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Viacom Wants Industry Wide Copyright Filter
slashqwerty writes "Unsatisfied with the proprietary copyright filter Google recently unveiled, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has called for an industry standard to filter copyrighted material. Mr. Dauman has the backing of Microsoft, Disney, and Universal. 'They reflect the fact that there ought to be a filtering system in place on the part of technology companies,' he noted. 'Most responsible companies have followed that path. What no one wants is a proprietary system that benefits one company. It is a big drain to a company like ours to have to deal with incompatible systems.' How would an industry standard impact freedom of speech and in particular censorship on the internet? How would it affect small, independent web sites?"
Has anybody been to youtube lately?
Almost every link to a video worth watching(with the rare educational exception) leads to "This video has been removed due to...."
Control is controlled by the need to control. The content providers will shoot themselves in the feet so many times that they won't have a leg to stand on.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
One day, maybe in the not too distant future, there will be an article on /.
It will read like this:
Your Rights Online: MPAA admit that everything they have said for the last 5 years has been a practical joke
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday Cantrembember 75th @ 27:00
from the i-knew-it department
Anonymous Coward writes: The MPAA has finally admitted what a lot of people on Slashdot have suspected for a while. Everything they've done for the last 5 years was all part of a practical joke.
"The lawsuits, the absurd DRM, the crazy "the entire industry is going to collapse" rhetoric - we never believed any of this crap", said a spokesman. "What actually happened was someone suggested that perhaps we could somehow start announcing these ridiculous ideas, record the reaction then release it as a movie. Kind of like The Truman Show, only much much bigger." Has the MPAA finally gone too far? Will this lead to their ultimate collapse? Quiver with excitement. Tremble with fear. Eat peanuts with raisins.
The media companies love standards when it suits them, such as when it limits the technology companies power (as in music DRM or content filtering). However, when the standards become, well, too standard, they want their own proprietary formats. NBC pulls out of ITunes because they didn't like the standard pricing. Sony tweaks its DVD's because it doesn't like the standard DRM (and I rented a coaster from Blockbuster recently, thanks Sony).
Viacom says "we believe in following the consumers". The real quote was "We believe in following the consumers as long as it pleases us. Otherwise fuck the consumers."
First up we have a new variant on googlebombing. The filter will be gamed by content owners to pick up on anything they possibly can.
This is because of the asymmetric costs. A false positive will cost them nothing, but the poster will get zapped. Indeed blockingd free content will serve the industry quite nicely.
There are >50 content formats, and new ones keep appearing. If the "standard" filter cannot read them, then the obvious thing to do is ban them.
You've now established a monopoly where only "approved" formats are allowed.
Even if it is an open standard, who writes the filter for new formats ? More importantly, who pays ?
It is also an arms race, and I think we can be clear that the "standard" filter will not be open source.
DRM attracts crackers in direct proportion to it's success. Many crackers may not be fans of economics, but their goals are easily modelled in economic terms.
They want to take out the "big beast" current filters are small, unsucessful critters.
Cracking the industry standard media filter will be more of a coup than breaking WEP, and thus inevitably be swamped.
Also, an entertaining technical/legal point is so many site use Linux so the GPL may get involved.
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
I say give them the filter. It should be built into every node of the network, so the network flat refuses to transmit Viacom's material, or that of any other copyright holder who wants out of the Internet. Surely a network that will only transmit stuff under a free license would have to be every free software author's dream?
TFA is a summary of comments made at the Web 2.0 Summit which reference another announcement which summarizes these principles.
Considering who's on the press release - NBC Universal, Disney, Viacom, Fox, Microsoft, MySpace, Dailymotion (who?), veoh (who??) - the proposed principles are actually fairly balanced. They mention fair use four times, including a statement that "When sending notices and making claims of infringement, Copyright Owners should accommodate fair use" and "If the UGC Service is able to identify specific links that solely direct users to particular non-infringing content on such [piracy-oriented] sites, the UGC Service may allow those links while blocking all other links" and even "If a UGC Service adheres to all of these Principles in good faith, the Copyright Owner should not assert a claim of copyright infringement against such UGC Service with respect to infringing user-uploaded content that might remain on the UGC Service despite such adherence to these Principles."
It's worth reading the whole principles statement. I'm sure there are things that could be tweaked, but there are no major outrages that jump out at me; I'm actually kinda impressed.
He seems to be confusing "responsible" with "threatened."
industry standard to filter copyrighted material
...
