The coming robot apocalypse

Ironically, one of those events involved a science fiction convention — arguably the most important one on the genre's annual calendar. As Neil Gaiman took the stage to accept a Hugo award at WorldCon, an automated copyright enforcement system at UStream disconnected the network feed, claiming that copyrights were being infringed. That turns out not to be the case; the offending Dr. Who segments had been provided by the studio for the purpose of being run before the talk, but the robot involved was not interested in such details. Remote fans who wanted to watch the live stream were denied the privilege in the name of protecting copyright.

Shortly after that, the national convention of the US Democratic party was hit by a similar episode; Mars lander footage has also been denounced by the robots in the past. Perhaps more importantly, there is a growing list of people who lack the prominence of a major author, politician, or interplanetary probe who have run into similar difficulties. Needless to say, these lower-profile publishers tend to have a harder time drawing attention to the problem or getting it fixed. Increasingly, the right to publish is subject to the will of anonymous, semi-autonomous software that is given veto power over any material it does not like. This does not seem like a viable path toward greater freedom.

The free software community, arguably, does not pay as much attention to copyright issues as it should. Copyright infringement is relatively easy to avoid while developing software, and, as the SCO Group so kindly made clear to the world, we are quite good at avoiding infringement. Related issues, like ever-lengthening copyright terms, are mostly of academic interest; whether coverage lasts for 50 or 70 years (or longer), it is hard to imagine that today's software will be of much interest when it finally makes its way into the public domain. So it is natural for us to worry about things that look like more immediate threats: software patents or new init systems, for example.

But the rise of autonomous enforcement bots raises a whole new set of threats. If there is anything that is clear about the "intellectual property" industry, it is that industry's willingness to use every tool and technique available — and to try to force others into doing the same. UStream almost certainly did not set out to be a copyright enforcer as part of its business plan; that role was forced upon it by the entertainment industry. There has been great pressure on internet service providers to do the same. It is not hard to imagine aggressive enforcement bots moving outward from the source of traffic (UStream or YouTube, say) into the transmission path and, eventually, into the endpoints where content is consumed.

It is also not hard to imagine that, as these bots spread across the network, their mission will expand as well. Why be satisfied with interfering with video distribution when there is so much more that could be done? Certainly these bots could be charged with stopping anything that looks like a "circumvention tool" — jailbreak kits or alternative images for locked-down phone handsets, for example. Software that has been deemed to infringe somebody's patents — Android, say — could be blocked. Electronic book readers already phone home with their users' reading habits; it would not be hard at all to block access to reading material that lacks a commercial paper trail or that offends whatever powers are in charge in any given area.

Much of the infrastructure for this kind of regime already exists. There is monitoring software for central nodes, and DRM-enforcement systems for the end nodes. And if your particular system lacks the appropriate hooks, there are companies like FinFisher that are happy to put monitoring and control software in place without concern for niceties like whether the user actually wants it.

In other words, there is little that is new about what is going on except, perhaps, the increasing role of autonomous software agents. These bots have little concern for issues like authorized use, much less fringe details like fair use or inappropriate copyright claims. Their use is on the increase; more stories of ridiculous bot-driven shutdowns in the future seem certain. It may not be the robot apocalypse, but it sure looks like the beginning of a large amount of robot-driven obnoxiousness at the very least.

Naturally, free software can help. We need not implement interfaces for the use of our robot overlords in our software; indeed, we have shown little interest in doing that in the past. When combined with true control over our hardware, free software can, at least, give us some assurance that our endpoints are not acting against our interests. Control over the hardware is far from guaranteed, but the situation could have been far worse than it actually is at the present. With luck and continued attention and pressure, we may be able to avoid a completely locked-down world.

Fixing the rest of the system will be harder. It is time to pay more attention to the copyright maximalist agenda and push back. Fair use rights must be asserted where they exist and created where they don't. The business concerns of the entertainment industry should not drive the design of our systems, our networks, and our international agreements. Perhaps there should be penalties for false assertions of copyright. And so on.

The free software community interacts deeply with the copyright system. We make full use of it in our software licenses; even permissive licenses have requirements that are backed up by copyright law. But the system we use to ensure the freedom of our software can also take away our freedom on other fronts if we do not pay attention. A world where our right to express ourselves is moderated by somebody else's software — usually very proprietary software — is not what we have been working for.