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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."
Because the best way to argue against them is with insults and the lack of an actual argument. Seriously, if you're going to start the debate, at least provide something tangible.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Creation and possession of child porn £300 fine and 6 months suspended sentence.
Illegally downloading said child porn without the copyright holder permission - 10 years for each file and a max fine of $250,000 per image.
Copyright is theft!
The crux is - Copyright is a civil matter; but they've turned it into a criminal one.
Personally I still get all of my content legally (generally via rental now, ie LoveFilm and Spotify), but if the industries keep acting the way they are, they kind of get what they deserve.
You can't keep ignoring reality either. I have no idea of the real figures, but the vast majority of my friends watch TV shows and listen to music illegally. It kind of sucks, but it's how people are. Expecting everyone to ignore free sources of entertainment is slightly like expecting everyone to use film cameras when digital is available. Or expecting people to go into a dark room full of strangers just to watch a new movie. If they want to keep making money, they should embrace change, rather than fight it tooth and nail.
which is totally what she said
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.'
Nobody is entitled to make money
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Who don't you explain why we should not have all the stuff we want for free?
It worked fine for at least 50.000 years of human history, artists, musicians etc happily continued creating "culture" without getting payed for it 70 years after their deaths.
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".
To reply to myself. Sentences for making child porn on the first page of search result is 25+ years. Texas being most awesome by handing out a 290 year sentence! Go Texas.
Exactly.
This is like saying that because the SWAT and the FBI handle situations involving murder and hostages, that those departments should be more than capable of finding my lost kitten.
Then proceeding to complain that they are not doing so.
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.
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.'"
If it makes it any easier for the MPs, I'm sure that Google would just be willing to block off the UK instead.
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
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
I'm a proud pirate. I think the whole system is corrupt and indefensible. I think there is a role for IP, but compared to where we are now I think we'd be better off scrapping it all together. I have been known to actually buy stuff, but only when it saves me time over piracy. Sadly, it is often more convenient to pirate (especially software and video).
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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 if you choose to share it. If you don't want other people to know about it then keep it to yourself. Then only you and the NSA will know.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I want to know what we block after piracy?
If we can block child porn and pirate sites, we can also block everything else that somebody, somewhere doesn't like. Right?
Shooting the messenger isn't the way to stop piracy (or child porn for that matter). All it does is drive it underground.
No sig today...
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.
I know right? Why use our brains when we "think" of the children? No need to have sentences that mesh with the crime. After all, why should there be any difference between the sentences for downloading a couple of images into your cache and kidnapping, violently raping, torturing, and then murdering a hundred children? I mean, that's practically the same thing right?
Government protection for a business model that's failing (for whatever reason) is a very slippery slope.
(Before answering, consider that the music industry's golden years were when people used to freely record music which was being broadcast by radio...)
No business should expect that profits will always go upwards to infinity. Every market will plateau. Some markets will collapse. Some will no longer be able to support a huge amount of middlemen (which is who's inventing the figures for 'losses' by the music industry, despite all independent studies to the contrary).
No sig today...
I think it's reasonable that the time and effort a creator puts behind a work is rewarded appropriately.
The "piracy" conflict is mostly down to the music mogul's definition of "appropriate".
Remember that the actual artists very rarely get paid, if at all (see Internet for further details...)
No sig today...
And no one is entitled to someone else's work.
;)
So I take it you don't pay taxes?
Snark aside, you have it absolutely correct. No one has as a "right" to your work. In the real world, however, that only works as long as you don't ever let your creations out of your head. As soon as you casually whistle that catchy little tune you wrote, in earshot of someone else - Game over (potentially). The universe now owns it, and you can go suck eggs.
For better or worse, compensating the author of a creative work very much depends on the charitable, even grateful, feelings those works inspire in their audience. I want my favorite bands to produce more, and do my best to get money to them; on the flip side of that, I loathe my favorite bands' labels, and wouldn't stop to piss on their execs in I found them dying of thirst in the Sahara. This leads to a bit of cognitive dissonance, obviously, which I personally resolve by doing my best to compensate the artists directly (concerts, merchandise, direct sales, etc) while shamelessly pirating anything actually released by the parasites that "own" them.
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.
Disagreeing with the current political party. They DESPERATELY want that to be blocked.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Because they do it to me.
My personal information I never get paid for, yet companies pirate it from me daily.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Who don't you explain why we should not have all the stuff we want for free?
It worked fine for at least 50.000 years of human history, artists, musicians etc happily continued creating "culture" without getting payed for it 70 years after their deaths.
You can have all of the stuff you want for free. On the other hand, if you want somebody else to produce it for you, they don't have to produce it for you for free. But, you, yourself, can do it for free.
As for the rest of your post, at least since the Middle Ages and probably long before that, the arts were supported by the wealthy and the artisans could only "perform" with the permission of their sponsor. Back then, the artisans were more like indentured servants. As long as they pleased the king, the prince, or whomever, they got to eat and ply their trade. If not, well, there is a reason why artists have the reputation of being starving.
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/
I preordered Iron Man 3 on BR. It wasn't shipping yet, so I downloaded a copy.
What the fuck was their problem with making me wait to watch a movie I enjoyed with my kids?
They could just as easily sell the movies at the theatre. But they don't. It's still all about the buggy whips.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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.
> Come on self-entitled brats. Lets hear why you should be allowed to have all the stuff you want for free.
A human can instantly 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?
The self entitled brats are the copyright owners thinking Google and everyone else should do their job for them and owe them a living forever and ever for doing something creative one time.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Download films? What dork does that. you rent the Bluray from Netflix and rip it so you get a superior copy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Sometimes, the winning move is to not play. I recommend civil disobedience to our corporate overlords - pirate everything you can even if you're not going to watch/listen to it.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
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.
Okay. I'm sure you can cite many examples of copyrighted child porn to back up your argument.
I think I know someone who can help you with that.
I found this extremely offensive website through just a simple Google search. It must be banned instantly! After all, we can ban child abuse images, why not MPs who are idiots?
http://www.johnwhittingdale.org.uk/
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
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.
And no one is entitled to someone else's work.
I take it you've never read the constuitution to see why there's such a thing as copyright in the US in the first place? The whole purpose is to encourage artists and writers to produce things so they will go into the public domain. Originally it was only 14 years.
I also take it that you've never read any Asimov.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
> 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.