From the start copyright and anti money laundering laws have very different intents and act upon very different subjects. Avoiding money laundering is a laudable goal, while avoid the dissemination of information is not clearly so.
Yes, anonymous payment systems are something interesting, and it may be that societies should let them flourish (I'm very ambivalent on this). But they are not on the same league as free communication systems.
>Avoiding money laundering is a laudable goal, while avoid the dissemination of information is not clearly so.
You're not comparing apples to apples. The goal of money laundering laws is to make it harder to profit from crimes, achieved by the means of e.g. violating financial privacy.
The goal of copyright laws is not to "prevent dissemination of information" but to encourage better intellectual works by granting their creators temporary control of them; this is achieved by the means of restricting some kinds of copying.
Both intents are noble; to characterize the goal of copyright law as "preventing the dissemination of information" is the wrong comparison.
Original copyright law expired after so many years to fall into the public domain so others could use it and it made copyright holders invent new copyrights to encourage better intellectual works.
Only Mickey Mouse was set to expire so Disney had the laws changed. The same with Time Warner aka DC Comics and Superman. So other companies can't use them as they will never fall into the public domain.
That's a bit parochial --- I guess you are talking about the origin of copyright law in the US? The world is older than that country. Copyright law has its origins in censorship and rent seeking.
The biggest change happend in the 80s, when USA signed the Bern convention on copyright.
Note btw that said convention was called to merge two systems of copyright. The English, and the "continental" (French).
The English system was basically what the US system copied back in the day. It was mainly focused on the economic aspect and thus had a "short" duration.
The French concept on the other hand, "rights of the author", was more focused on the reputation of the author, and thus had a long time frame (life of author+x years). It was about giving the author the ability to say "no you can't use my creation in your political campaign".
Frankly, if i am to speculate, i would claim that USA stayed out of these conventions as long as it was importer rather than exporter.
> It was about giving the author the ability to say "no you can't use my creation in your political campaign".
Which is why the modern US system is extreme nonsense. Political speech is protected under the First Amendment and that kind of use is basically the purpose of fair use, but we still have century+ copyright terms.
Free Speech only protects you from the government, not other people and corporations and colleges, etc. Internet companies can ban you or shut down your account or censor you if they don't like your speech.
Try posting opinions that go against what the majority believe and see what happens.
It is more than just copyright. I remember some politicians tried to use songs for their campaigns to have the artists complain because they didn't support the politician.
> Free Speech only protects you from the government, not other people and corporations and colleges, etc. Internet companies can ban you or shut down your account or censor you if they don't like your speech.
"Internet companies" can't ban you from the internet, only from their own sites. You can make your own site and they have nothing to say about what you put on it. They can't control what you say, only where you say it. Which isn't nothing, but it's definitely a different thing than copyright, where they can control what you can say regardless of where you say it.
> I remember some politicians tried to use songs for their campaigns to have the artists complain because they didn't support the politician.
But that kind of sorts itself out by itself then, doesn't it? If you use an artist's work you're giving them the stage. If they hate you, they're going to step out onto that stage and denounce you with everybody watching. If stupid politicians want to self-immolate like that then let them and there will be fewer stupid politicians.
Yeah, it was just a nitpick to clarify means and ends. I think the means and the ends need to be acceptable in any endeavor, one never justifies the other. But at the same time, one never disqualifies the other.
Your point wasn't a nitpick. It is crucial to get the structures right, because otherwise the status quo easily hides behind non-obvious circular reasoning.
It's almost like, oh I don't know, a balance of consumer and business interests and input would lead to more acceptable outcomes for everyone, when drawing up policy, as opposed to shutting one side out of the discussion completely.
Hum, no, modern copyright laws do not have have the intent of encouraging better intellectual works. Politicians may claim this intent on some countries to deceive the population, but it is obvious by their format that they were not created for that goal.
Anti money laundering laws vary a lot in quality, and some of them do have the goal of catching criminals.
