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UK MPs: Google Blocks Child Abuse Images, It Should Block Piracy Too
nk497 writes "If Google can block child abuse images, it can also block piracy sites, according to a report from MPs, who said they were 'unimpressed' by Google's 'derisorily ineffective' efforts to battle online piracy, according to a Commons Select Committee report looking into protecting creative industries. John Whittingdale MP, the chair of the Committee — and also a non-executive director at Audio Network, an online music catalogue — noted that Google manages to remove other illegal content. 'Google and others already work with international law enforcement to block for example child porn from search results and it has provided no coherent, responsible reason why it can't do the same for illegal, pirated content,' he said."
Come on self-entitled brats. Lets hear why you should be allowed to have all the stuff you want for free.
It always comes to this, might as well get it out of the way early.
Just filter out every mention of UK Members of Parliament and their policies from your search results for, say, 28 days, and see how keen the censorious, self-aggrandizing, cockwombles are on compulsory filtering after that.
British MPs receive kickbacks.
Child abuse and piracy are not comparable. Child abuse is human depravity pushed to such an extreme that is justifiable to use it as a reason to defy common sense. Piracy is simply deviation from the rule of law - it does not warrant ubiquitous censorship of the kind that is being proposed.
If you want censorship, you should be willing to accept censorship directly as well.
Child abuse is machine recognizable; piracy is not.
Pretty easy to understand, numb-nuts.
Child pornography is quite obvious without further investigation, copyright can be very complex and right can be claimed by a lot of people. The system can also easily abuse to remove perfectly legal content. But seems that UK MP like to compare pears and apples.... (or that they don't have a clue about what they are talking about)
http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-must-be-re-legalized-in-the-coming-decade/
Child porn: felony
Piracy: infringement
Two completely different classes of "crime".
What really kills me is that when I come across the many pirated sites that Google links to, the sites are supported by AdSense! Google is not only linking to them, they're paying them to stay open. I've even reported a few of the really obvious ones, but a month later I check back and nope, still got their AdSense up.
Google really doesn't care as long as people use Google and they're making money.
Blocking child porn is a common good and great PR; so while Google doesn't get paid for their efforts they are earning positive public reputation for their expense.
Blocking piracy costs Google but gains them nothing unless the industry wants to pay Google's expenses
Child porn is illegal to own. Pirated content is not.
Sharing child porn is a criminal offense. Sharing pirated content is a civil offense.
Even if google blocked it people would use a different search engine to find it. Stop playing whack-a-mole and do something constructive.
Why, we could completely block organizing efforts for those political parties that are advocate independence for parts of the UK: How do you like that, Sinn Fein, Plaid Cymru, and Scottish Nationalists? And then maybe get rid of those pesky Green parties, and then the Liberal Democrats too, just to be on the safe side.
I am officially gone from
Child porn can be identified without input from the content creator (looking at content is all that's needed), piracy cannot, you need to ask the content creator if it's piracy, and real piracy will attempt to hide who is the content creator to make that process difficult (and often the content creator will lie, we've seen this happen many times over on youtube where a big network steals some youtube content and then send them a takedown request for posting the content that the network decided to steal).
So to actually implement this google would have to accept inputs from supposid content creators to have whatever they want blocked, that sounds ripe for abuse to me, maybe I'll get these MPs' sites blocked for pirating "my" content.
Because then it'd have to shutdown YouTube.
One is a crime against "the innocent" (I know, I know - think about the children!), while the other is unauthorized use of the commercial properties of specific businesses. It is reasonable to expect that the more disseminated and prolific child pornography is, the more children would be abused in the creation of more images and video. Thus by directly fighting child pornography, Google is protecting children. On the other hand, when it comes to pirated material, the only supposed (and I say "supposed" because numerous studies have shown this isn't the case) damage is to a corporation's profit margin.
To me, it comes down to expecting Google to do the work of policing copyrighted material, which should be the responsibility of the copyright holders, not some middle-man search entity.
Better known as 318230.
What a surprise. Start with the slam-dunk of getting them to ban CP (After all if you don't agree it should be banned you must be a pedo sympathiser) , then turn round and say "Well you can block that illegal content, what about this?"
What next, demand Google block sites of banned political parties? Disallow all dissenting opinions? Silence religions you don't like? This is why we shouldn't have allowed the thin end of the wedge in in the first place. Give centralised control an inch and it'll take a mile.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
If the content producers succeed in demanding -- and getting -- the right to force other people to prop up their business model at their own expense, it could open the gates of Hell for anybody with an oversized sense of entitlement to do the same.
Google are quite within their rights to tell the "creative" industry parasites to go and fuck themselves. If people are stealing their stuff, it's THEIR problem that their failing business models aren't keeping up with reality.
There's ALWAYS some arsehole out there who thinks the world owes him a living.
How can I use Google to access pirated content? Google can stop indexing torrent sites, I guess, but a link to a torrent file is not automatically an index of copyright infringement (the Humble Bundle site would be blocked for example, as well as several Linux distros), and I don't think you can hold Google liable for the content hosted on third party sites. And once you create a blacklist of "torrent sites" then other mechanisms kick in, distributed tracking, magnet links, links exchanged on forums, on mailing lists, via sneakernet. What Google could do is to tell this guy "Give us a list of sites to block, backed by a judge's signature, and well'exclude them from our search results. But you will be held liable for any error in the supplied list, and it will be your duty to keep it up to date".
All copyrighted media should start including some child porn.
Commercial piracy sites are rather easy to identify.
