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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."
Geeta Dayal is a she. Just sayin'.
Might want to double check your pronouns.
We have repeated cases of people going to court to dispute 'fair use', which shows that it is not well defined enough for humans to get right, let alone automated bots.
Lay down specific rules for 'fair use' and then you can write an algorithm to respect those rules.
(Just don't let RIAA/MPAA dictate the rules.)
President Obama,
The DMCA has deleted your wife from the internet! You must repeal it immediately!
Sincerely,
A Concerned Internet Citizen
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?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
The solution is to implement penalties for false takedown requests. Say, $25 per user per stream.
Make no mistake, takedowns are always malicious, by their very nature. And the law that permits/demands it is even more so. I still hold on to the hope that someday our communications systems (internet, telephone, broadcast, etc) become robust enough to make all censorship impossible. Must destroy central control. That is our obligation.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Unfortunately, this has only agitated people who already were against automated copyright filtering and DRM. It's like telling eskimos snow is cold. No, we'll have to wait until the MTV music awards are knocked offline by copyright bots before anybody who didn't already know about them gets wind of it.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
You're not paying the copyright overlords. You're paying the video distribution system. If you're using the system for free, you can't expect them to take the lawsuit risk for you, so you shouldn't complain if they impose a stupid filter robot. So pay a fee (which probably gets rid of those ads people love to complain about) and show them you have permission to use the material you're broadcasting, so they can safely turn off the filter.
This is nothing new. "Clearance" has always been a major part of making movies and TV shows. (You know why the little kid in E.T. ate Reese's Pieces? They couldn't get permission to use Skittles.) Creative people have to work with the system, in part because it's the same system that allows them to profit from their work.
Mind you, I'm not defending the copyright overlords, with the legal sledgehammers and retroactive copyright extensions. But as fucked up as the system is, it's the one we've got, and the problems of dealing with it are nothing new.
The fundamental problem with the current situation is that there is no "pain" (e.g., financial penalty) for these erroneous takedowns and that's the problem with DMCA. I wonder what the online world would look like if there was an equivalent "3 strikes" rule for false takedowns. After that, the escalating financial penalties kicked in, with damages going to the aggrieved party. Business understands money. Frame action and inaction in that context and business tends to behave in a predicable fashion, most of the time.
media outlets could certainly make an argument that such automated "take downs" constitute an unfair burden and so are invalid.
And the legal theory on this could develop from Lenz v. Universal: a copyright owner's representative must consider fair use and other defenses in good faith before filing a notice of claimed infringement under OCILLA.
Do you not understand how organisation like the Mafia implement a protection racket. The Don or Boss doesn't go out roughing people up, nor does the Consigliere, even the Caporegime doesn't go out and rarely do the soldiers pay a visit (they tend to visit latter in the piece), it's associates who go out and do the dirty work, those with the least links bank to the Capo. Now that holds true for them all whether it be the Triads, Yakuza or the RIAA/MPAA. Something else interesting all of them at various times have had direct ties to government, just as the RIAA/MPAA does now.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The people who think THESE things are so important (and there should be a LOT of such people) need to do EVERYTHING they can to be sure the system works ABSOLUTELY CORRECTLY from here on out. Otherwise the internet WILL work around the flaw of these misprogrammed incompetent bots, and then their goals of blocking things like child porn will not be able to succeed. This is the dire warning they need to heed, and join in the effort to fix the seriously broken copyright enforcement system. ANY one of them that does not shout out against the RIAA and MPAA and others that are ruining things loses any right to expect the changes in the internet to consider their needs.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The DMCA will probably never be overturned in the US, there is too much industry money behind it, and we know what feeds the political machine in the US.
If some third-party copyright trollbot interferes with the legitimate viewing of a webcast event, there has to be a law firm somewhere that, for the notoriety alone, would be willing to file a class action suit alleging damages of inconvenience and anguish on the behalf of thousands of viewers. Moreover, the broadcaster could sue for the costs of their broadcast that was interfered with. It costs real money to do a good quality webcast, trolls should be on the hook for diluting the value of a broadcaster's investment.
Takedowns have a legitimate purpose.
No, they seem to be abused time and time again. Go through the courts if you have an issue. You can't take shortcuts.
As an extreme example, what if it's child porn?
I like how people mention this as if it's self-evident. Honestly, not everyone has an irrational, insatiable desire to go after people who look at images or websites hosting them; some people would rather the actual perpetrators get caught.