The clause in the US Constitution that gives Congress the power to create copyright laws says
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The original intent is actually written into the Constitution.
It might not be the goal that they serve in practice, but if you ask a random person why they think some sort of copyright is a good idea, provided that they do think that, uh,
actually nevermind a fair number of them will probably talk about the rights of the creator of the work instead. Hm.
Different people have different goals for the laws. For a sane comparison, you should look at the most laudable goals, otherwise it's going to be a fruitless discussion, trying to divine the "real" reason behind copyright laws.
For a sane comparison, you should look at the most laudable goals
I don't think this is self evident. One cannot understand the current state of copyright without also understanding the less than laudable goals of some of the media conglomerates.
> Different people have different goals for the laws. For a sane comparison, you should look at the most laudable goals
I couldn't disagree more. This makes you a simpleton who's excessively vulnerable to baptists-and-bootleggers type efforts. Don't ever support legislation (or anything else!) because it's labeled with a goal; attaching a goal to something is free.
For a sane view of laws, you should look at the effects. What people say they want the law to do just isn't relevant compared to what it actually does.
> The goal of copyright laws is not to "prevent dissemination of information" but to encourage better intellectual works by granting their creators temporary control of them
We know that copyright systems originate in efforts by the state to prevent publications from being disseminated freely. This is all part of the same political impulse that made private organizations such as volunteer firemen illegal -- if you let people assemble and speak to each other, who knows what might happen.
So you've stumbled into the interesting question "if we create a system to promote goal X, but later decide we can't endorse X and relabel the system as promoting goal Y (without making non-cosmetic changes to the system), what is that system's goal?"
It's like the Ship of Theseus for organizations. It's not really crazy to argue that the goal is still X.
(As to this particular case, I don't believe that the US government is particularly interested in using copyright to prevent stuff from getting published. But I do think the people saying "the goal of copyright is to prevent certain things from being published" have a reasonable argument that deserves more than just an offhand dismissal.)
> As to this particular case, I don't believe that the US government is particularly interested in using copyright to prevent stuff from getting published.
There is a fair argument to be made that the companies who induce the government to enact excessive copyright terms do want exactly that, because competition with more public domain works would reduce the margins on works still under copyright (supply and demand).
It also allows those companies to more effectively censor unflattering parts of their own history, e.g. Disney's Song of the South.
Money laundering laws require your driver's license number when transfering accounts to verify who you are. They discriminate against those who can't get a license for some reason.
Copyright laws get rid of fair use by DMCA takedown notices of any material that has even a small bit of copyrighted material even if it was nonprofit or educational or parody and covered under fair use.
Why is avoiding "money laundering" (whose modern legal incarnation can apparently be trace to the misguided days of Prohibition) a laudable goal? As far as I can see, the concept amounts to inventing a new crime to force third parties such as banks to help law enforcement do its job of preventing and/or punishing actual crimes. In doing so, it undermines the fungibility of money, makes the financial system more costly / less efficient, and leads to systematic persecution of and inconvenience for people innocent of any crime (e.g. those who get into legal hot water for "structuring transactions").
It isn't about the anonymous payment parts, it is about the restrictive terms anti-laundering laws force upon any form of currency, in a time when we are trying to push the boundaries of what "currency" or "money" should even mean.
We cannot achieve the potential of technology in the scope of economics if this entire aspect of market cannot be explored because of archaic laws mostly made as draconian as they are to complement a war on drugs that is even more draconian.
That would be an interesting challenge to the money laundering laws. Suppose you want to fund anti-bank political speech and you fear unlawful retaliation from financial institutions if they know who is funding it.
Does anybody know if that has ever been tried in court?
The premise of the article is interesting though a little bit of a stretch. Personally I've had some exposure to AML/KYC training for Kraken's implementation (~5% of global Bitcoin/conventional financial system exchange volume at last estimate).
