Slashdot Mirror
Web Copyright Crackdown On the Way
Hugh Pickens writes "Journalist Alan D. Mutter reports on his blog 'Reflections of a Newsosaur' that a coalition of traditional and digital publishers is launching the first-ever concerted crackdown on copyright pirates on the Web. Initially targeting violators who use large numbers of intact articles, the first offending sites to be targeted will be those using 80% or more of copyrighted stories more than 10 times per month. In the first stage of a multi-step process, online publishers identified by Silicon Valley startup Attributor will be sent a letter informing them of the violations and urging them to enter into license agreements with the publishers whose content appears on their sites. In the second stage Attributor will ask hosting services to take down pirate sites. 'We are not going after past damages' from sites running unauthorized content says Jim Pitkow, the chief executive of Attributor. The emphasis, Pitkow says is 'to engage with publishers to bring them into compliance' by getting them to agree to pay license fees to copyright holders in the future. Offshore sites will not be immune from the crackdown: almost all of them depend on banner ads served by US-based services, and the DMCA requires the ad service to act against any violator. Attributor says it can interdict the revenue lifeline at any offending site in the world." One possible weakness in Attributor's business plan, unless they intend to violate the robots.txt convention: they find violators by crawling the Web.
I'm sure these guys have no compunction against ignoring robots.txt if it makes them money by doing so.
There is a war going on for your mind.
What on earth is the DMCA supposed to achieve, in the context of Ad-providers?
Sounds pretty scary to me.
Love over Gold.
This one.
On the other hand, that's an utterly asinine comment to have made (the one you quote, not yours). Of course they'll ignore it, why on Earth wouldn't they? It is in no way binding, and robots are free to ignore it, just as site owners are free to block connections from specific incoming IP addresses, the owners of those IPs are free to switch to new ones, and so on, ad infinitum.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Sounds like they've learned their lesson from the RIAA. I'm not saying I agree with them and think they are right to do this. But, if you're going to try to enforce your interpretation of the law, this is at least a sane philosophy of doing so. Not going after damages is a smart move.
A lot of aggregator sites like this one base a lot of their topical content on articles printed elsewhere. While most (incl. /.) don't print whole articles intact, a lot of them do quote heavily (what used to be called "fair use," back when that phrase actually meant anything). So their first step is to go after the sites that reprint the articles whole-cloth. But will they stop there?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
And in the process take down all those inane blogs whose sole purpose is to scrape and repost articles so they get an advertising hit.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The Robots exclusion standard. Not that it will stop them; as others have pointed out, if they think they're "doing the right thing," I'm sure they will not be concerned about such a standard.
The worry here really isn't so much for the people who are hosting sites with infringing content. I'm sure a moral argument could be made that Attributor is well within the right to disregard the wishes of those who are breaking copyright law. However, I run several sites that have no infringing content whatsoever, sites with things that have content that, while not private, I don't particularly want spiders crawling. I'm not so naive to think that they don't do it anyway; I have server logs proving that they do. However, in this case, we have a company that is claiming to be legitimate completely ignoring my--someone who is not infringing--wishes and doing it.
Put another way, by convention, my neighbors don't use binoculars to peer into my house windows to see what I'm doing although there's currently not really anything stopping them from doing so. Even though I don't particularly have anything to hide, if I find that they are violating our polite social contract, then I'll put up shades just because it's none of their damn business.
I don't think that the robots.txt convention will be the thing that stops Attributor. I think that it will be that it won't take long for web site authors to figure out what user agents, IP address, etc. that Attributor is using and will block access from Attributor to their sites. Like I said, I have no infringing content on my sites, but if Attributor is going to ignore me politely asking their robots not to scan my sites, then I'm fully in the right to take further steps to forcibly prevent them from doing so.
Slashdot for it's copy-pasted copies
News publishers using Attributor probably won't attack Slashdot for excerpting one paragraph from a ten-paragraph story any time soon. From the summary:
the first offending sites to be targeted will be those using 80% or more of copyrighted stories
Are you kidding? ACTA's going to harmonise everything so closely to the US that they'll be able to prosecute anyone.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
A coalition of traditional and digital publishers this month will launch the first-ever concerted crackdown on copyright pirates on the web, initially targeting violators who use large numbers of intact articles.
Details of the crackdown were provided by Jim Pitkow, the chief executive of Attributor, a Silicon Valley start-up that has been selected as the agent for several publishers who want to be compensated by websites that are using their content without paying licensing fees.
In a telephone interview yesterday, Pitkow declined to identify the individual publishers in his coalition, but said they include “about a dozen” organizations representing wire services, traditional print publishers and “top-tier blog networks.”
The first offending sites to be targeted will be those using 80% or more of copyrighted stories more than 10 times per month.
In the first stage of a multi-step process aimed at encouraging copyright compliance instead of punishing scofflaws, Pitkow said online publishers identified by his company will be sent a letter informing them of the violations and urging them to enter into license agreements with the publishers whose content appears on their sites.
If copyright pirates refuse to pay, Attributor will request the major search engines to remove offending pages from search results and will ask banner services to stop serving ads to pages containing unauthorized content. The search engines and ad services are required to immediately honor such requests by the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
If the above efforts fail, Attributor will ask hosting services to take down pirate sites. Because hosting services face legal liability under the DCMA if they do not comply, they will act quickly, said Pitkow.