But what does this have to do with takedown notices?
What if it's a bootleg of your favorite movie that just came out on DVD?
Why did you even mention this? Why would I care? Incidentally, ask a judge to order the content removed.
So, anybody who tries to get money out of somebody else for any purpose is a gangster? As the anarchists used to say, Property is Theft? Whatever. I don't think that's a concept that's going to catch on.
The problem could also be partially solved by simply instituting legal fines to corporations that falsely accuse somebody of infringing on copyright. There'd be no particular benefit to anyone who was wrongly accused, but if the fines are heavy enough, there could plenty of disincentive for companies to do that to people in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is just a part of a much bigger problem, and that is who is responsible for the behaviour of rouge A.I.? Soon we'll have to face this problem head-on. With the military drones and robots being more and more autonomous, it's only a matter of time before DARPA comes up with the Terminator(TM), capable of autonomously deciding on the killshot. Then it's a matter of time before this machine makes a mistake killing a civilian or a war journalist and we'll find ourselves in the deepest legal shit humanity has faced since the Nuremberg Trials. You can't send a robot to prison, you can't charge it's maker, you can't lock up the author of the software. Yes, you CAN demand damages from the government/military but the crime still goes unpunished. So, should we grant the owners of such A.I.s a license to kill/threaten/arrest in autonomous nature and hope it doesn't turn ugly? And when it does, do we just say "shit happens, here's some money to make you feel better"?
I propose we make the people up-top personally responsible for such events. And there shall be peace on earth...
We live in an economic system based primarily on the concept of scarcity. Money is valuable because nobody ever seems to have quite enough of it, just like diamonds and gold. The law of supply and demand, there is more demand than supply.
The internet and the information age changes all that, its economics that is based on abundance. For the cost of a broadband connection we can give every human child access to the entire digitized archive of the collected works of the human race. The cost of doing this even 100 years ago would have been astronomical and beyond the reach of even the richest philanthropists. The old business models based upon everybody getting a percentage of the production costs break down then the production costs become zero. We have so thoroughly eliminated the nature of scarcity with information that our scarcity based economics, upon which we all depend for our basic survival, has deemed everything that abundance touches to be worthless. Rather than creating "utilitarian" value, it is seen as destroying "valuable" scarcity.
If you want economics based on abundance/gist-culture to actually work, then content effectively needs to be paid for in advance, with the risk of not-recieving, rather than our debt based culture of buy now pay later, where we only buy the hits after they have proven popular.
Copyright is about trying to maintain the concept of artificial scarcity in an environment where it doesn't naturally exist. But assuming that copyright has its place, there are checks and balances, but they don't all operate at the cost level and the speed we are used to in internet time.
The old school system of checks and balances are the courts and the legal system, You can spend a huge quantity of time, energy and money to argue your case and get a ruling from a professional judge. This works well when you have a small number of large, rich corporations with known fixed addresses and assets. Under the old school system, for things like copyright, most private individual use tended to simply fly under the radar and nobody made a big fuss about it regardless of the technicalities of the law. So disregarding morals, we are now down to game theory.
Now Mr Joe Blogs with his modern broadband connection could easily broadcast more copyrighted music than half a dozen fully funded commercial radio stations from a decade ago. Mr Joe Blogs has very little in sue-able assets beyond a bankruptcy order and by the time the cogs in the legal system have turned, he has managed to transfer more data than could fit on a supercomputer from 25 years ago. Joe blogs wasn't as issue when all he had was a mix tape and 5 friends, now he has a mix computer and 5 billion friends. Plus there are now a hundred million Joe Blogs on the internet doing exactly the same thing. So we have innocent until proven guilty, with a very high cost and high standard of proof required to enforce copyright, with the burden resting fully on the copyright holders.
So the copyright holders go to the politicians and say they cannot effectively enforce their business model, so they ask for the risk model of the checks and balances to be changed. Hence the DMCA, we want to be able to just send a letter and then shift the burden of proof onto Joe Blogs to argue his case, plus we want legal liability to rest with registered companies with static address who have something to lose if we have to take them to court. Guilty until proven innocent, but at least with the right of appeal.