AML and KYC operate under a simple premise: if you don't comply, the government in a given jurisdiction fines you heavily and/or removes your license to operate. In practice, we've seen only 'slap on the wrist' (eg. for the recent case of HSBC laundering cartel money).
The only way this works on a global basis is that the US goes around bullying different countries in to theoretically agreeing to comply, because terrorism blahblah. Enforcement in reality is weak to nonexistant: basically other than looking at SWIFT traffic and extrapolating what they believe 'should' have been reported (definitions are pretty vague in many cases), the US has no real way to check on financial institutions.
Since basically the top 5-10% of capital holders routinely minimize tax (launder money) and much of the developing world's capital is illegally exported to western banks (Africa, China, etc.) and nobody blinks an eye, the system as it stands could be said to actively encourage a fiscal divide based upon selective enforcement.
To put it simply, money under any premise of central control acts as a purveyor of political will. Personally, I have been extremely impressed at the efficacy with which the US has threatened various Bitcoin/conventional financial sysytem exchange operators in to complying, but simultaneously deeply disappointed at the resulting enhancement of status quo.
Instead of the article's premise, I would posit the question: shouldn't high barriers to financial institution licensing be the real target here? Reporting is already arbitrary and vague, and somewhat useless to the government compared to pre-existing SWIFT surveillance.
I don't really get the article's point on bitcoin and AML/CTF. The legislation works by requiring financial institutions to bind real-world identities to accounts, at the point of registration. Many bitcoin exchanges comply with this in the same way banks do: they do the required ID check if you want to set up an account (or when you want to transact in non-trivial volumes).
Most of the reporting under AML/CTF laws is automated, as there are a bunch of 'automatically report' rules like:
- Any transaction over $10,000
- Any transfer involving a foreign bank account, regardless of the amount
The manual reports are much rarer, and rely more on things like bank teller judgment. Essentially they'll report 'structured' transactions that seem designed to avoid triggering the 'automatic reporting' rules (e.g. someone depositing $9,999 5 days in a row).
Of course there are tonnes of holes in AML/CTF, even for conventional financial systems. For instance, if you want to transfer your money to a tax haven, you first route the money through some non-suspicious country. Even if that country has a data sharing agreement with the US, it's much harder for investigators to follow the trail. It's hard enough to get two bureaucrats from different departments to co-operate/co-ordinate. It's orders of magnitude harder to achieve this across borders.
My point is this: yes bitcoin allows you to use a tumbling service, or coin join, or whatever to sever the link between your transactions and your identity. But this is also easy enough to do with conventional financial systems. I don't think bitcoin has some special property here that presents any kind of new problem for AML/CTF.
Perhaps the more relevant issue, which has nothing to do with bitcoin, is that there are fairly trivial ways to avoid detection via AML/CTF laws, regardless of your chosen medium of exchange. So the laws tend only to catch the less sophisticated money launders/tax cheats.
Bitcoin doesn't pose any new questions, but the existing ones are still worth answering: is the additional regulatory impost on financial institutions worth the compliance gains from AML/CTF reporting? If the answer is 'no', then perhaps we should just do away with them entirely.
I think you wrote down a list of facts and anecdotes that are valuable, but you need to proof-read your work or collaborate with a greater intellect to make a coherent point, maybe Eben Moglen?
In another words totalitarian governments should be reformed. Laws did not come into existence on their own. They were implemented by governments that don't respect the will of the people.
It may surprise you to hear that most citizens do not care about privacy, and actually support government surveillance, for a variety of reasons. If you want a simple gauge of whether the public supports a measure without wanting to read through polls, just look for a signing ceremony, and the date of passage. Unpopular or politically risky things (like releasing Hillary Clinton's e-mails) are done just before major holidays or events, and popular measures are enacted Monday-Wednesday on a quiet week (, whereas the largest group of Clinton's e-mails were released the day before the Super Bowl).
Pew Research states that "A majority of Americans (54%) disapprove of the U.S. government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts".[1]
So, right off the bat, we know that most people care about privacy. And maybe this meme that so many people are uncaring or ignorant about privacy will eventually die.
