Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

New alliances will form around commercial interests as well, particularly copyright and intellectual-property issues. As commerce moves increasingly to the online world, the dynamics around copyright enforcement will lead to another layer of virtual alliances and adversaries. Most copyright and intellectual-property laws are still centered on the notion of physical goods, and there are divergent attitudes about whether theft or piracy of online goods (movies, music and other content) are equivalent to the theft of physical versions of those same items. In the future, states will begin to wade more deeply into legal battles over copyright and intellectual property because the health of their commercial sectors will be at stake.

There have been multiple international agreements dealing with copyright laws: the Berne Convention of 1886, which requires mutual recognition of the copyrights of other signatory states; the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of 1994, which set the minimum standards for intellectual-property rights in World Trade Organization (WTO) states; and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty of 1996, which protects information-technology copyrights against infringement. The laws that govern copyright around the world are generally the same. But each country is responsible for enforcement within its borders, and not all countries are equally vigilant. Given the ease with which information crosses borders, people who pirate copyrighted material are typically able to find virtual safe havens in countries with less stringent regulation.

The great concern among intellectual-property watchers in the technology world is China. Because it is a signatory to the conventions above, technically it is bound to the same standards as other countries, including the United States. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in 2011, then Chinese president Hu Jintao privately told a small group of business leaders that China would “fully implement all of the intellectual property laws as required by the World Trade Organization and modern Western practices.” We attended this meeting, and as we filed out of the room after President Hu’s comments, the American business contingent clearly expressed skepticism toward his claim. And with good reason: It’s estimated that U.S. companies lost approximately $3.5 billion in 2009 alone because of pirated music recordings and software from China, and that 79 percent of all copyright-infringing goods seized in the United States were produced in China. Clearly, it’s not the absence of laws that contribute to this problem, but their lack of enforcement. Officially, it’s against Chinese law to produce counterfeit goods or to copy intellectual property for profit, but in practice, officials are discouraged from pursuing criminal prosecution of these crimes; violators are allowed to keep their profits. Moreover, the fines for violating the laws are too low and too irregularly issued to be effective in deterring such behavior, and corruption at local and regional levels encourages officials to turn the other way and ignore repeated violations.

China is by no means the only state unwilling or unable to enforce international intellectual-property norms. Russia, India and Pakistan have all been singled out for their equally dismal enforcement of these laws. Israel and Canada aren’t normally considered hotbeds of copyright infringement, but neither country has fully implemented the standards and laws of the WIPO, making them a haven for Internet piracy. And within the group of states that do have strong protections for intellectual-property rights, there are usually significant and exploitable differences in interpretation. For example, the notion of fair use (as the United States terms it) or fair dealing (as the British do), which allows for the limited use of copyrighted material without consent from the copyright holder, is far more tightly controlled in the European Union than it is in either the United States or the United Kingdom.

Virtual Statehood

One of our recurring themes is that in the virtual world, size matters less. Technology empowers all parties, and allows smaller actors to have outsized impacts. And those actors need not be known or official. To wit, we believe it’s possible that virtual states will be created and will shake up the online landscape of physical states in the future.

There are hundreds of active violent and nonviolent secessionist movements in the world today, and this is unlikely to change in the future. A large portion of the movements are motivated by perceived ethnic or religious discrimination, and shortly we will discuss how physical discrimination and persecution of these groups will play out online, changing shape but not intent. In the physical world, it’s not uncommon for persecuted groups to be subject to different laws and vulnerable to indeterminate detention, extrajudicial killings, the absence of due process, and all manner of restrictions on their civil and human liberties, and most of these tactics will find their way online, aided significantly by technology that helps regimes monitor, harass and target their restive minority populations.

Hounded in both the physical and virtual worlds, groups that lack formal statehood may choose to emulate it online. While not as legitimate or useful as actual statehood, the opportunity to establish sovereignty virtually could prove to be, in the best cases, a meaningful step toward official statehood, or in the worst cases, an escalation that further entrenches both sides in a messy civil conflict. The Kurdish populations in Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq—the four countries where they are most concentrated—might build a Kurdish web as a way to carve out a sort of virtual independence. Iraqi Kurdistan is already quasi-autonomous, so the efforts could begin there. Kurds could establish a top-level domain (e.g., www.yahoo.com.krd), with “krd” standing for Kurdistan, by registering a new domain and basing the servers in a neutral or supportive country. Then they’d build upon that.

Virtual statehood would be much more than just a gesture and a domain name. Additional projects could also develop a distinct Kurdish presence online. With enough effort, the Kurdish web could become a robust version of other countries’ Internet, in the Kurdish language, of course. From there, Kurdish or sympathetic engineers could build applications, databases and other online destinations that not only support the Kurdish cause but actually facilitate it. The virtual Kurdish community could hold elections and set up ministries to deliver basic public goods. They could even use a unique online currency. The virtual minister of information would manage the data flow to and from the online Kurdish “citizens.” The minister of the interior would focus on preserving the security of the virtual state and protecting it from cyber attack. The foreign minister would engage in diplomatic relations with other, actual states. The economic and trade minister would promote e-commerce between Kurdish communities and outside economic interests.

Just as secessionist efforts to move toward physical statehood are typically resisted strongly by the host state, such groups would face similar opposition to their online maneuvers. The creation of a virtual Chechnya might cement ethnic and political solidarity among its supporters in the Caucasus region, but it would no doubt worsen relations with the Russian government, which would consider such a move a violation of its sovereignty. The Kremlin might well respond to virtual provocation with a physical crackdown, rolling in tanks and troops to quell the stirrings in Chechnya.

For the Kurds, who stretch across several countries, this risk would be even more pronounced, as a Kurdish virtual-statehood campaign would be met with resistance from the entire neighborhood, some of whom lack Kurdish populations but would fear a destabilizing effect. No effort would be spared to destroy the Kurdish virtual institutions through low-grade cyber-meddling and espionage, like cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and infiltration. The populations on the ground would surely bear the brunt of the punishment. The governments would be aided, of course, by the massive amounts of data that these citizens produced, so finding the people involved or supportive of virtual statehood would be easy. Very few secessionist movements have the level of resources and international support that would be required to match this level of counterattack.