People protesting SOPA

The web community and political activists fighting for less draconian copyright laws have seized the opportunity afforded to them by the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act in the U.S. Congress to go after a bigger topic, the exportation of SOPA-style laws abroad. These laws, which include the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which opponents have dubbed ACTA 2.0, are in the news lately.

These agreements are problematic, not just because of their content, but because they are negotiated in secret, and in the case of ACTA, were pushed through without event getting ratified by the Senate, holding the U.S. to international laws that never ever went through Congress. In this way, SOPA-style provisions might find their way into the U.S. But before we wade into the morass of intellectual property protection agreement, let’s just get some basic vocabulary down.

What the what?

ACTA: ACTA is an international trade agreement that criminalizes intellectual property theft across borders. Its targets are both those counterfeiting physical goods as well as folks pirating digital content. The U.S. signed it in 2010 along with six other nations, including Japan and Canada. Last week ACTA was in the news as the EU and Poland signed the treaty as well, much to the dismay of some of their citizens and politicians. Other countries have until March of next year to join — and trade groups representing the content industry would dearly like everyone to join.

SOPA/PIPA: The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act were companion bills that were proposed last year in the House and Senate respectively. As of last week, they have been shelved thanks to a massive online and offline protest spearheaded by web giants and communities such as Wikipedia and Reddit.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (or ACTA 2.0): The TPP is currently being negotiated in Los Angles as a wide-reaching trade agreement between Singapore, Chile, New Zealand, Brunei, Australia, Peru, Vietnam, and the United States. It includes provisions about everything from labor conditions to tariffs, but it also has provisions on intellectual property, which have caught the eye of consumer-rights groups.

The theme here is behind closed doors.

Psst, let's negotiate a trade agreement.

However, a big issue with all of these agreements are not just the provisions– it’s the fact that the negotiation of these provisions and the treaties occur in secret. Like a VC Andrews novel (ACTA in the Attic?) all sorts of nasty things can occur when people negotiate behind closed doors, and those attacking such laws should mention that. Sure, some of the provisions might “destroy the Internet,” as folks argued that ACTA, SOPA and PIPA would do, but in all cases further discussion over problematic provisions helped eliminate some of the most damaging aspects of ACTA and stopped PIPA and SOPA for now.

For example, ACTA shows how secretive and undemocratic the process was in 2009 when it was being debated in the U.S. and in 2012 as the EU was approving it. In 2009, public interest groups including Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge sued to get the details about the agreement before the Senate ratified it, and what they found was discouraging. But thanks to a procedural sleight of hand, it was ratified without ever going before the Senate.

And as ACTA spreads to other nations, frustration with it is mounting. Just last week, Kader Arif, a representative investigating ACTA on behalf of the EU, resigned from his position in apparent disgust at the way he felt the democratic process had ben circumvented in order to get the EU to sign the treaty. Meanwhile, the EU member states still have to ratify it. In Poland, citizens protested the country’s signing of the treaty.

Now, folks protesting TPP must first find out what it says before they can make judgements about it. Draft documents show that the agreement has several issues many in the online world will find problematic, including defining infringement not just by the intent to profit off the infringement, but also by how many people have illegally accessed that content — a problem if your YouTube clip that uses a copyright song goes viral. It also seeks to lengthen the time something is protected by copyright to match U.S. law, which now protects it for 70 years. For more, see this page set up on the agreement by the American University Washington College of Law.

Why is this all such a big deal?

Fundamentally, there are two big issues when it comes to piracy — one philosophical and one a difference in the underlying business models. Philosophically, the issue here is that the law, much like SOPA and PIPA, conflates the issue of counterfeiting goods with the many shades of copyright violations. The problem is counterfeiting goods such as baby formula or medicine where the buyer is unaware of the deception and could become physically injured as a result is a different kind of crime than copyright violations that range from videotaping a movie in theaters to a consumer breaking the DRM on their movies so they can side load them to their phones or other devices. There are many ways one can slice and dice these issues, and that’s where all that democratic process and discussions come into play.

The second big issue is one of a difference in understanding between the online world and the content world. Brad Burnham, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures expressed this dichotomy well when he explained to me that the content industry doesn’t understand its customers the same way the web industry does.

“In web companies like Etsy, Kickstarter and Foursquare, they provide an environment for users to create the value,” he said. “The users are partners and co-creators and a web company needs to think about them and empower them. The content industry views customers on whether they pay them or not, and instead of empowering customers they want platforms to control the customer on behalf of the content industry.”