I'm not entirely fond of where the internet is heading these days but at the same I do understand the never-ending battle against the various crapmeisters and scammers that ruin the internet experience.
But why can't they also turn this question around: shouldn't content providers be required to make their content available at fair market prices in all regions to benefit from this type of law?
(Note: On principle I do not like how governments are requiring search companies and social media to enforce their "will", treating these companies as an extension and enforcer of their rule. Where is the limit? I do not expect to see one, ultimately)
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
They can't block "piracy sites" because they don't exist. I get my Linux images from these "pirate sites" so they're not pirate sites. It's user uploads that are the problem.
One of these days they are going to get their wish. Then they will want to take it back.
So how does a machine recognize the difference between a war photo of a bloodied child and a photo of civilian child abuse?
So how does a machine recognize the difference between a war photo of a bloodied child and a photo of civilian child abuse?
I don't think it's recognition, as much as definition.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Child abuse is machine recognizable; piracy is not.
It is not an impossible task. It is a difficult one. But we're fundamentally simply talking about two data analysis tasks. One is visual data, the other is textual data... and some checksums. Someone who can reasonably take on the former ought to be able to take a serious stab at the latter. Google doesn't want to, because they fear they will be forced to; probably true.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I doubt it is machine recognizable. Feel free to point out a source.
But "child abuse" is slightly easier to use as a reason to block off anything. You hit the
internet with a sledgehammer on "child abuse" reports, blocking off just about anything
you feel like - sometimes "child abuse".
Most countries these days have block-lists that were supposed
to block "child abuse" sites but now contains a lot more (often including critics).
You can probably sledgehammer the internet on "piracy" reports too if you want to continue
to cripple the internet.
If it makes it any easier for the MPs, I'm sure that Google would just be willing to block off the UK instead.
Why Google? I thought UK blocked everything they felt like from the internet,
regardless of provider?
Or...it could be the fact that the "think of the children" crowd have pressed for so hard and so long that not taking proactive steps to remove child abuse images, and AFAIK only child porn*, that one will minimally be demonized in the press as a child porn promoter and at worse either arrested as a child porn producer (where in the UK, again AFAIK only for child porn, to make a copy is to produce) or have all sorts of government regulations and restrictions placed upon you. In short, as has been stated plenty of times, the "think of the children" crowd is used as a basis to usurp all sorts of liberty and again is being used to extend power into even unrelated areas.
To pretend any of this is a technological issue really misses the point.
*Back in the real world, similar rules apply for various professions about signs of child abuse and being required to take proactive steps. I'd think it to be of note that (a) most child abuse that occurs is neglect and is ironically the kind is least likely to be followed up over said proactive steps and (b) the next leading form of child abuse is of the physically beating kind, but a lot of that gets delayed as well since an abuser is most likely to leave a mark where clothes are likely to hide it and unlikely to seek medical treatment precisely because of the reporting laws (admittedly, doctors and nurses may well report it anyways, but I imagine the reporting laws are really there so doctors and nurses are allowed to follow up on suspected abuse instead of having a hospital supervisor going "it looks like a fall to me, so work on your next patient"). Regardless of what you believe about government imposing itself for the right reasons to curtail a person's liberty, this seems a perfect example of a slippery slope.
One would be hard pressed to argue that a bloodied child in a war zone is not being abused. I'd say thats abuse by definition.
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Okay a more concrete example. Would you consider censoring this very famous photo that appears in this Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc). The photo meets all the mechanical criteria for a child abuse photo. Sure, it should be easy to put exceptions for such famous images into your child porn recognition algorithm, but this would mean erecting a prude's verion of the Great Firewall, crewed by gatekeepers who decide whether it's okay for the masses to see a controversial image.
...with lawmakers who equal child abuse with unlicensed use of intellectual property. Kudoz to Google for spending serious effort on the first one, and not diverting it to the second one.
It *is* an impossible task because while *all* child pornography is illegal - no exceptions - redistribution of copyrighted contents is illegal when the right owner didn't consent to it and legal when he did. It's the same thing as with photos of people - in some jurisdictions, you're only allowed to publish photos of people who consented to it (with perhaps some exceptions), but how do you divine the presence or absence of consent from the photo itself?
Ezekiel 23:20
Imagine that every day, you came into work and your boss said, "You already do A, why can't you do B?" Repeat every day until the entire alphabet is exhausted, and so are you.
We pay a lot of taxes already to have law enforcement do the job. It's not the job of businesses to actively police their users, any more than it's the job of a farmer to put cameras in every acre in case someone tries to plant some cannabis.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Great article, mod parent Interesting.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
whats funny is that these people think that by asking google to ban "piracy" it will actually make it go away or something...
even if google wont give me a result when searching for the pirate bay, i can still type the URL ...
so whats the point ? who actually uses google to search for pirated stuff anyways ?
"Well, Google blocks piracy sites, it should block dissenting opinions about government too."
I mean really, searching for Images through a Google webpage is why Google can block child porn.
Torrenting has nothing to do with Google.
Do these politicians really believe Google is the main server of the Internet?
I will agree that Google could stop search results for prolific torrent sites, but seriously, people who pirate are not starting their day searching for content on Google.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Count the number of "reputable" sites linking to it?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Mission creep. It always happens. First it's to prevent "child porn" or "terrorism". Then someone gets a bright idea - "but we can get x this way too!". And then someone else wants to use it for their pet agenda. What you end up with is police in body armor and assault rifles storming your house to confiscate files in a civil (not even criminal!) case, Kim Dotcom style.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Google's 'derisorily ineffective' efforts to battle online piracy"
It's an indexing&search engine for cryin' out loud, not a censoring body (thankfully). Censorship falls into government territory, they should censor and block sites if they can, not force the censorship tasks onto a company. I do not want to understand why these - and other similar - people can't fathom what they're dealing with. Derisorily ineffective my a**. They are pretty effective in what they do, which is provide results for your queries. They might want to actually regulate search engines though laws, but they wouldn't like the backlash from the people, so they seem to try to force the task onto the companies (especially Google, go figure).
