U.S. Copyright Surveillance Machine About To Be Switched On, Promises Of Transparency Already Broken

The "Copyright Alert System" – an elaborate combination of surveillance, warnings, punishments, and "education" directed at customers of most major U.S. Internet service providers – is poised to launch in the next few weeks, as has been widely reported. The problems with it are legion.  Big media companies are launching a massive peer-to-peer surveillance scheme to snoop on subscribers. Based on the results of that snooping, ISPs will be serving as Hollywood’s private enforcement arm, without the checks and balances public enforcement requires. Once a subscriber is accused, she must prove her innocence, without many of the legal defenses she’d have in a courtroom. The "educational" materials posted for subscribers thus far look more like propaganda, slanted towards major entertainment companies' view of copyright. And all of this was set up with the encouragement and endorsement of the U.S. government.

One of the mechanisms that was supposed to ensure some degree of fairness was independent auditing of the P2P surveillance methods used to identify alleged infringers, and of the ISPs' procedures for matching Internet Protocol addresses to actual humans. But last month, the group set up to oversee the system - the Center for Copyright Information - revealed that its "independent" reviewer was Stroz Friedberg, a lobbying firm that represented the Recording Industry Association of America in the halls of Congress from 2004 to 2009. Needless to say, RIAA's former lobbying firm is hardly an "independent" reviewer. And CCI could have discovered the relationship between Stroz and the RIAA – it’s on the public record, in reports that lobbyists must file with Congress every year.

It gets worse. In response to criticism of this obvious conflict of interest, CCI acknowledged that "[r]ecent reports that a former employee of Stroz Friedberg lobbied several years ago on behalf of RIAA on matters unrelated to CCI have raised questions" about the group's impartiality.  In the name of “maintaining transparency,” CCI released the Stroz report to the public last week...