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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.
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.
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...
Pretty much bullshit, "fair use" is indeed well defined.
But the bigger issue *is not* the "bots", it's the media outlets that accept "take down notices" from bots.
In other words, I'm questioning the legality of machine generated "take downs" that have no human interaction. I'm suggesting that it is not strictly legal and media outlets could certainly make an argument that such automated "take downs" constitute an unfair burden and so are invalid.
Seriously.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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 :)
Funny, but unfortunately the RIAA/MPAA aren't that clever. If they were, they wouldn't issue takedown notices to all the free advertising they get in fan videos on Youtube of movie scenes and teens dancing to pop songs, which would be deemed fair use in any sane legal universe.
Also, definitely not fair use but still remarkable: it's astonishing how they happily piss money away in their idiotic war on pirated films and music - imagine what this word-of-mouth marketing would cost them if they actually had to PAY for it.
Actually, Viacom sued google for distributing on youtube content uploaded by their own employees, both from their own offices and the employees homes.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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
PP is, in every relevant way false.
Fair use is, by statute declaration, not copyright infringement at all. Copyright holders have no authority at all to forbid any fair use.
PP might as well have said a lot of people have a big misunderstanding of what "innocence" is, that "innocence" is just a defense you can use.
The criteria for fair use are laid out in statute law and have decades of case law to back them. Courts have the same discretion in finding the boundaries of fair use as they have in finding the boundaries of any other law, and the same responsibility. There's nothing at all remarkable about that discretion, it's why they're called "Judge".
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Agreed. Something has to be done. Censorship and wrongful take downs are just one aspect of the many problems with our copyright laws. My biggest issue with them is that they prevent young artists from remixing anything from their generation. This needs to be fixed by repealing the DCMA and reforming these draconian copyright laws.
Before Disney, copyright granted authors protection for 28 years. I’m fine with that. The problem is it’s pushing 100 years now. This stifles our culture and innovation.
For example, Star Wars was released in 1978, so it should have gone into the public domain by 2005. With existing laws, George Lucas retains exclusive rights to butcher the SW universe until 2072!!!! 95 YEARS! Imagine what new aspiring authors could do with his work, instead of the sterile Jar Jar crap that Lucas served us, recently? Thank you, copyright.
Do you think your favorite authors would not have created their material, if it was not protected for 70 years after their death? The copyright system is designed make companies, like Disney and RIAA, rich at the expense of our freedom.
The irony is Disney made its fortune by ripping off the great works of others. Walt Disney was a master of this. At its origins, Mickey Mouse was a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill Jr. And almost all of their great work since then has continued this tradition of copying. Just to name a few: Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Jungle Book, Sleep Hollow, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid,
With the RIAA, SOPA and Courtney Love’s excellent essay on how they screw over artists should give you an idea of how this industry works. http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
If you want to know more, Kirby Ferguson's series "Everything is a Remix" at
http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
is a great watch!