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." The second, let's deal with all the idiot politicians.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Doesn't the ability to comprehensively search for such things as child abuse photos OR pirated software aid the authorities in tracking it down and stopping it at the sources, just as much as it aids someone trying to download it?
...they are offensive to me. Ah, and the Republocrats and the Jihadists and... BLOCK ALL!
While I agree that real child abuse is abhorrant, I do understand the logic in this.
Esp. if someone downloads an image onto your computer and you can't prove that you didn't download it.
Whatever this is, it is not "online piracy".
No ships have been illegally seized, not a single cutlass has been brandished. There has been no disturbance of the lawful transfer of goods from one entity to another. No one is being held for ransom.
Violating a licensing "agreement" involves no theft of moneys, nor theft of tangibles, nor theft of services. Making and distributing an unlicensed copy of software, a book, a movie, or music may in some cases reduce the potential for future sales, but that is not a reduction in current value. It only affects speculative value. That is not nice, and there should probably be some legal protection against it, but it is not theft.
Until the legislators who are attempting to write laws start using English words appropriately, there can be no good laws written to cover this new economic activity. Appropriating verbiage from maritime law because "piracy" sounds so menacing is bullshit, plain and simple. Perhaps those who are misusing the word so much should be sent to the waters off Somalia to learn what it means.
Will
So your base assumption is wrong.
Say hello... ...to the slippery slope!
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
One would be hard pressed to argue that a bloodied child in a war zone is not being abused. I'd say thats abuse by definition.
Not hard-pressed:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/abuse
tr.v. abused, abusing, abuses
1. To use wrongly or improperly; misuse: abuse alcohol; abuse a privilege.
2. To hurt or injure by maltreatment; ill-use.
3. To force sexual activity on; rape or molest.
4. To assail with contemptuous, coarse, or insulting words; revile.
5. Obsolete To deceive or trick.
IMHO, Your definition exceeds the actual definition.
Now define piracy in a way that's machine detectable, and what you'll really have is the ultimate DRM.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I would love Google retaliating by releasing the search requests for the the relavent MPs.
I'm sure google could easily implement this: If the UK government provides a list of "pirate" sites, google will try hard to remove any links to such sites from any search results it sends to UK addresses, at a cost of £1 each time a link is removed. As usual in computer stuff, no guarantees of things working well... Google, in the spirit of not doing any evil, could also display a notice that "9263 links were removed from the results, by request of your government. Showing the remaining 13.
But think how much it would cost to try to create and implement such system? It's a logical step - if Google can't do it, let's find some contractor company who will do it for us. Oh, the owner of this company is a nephew of a said MP? Well, it's a strange coincidence, of course!
And, after all, we can always change law back after several years of abusing this broken system.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
There is a difference in how it is illegal. No, I did not write "how illegal it is", read the sentence again.
With child porn, the content itself is illegal. No discussions, end of story. With piracy, the same content can be illegal to download from one site, and legal to download from another site. Because the content doesn't matter, whether or not somebody has permission to distribute matters.
I have downloaded a game called Portal. First I downloaded the Windows version from The Pirate Bay. About a month ago, I downloaded the Linux version from something called Steam. That's the same game (though for two different operating systems). Yet, one version is distributed illegally (the torrent users don't have a distribution license), the other is distributed legally (Steam is owned by Valve, creators of Portal).
How is a web crawler going to tell the difference between Portal (illegal) and Portal (legal)? Sometimes even humans have trouble telling the difference, as shown by the story a couple of years ago where a shop owner was busted with hundreds of pirated Firefox discs.
I'm glad to know that the MP equates downloading a song with viewing pictures of child rape. Since the content providers are pushing the MP on this, one can only assume they share the view that downloading songs is more serious than child rape, too.
This would work for famous images or images that have a certain similarity threshold to them. New images would have to be vetted. So you need to censor the news so that only photos of fully clothed and smiling children can be seen.
Pretty sure its just people outsourced in India reviewing image results, Easily blocked with thousands of people hammering away at a keyboard. Dont let the myth of complete automation of technology companies fool you, its mainly driven on pure work than "machine read" data.
Pie, A magical delicetessant!
Wait.. they're "unimpressed" that Google can't do their jobs for them? Well that makes sense. It's always easier to wag your fingers at someone else and try to make them do your dirty work for you. But actually hiring the armies of people necessary to do the policing, that's another matter entirely. No, that's Google's responsibility, somehow.
as we all knew it would think of the children mission creep.
You're using logic. These are politicians. If they pass a law it will be so. They have the power to alter the reality of the universe.
He's not completely wrong. If we didn't pay for culture, we still would probably have it around, but more of it would be hobbyist-level stuff. Not that there would be anything wrong with hobbyists, actually their work is often quite refreshing. But do we want only that?
It is inevitable that larger projects require money to happen.
It should surprise me that a politician doesn't understand the difference between criminal and civil offenses, but honestly, it doesn't.
