission form on the USTR’s Web site where citizens can submit comments and inquiries about TPP to the higher powers.

What’s more important is to stay informed on all changes to the treaty. The next round of negotiations will be held in Australia in March. While I’m not advocating that you travel to Australia to protest, you can make your voice be heard through a variety of ways in which Flynn points out:

People wanting to get involved should contact their representatives in Congress and write the White House to express their concerns with negotiating new intellectual property laws in secret international negotiations. The next round of negotiations will take place in Melbourne, Australia, starting March 1, 2012. EFF has an action alert out on TPP. It would be great for other groups to do the same and make it easier for people to register their concern. It should also be noted that ACTA, another international IP agreement crafted entirely in secret, is still not in force and could be defeated. The EU parliament will begin considering the issue in March, with a vote scheduled in June. And in the US, the administration is saying that it will not allow Congress to vote on whether to bind us to that controversial agreement. There is still time to halt this course and return intellectual property law-making to domestic legislatures where it belongs.

Until we get more information or another leak on TPP, I’m afraid this is all we have. Once again, it’s important to note that it could have changed. We just don’t know. Until the governments of the world decide that it’s smart business to include their citizens in any international treaties, we aren’t going to know much this or any other treaties that could be around the corner.

Are you concerned about TPP? If you are, what concerns you most from the limited information we have on it? Let us know in the comments.

Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation is partnering with Carpathia, one of the two hosting companies that own MegaUpload’s servers, to help users get their data back. They have set up a MegaRetrieval to provide users information on recovering their data. The project is still in its early days, so don’t expect to get your data back any time soon. Nevertheless, it’s good to see that someone is looking out for MegaUpload’s law-abiding users, in light of the government’s refusal to do so.

There is no word yet on whether the other company that hosted MegaUpload’s servers, Cogent, will be participating in this program as well. As we reported yesterday, the government informed the two companies that they could begin deleting MegaUpload data as early as Thursday. TorrentFreak reported this morning that users had at least another two weeks, however, while the authorities, hosting companies, and MegaUpload’s attorneys tried to work out a solution.

Did you have legitimate data stored with MegaUpload? Let us know in the comments.

Now, however, the exemption granted by the Copyright Office is set to expire, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation is working to make sure that doesn’t happen. The group has set up a page with information on the situation, and instructions for contacting the U.S. Copyright Office in order to petition that the exemptions be renewed. They also want the exemption expanded to include tablets and video game consoles.

The site does not say when the exemption is set to expire, however the Copyright Office will stop accepting comments on the issue on February 10th at 5 pm Eastern time. So if you have a jailbroken iPhone or iPad, or a rooted Android device, you’ll want to head on over and make your voice heard.

The EFF activist team – Rainey Reitman, Eva Galperin, Trevor Timm, and Parker Higgins – was also joined by two of their staff attorneys – Marcia Hofmann and Julie Samuels – in order to comment and answer on general legal questions regarding SOPA, PIPA, and any other legal issues (barring any cases that the EFF is involved in, for obvious reasons). A couple of the highlights thus far:

The Q&A will continue throughout the day with the EFF people chiming in as they can, so follow the updates over on the Reddit thread.

Twitter is right to resist. If the U.S. were to pressure Twitter to censor tweets by organizations it opposes, even those on the terrorist lists, it would join the ranks of countries like India, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Syria, Uzbekistan, all of which have censored online speech in the name of “national security.” And it would be even worse if Twitter were to undertake its own censorship regime, which would have to be based upon its own investigations or relying on the investigations of others that certain account holders were, in fact, terrorists.

The government has been fairly presumptuous about the reach of their authority when it comes the issue of censoring Twitter accounts (and the Internet in general, really) they think pose a danger to national security. An article published last month in The New York Times reported that government officials audaciously believe that “they may have the legal authority to demand that Twitter close” accounts they deem to be associated with suspected terrorists.