But still the DMCA only works at the speed of the postal system, and requires human interaction, which is still orders of magnitude slower and more costly than "internet speed" which we all now mostly take for granted. Hence the advent of AI copyright bots that can at least operate at "internet speed", but the people who create them are on the payroll of the copyright holders and their definition of "failsafe" is to block content first and ask questions later. The checks and balances then start to operate, but they can only proceed a
If I remember correctly, these take down notices have a section where the issuer of the notice swears "under penalty of perjury" that the information on the notice is correct. When it turns out to be incorrect (or even when it isn't but no human ever checks the results from the bot), is that actionable? In a civil court? What is "penalty of perjury" exactly?
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
People choose not to implement this robustness...
And that is exactly what we need to circumvent... We have to remove control from these people who think they know best. We have to create the proverbial 'dumb pipe' that remains transparent to all content, no matter how offensive one may feel about it. You don't control kiddie porn by censorship, you do it by treating the desire. Allowing people to have normal, healthy sex would be a good first step.Censorship has the opposite effect. Sexual depravity is usually a consequence of the puritan rules created principally by powerful religious groups and their subservient governments. Sexual deprivation will make people crazy, literally, and the the only result can be sexual perversion. Censorship is always evil and against our better interests. Takedowns have no legitimate purpose of any kind. There is no benefit to the society. Only its elites with their mad desire for domination can benefit.
As for the movies... fuck them. That discussion has already been hashed out.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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?
The first case is nothing about copyright at all. It shouldn't be the same mechanism. Only a complete idiot would even try to put child porn on the open Internet now. It'd be like walking into an airport with a bomb vest. To suggest that it's somehow in the same category as streaming a Hollywood movie is really stupid and inflammatory, though I'm sure politicians and media companies would do so without blinking.
In any case, both cases would clearly be criminal acts so they should not be "taken down" by a bot but the relevant agency (probably FBI) should track down the source and prosecute, and blocking it might make that harder.
If they remove content that was already there, that is censorship. You might believe it's perfectly acceptable for them to do, but it's still censorship.
No it's not! You have no more right to force others to publish what you like, than you have to stop others from publishing what you don't like. Censorship is something imposed by the authorities (ie: government, or in the case of a theocracy the church). Private entities can be said to "self-censor" but that is an entirely different thing, and yes, as a legal principle self-censorship is a perfectly acceptable concept because it keeps government out of the bussiness of policing what people choose to, (or choose not to), publish.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is a perfect example of an arms race where one side has no governor (my hat tip to the earlier Jefferson reference). James succinctly described the rationale and process by which DCMA laws came into being. However, the fatal flaw is that DCMA enforces no penalty for excessive false positives. Consequently, as a content owner, it is in my best interest to take down first and ask (actually, they never ask) questions later. Businesses are driven to maximize the value of their product. Creating scarcity is a straightforward and easily understood concept. DCMA is just one more tool by which a business can achieve this goal.
That said, creating a monopoly was and is to a degree, another time-honoured tradition of creating scarcity and maximizing value. However, that was legislated as illegal. Likewise, there is an opportunity to amend DCMA and create a governor that addresses egregious false positive offenders. The penalties could be administrative, lose their privilege to use automated take downs (e.g., take away their toys) or even financial. Effectively, you would create a new line to quote James that balances the process.
Will this happen? Unlikely unless organizations with influence and money are consistently impacted by the current law. Other than the rare case as we've seen here, that has not happened and the status quo is likely to remain.
But why is there no attempt to borrow sentence construction and syntax from other languages when there is a clear benefit? So many languages have a gender neutral third person singular pronouns. For example Tamil has /avan/aval/avar/athu/ to mean /he/she/he or she/it/. Being Indian, I know Geeta is a typical Indian female name. But I cant tell a male first name from a female first name in many European, South American, Chinese and African cultures. And there are names used by both males and females in all languages. Gone with the wind had Ashley as a man's name. Agatha Christie wrote a whole mystery based on the idea Evelyn is a name used by both males and females. I think it was "Why didn't they ask Evans?" or Evil under the sun. Cant remember. There was an Indian MP by the name Kumari Anandan. Kumari with a short a is his home town used as first name. But with a long a, his first name translates as "Miss" in Hindi! He was assigned quarters along with female MPs and got routinely placed in railway sleeper coaches reserved for women!
English desperately needs a gender neutral third person singular pronoun. Time to coin a new word, something like "ce" to mean he or she. It could pronounced "see" half way between he and she.
Wish there is a bugzilla to file a ModReq on the English language.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact