Author: David Newhoff

David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.

What’s in a Search Result?

Ukranians faced off riot police yesterday in Independence Square, a tense scene that ended peacefully for now, with police forces withdrawing.  The protests are sparked by anger over president Viktor Yanukovich’s apparent stonewalling on signing a trade deal with the EU that would further emancipate the fledgling democracy from its former Soviet occupiers.  The pact would bring badly needed investment into the nearly-bankrupt country of 46 million and help break the stranglehold Russia has on its industrial sector as the sole supplier of natural gas.  Meanwhile, what are Americans and other citizens who enjoy diverse economies quibbling about?  What movies are available online of course.

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My colleague at Vox Indie, Ellen Seidler brought it to my attention that a Google search for “movie piracy” will presently bring up as the second result an October 15th article written by Timothy B. Lee, a libertarian with views generally hostile toward copyrights.  Lee offers yet another variation on the message “piracy is a reaction against industry failure” by pointing to a handful of top movies that are supposedly unavailable to stream or purchase online through paid services yet. Although the central fact is exaggerated — some of the movies cited are available — Lee unblushingly quotes fellow libertarian and team leader of Piracydata.org, Jerry Brito, thus:

“The MPAA is complaining that Google leads people to infringing links, but what’s the alternative?” The movies that are available on file-sharing sites, he says, are “very rarely available for legal acquisition.”

Oh the humanity!  What is the alternative indeed?  What will my long-suffering fellow countrymen do of an evening if they cannot find a recently released movie on demand? Are they to risk carpal tunnel searching aimlessly?  Or watch something else, like maybe a film with an older release date?  Or (perish the thought) read something????  What is the point of living in a free and culturally diverse society?  What is this, Ukraine??

If you’re an American, everything about this search result should worry you, and everything it’s communicating should embarrass you. As for the worrisome part, if you read Ellen Seidler’s post about Lee and Brito and the Mercatus Center, the information-control process looks like this:  a user types in a broad search term like “movie piracy,” Google ensures that this pro-piracy article is the number two result, and the body of the article promotes the agenda of from an organization that is heavily funded by anti-labor, anti-civil-liberties forces like the Koch Brothers.   As many of us keep saying, the anti-copyright agenda is effectively an anti-fair-trade, anti-labor, anti-collective-bargaining agenda disguised as a pro-liberty agenda, and that brings us to the part that should embarrass you.  Because this message only works if you the user really believe that instant, round-the-clock access to all content is a right tantamount to a civil liberty.   If you honestly believe that, read about Ukraine this week. This is a nation hungry for a diverse economy, and I’ll bet the Ukranians would dearly enjoy a rich IP sector modeled after countries like the U.S., where artists are rewarded instead of, you know, jailed.  By contrast, people like Lee and Brito sound a hell of a lot like my kids complaining that there’s nothing to watch on television.

Want to Protect Speech? Strengthen Copyright

Following up on yesterday’s brief reference to Jaron Lanier’s editorial in the New York Times, we find the same theme echoed in this coverage by Emma Green at The Atlantic.  Green writes about an event at which authors E.L. Doctorow and David Simon also raised concerns regarding the disconnect between overreacting to stories about government surveillance while remaining unconcerned with Google’s collection and exploitation of data we volunteer as users of the Internet.  The title of the article, predicated on a quote from Simon, invokes Orwell, as topics of this nature invariably do; and I while I think it takes much more than technological means to produce the “Orwellian nightmare,” the exaggeration is still instructive.

Although she doesn’t really preface quite what she means by “principles,” Green concludes with an editorial statement that “principles may serve as better starting points than solutions” when it comes to addressing the matter of privacy in our digitally connected lives.  Certainly a lack of privacy is one feature of an Orwell-like dystopia, but privacy alone, as is often interpreted through a technological bias, translates into anonymity as a solution; and I would argue that voluntarily turning ourselves into faceless avatars would be a very effective way to hasten a post-human society orbiting some centralized, fascistic body.  On the subject of principles, however, if the Orwellian nightmare is what we fear, then there is one thing we can do in the coming year to hedge against it:  let’s strengthen copyright law against threats from internet companies like Google.

Artists, journalists, and cultural leaders whose faces and voices are known to us, who speak in the sunlight, and who author works and sign their names to those works have been, and continue to be, a counterforce against all mechanisms of tyranny. And in a free society with a market economy, we cannot separate the social value of those voices from their civil right to derive economic value by their labors.   While it is necessary that speech for all is an absolute right, the boundaries and power of speech are not always extended by mass reaction through social media (i.e. what’s trending).  The overreaction to the Snowden leaks attended by simultaneous blindness to Google’s use of data makes a good example. Speech is not inherently made more powerful every time a troll acts like a jackass, or even necessarily every time millions of us write rational critiques of the world on Facebook and Twitter.  Speech is made more powerful by those who use it powerfully, and what the Internet surely proves is that this can be anyone from a poet laureate to a six-year-old child you would never have known without a thing called YouTube.  Still, if we want to avoid sliding over the cliff into the Orwellian abyss, then an empowered population of authors is essential, and like it or not, that means protecting the economic power of authors.

Yes, the industries built on copyright often serve up a lot of drivel that can hardly be said to live up to the platitudes stated above.  I would not suggest, for instance, that Miley’s twerking or the subsequent circus of response to it do much of anything in particular for speech; but then, this is a chicken and egg issue, isn’t it?  Who buys tickets to the circus and makes a non-story a story?  YouTube doesn’t force twenty-plus-million people to click on the video to see what all the fuss is about.  We get caught up in the frenzy, and certain entities, including what used to be television news, must monetize the frenzy or go out of business. On this matter, Christopher Hedges’s editorial from June 2010, describes the Coliseum-like atmosphere in which Americans are too distracted by shiny objects to deal with the reality that our economy my be rotting from within.  Meanwhile, the most powerful oligarchs of this era, to paraphrase Andrew Orlowski, have built themselves luxury life rafts in order to transcend the bleak future their distracting technologies might help make manifest for the rest of us.

If we want to strengthen free speech; if we want a hedge against invasions of civil liberty; if we want to speak truth to power, then we must continue to empower those who speak the truth and do so openly and professionally. To put it whimsically, a great bulwark against tyranny would be a class of unusually wealthy poets.  As Congress resumes the process of copyright review in 2014, we should seek not to weaken these laws on an assumption of their irrelevance in the digital age, but to strengthen them on the grounds that they are more important than ever.

Jaron Lanier warns against “digital passivity”

Once again, computer scientist, author, and musician Jaron Lanier passionately addresses ways in which digital age toys and apps offer illusions of empowerment and greater freedom while in fact limiting both.  This article was shared by reader Mike Katell, who also offered a thoughtful comment in response to my post as to why I’m not losing sleep over the revelations of Edward Snowden.  Some misinterpreted that post as advocating apathy about government surveillance, but that wasn’t the point at all.  As echoed in this editorial by Lanier, the post was about questioning an overreaction to perceived government surveillance while simultaneously volunteering ourselves to surveillance through fun gadgets linked to large, corporate-owned computers.

From Lanier’s article:

“To be free is to have a private zone in which you can be alone with your thoughts and experiments. That is where you differentiate yourself and grow your personal value. When you carry around a smartphone with a GPS and camera and constantly pipe data to a computer owned by a corporation paid by advertisers to manipulate you, you are less free. Not only are you benefiting the corporation and the advertisers, you are also accepting an assault on your free will, bit by bit.”

 Read full article at the New York Times here.