But as Burnham added, if a web platform tries to enforce the demands of the content providers, it hacks off their co-creators — and without users the web platform is sunk. Burnham doesn’t think the content industry appreciates the position the web guys are in. Unsurprisingly, because of their inability to expand their world view, many in the content industry have been slow to embrace these platforms for marketing and promotional purposes that might actually encourage users to pay more for their content.

But, on the flip side, there are egregious violations of copyright out there, and web platforms have been understandably loose about enforcing rules as they try to woo users to their platform.

So, the issue here is the U.S., at the behest of Hollywood, is exporting its strictest IP protection laws and doing much of it in secret. Unfortunately, Hollywood and those in Congress who seem proud not to be a nerd and unable to understand how the web works are trying to force their worldview on a world whose views have moved substantially in a different direction. The debate over IP in a digital age is one well worth having, but we can have it if things are negotiated in secret.

Pirate image courtesy of Flickr user Richard Masoner.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• After the blackout: How the IT industry can stop SOPA in the long term

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

Gizmodo

Yeah, you might find yourself having to worry less about infrastructure, less about how storage systems work or what networking to use to connect a virtualized resource pool, or even what middleware settings are optimal for your applications. However, for every problem eliminated by choosing cloud, you’ll find it just creates more of the problems you remain accountable for—and may even create some new problems that you never had to face before.

Which is as it should be. Let me explain.

When I describe cloud computing as an application-centric operations model, one of the first questions that should come to mind is “operations of what, exactly?” Just because the cloud is focused on the application, it by no means implies that the application is all that is being operated. In fact, just as in any computing technology since the earliest electronic computers, the application can’t exist without myriad things supporting it.

And the world doesn’t consist of a single applications, but, in fact, millions of applications. Most of these are interconnected in some way, and the matrix of code, data, infrastructure, people, policies, requirements and so on that makes up modern IT is ultimately a very interconnected, complex system. Cloud computing is just one (very effective) way of dealing with that complexity.

Cloud as a complex system

What’s interesting is that it turns out science has a whole body of work around complex systems. A complex system, according to Wikipedia, is “a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behavior among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts.”

That’s certainly true of the modern interconnected IT environment. Just look at automated trading systems and the famous “flash crash” for an example—systems designed for increasing market returns reacted to each other in a way that temporarily crashed that very market. Other examples abound, and I’m sure your own IT environment often behaves in ways that no single application or other element was designed to do explicitly.

What science teaches us about complex systems is that they are made up of many individual agents, each of which effect and are affected by agents around them. The feedback loops of events created by agents affecting each other both directly and indirectly, combined with the mechanisms that choose behaviors to in response to those events, combine to create the systemic behavior that is so unpredictable.

Cloud as an adaptive system

The thing is, however, a certain class of complex systems, complex adaptive systems, have the additional trait that they can change their behavior in response to the success or failure of previous behaviors when a given event occurs—or when a certain series of events occurs. This ability to “learn” and adapt to the surrounding system environment creates amazing outcomes, including many of the most rich, enduring and powerful systems in our universe.

Think biology. Think economics. Think ecosystems.

IT is adaptive, in that winning functionality survives and thrives, while losing functionality dies out and disappears. Thus, those investing in building IT technologies are constantly seeking ways for their technology to survive in a changing, often hostile environment.

If an application, or function or even just a line of code fails to add value to the environment—or worse, negatively disrupts the value of the environment—it will be removed or changed, one way or another. Those that rely on IT are constantly seeking ways to optimize applications, data and technologies to take the most advantage of their systems environments.

The result is constant innovation, and constant adjustment to our needs as businesses and individuals. It ain’t always pretty, as they say, but so far it has been quite effective. (I should note that this even applies to infrequently modified “legacy” applications; there is an ongoing decision to not modify such an application, and thus it continues to survive.)

The developer as DNA

I want to leave you with one last thought, however. One of the things about complex adaptive systems is the learning or adapting traits of the agents in the system. In the world of evolution, the main agent of learning or change is DNA. In the world of IT, the agent of learning or change is the engineer or software developer.

If something goes wrong with an application, developers are on the hook to fix it, change it or kill it. If existing hardware fails to create new opportunities to innovate, engineers find new approaches to introduce into the ecosystem to shake things up.

However, developers and engineers can only make those changes one, or a few, components at a time. Nobody can configure the “system” to work an expected way. All you can do is constantly monitor the success and effectiveness of the technologies you deploy into the cloud, and constantly tweak them to make them as useful as they can be in that environment.

It’s up to people to make technologies that survive cloud as a complex system—one component at a time. That’s, well, how you deal with it.

Image courtesy of Flickr user gruntzooki.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• A clouded view of Google Music
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM