[Marxism] "Eyes on the Prize" torrents offline

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

        Well, the lawyers have intervened, and Downhill Battle has taken
down the .torrent files for the first three parts of the acclaimed civil
rights documentary Eyes on the Prize and the credits, all that had been made
available so far. Not only the visible links are gone, but the files, too
(yes, I did think to save the links to the .torrent files themselves, but
they don't work.) 

        That the .torrent files, which connect you to people sharing the
material, are also inaccessible makes sense because the *tracker* is also
down, it went down as of 4 PM Eastern. The tracker is an essential part of
the bit torrent downloading protocol that connects someone new to a
downloading "swarm."

        Given U.S. law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the downhill
battle folks probably had no option, for their service provider would have
been obligated to take their site off line if they refused. All it takes is
an email from someone who claims to represent someone who claims to own some
copyrighted work that they claim they imagine is being offered by your site.
They don't even need to *check* whether it really is the work, all it takes
is a "good faith" belief on their part, i.e., a cynical bad faith
calculation, since mostly we're dealing with corporations here.

        In the instant case, I don't see how any copyright owner has any
basis for complaint at all. The work, despite multiple awards and praise as
the best documentary on the civil rights movement ever, has nevertheless
been *abandoned* for all practical purposes. Perhaps "because" and not
"despite" would be more appropriate here: for that is the truth. But at any
rate, it is not in commercial distribution, nor has it been for a decade or
more, nor were there any plans to make it available in the future. 

        The company that "owns" it is non-functional in relation to this
series. The person behind it, who made the documentaries, died and it was
inherited by relatives with apparently no interest or capacity to operate in
this field.

        Thus we are left with Eyes on the Prize not as an object of
commerce, but simply as a record of the civil rights movement and a comment
and statement on these issues, in other words, pure speech and, according to
countless Supreme and lower court decisions, the very kind of speech that is
most categorically and absolutely protected by the Constitution, political
speech on a controversial subject.

        Thus, for example, the famous Times v. Sullivan decision in the
Pentagon Papers case. The court ruled then precisely because it was
political speech, any prior censorship was verboten. Perhaps if it was a
matter of printing departure times of troop transport ships during an actual
war when enemy subs were known to be operating off the coast, THEN that
might be subject to prior censorship, but nothing short of that.

        The court ruled that it may well be true that the Times was acting
illegally, and all its folks might go to prison for printing classified
documents, but the government was powerless to prevent their publication
even if it was a treasonous act, preventing publication was beyond the pale
under the first amendment, so absolute is its protection for political
speech on controversial subjects. 

        Or was.

        Because you just have to compare that to the instant case, where
without a hearing, without motions before a judge, without even a factual
determination that these ARE indeed the copyrighted materials, without a
balancing between the (in this case non-existent) commercial interest of the
owners and the public interest in unfettered and robust political debate
(which the courts *claim* to uphold), without even requiring the complaining
party to at least certify that they verified that this is the infringing
material, without as much as requiring the formality that the work be
registered with the copyright office, through an email, bourgeois lawyers
are allowed to knock anything off the internet --anything at all-- that's
within the reach of U.S. law.

        Nor can it be claimed that the commercial interest of holders of the
copyrights are being damaged. They receive absolutely no licensing income
from this material now, its distribution, if anything, enhances the value of
their archive by reviving interest in that epoch. There can be no claim made
that this distribution undercuts sale of "legal" copies of the work for
there are no such legal copies for sale: an utterly extraordinary
circumstance when one considers this is one of the most highly praised
documentaries ever made on which fell a monsoon of awards.

        What we're seeing here is that it is not speech that is protected
but speakers; some but not all. When the New York Times published the
Pentagon Papers, only the bourgeoisie, or, by way of exception, significant
organizations of working people, but tightly regulated by the capitalist
state and mostly under its control, had the capacity to reach thousands or
millions with a message. 

        Today regular working people, the kind of people who were the
protagonists of the struggles that Eyes on the Prize documents, have a
qualitatively greater capacity to produce copies and distribute them on the
sort of scale that previously was available only to the bourgeoisie. 

        Which proves once against that American freedoms are bourgeois
freedoms, freedoms for the capitalist class, and working people have to
fight every inch of the way to access those same freedoms. 

        This is clearly and classically a case of freedom of the press.
Traditionally the joke is that freedom of the press is for those who own
one. And that is true enough.

        But now that we, regular people, also own "a press" especially by
acting collectively through empowering technologies like P2P networks, the
rules get rewritten. And the situation congress and the copyright cartels
have set up is that any bourgeois with a lawyer can shut down these new
tools. And that is precisely because they extend freedom of the press to
significant layers of working people.

        Did I say shut down? I said too much. They can TRY. But we can, and
should, fight back.

        The first step is a practical and immediate one: to keep the
downloading swarms going. 

        If I understand the protocol correctly, these .torrent files will
not work now without their tracker, but those who have *begun* downloading
and therefore are in touch with other clients should be able to continue,
provided they do not interrupt the transfer. It is important that as many
people as possible get copies of what has been made available. This means
not shutting down the client once your download is complete, but leaving it
up until others also finish getting the files. Inevitably the swarm is going
to decline with no new people joining, speeds will slow. Let's make sure it
gets out as much as possible.

        Given what has happened, it is unfortunate that the "Common Sense
Culture releasers" who are given credit by Downhill Battle for digitizing
and making available the actual files of the documentary did not release
them all at once. (Downhill Battle's role through use of the bit torrent
protocol was simply to put those who had the files in touch with those who
wanted them; the actual files were not on their server). 

        Given that U.S. copyright cartel bloodhounds have their eyes on this
prize, it is probably futile for people within the reach of U.S. lawyers to
try to put up new trackers and create a torrent file for people to use to
start the download, which I think is dependent on where the tracker is on
the Internet. That is likely to lead to fragmented, inefficient micro-swarms
and incomplete transfers and even possible victimizations.

        But I wouldn't be surprised to find new torrents for these files
showing up on sites that can operate a tracker beyond the reach of U.S.
lawyers, and of course they can also wind up being shared on emule/edonkey
and even the FastTrack (Kazaa) network. And presumably the Common Sense
Culture releasers will facilitate getting the rest of the episodes onto file
sharing networks.

        The lawyers may think they have won this one by forcing downhill
battle to retreat; but I'm willing to bet there's a world of people on the
Internet that will have the last say on this matter.

        Which reminds me of the very colorful response of thepiratebay.org,
a Swedish file sharing portal, to a DMCA takedown notice sent on behalf of
Dreamworks for a "Shrek" tracker:

*  *  *

As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States
of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it
out by now, US law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law
is being violated.

Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium,
will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for sending
frivolous legal threats.

It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are f******* morons, and
that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.

Please also note that your e-mail and letter will be published in full on
http://www.thepiratebay.org.

Go f*** yourself.

Polite as usual,
anakata

*  *  * 

        In the medium term, work is ongoing on a reworking of the bit
torrent protocol so that the functions now played by the fixed web torrent
web sites, which are an easy target, can become a distributed function of
the file sharing network itself, much like the shift from Napster to
gnutella. The first program that claims is a proprietary software,
spyware-infested abomination, but never mind, hackers will soon fix those
problems if the developers themselves don't, provided the implementation is
any good.

        There are also a couple of relatively new anonymizing P2P apps out
there, not the impossible-to-use freenet, but more accessible protocols. And
although the anonymizing carries a price in terms of the efficiency of
transfers, the more the forces of censorship push, the more people will turn
to and developers perfect this sort of software. 

Joaquín


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