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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."
The Hugo Awards, he said, were not using the paid “pro” version of Ustream’s live streaming service. The paid version of Ustream does not use Vobile.
“The Hugo Awards were using the free ad-supported capability,” Hunstable said. “And unfortunately Ustream was not contacted ahead of the time about their use of the platform.”
I think the lesson we should take from that is this: if you're broadcasting copyrighted material, you need to contact the streaming vendor and work with them to make sure there's no interruption.
Which is not to defend the interruption. It seems pretty unfair to automatically take down a live stream just because it might have unauthorized content. Though one can't really complain about it when you're using a free ad-supported version of the service. Next time, the Hugo people will presumably do their homework, maybe spend a little money, and avoid this kind of glitch.
Why?
Takedowns have a legitimate purpose. As an extreme example, what if it's child porn? What if it's a bootleg of your favorite movie that just came out on DVD?
It already is robust enough to make censorship impossible. People choose not to implement this robustness, because of genuine concerns that you may not totally agree with but at least have a logical argument supporting them.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
No. The solution involves C4
---- Booth was a patriot ----