A photo of a bloodied child is not illegal no matter what the cause. Sexualized imagery is clearly what's being discussed, as that's all that's illegal. And it's made even easier by laws in many jurisdiction stating that anything that looks like a child is illegal, even if they're actually 30 years old and just underdeveloped; even if it's a cartoon or digital rendering.
I still don't think these are usually machine-recognized yet (I believe the usual system is a bunch of third-worlders sitting in front of monitors with images flashing by and a button to click if it's "illegal" or "offensive"), but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they had algorithms also feeding in potentially illegal images. But yeah I doubt they're totally blocking much of anything without some human somewhere looking at it briefly.
> ought to be able to take a serious stab at the latter.
A picture of child abuse is always a picture of child abuse context not needed.A picture of a flower might haven been licensed or it might be pirated you need context to find out what is the case.
That's basically how content filtering is currently done by major corporations. They give a bunch of third world "consultants" a big list of what's OK and what isn't and just feed them images to select if they're violations or not.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/22/low-wage-facebook-contractor-leaks-secret-censorship-list/
What is the license for 123d56.iso? Are its content copyrighted? If it is copyrighted, does it's license permit this particular use case, in the source and destination regions involved? Google has 40,000 extraordinarily skilled people working on problems like this. If they say it's a problem they can't solve, I believe them.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
...and pictures of spiders make my skin crawl.
Therefore, I want pictures of spiders censored. ...Wait? It doesn't work like that?
The systems that recognize child abuse are usually comparing it with known photos.
Technoli
Maybe then there would be an incentive to create an uncensorable alternative.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Even trained federal agents can't seem to tell the difference, and you expect an automated algorithm can? How exactly do you tell the difference between an advance copy posted to a blog by the artist themselves and an advance copy illegally leaked to a blog by someone else? The difference between kiddy porn and pirated content is that kiddy porn is always illegal. The exact same .mp3 file on the exact same server could be illegal today and legal tomorrow if the guy hosting it goes and asks for permission.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/08225217010/breaking-news-feds-falsely-censor-popular-blog-over-year-deny-all-due-process-hide-all-details.shtml
Have Google block Netflix, iTunes, Hulu and every advertised legal video and music service and then go in and explain the problem again.
Or, even more likely there is a law enforcement database of known child porn images, and you look for what you know is out there. In my soul, I have to believe that the generation rate of new kiddie porn images is low enough that law enforcement keeps up with it, and investigates when new images start showing up at the dark crevices of the internet that distribute them.
Piracy just doesn't add any value to society at all... it just turns people into mindless consumerist zombies addicted to artistic consumption, without producing any art in return.
And before piracy they were what exactly?
Good music was pirated to death
Actually, no, the heyday of music sales was also the heyday of Napster. Music sales drops directly correlate to (A) the lowered number of premiere band and album launches and (B) the music industry's lack of ability to forced-obsolescence much of their product compared to past years. Tapes wore out; Vinyl required great care. The music industry enjoyed a massive boost with CDs largely because they could resell the same old crap, plus all their "new acts", on CD and people would actually buy the various greatest-hit collections and album re-releases on CD because their old copies were degrading and not playing back at the same quality.
The nice thing about digital, though, is it doesn't degrade. And people have learned about transferring things device to device, and their RIGHT to do so.
There's also the nice rise of the single again, with people able to buy just the TRACKS they want rather than having to buy a shitty-ass album to get the one track they liked that was way overplayed on the radio from this summer's one-hit wonder. Great for consumers, lousy for coke-addled music execs who counted on selling CD albums at $19.99 forever.
The music industry is in decline because all they are producing is Biebers, Gagas, and twerking bimbos rather than elevating the best new acts. They do this because they can get the Biebers, Gagas, and twerking bimbos cheap and sign them to a long term contract early (much like Disney's "this is how we sell sex to 5 year old girls" tools, the Jonas Brothers, or the former trajectory of most Boy Bands).
What it would take for the music industry to stop the decline is to start producing a better product again. "Piracy" did not cause the Biebers, Gagas, etc. The relentless drive of one-hit wonder crap albums, tweeny-pop boybands, twerking bimbos, Lesbos Like Bieber, and on and on caused people to be leery of buying product sight-unseen.
> Child abuse is machine recognizable; piracy is not.
A human can recognize something is child pr0n.
Neither man nor machine can tell whether something is copyright infringement.
Even if you can recognize something as a bit of a popular song or video clip, how can you know whether it is authorized (therefore not piracy) or whether it is fair use under the law?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Good timing for this Sunday then : http://www.meetup.com/ORG-Manchester/events/141759552/
How is it machine recognizable? How does a machine recognize a "late bloomer" 19 year old or a "early bloomer" 16 year old? Or similar pictures of actual child porn vs a pediatric medicine textbook with legitimate value? Is that naked baby or toddler photo that everyone seemingly has from their childhood recognizable by a machine and should it be filtered?
Many of the same arguments that apply to piracy have analogous with regards to child abuse. Both have cases where it's really easy to say yes that is illegal. And both have cases where it's not obvious, or worse where the obviousness is wrong.
Personally, I think most artists are lazy fucks who think that doing work for about 3 months should entitle them to a lifetime of luxury. I prefer to support people who actually play music. You know, concerts.
Nope, haven't bough music in years. But I have been to more than a few concerts.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
... how do you divine the presence or absence of consent from the photo itself?
You just look at the copyright-bit. It's the one to the left of the evil-bit.
Mnemonic to remember if the copyright-bit is to the left or the right of the evil-bit: The most significant bit is to the left, least significant bit to the right.
there are plenty of legal ways to post copyrighted material.