Interesting thing about all these polls, it's not split on party lines. The two major parties (and independents as well) are divided about whether they favor or oppose it.
This is a snapshot, when the issue has been brought to the fore; if you look at the historical data, it appears that people were more comfortable with continuous monitoring and intrusions in the past, and that they will again become more comfortable with it in the future.
They were fine with it until they realized their private pictures and everything else belonging to them on the web were accessible to the government. In other words, no one cared until they were made to care. No one knew the government was watching, and people who thought they were had no evidence.
But that's tangential to the fact that a statistic has poked a hole through your argument about today's day and age, for which you haven't provided a counterargument. Is there a logical reason you think that people "will again become more comfortable with it" or is it just a hunch?
I'm tired of the nonsense and FUD surrounding American attitudes towards privacy.
I actually looked up the Pew polling data before posting. You found a contradictory point, but not a solid case. Look at the public's reactions to the 'Echelon' program for instance, and you will see their revulsion is ephemeral. In addition, the average citizen is against general surveillance, but in favor of suspect surveillance (as you will find if you look at the data a little more closely). The only way this works is to have backdoors, which everyone here knows are flawed.
Or in other words: People always see themselves as good, then naively assume that therefore everyone else does, too, and that therefore obviously nobody would want to watch them, and therefore agree that surveillance of bad people is ok, as it couldn't possibly ever affect themselves. People generally aren't actually ok with surveillance, but rather they don't understand the dynamics of surveillance and thus ultimately don't actually understand the question they are answering in such a poll.
That is a lie. Targeted surveillance is easy if you can justify spending more resources per person than would be economical for mass surveillance. Because you don't need their own device to do the surveillance, you can use your device. Put a bug where the suspect is. You'll get surveillance of them entering their passphrase and then you can decrypt their device with it. No backdoor required.
The Apple case is bizarre because the suspect is dead. Normally you don't investigate the dead because it's hard for the government to punish them.
This is the kind of discourse I was looking for! Is there anywhere I can read about the public's reactions to Echelon?
And in terms of suspect surveillance, do you mean terrorist suspects? While it is true that most Americans are okay with terrorist surveillance (e.g. 64% think it's acceptable, ibid.) I don't think that equates with supporting blanket 4th-amendment-breaking government surveillance on US citizens.
I think other than a minority, the majority in the US that consume digital goods are willing to not respect copyright when acquiring them, so they don't care about copyright much more so and then don't wish to be prosecuted for it. In fact you will have a very hard time finding majority support for prosecution of copyright violation. In terms of money laundering most Americans don't care for their finances to be constantly monitored, and will not support such policies.
Surveillance and privacy are a different issue, because it's not really possible to properly frame it in terms of most American's activities. You can frame it as a way to get drug dealers, junkies, the terrorists. So obviously when you put it that way you can get support.
>In fact you will have a very hard time finding majority support for persecution of copyright violation.
I think it's a little more nuanced than that. Most people might not support criminal prosecution for individuals downloading movies, but I think a majority would definitely support prosecuting someone that made thousands of dollars from copyright infringement.
Why do we keep assuming that people don’t care about privacy? Perhaps they care just not the way we do because we’re more informed. The average user doesn’t have the technical background to realize how companies are monitoring him online, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that if he knew he wouldn’t give a damn. From another point of view perhaps the main reason a great part of society is skeptical towards technology could be exactly because they fear it could steal away their privacy.
I think just about everybody cares about privacy, but many care about it so differently that it looks a lot like not caring.
A lot of it comes down to essentially having faith in law enforcement. Basically, "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." Nobody wants to be watched while they get dressed or use the toilet, but government surveillance is looking for criminal activity. People don't mind it, because they're not criminals.