How about we suggest the following standard:
1. the © character (Unicode 00A9, or decimal 251), followed by
2. the date of the copyright, followed by
3. the name of the copyright holder, optionally followed by
4. an email or web address to contact the copyright holder
I've heard that a system similar to this (but lacking part 4.) is already in use in some publications.
Such a copyright standard would make it easy to use hundreds (or thousands) of programs that already exist to filter copyrighted material and determine what to do with it.
Think anyone would go for it?
Maybe we should write up an RFC
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I have mentioned before that we will come to a time where the Internet as we know it will no longer exist in the way we see it now. There will be the "Trusted Computing" Internet where these low-jacked computers will communicate and there will be the "Hacker/Hobbyist" Internet where custom built machines, not running the majority OS, will connect to. Guess which one your banking, newspapers, search engines, most of your friends, jobs, etc will operate on?
Actually, this sort of thing happened back in the 1980s, when we had a lot of commercial networks, controlled by the corporations, each one in use by only a small set of corporate customers. Then news got out about this other network called the "Internet", built on government projects by a flock of "hackers", and not controlled by anyone.
It's pretty clear which one people decided to use.
So now the corporate world is hard at work bringing the Internet to heel, with strict corporate controls on what you and I can see or do. If they succeed, your scenario will happen once again. And as the Internet becomes as unusable as all those other networks back in the 1980s, people will slowly move to the network that actually works.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
A copyright holder can't demand cash keep flowing to him, he can only demand that for a limited number of years he have a monopoly on publishing his work as granted by the Constitution.
The current duration of copyright is effectively infinite, and will be extended as necessary by the likes of Disney. You can no longer use the "limited duration" of copyright in any rational discourse on this subject. Also, since you brought up the Constitution, I feel compelled to point out that the Founders did not intend copyright to provide an unlimited cash flow to content creators. They certainly did not intend it to have the dramatic negative effects that modern copyright law is having on the whole of our society. No sir. The intent was to enrich the public domain, so that all can benefit from the creative minds among us.
So, copyright holders got a limited time to make a buck: the presumption (and it was only a presumption) was that potential remuneration was required to encourage the production of such works. The fact that you believe that to be true has little to do with the primary function of American copyright, which was to make more creative works available to all. Jefferson himself considered copyright to be a loan from the public domain! Ideas and creative works were never meant to be kept under private control indefinitely, yet that is precisely what has happened. It's my belief that we would be far better off abolishing copyright completely rather than maintain the current state of affairs. Modern copyright is diametrically opposed in purpose and effect to what the Founders wanted: a vibrant public domain that enriches us all.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You seem to think copyright protection should be a given. Why shouldn't there be some sort of legal protection to allow me to at least try to make money off of filing bug reports? I'm sure you know that most musicians don't make money off of copyright, but from performances. Most musicians really don't need copyright to make money. Radiohead's recent album might as well be public domain for all intents and purposes since they are giving it away to anyone who asks for it, and they've made about $6,000,000. They've got a better than 0% chance. I hope that dada21 is reading this so that he can put his word in. I believe he is working on music production for artists that don't utilize copyright. AFAIK, his artist partners are making money w/o the benefit of copyright.Which...the only reason why he'd want the monopoly is to keep cash flowing to him.
Piracy is not unconstiutional. Piracy is spelled out in Article 1, Section 8:
To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations; So congress can define and punish piracy, but it doesn't have to. Getting back on topic:
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;
Congress has the power to establish copyrights and patents, but it is not commanded to do so. Famously, Thomas Jefferson was very much against copyrights. In any case, the Constitution restricts the government, not people, so the Constitution cannot declare the actions of a private citizen to be repugnant to itself. What you mean to say copyright infringement is illegal under current law.The constitution singles out only authors and inventors. I am an author of this post, but I have no possibility of making any money from it even if it was copyrighted*. Copyright as a means to try to make profit off of one's works isn't as important as you think it is. And judging from the amount of people my age (early-to-mid 20s) who download music illegally, your argument that society supports copyright is suspect.
When all is said and done you believe that people who make creative works should be allowed to try to make a profit from them. That is fine, but you believe they are entitled to special rights to that effect which allow them to be paid again and again for work they've already done. No other profession I'm aware of allows for such special rights. I don't get royalty checks for my previous consulting gig, even though they are still using the systems I set up for them. Why authors and inventors should get a special pass, I don't know.
*All my posts are public domain.
** I support a limited copyright as intended by the founders. A copyright that has the goal of enriching the public domain. I believe a term of approximately 10 years with an optional 5 year extension to be optimal.