EFF goes on in the article to recount multiple examples of the U.S. government’s attempt to cajole Twitter into removing the “terrorist” tweets and accounts. As if the imminent domain complexities weren’t bad enough when exercised in the physical world but now the government is apparently trying to flex those muscles over here in cyberspace. EFF sums up the fixation of government officials on alleged terrorists’ Twitter accounts by expressing their hope that “the U.S. government has better things to do than to upend Constitutional law and proceed with unprecedented censorship over a Twitter account that gets into Internet flame wars and professes a love for caramel macchiatos” (one of the Twitter accounts the U.S. government has singled out contains posts about the wonders of the delicious coffee beverage).

This reminds me of that fad in the 19th century when, if ever a newspaper published some unflattering or damning information about a group, it was de rigueur for the defamed parties to go smash up the printing press that produced the newspaper. The act of political vandalism didn’t work then – obviously, or else we wouldn’t still know about it – and it won’t work with the printing press’s journalistic descendent, the Internet. Society’s utterly clueless commitment to repeat history never ceases to astound.

From the group’s perspective, the pieces of legislation threaten innovation, due process of the law, the security threat SOPA/PIPA poses, and the creation of something similar to the Chinese firewall in regards to censorship. It’s powerful approach from some of the most powerful entities in the tech industry, and it’s just found a loud voice of support from additional power players in the Internet industry.

Thanks to a post from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), we find the support Google, et al, is receiving comes from “83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers” who also penned their own open letter, this one aimed at the United States Congress. The letter, in its entirety:

We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. We’re just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our project, the Internet, has brought with it.

Last year, many of us wrote to you and your colleagues to warn about the proposed “COICA” copyright and censorship legislation. Today, we are writing again to reiterate our concerns about the SOPA and PIPA derivatives of last year’s bill, that are under consideration in the House and Senate. In many respects, these proposals are worse than the one we were alarmed to read last year.

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’ right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but these bills are particularly egregious in that regard because they cause entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under these proposals. In fact, it seems that this has already begun to happen under the nascent DHS/ICE seizures program.

Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship. It is also true regardless of whether censorship is implemented via the DNS, proxies, firewalls, or any other method. Types of network errors and insecurity that we wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

The current bills — SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly — also threaten engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that are not readily and automatically compliant with censorship actions by the U.S. government. When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish.

The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its central position in the network for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.

Senators, Congressmen, we believe the Internet is too important and too valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore you to put these bills aside.

While the prose of the letter is indeed impressive, the people that volunteered their endorsement is a who’s who of Internet dignitaries, including such names as Vint Cerf, furthering the point that, by and large, the Internet industry is against the methods with which SOPA/PIPA enforces its rules. The letters signees are as follows:

• Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP, one of the “fathers of the Internet”, signing as private citizen
• Paul Vixie, author of BIND, the most widely-used DNS server software, and President of the Internet Systems Consortium
• Tony Li, co-author of BGP (the protocol used to arrange Internet routing); chair of the IRTF’s Routing Research Group; a Cisco Fellow; and architect for many of the systems that have actually been used to build the Internet
• Steven Bellovin, invented the DNS cache contamination attack; co-authored the first book on Internet security; recipient of the 2007 NIST/NSA National Computer Systems Security Award and member of the DHS Science and Technology Advisory Committee
• Jim Gettys, editor of the HTTP/1.1 protocol standards, which we use to do everything on the Web
• Dave Kristol, co-author, RFCs 2109, 2965 (Web cookies); contributor, RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1)
• Steve Deering, Ph.D., invented the IP multicast feature of the Internet; lead designer of IPv6 (version 6 of the Internet Protocol)
• David Ulevitch, David Ulevitch, CEO of OpenDNS, which offers alternative DNS services for enhanced security.
• Elizabeth Feinler, director of the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI International, administered the Internet Name Space from 1970 until 1989 and developed the naming conventions for the internet top level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .com, .org, etc. under contracts to DoD
• Robert W. Taylor, founded and funded the beginning of the ARPAnet; founded and managed the Xerox PARC Computer Science Lab which designed and built the first networked personal computer (Alto), the Ethernet, the first internet protocol and internet, and desktop publishing
• Fred Baker, former IETF chair, has written about 50 RFCs and contributed to about 150 more, regarding widely used Internet technology
• Dan Kaminsky, Chief Scientist, DKH
• Esther Dyson, EDventure; founding chairman, ICANN; former chairman, EFF; active investor in many start-ups that support commerce, news and advertising on the Internet; director, Sunlight Foundation
• Walt Daniels, IBM’s contributor to MIME, the mechanism used to add attachments to emails
• Nathaniel Borenstein, Chief Scientist, Mimecast; one of the two authors of the MIME protocol, and has worked on many other software systems and protocols, mostly related to e-mail and payments
• Simon Higgs, designed the role of the stealth DNS server that protects a.root-servers.net; worked on all versions of Draft Postel for creating new TLDs and addressed trademark issues with a complimentary Internet Draft; ran the shared-TLD mailing list back in 1995 which defined the domain name registry/registrar relationship; was a root server operator for the Open Root Server Consortium; founded coupons.com in 1994
• John Bartas, was the technical lead on the first commercial IP/TCP software for IBM PCs in 1985-1987 at The Wollongong Group. As part of that work, developed the first tunneling RFC, rfc-1088
• Nathan Eisenberg, Atlas Networks Senior System Administrator; manager of 25K sq. ft. of data centers which provide services to Starbucks, Oracle, and local state
• Dave Crocker, author of Internet standards including email, DKIM anti-abuse, electronic data interchange and facsimile, developer of CSNet and MCI national email services, former IETF Area Director for network management, DNS and standards, recipient of IEEE Internet Award for contributions to email, and serial entrepreneur
• Craig Partridge, architect of how email is routed through the Internet; designed the world’s fastest router in the mid 1990s
• Doug Moeller, Chief Technology Officer at Autonet Mobile
• John Todd, Lead Designer/Maintainer – Freenum Project (DNS-based, free telephony/chat pointer system), http://freenum.org/
• Alia Atlas, designed software in a core router (Avici) and has various RFCs around resiliency, MPLS, and ICMP
• Kelly Kane, shared web hosting network operator
• Robert Rodgers, distinguished engineer, Juniper Networks
• Anthony Lauck, helped design and standardize routing protocols and local area network protocols and served on the Internet Architecture Board
• Ramaswamy Aditya, built various networks and web/mail content and application hosting providers including AS10368 (DNAI) which is now part of AS6079 (RCN); did network engineering and peering for that provider; did network engineering for AS25 (UC Berkeley); currently does network engineering for AS177-179 and others (UMich)
• Blake Pfankuch, Connecting Point of Greeley, Network Engineer
• Jon Loeliger, has implemented OSPF, one of the main routing protocols used to determine IP packet delivery; at other companies, has helped design and build the actual computers used to implement core routers or storage delivery systems; at another company, installed network services (T-1 lines and ISP service) into Hotels and Airports across the country
• Jim Deleskie, internetMCI Sr. Network Engineer, Teleglobe Principal Network Architect
• David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify
• Mikki Barry, VP Engineering of InterCon Systems Corp., creators of the first commercial applications software for the Macintosh platform and the first commercial Internet Service Provider in Japan
• Peter Rubenstein,helped to design and build the AOL backbone network, ATDN.
• David Farber, distinguished Professor CMU; Principal in development of CSNET, NSFNET, NREN, GIGABIT TESTBED, and the first operational distributed computer system; EFF board member
• Bradford Chatterjee, Network Engineer, helped design and operate the backbone network for a nationwide ISP serving about 450,000 users
• Gary E. Miller Network Engineer specializing in eCommerce
• Jon Callas, worked on a number of Internet security standards including OpenPGP, ZRTP, DKIM, Signed Syslog, SPKI, and others; also participated in other standards for applications and network routing
• John Kemp, Principal Software Architect, Nokia; helped build the distributed authorization protocol OAuth and its predecessors; former member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group
• Christian Huitema, worked on building the Internet in France and Europe in the 80’s, and authored many Internet standards related to IPv6, RTP, and SIP; a former member of the Internet Architecture Board
• Steve Goldstein, Program Officer for International Networking Coordination at the National Science Foundation 1989-2003, initiated several projects that spread Internet and advanced Internet capabilities globally
• David Newman, 20 years’ experience in performance testing of Internet
  infrastructure; author of three RFCs on measurement techniques (two on firewall performance, one on test traffic contents)
• Justin Krejci, helped build and run the two biggest and most successful municipal wifi networks located in Minneapolis, MN and Riverside, CA; building and running a new FTTH network in Minneapolis
• Christopher Liljenstolpe, was the chief architect for AS3561 (at the time about 30% of the Internet backbone by traffic), and AS1221 (Australia’s main Internet infrastructure)
• Joe Hamelin, co-founder of Seattle Internet Exchange (http://www.seattleix.net) in 1997, and former peering engineer for Amazon in 2001
• John Adams, operations engineer at Twitter, signing as a private citizen
• David M. Miller, CTO / Exec VP for DNS Made Easy (IP Anycast Managed Enterprise DNS provider)
• Seth Breidbart, helped build the Pluribus IMP/TIP for the ARPANET
• Timothy McGinnis, co-chair of the African Network Information Center Policy Development Working Group, and active in various IETF Working Groups
• Richard Kulawiec, 30 years designing/operating academic/commercial/ISP systems and networks
• Larry Stewart, built the Etherphone at Xerox, the first telephone system working over a local area network; designed early e-commerce systems for the Internet at Open Market
• John Pettitt, Internet commerce pioneer, online since 1983, CEO Free Range Content Inc.; founder/CTO CyberSource & Beyond.com; created online fraud protection software that processes over 2 billion transaction a year
• Brandon Ross, Chief Network Architect and CEO of Network Utility Force LLC
• Chris Boyd, runs a green hosting company and supports EFF-Austin as a board member
• Dr. Richard Clayton, designer of Turnpike, widely used Windows-based Internet access suite; prominent Computer Security researcher at Cambridge University
• Robert Bonomi, designed, built, and implemented, the Internet presence for a number of large corporations
• Owen DeLong, member of the ARIN Advisory Council who has spent more than a decade developing better IP addressing policies for the internet in North America and around the world
• Baudouin Schombe, blog design and content trainer
• Lyndon Nerenberg, Creator of IMAP Binary extension (RFC 3516)
• John Gilmore, co-designed BOOTP (RFC 951), which became DHCP, the way you get an IP address when you plug into an Ethernet or get on a WiFi access point; current EFF board member
• John Bond, Systems Engineer at RIPE NCC maintaining AS25152 (k.root-servers.net.) and AS197000 (f.in-addr-servers.arpa. ,f.ip6-servers.arpa.); signing as a private citizen
• Stephen Farrell, co-author on about 15 RFCs
• Samuel Moats, senior systems engineer for the Department of Defense; helps build and defend the networks that deliver data to Defense Department users
• John Vittal, created the first full email client and the email standards still in use today
• Ryan Rawdon, built out and maintains the network infrastructure for a rapidly growing company in our country’s bustling advertising industry; was on the technical operations team for one of our country’s largest residential ISPs
• Brian Haberman, has been involved in the design of IPv6, IGMP/MLD, and NTP within the IETF for nearly 15 years
• Eric Tykwinski, Network Engineer working for a small ISP based in the Philadelphia region; currently maintains the network as well as the DNS and server infrastructure
• Noel Chiappa, has been working on the lowest level stuff (the IP protocol level) since 1977; name on the ‘Birth of the Internet’ plaque at Stanford); actively helping to develop new ‘plumbing’ at that level
• Robert M. Hinden, worked on the gateways in the early Internet, author of many of the core IPv6 specifications, active in the IETF since the first IETF meeting, author of 37 RFCs, and current Internet Society Board of Trustee member
• Alexander McKenzie, former member of the Network Working Group and participated in the design of the first ARPAnet Host protocols; was the manager of the ARPAnet Network Operation Center that kept the network running in the early 1970s; was a charter member of the International Network Working Group that developed the ideas used in TCP and IP
• Keith Moore, was on the Internet Engineering Steering Group from 1996-2000, as one of two Area Directors for applications; wrote or co-wrote technical specification RFCs associated with email, WWW, and IPv6 transition
• Guy Almes, led the connection of universities in Texas to the NSFnet during the late 1980s; served as Chief Engineer of Internet2 in the late 1990s
• David Mercer, formerly of The River Internet, provided service to more of Arizona than any local or national ISP
• Paul Timmins, designed and runs the multi-state network of a medium sized telephone and internet company in the Midwest
• Stephen L. Casner, led the working group that designed the Real-time Transport Protocol that carries the voice signals in VoIP systems
• Tim Rutherford, DNS and network administrator at C4
• Mike Alexander, helped implement (on the Michigan Terminal System at the University of Michigan) one of the first EMail systems to be connected to the Internet (and to its predecessors such as Bitnet, Mailnet, and UUCP); helped with the basic work to connect MTS to the Internet; implemented various IP related drivers on early Macintosh systems: one allowed TCP/IP connections over ISDN lines and another made a TCP connection look like a serial port
• John Klensin, Ph.D., early and ongoing role in the design of Internet applications and coordination and administrative policies
• L. Jean Camp, former Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, focusing on computer security; eight years at Harvard’s Kennedy School; tenured Professor at Indiana Unviersity’s School of Informatics with research addressing security in society.
• Louis Pouzin, designed and implemented the first computer network using datagrams (CYCLADES), from which TCP/IP was derived
• Carl Page, helped found eGroups, the biggest social network of its day, 14 million users at the point of sale to Yahoo for around $430,000,000, at which point it became Yahoo Groups
• Phil Lapsley, co-author of the Internet Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), RFC 977, and developer of the NNTP reference implementation
• Jack Haverty (MSEE, BSEE MIT 1970), Principal Investigator for several DARPA projects including the first Internet development and operation; Corporate Network Architect for BBN; Founding member of the IAB/ICCB; Internet Architect and Corporate Founding Member of W3C for Oracle Corporation
• Glenn Ricart, Managed the original (FIX) Internet interconnection point