Another big chunk is what I'd call theoretical versus practical privacy. The NSA is capturing all our phone calls and internet activity. Us techies typically see this as a massive invasion of privacy, because NSA employees might be looking through all our stuff. I think the average man on the street does not see it as a massive invasion of privacy, because NSA employees probably aren't looking through all of their stuff, as they have more important stuff to do.
And then there's just the question of tradeoffs. We usually see government surveillance as a huge invasion of privacy with little if any benefit. Lots of people see it as a minor invasion of privacy with a huge law-and-order benefit.
I think just about everybody cares about privacy, but that doesn't necessarily translate into opposing government surveillance.
People don't mind it, because they're not criminals.
This should be called the "other people" fallacy, the idea that bad things only happen to someone else. Similar to the just world fallacy. How could we get people to understand these fallacies?
probably aren't looking through all of their stuff
We understand that the risks are not just from humans creeping on us, but also inscrutable secret algorithms monitoring and/or influencing people in ways we may not agree with. Also, potential abuse just about as important as actual abuse, since we don't know who will have access in the future.
minor invasion of privacy with a huge law-and-order benefit.
Maybe this can be countered by demanding numbers, with documentation backing up the numbers. How many crimes were solved, or terrorist plots foiled, by invading our privacy, that could not have been solved otherwise? And even if that number is significantly greater than zero, what is the societal cost, and is that societal cost justified by the numbers?
Is your "other people" fallacy actually a fallacy?
I mean, if the authorities really are just looking for criminals, and you really are not a criminal, then it doesn't seem to me that this reasoning is fallacious at all.
Where it falls down is when the authorities overreach and go after non-criminals, or when "criminal" gets so broadly defined that everybody qualifies when the authorities want them to.
> Where it falls down is when the authorities overreach
Which in practice, in the west doesn't happen that often (to people who live there - I am not considering drone strikes etc for now).
The concerns about what the NSA are doing are serious, real and I fully share them. But I will happily admit that it is hard to convince someone who doesn't care at the moment, because
a) Everything done with the data is secret, so giving people examples of abuses is hard.
b) The worst problems are mostly what could happen rather than what is happening.
Even Edward Snowden called it "turn-key totalitarianism", that is, there's huge potential but the US is not yet a totalitarian state.
Of course the problem is, if one day the problems caused by massive automated surveillance are so clear that everyone dislikes it, almost by definition it'll be too late.
I must confess that I don't find the (b) arguments very convincing. I generally oppose these mass surveillance programs, but just on principle and because they seem like a massive waste of resources.
The notion of "turn-key totalitarianism" just doesn't make much sense to me. Let's say the US elected Hitler II. (Hitler Jr.?) With the current situation, he could turn the NSA surveillance apparatus into a method of control. In a world where the government didn't have these mass surveillance capabilities, then he couldn't. Except I imagine the first thing he'd do would be to build them. So we'd get, what, a year or two under a totalitarian regime without mass surveillance, then we're back where we'd be anyway. Yay?
It feels a lot like the gun nuts' argument that the Second Amendment exists so we can overthrow the government if it turns tyrannical. It's planning for failure, and it won't work anyway. Much better to concentrate on getting good people into political office, and keeping the system itself in good shape so that bad people can't fuck it up too much.
"He'd just build them" is a huge stretch. Remember who we're dealing with here - guys like Trump are not technology experts and do not really have any conception of what's possible, until the tech guys actually build it and say, hey, check this out. We can hack every phone in the USA and turn its microphone on remotely.
or when "criminal" gets so broadly defined that everybody qualifies when the authorities want them to.
Right, this is the scenario I was trying to suggest. And as someone who has had some above median but still indirect involvement with politics in the past, I have to worry about the probability of this going up with proximity to people planning on running for office, or journalists, etc.
From the start copyright and anti money laundering laws have very different intents and act upon very different subjects. Avoiding money laundering is a laudable goal, while avoid the dissemination of information is not clearly so.
Yes, anonymous payment systems are something interesting, and it may be that societies should let them flourish (I'm very ambivalent on this). But they are not on the same league as free communication systems.