The Algorithmic Copyright Cops: Streaming Video's Robotic Overlords

thomst writes "Geeta Dayal of Wired's Threat Level blog posts an interesting report about bot-mediated automatic takedowns of streaming video. He mentions the interruption of Michelle Obama's speech at the DNC, and the blocking of NASA's coverage of Mars rover Curiosity's landing by a Scripps News Service bot, but the story really drills down on the abrupt disappearance of the Hugo Award's live stream of Neil Gaiman's acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script. (Apparently the trigger was a brief clip from the Doctor Who episode itself, despite the fact that it was clearly a case of fair use.) Dayal points the finger at Vobile, whose content-blocking technology was used by Ustream, which hosted the derailed coverage of the Hugos."

Comments

And why is the technology to blame?

[c0lo]

the trigger was a brief clip from the Doctor Who episode itself

In itself, the tech has shown an impressive quality if a brief clip was recognized in realtime.

Would anyone blame the hammer because it's an excellent tool to drive nails under one's... well... nails?

Re:And why is the technology to blame?

[c0lo]

This technology was designed to find infringement. It was not designed to find cute images of puppies. There is nothing in the code to recognize fair use. The technology is intrinsically broken.

Correction: as demonstrated, the technology is excellent (in its recognition capabilities). Also as demonstrated, the use of the technology for certain purposes (police copyright infringement) is broken.
It doesn't mean that for other purposes (finding images of cute puppies included) the same technology cannot be excellent.

My point: don't blame the "robots", blame those who use them as "overlords". Otherwise, you'd be only adopting the same position to those who would very much like to ban/criminalize a technology (e.g. encryption? The use of Tor?) only because they can be used for copyright infringement or drug trafficking.

Re:'Fair Use' is not sufficiently well defined

[Anonymous Coward]

But the RIAA/MPAA has already dictated the terms of fair use: Any use that brings us revenue is fair, and all others are not :)

Reason I think we should stuff a hot poker up their asses and make copyright a flat 18 years for individuals and 5 years for corporations, with not extensions and a one year loss in term for each transferral of copyright (be it selling the copyright or merging/wholly owning the company).

That would solve the current issues with it, provide revenue over the primary useful life of the material, cut into residuals sadly, but result in more long term innovation since not producing new material will result in bankruptcy rather than an endless stream of relicensing/remaking old material. If all actors/actresses got flat pay (same as 'staff') however it'd be no different than any modern non-IP related job.

Re:'Fair Use' is not sufficiently well defined

[Mr. Shotgun]

Unfortunately the example from the summary are not fair use cases, more like original producers vs hangers on. The content publishers are using bot's without checking the results. They need to have some guy checking the flags and using sanity testing to verify if the flag is correct. I mean come on, NASA vs some newspaper in Cincinnati, who in the fuck is more likely to have produced footage from the curiosity rover on Mars. Or DNC coverage, who has the copyright, the DNC or a news organization rebroadcasting what the DNC made? Some types of people accept what a program says as the gospel truth, which leads to fuckups like the content flagging and Knight Capital. Computers are tools, not overlords as someone else said.

Re:'Fair Use' is not sufficiently well defined

[curunir]

The problem with your argument is that fair use is not a right. Instead, it's a defense against infringement. Even if something is within the boundaries of fair use, no one is required to respect that...it only protects you from being liable for infringement. So when someone (or some machine) denies that fair use, there's nothing legally wrong with doing so.

The problem isn't (yet) with the definition of fair use, it's with the lack of protection of fair use as a right. For the purpose it serves, fair use is defined well enough...it describes enough to explain the intent and purposefully leaves the interpretation to judges and juries. To protect against cases like the one in the story, we need to first make it against the law to deny fair use...then we can worry about more explicitly defining what is and isn't fair use.