The fact that viacom can't keep track of what they uploaded on their own should be proof of how bad an idea this is.
People were creating artwork long before copyright was invented...
All copyright has done, is encourage the greedy by allowing someone to continue getting paid for work they did long ago.
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The issue is ownership. To block illegal copyrighted material you must know if the distributor (web site) is legally allowed to serve the material. Given that we can't reliably determine the owner of half the copyrighted material on the web, this could be a problem.
Another here. The fun was in making. Why do I need to get paid twice? Money isn't the only reward.
Okay first of all when google tries to eliminate child porn, they have the assistance of the police who in general are trying their best to eliminate this content because we've deemed this sort of content less than legal. I think most would agree this is a clean directive and relatively simple to understand.
When it comes to media organizations such as RIAA, it's pretty obvious they don't care too much about the music, people or privacy. All they care about is making money from the system. This results in them blanketing everyone with lawsuits including themselves and folks who are completely innocent.
If the police were like this it would be like them shooting everyone in the building to catch a single criminal because somehow that's a much better idea that actually doing your job correctly. This is the key difference between google looking for child porn and looking for pirated media. The organizations they need to co-operate with operate entirely differently.
Sometimes the slope really is slippery.
and you speak for all musicians? even those that practice their art full time for a living? gtfo.
btw, you were modded +5 NOT because you are correct, but because you assuaged the guilt of all the self-deceiving pirates. just keep that in mind.
This can be done for pirated content too.
Just hire a staff of copyright lawyers to sift through the content and sort out the legality with a judge on a case by case basis. Contact copyright holder whenever possible to determine if that particular redistribution is allowed.
Send the bill for it to the copyright industry.
It starts out protecting the children, then it moves to protecting content authors. Then it moves to protecting government officials from negative political speech. Then it moves to protecting criminals from journalists reporting about their actions. Where does it end? You might as well just take down the internet and block everything.
Actually, Law enforcement agencies in the US have been infecting computers with child porn malware, to frame people for breaking the law To quote the non-popularized Snowden Leak from about a month ago: "The procedure will be using the new methods which include stuffing child pornography images and moving-images inside of average files which will be shared by servers sanctioned by the FBI. The methods of stuffing will vary from each agent or officer but are approved as long as the suspect cannot detect that the file contains child pornography until the file has been downloaded. Child pornography has successfully been stuffed into adult pornography films, music files using ID3 tags, software programs, keygens and cracks, and other material that has been illicitly traded over P2P file sharing networks. This method has been successful at deterring both child pornographers and copyright infringement and has been approved for official procedures under the guise that it be kept as classified information."
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Just block anyone searching from the United Kingdom ... unless they hide where they are coming from, of course.
I'm sure Baidu would like to set up a censored internet search engine customized to the needs of Parliament.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
But do we want only that?
Agreed, I couldn't live in a world without Brittany Spears or Justin Beiber.
Yeah, it's not generally machine recognizable. What Google is doing is just filtering KNOWN child abuse images, which have been widely recirculated over the last decade. And they still do only a mediocre job at that.
IIRC Sony and Google have a bit of a problem with Youtube videos. Sony was uploading videos to Youtube for some viral marketing and then sending takedown notices because Sony didn't know Sony uploaded the files. To further complicate things, Sony then sued Google for not taking down videos it had uploaded and certified that they owned.
Why would anyone want to throw more gas into that mess?
Even if making that situation more complicated seems like a good idea, what about all the incorrect assertions of copyright ownership? Or files that are legally shared?
In the end, I guess the lawyers will be the ones that win big.
There in no religion higher than truth.
What is illegal varies. For instance, in the U.S. textual or drawn child porn is legal, while in Canada it is not, as someone crossing the border discovered when they were arrested for possessing a Japanese manga depicting underage sex. How wide it covers is unclear though - none could say a picture of Bart Simpson baning his sister depicts actual persons, but would still fall under some definitions of child porn.
Hmm, could I interest you in some swampland in Florida?
Considering that the definition of "child porn" isn't universal, how is it even possible to think that the production rate is "low enough that law enforcement keeps up with it"?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Google should not block anything. The police should catch child abusers, and other criminals. If Google blocks content, there's less pressure on members of parliament to increase funds for catching child abusers. As one of the founders of meldpunt.org and inhope.org, I've always said criminal content should not be blocked, but rather the criminals should be caught.
no, I don't have a sig
Child abuse images are always wrong, so they all can be blocked just based on the content. The identification can be enhanced with analyzing the text and other content in the context.
Copyrighted content, however, is wrong only if the copyright holder has not given consent. How do you know if the consent has been given? I tried searching The Pirate Bay for Skyrim so I can compare how they are described in there and on Steam or other sources. The game itself is quite clearly there without permission, but I found a lot of content that seem to be freely distributible mods, but I can't actually be quite sure. How could a computer decide about those, then?
A simple solution would be to just block all content identified as copyrighted. And no exceptions for large retailers and publishers, block them equally or it's not fair competition when the smaller legal players get blocked.
I don't think the issue is in blocking, google can (and it seems does) block links to certain pieces of content.
The problem is reliable identification. Up to a certain age, CP is fairly easy to identify as such. Copyright infringement, no so much.
a) CP is pretty much illegal everywhere (even places that only show lip service to combating child abuse, it's still illegal)
b) Copyright varies by country, and can apply differently depending on the type or age of the content
c) There is no issue of CP ownership. If it's there, it's illegal. Just because a clip of Band X is online doesn't mean it's illegal, as promo clips etc are not uncommon
d) Fair use for certain types of clips, etc
The studios seem happy to use automated tools for take-downs that also cause some fairly significant collateral damage, so even having *them* ID potentially infringing material is fairly inaccurate.
The most significant bit is to the left, least significant bit to the right.
Big-endian scum!
People were creating artwork long before copyright was invented... All copyright has done, is encourage the greedy by allowing someone to continue getting paid for work they did long ago.
Tell me again how a lack of international copyright helped Georges Méliès create art and discouraged greedy douchebags from stealing it.
Hash list or image fingerprint. The number of such images in circulation is small enough and slow enough in growing that it's practical for a few organisations around the world, working together, to monitor and catalog them all into an 'index of child abuse' that can then be fed into an image recognition engine.
Trying to do that for piracy would be as effective as trying to drain the ocean with a bucket.
I don't believe cp is free speech anywhere.
There is a big difference between Child Porn and Pirated content:
Pornographic pictures of children when seen can be objectively judged as child porn and easily filtered. If you see it, it's Illegal, and filter it. Save the hash- if you see the hash again, immediately block it.
Copyrighted content has to be judged if the person distributing it has clearances to distribute it. If you see a stream of a TV show, how do you know instantly (and automatically) that it's illegal? Even if you've found an illegal instance, you can't automatically block all subsequent instances as they may be Fair use, or authorized IE: song used as background on a commercial. Since it contains a copyrighted song, should google block it from YouTube automatically, even though the car company that posted the video has paperwork giving them clearance?
It's not easy to block copyright infringements without blocking valid uses. There is no valid use of Child Porn under the law.
From blocking things that are illegal everywhere to thing are illegal in some places.
The reason why child porn is blocked is because the person pictured is the underage victim of a crime
and the creation of child porn is a mala in se offense (illegal because its bad in of itself) because its the distribution of the product of child abuse.
software piracy is a malum prohibitum offense (illegal for statutory reasons).
The right to enforce copyright should lie with the copyright holder not the state. Not all copyright holders choose to exercise their rights or have constructively abandoned their rights (aka Abandonware), something the law has not been updated to reflect.
How about this reason: There are lots of legal music to download and very little legal child abuse (ie: less false positives)
but your art sucks so bad it's hard to giveaway, never mind sell.
Shows give a lot of money. The Three Stooges and Abbot & Costello made their money at shows. Their films and shorts were advertising for them, only the studios made a lot.
That's why some of the richest performers are Vegas gods, like Wayne Newton, and why guys tired of touring like Elvis set up permanent shop there.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That's just a lack of imagination on your part. Why is it that we have to use this one, specific model (copyright/licensing/royalties) to ensure artists get revenue?
Bad weather more often than not ?
Check.
GATSO cameras ?
Check.
Surveillance cameras everywhere ?
Check.
Government willing to assist in repressing Julian Assange ?
Check.
Idiot politicians who lack a basic understanding of the web yet
want to control it anyway ?
Check.
What a sad place the UK is now.
Mod parent up x1000!
It *is* an impossible task because while *all* child pornography is illegal - no exceptions - redistribution of copyrighted contents is illegal when the right owner didn't consent to it and legal when he did. It's the same thing as with photos of people - in some jurisdictions, you're only allowed to publish photos of people who consented to it (with perhaps some exceptions), but how do you divine the presence or absence of consent from the photo itself?
Probably the same way you "divine" the age of the participants in a particular "child pornography" image. Especially the hand-drawn ones where you don't have a telepath close enough to read the artist's mind.
Honestly, given 2 files: one a naked picture of a possible child, the other an mp3 of Michael Jackson's Bad, which is more difficult to identify, programatically, as illegal?
Somebody didn't think very hard before they suggested this idea.
If computers were able to detect copyright infringement, then there wouldn't be any DRM, or if there was DRM, nobody would have a problem with how it worked, and so there wouldn't be enough infringement for anyone to want to block.
If computers were able to detect copyright infringement, then HBO's DMCAbot wouldn't be sending takedown notices to Google for half of the pages on the web that use the word "boardwalk" or "thrones" somewhere in their text.
But computers aren't able to detect copyright infringment, and to date, every single attempt to have them try to do it, has resulted in over-the-top comedic failure that was deployed thirty years before it was ready.
Nobody's computer ever went to law school and learned the difference between infringing and non-infringing uses. Geez, ask experts whether or an H.P. Lovecraft story is still under copyright, and you can get two different answers. And you want computers to accurately identify each work, know its publication history, know whether or not its distribution is authorized, understand the nature of a use asnd its effect on the market, and then have the smarts to put all the facts together and come up with "infringing" vs "non-infringing"?
Tell you what. If I ever get a message from Google about DMCA-blocked search result that isn't absurd bullshit, or if I ever hear about a DRM scheme that doesn't prevent innocent noninfringing uses, then the idea may start to have some credibility. Until then, seriuously asking for Google to identify copyright infringement, is like seriously asking your Honda dealer where the lot with the flying cars is.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Parent deserves a higher mod value!
Most MPs are stupid enough to believe that Google should be able to fix this - but would also believe the opposite if told by the right person.
The particular group of MPs in this case are motivated purely by financial obligations - personal ones at that.
One would be hard pressed to argue that a bloodied child in a war zone is not being abused. I'd say thats abuse by definition.
Not hard-pressed:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/abuse
tr.v. abused, abusing, abuses
1. To use wrongly or improperly; misuse: abuse alcohol; abuse a privilege.
2. To hurt or injure by maltreatment; ill-use.
3. To force sexual activity on; rape or molest.
4. To assail with contemptuous, coarse, or insulting words; revile.
5. Obsolete To deceive or trick.
IMHO, Your definition exceeds the actual definition.
Now define piracy in a way that's machine detectable, and what you'll really have is the ultimate DRM.
Agreed on the DRM, disagree on the war zone children.
* Children in war zones should not be combatants, they should be civilians. Any child in a war zone who is acting as a combatant is being maltreated, or ill-used; definition 2.
* Civilians are non-combatants, and so should not be getting injured. A civilian being injured due to wartime activities is being "hurt or injure[d] by maltreatment"; definition 2.
I don't think that BitZtream exceeded the definition; it seems to me he got it spot-on.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Definition number 2 looks fairly apt. It's not nice to blow up children.
Agreed on copyright infringement. The very same file may be infringement in one context and fine in another and Google has no way to know the context.
The Three Stooges didn't make a lot of money for various reasons. The studios kept most of the money while trying to disguise the fact that the Three Stooges were very popular lest they demand more money. Not too surprising really since at the time the shorts at the start of movies weren't commonly though to be that valuable. So they kept cranking out the shorts like working stiffs. Later on they figured out how valuable they were but by then their popularity was declining.
The odd thing about that is that different people have different ideas of what's sexy. Some people get really turned on by high heels popping balloons for some reason. So is a picture of a fully clothed child trying out mommy's high heels and popping a balloon forbidden?
It *is* an impossible task because while *all* child pornography is illegal - no exceptions - redistribution of copyrighted contents is illegal when the right owner didn't consent to it and legal when he did.
This is a stupid statement. I could just as easily say *all* pirated content is illegal. That doesn't magically make it easy to ID, and your statement that *all* child pornography is illegal is no different. The question is how do you distinguish the pirated content (or child pornography) from the legal-to-distribute content (or regular pornography, or art/family photos containing nude or partially nude imagery).
By paying the 3 power points to manifest Object Reading, of course.
And it's a slippery slope to a hellish society. Filtering in my mind constitutes child abuse too.
People should have stood up, and should stand up now, to eliminate filtering from the Internet. If they can do it for one thing they can do it for another and a censored society is an uninformed society. You can't have a free democratic society if children and adults alike are kept uninformed and prevented from coming to there own decisions.
Meanwhile censoring child pornography ensures that only pedophiles have access. Its trivial to get around the most advanced filtering technology for anybody who has a remote desire to do so (most don't, but most aren't pedophiles either). It doesn't actually solve the problem of child abuse or reduce the harm.
A child is not harmed by another viewing them naked either. Nor would they be harmed by actual abusive photos (regardless of the clothing or it even being sexual in nature). They may be emotionally impacted by society's reaction to it though and/or knowledge of its existence. That's shame and that's something caused by you and me, not the pedophiles. The pedophiles obviously don't have a problem with it.
The answer to the whole problem is changing societal views on pornography and sex. It is not 'lock everybody up'. If you take this to the extreme there will be no people left who are not under house arrest and whereing ankle bracelets. In fact you'll eventually end up in a society that more closely resembles that of the Tailibans.
> Have you never checked out a girl
No. Never.
Ever.
> Not even with metadata attached to the file? Not even with a database, like the CDDB . . .
That does not mean it is piracy. Just because you can identify something doesn't mean the use is infringing.
First there is fair use. Can you determine whether a particular use is fair use? The major record labels can't. They have to go to court.
Then there is the issue of authorization. Just because you can identify something that is clearly copyrighted, doesn't mean that it isn't authorized to be where you found it. The major record labels have used DMCA to take down content that they themselves uploaded for promotional purposes! And on multiple occasions! If they can't even tell what they themselves uploaded and authorized, then how can you or especially a machine?
And finally, as for the issue of "clearly copyrighted" (in my previous paragraph), EVERYTHING is clearly copyrighted. So even if you CAN'T identify it doesn't mean it isn't copyrighted -- by someone. Everything is instantly copyrighted the moment it is fixed in a tangible medium of expression. So ANYTHING you find online is copyrighted. Is it piracy? Is it infringing? Is it authorized to be there? Is it fair use? Can you tell? Can a machine tell?
> Once you've identified a copyrighted song, image, or other work, you can then calculate what % of the entire file is using that copyrighted material.
There are already court precedent cases that some uses of 100% of the material are fair use. There are multiple factors that determine fair use. Percent of the work quoted or excerpted is not the only factor. And there is no magic percent that you have to cross. There are other factors such as character and nature of the use, and others I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
So Google thought that bending over and censoring search results will protect them from further harassment from the copyright industry? They got kicked in the face with the same boots they are kissing.
They actually are not overly effective at blocking child porn, are they? I can find it with a quick google search. Would you be all that upset if they blocked piracy as ineffectively as they actually block child porn?
It is not some super-effective Google filter that makes child porn harder to find on the internet; it is the relatively small amount of child porn out there, as different police agencies jump on whatever they find and prosecute people. If they jumped on piracy as hard as child porn, their would be a lot less piracy as well. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why they will never do that. Don't confuse your problems with finding child porn with Google filtering; it's got very little to do with the latter, despite what John Whittingdale MP might claim.
The biggest difference is the scale of the problem. There is probably half a billion people who have commited copyright infringment. I would be surprised if there are more than 10,000 people involved in child abuse. The stakes are very different as well. You discover a person involved in child abuse you may save the lives of several children. You discover copyright infringment you may save the music industry a few hundred dollars. That if you don't count the money lost to lawsuits from all the false positives.