That’s a lot of clout speaking out against these protection acts. The question is, will such a powerful piece of opposition work or will it fall on deaf ears? Is there anyone else you’d like to see on here that wasn’t? Let us know what you think.

The case involves a blogger named Leland Wolf, who operates a blog called It Makes Sense, and his use of a Denver Post photo in a parody. The photo showed a TSA agent performing a pat-down.

“In a pattern used in dozens of other cases, Righthaven created the lawsuit by first scouring the Internet for blogs and discussion forums that posted the photo, and then sued for infringement, claiming it had acquired the copyright of the photo before it started legal action,” says the EFF’s Rebecca Jeschke.

“As those following the Righthaven developments know, a critical document unearthed by EFF shows that the copyright assignments done in Righthaven lawsuits based on Las Vegas Journal Review content are a sham — a discovery that has led to the dismissal of six Righthaven suits in Nevada,” she continues. “In this case, Wolf’s lawyers found a similar agreement with Denver Post owner MediaNews Group. As EFF’s brief explains, the agreement makes any assignment of MNG copyrights to Righthaven — including its rights in the TSA photo, which Righthaven claimed were assigned to it — effectively meaningless. Copyright law does not permit non-owners to bring infringement actions; since Righthaven never became an owner, it had no business filing suit against Wolf or anyone else.”