“We are not going after past damages” from sites running unauthorized content said Pitkow. The emphasis, he said is “to engage with publishers to bring them into compliance” by getting them to agree to pay license fees to copyright holders in the future.
License fees, which are set by each of the individual organizations producing content, may range from token sums for a small publisher to several hundred dollars for yearlong rights to a piece from a major publisher, said Pitkow.
Attributor identifies copyright violators by scraping the web to find copyrighted content on unauthorized sites. A team of investigators will contact violators in an effort to bring them into compliance or, alternatively, begin taking action under DMCA.
click the link to read the last 21%
Yes, but ACTA is not the whole world.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Since, as you say, robots.txt will likely do nothing against them, the bigger question becomes "how do they plan to do their crawling?". Crawling from a well defined IP block, using software with user agent Attributor_copy_cop, will be laughably simple to block or present false noninfringing content to.
Spoofing the UA strings and(if necessary) some of the behavior of common web browsers is a simple software problem, so I assume that they'll do that(unless they are terminally incompetent). Out of curiosity, though, does anybody know how easy and cheap it would be (using legitimate methods not botnet style stuff) for such a commercial entity to obtain a reasonably large number of, ideally "residential looking", IPs that change fairly often? Do you just call verizon and say "I want 500 residential DSL lines brought out to so-and-so location"? Would you obtain the services of one of the sleazy datacenter operators who caters to spammers and the like and knows how to switch IP blocks frequently? Do you pay to have second lines installed at your employee's houses, with company scanner boxes attached?
I welcome them to crawl my sites and ignore my robots.txt files. They won't get very far though. When my server detects that behavior it passes the IP to my firewall which adds it to the "drop these packets into a black hole" list.
I have quite a large table of IP addresses of idiots that violated robots.txt.
I've had an experience with Attributor myself, and it's given me a pretty low opinion of them. I'm the author of a CC-BY-SA-licensed calculus textbook, titled "Calculus." Someone posted a copy of the pdf on Scribd, as allowed by the license. So one day I got an email from one of the people who runs Scribd, saying that Attributor had sent them a takedown notice, which they were skeptical about. Attributor hadn't supplied any useful information about what they thought was a violation. I called Scribd, and they checked and said it was a mistake -- they were working for Macmillan, which publishes another book titled "Calculus." So here they were, serving a DMCA notice under penality of perjury, and they hadn't even checked whether the name of the author was the same, or whether any of the text was the same. Their bot just found that the title, "Calculus," was the same as the title of one of their client's books. Pretty scummy.
Find free books.
According to this, only Australia, Canada, USA, EU, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and Switzerland are currently part of that treaty. This (currently) leaves more than enough room for a whole lot of other countries (some of them as big as Russia and China) that are not part of it.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
It's not just copyright. The slow but steady alignment of copyright holders, oppressive governments, legal changes, media pressure and surveillance technology has wound itself around the internet worldwide, and now the real pressure is being applied. This is a secular change, largely unobservable over smaller intervals, but the end result is that the web in 10 and 20 years time will be a noticeably less free place than it is today. Everything you do online will be monitored, everything will be logged, everything will be legally defined and controlled, and every infringement will be subject to criminal penalties.
The parties responsible have the support of the politicians, the censors, the press, the money men and most of the public. We used to have the support of the geeks and their creativity in bypassing censorship. But let's face it; geeks have not created a truly disruptive technology since BitTorrent almost ten years ago. While Geekdom slept, the likes of Cisco and the major Telcos have constructed a frightening array of technologies for surveillance and control of the internet, and the fruit of their efforts can be seen in China, Iran and now even countries like Australia. Soon it will be seen all over the world.
The Web has changed. Governments are no longer going to tolerate the freedom and anarchy that it grants to the population at large. They now have the means, method and opportunity to put this genie back in the bottle. This crackdown is the first offensive on what is going to be a wide front. Expect the free net to lose.
May the Maths Be with you!
I suspect that many sites that are using this type of content will find ways of hiding that fact by using non-display characters, breaking the article into multiple pages and the like to cover the fact that they are using the content. Would love to see their system in action on some test sites to figure out how much you need to do to cover the content and make it not match the original.
One idea would be to use the many available cloud services like EC2, Google App Engine and Azure. The IP blocks those services come in are going to remain fairly regular, but they are so common that it might not be acceptable for a site to block everything from ghs.l.google.com (and whatever EC2 and Azure live on). It is still blockable, though, so it probably would have been better for them (from a technical standpoint) if they hadn't announced their existence and these sites had been slowly indexed by their service before anybody knew what was happening.
Another (better) idea would be to use a service like Tor. Sure, their latency is going to skyrocket, but that's not a big deal since interactivity isn't a primary concern of an indexing service. It's still blockable, if infringing site admins block Tor nodes. This may or may not be doable, as I would imagine many users of said infringing sites use anonymizing networks for their normal traffic.
Sure, either of the solutions I've come up with in five minutes can be circumvented, but the idea isn't to totally eliminate piracy, its to make it inconvenient enough to make getting the legitimate version easier.
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.