oops! not posted in a while.... ah well. anyway, i found this little gem and it reminded me of something i read a while back.

it appears that the us government is helping iranian citizens by-pass the internet filters put in place by their government. it's sponsoring anonymizer to create an iranian only proxy that will allow people to access sites that are otherwise illegal in iran. (story)

now this is all very good and i'm all for the free flow of information. it does however leave a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth when you consider america's opinion of other countries that allow online activity that is against us laws. for example, what about poor old Dmitry Sklyarov? for those of you who don't know his story, it goes something like this...

Dmitry writes a program in russia that allows the protection for adobe ebooks to be circumvented. "the software only works on legitimately purchased ebooks. it has been used by blind people to read otherwise-inaccessible PDF user's manuals, and by people who want to move an ebook from one computer to another."* this software is published by a russian company and sold from a website NOT hosted in the us. Dmitry then comes to the us and is arrested for "trafficking in a copyright circumvention device" under the shitty DMCA law. now the problem with this is that the software was written and published in russia, where this kind of software is not only legal, but is also required to adhere to 'fair use' clauses in their copyright.

thankfully he is now home in russia.. with certain agreements in place. this however is only one example of the usa enforcing its laws across the world, without the correct respect of the laws in other countries.

the problem is that "current and in-progress laws in the usa have made it illegal for people in other countries to publish certain kinds of information and computer programs to the usa."* which obviously means that "because of this us law, either the rest of the world would have to stop publishing perfectly legal information and software, or this information needs to be published only to the rest of the world, and not to the usa."*

so it's fine for the usa to decide that iranian law can be ignored and provide ways for iranian people to circumvent filtering, but it's not ok for other countries to carry out perfectly legal activities, in their own countries, not directly involving the us. i'm glad that's good and clear...

surely it's far worse for a government to directly market a service to people of another country, for the one and only purpose of circumventing that country's laws, than it is to program and release software in another country that allows people of that country to perform a task that they are legally entitled to do.

double standard anyone?

posted by the fifth at  18:17 -