Last month, Righthaven lost a case in Nevada against another blogger named Dean Mostofi, who used the full text of an article from the Las Vegas Review Journal, after the Judge determined that “the existence of federal jurisdiction ordinarily depends on the facts as they exist when the complaint was filed.”

In this case, Righthaven was trying to sue despite not having owned the rights at the time. They quickly turned around and filed the suit again, how having that ownership.

The EFF asked the judge to dismiss not only this particular case in its amicus brief, but many other related cases.

“Righthaven has filed 57 lawsuits based on the sham copyright assignment of the TSA photo, and the majority of those cases are still open in Colorado federal court,” says Jeschke. “The Colorado court stayed all the cases except Wolf. However, before the stay, over a third of the cases were settled, allowing Righthaven to extract revenue based on a copyright that it did not own. It’s well past time for Righthaven’s baseless litigation campaign to come to a decisive end.”

So far, Righthaven has shown no signs of letting up on its pursuance of mass litigation.

The ruling came in an appeal of Warshak v. United States, a case which is described by the EFF in the following manner:

EFF and other civil liberties groups filed an amicus brief in Warshak v. United States urging the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to hold that the government’s seizure of email without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment and federal privacy statutes, as well as the Justice Department’s own surveillance manual.

During its criminal investigation, the Department of Justice illegally ordered defendant Stephen Warshak’s email provider to prospectively "preserve" copies of his future emails, which the government later obtained using a subpoena and a non-probable cause court order. The government accomplished this "back door wiretap" by misusing the Stored Communications Act (SCA), which is only supposed to be used for obtaining emails already in storage with a provider.

According to the EFF, the ruling finds that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in email as with phone calls and postal mail. 

"Today’s decision is the only federal appellate decision currently on the books that squarely rules on this critically important privacy issue, an issue made all the more important by the fact that current federal law–in particular, the Stored Communications Act–allows the government to secretly obtain emails without a warrant in many situations," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston.

Bankston added that the EFF hopes the decision will "spur congress" to update the law.

In an open letter sent to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the coalition asks Facebook to close its "app gap" and allow users to decide which applications can access their personal data. The group also asks Facebook to make "instant personalization" an opt-in service and use an HTTPS connection for all interactions by default.

"Facebook continues to push its users into more and more public sharing — sharing that it’s not at all clear members want or fully understand," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston.

"We’re calling on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg to respect their members and give them the information and the tools they need for true control."

The EFF says Facebook made some important privacy improvements last month, but key aspects of user control were not covered by the changes.

"Social network service providers are in a unique position — hosting communications, conversations, and connections with loved ones, family, and friends," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl.

"This is extremely sensitive information, and social networking services must ensure that users have ongoing privacy and control."

In addition to EFF and the ACLU of Northern California, other groups signing the open letter include the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, Consumer Watchdog, Privacy Lives, and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
 

The goal of the EFF’s "TOSBacK" is to give users a real-time feed of changes and updates to more than three-dozen policies from the Internet’s most popular online services. Clicking on an update displays a side-by-side before-and-after comparison on what has been added and removed from the policy.

"Terms of service form the foundation of your relationship with social networking sites, online businesses, and other Internet communities, but most people become aware of these terms only when there’s a problem," said EFF Activism and Technology Manager Tim Jones.

"We created TOSBack to help consumers monitor terms of service for the websites they use everyday, and show how the terms change over time."

Fred von Lohmann

The issue of terms-of-service changes surfaced earlier this year when Facebook revised its terms of use. Some Facebook users were concerned that the change gave the popular social network the right to use members’ content indefinitely. After users complained, Facebook said it would revert to its former terms while it worked through the concerns of its users.

"Some changes to terms of service are good for consumers, and some are bad," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann.

"But Internet users are increasingly trusting websites with everything from their photos to their ‘friends lists’ to their calendar — and sometimes even their medical information. TOSBack will help consumers flag changes in the websites they use every day and trust with their personal information."