You can only practice Art for a living, if someone agrees to finance your living. There are several models for that: patronage, entrance fees, taxes (which are governmental patronage), sponsored competitions which hand out prizes...
Ten songs stolen by politicians:
British Conservative Party (current UK government) used Keane's "Everybody's Changing" without permission. Arrrgh, we be pirates, me hartiez!
www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11406906
Even trained federal agents can't seem to tell the difference
Can't, or don't want to?
How exactly do you tell the difference between an advance copy posted to a blog by the artist themselves and an advance copy illegally leaked to a blog by someone else?
You want me to do the work for you?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Piracy has destroyed the music industry. New artists can only expect to make between 50 and 100 million dollars per song these days. It is hardly worth turning up for.
I was with you 110% and was all set to give a +1 insightful until you used "lesbo" as an insult. That's not cool, and it really detracted from your argument.
> Biebers, Gagas
Lumping these two together simply because you don't like either doesn't speak in favor of your understanding of the music industry
> Lesbos
Ho, is that a derogatory term for you? This might explain why you dislike Gaga, seeing how supportive she is of the LGBT (as opposed to Bieber, who wouldn't get involved in any cause except his own welfare).
Anyhow, you clearly lack some knowledge of the history of the music industry. One hit wonder and tweeny pop band were always the main focus of the industry. Do you think there where only a handful of bands published in the 60's, like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zep, the Who, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan,...? Sorry, but these are only the ones that were good enough to remain in the public memory until now. For each one of them, there was 20 rippoffs, one-hit-wonders, or these day's equivalent of boys band, like the Monkeys.
Your post is almost 100% drivel, with the exception of killing the music "industry" which is a good thing and can't be completed quickly enough.
Good music was pirated to death
No. There's more great music being made today than ever before. The crap being spouted by the (still not quite dead, but hopefully soon) major labels is indeed crap, but that crap is becoming more and more obsolete with every day.
I have bought more excellent music in the last two years than I did in the 8 before, with more than 90% of the money going directly to the (damn talented) artists.
Piracy is, and has been, great for music.
It has been great for the movies, too. Never before have so many people paid to watch movies in the theaters than the last couple of years.
I don't know which world you live in, but it's not the real one.
Piracy is a hurdle to be jumped over, if it hasn't killed media in the decades it has existed, and even the recent post-Napster age, what makes your assertion plausible? People will create, people will find ways to monetize that should they choose to, and so far it seems like the industries are surviving in spite of these challenges.
Take your doom and gloom, and cool it.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
How exactly do you tell the difference between an advance copy posted to a blog by the artist themselves and an advance copy illegally leaked to a blog by someone else?
You want me to do the work for you?
No, I want to know how the hell Google is supposed to program an algorithm to determine something that even human beings can't manage to figure out. There is just not enough information, and short of establishing a massive database of all copyright works, along with the contact information of the copyright holder, in every possible format, creating some sort of hash of each of those, comparing to every file they come across and then contacting the copyright holder for every single media file and asking if it is authorized....that's a much harder proposition than 'that girl looks under 18 and her nipples are showing'. That's my point. Filtering out piracy requires a massive amount of additional data that Google just does not have access to. Might as well demand that they build a wormhole to Alpha Centauri.
No, I want to know how the hell Google is supposed to program an algorithm to determine something that even human beings can't manage to figure out.
I don't claim that they can catch it all, but clearly they could catch a lot of it. A lot of it is very clearly marked, they're not even removing that. (The issue of whether they should have to is orthogonal to the technical conversation.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They remove it if they're sent a DMCA request or some other similar legal assertion from the copyright holder. That's really the best they can do. What else do you want, block The Pirate Bay (for example) entirely? They're even already partially doing that, restricting non-infringing files from their results because of it.
This is the typical argument of conservative MPs and US Congressmen & Congresswomen who are in the pocket of the very corporations afraid of losing a few cents to free information and free speech. 'Piracy' is only a concern for the super-rich and power-hungry. The people just trying to make it in music and film most often encourage people to freely copy their work to get it in the TVs, phones, and MP3 players of more people. People should be glad that copyright is dying.
doesnt anyone have anything better to do like, solve the worldwide crises or fight the terrerists ? ...) where people swapped floppy disks, maybe piracy was more like a social thing then and my ever-returning topic : im sure the old people in charge of copytrolling remember the days when home recorded cassette tapes were destroying the music industry and cost the beatles their third pool a year as well
is it possible to block ? does actual child porn actually exist on the frontface of the internet ? not like i ever googled and accidentaly came across a link that led me to reportable imagery. Unless run-over roadwhores in sneakers and pigtails are considered
that, i think it would be way more productive if google tried to remove the first two pages of non-paying links on popular searches since about all of those lead to some kind of this-is-what-you-need-to-do-*keyword*-just install this (thing that will then download and install what you need in order to get to or install *keyword* but in fact replaces your search with something that gathers data and or installs a bit of malware on the side)
i dont think piracy sites need search engines anyway, i remember the days (dramatic music in the background
i also still think that the cut in losses if suddenly all sites went down would be negligible since its far from proven that everyone who downloads a blockbuster or game would actually for out the money if they couldnt, no one ever really makes statistics on that
as far as uk-news goes i found the bit where the chief of police appeals to 'end the war on drugs' a lot more interesting anyway
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Sorry, but this is completely false. Child abuse is not machine recognizable, and many of the tools that claim to do it, but fail.
- just because you're not paranoid, doesn't mean I'm not out to get you.