Category: Art

Maybe Google Means “See No Evil”

Yesterday, Google chairman Eric Schmidt was interviewed on public radio and simulcast on Google Hangouts.  WAMU’s Diane Rhem threw softballs, slow and over the plate at Schmidt, providing a friendly platform for the chairman to evangelize the many ways Google makes the world a better place.  Coincidentally, I happened to be editing the following:

For those who don’t know, ChillingEffects.org is a database and website managed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Berkman Center for Internet & Society.  It is a presumptive watchdog over the presumptive misuse of DMCA takedown notices — the implication being that free expression is “chilled” whenever such an abuse takes place.  In principle, this might seem like a reasonable thing for the EFF to oversee; after all, we don’t want free speech to get chilly, even if there is diminishing hope that speech is necessarily getting anymore valuable in the digital age.  But it turns out that whenever, say, Google receives a DMCA takedown notice for a link to infringing material, every one of these complaints is sent to ChillingEffects so that users are, in principle anyway, able to read the details of the complaint from the notice sender.   So for example, if you were to search the term “Expendables III,” which was weeks ago leaked before its theatrical release, you would find among the search results a notice from Google that reads as follows:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

In many cases, the link to the complaint will not provide the user with much information, and it’s a bit of a mystery what most users might do with the information anyway.  After all, if you’re the creator of a file like a YouTube video that is taken down by a rights holder, you can have access to the information needed to rectify the fault, if indeed it was a false claim.  What’s truly obnoxious about this notice, and even the name ChillingEffects itself, is the not-very-subtle implication that DMCA takedowns are by default abusive and generally chill free expression. Ya see what they did there?  And by they, I mean Google, which funds ChillingEffects to no one’s surprise I’m sure.  Now, enter the Hollywood hacked photo scandal and a twist on that story that, as Eriq Gardner recently wrote for The Hollywood Reporter, “might reveal something about Google’s policies toward flagged copyrighted content.”

What Garder is referring to is the fact that former Kate Upton beau, Detroit Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander, delivered via his attorneys takedown notices identifying 461 URLs that were hosting racy photos of him and Upton. Of those URLs, Google removed links to 51%, drawing a distinction, according to Gardner, between nude photos and racy-but-clothed photos, irrespective of the fact that all of the photos in question were indeed stolen and are being published without permission.  Never ones to lose an opportunity to be complete tossers about copyright, Google is supposedly relying on an untested legal theory that the copyright holder of a selfie can only be the button pusher at the time of the taking.  This seems hardly relevant with regard to the matter of just acting like decent human beings; if images are known to be stolen, and the subject(s) of those images request that your for-profit search business remove links to them, you ought to do it on principle alone.  But this is not the mindset of the web industry despite its many self-aggrandizing proclamations as the engineers of social change for good.

Google seems to be concerned with a much higher principle than invading the privacy of a baseball star, a supermodel, or frankly you or me, and that’s the principle of doing whatever the hell it wants without consequences.  I think Gardner is right and that Google would love nothing more than a court case to affirm its position that these photos, though acquired illegally, are not the intellectual property of Mr. Verlander and that he, therefore, has no right to request their removal under DMCA.  This could even prove to be technically accurate; the copyright owner of a photo is the individual who exercises sufficient creative control (not the button pusher), so these images could still be the intellectual property of Miss Upton if indeed they were hacked from her account.  But that doesn’t mean Google isn’t benefitting from traffic driven by a prurient interest in seeing photos that were stolen and believed to be secure by their owners.  And Gardner also raises a valid point about ChillingEffects when he writes, “Google has in effect provided a road map for any voyeur looking for sites that refuse to remove stolen photos.”

All of this falls within the scope of the broad agenda maintained and well-funded by the Internet industry to foster a policy of “anything goes.”  As long as we allow them to gloss over privacy invasions, infringements on intellectual property, and profiting from social harm in the name of free speech, we only end up harming free speech in the long run.

Neuroscience of the Gist

If I hadn’t given up regular TV watching about 20 years ago, I’d probably still be channel-surfing into oblivion.  You’ve been there, right?  Whatever you’re watching can’t possibly be as good or important as whatever you’re missing.  With hundreds of available channels, this is just mathematically reasonable in a very frustrating way.  Maybe, but it’s also an example of how technological access to more can make a person so distracted that he winds up investing time in nothing.  Thankfully, on-demand options for home viewing of filmed media have obviated the need for me ever to channel-surf, but then the Internet and social media came along and brought a whole new ADD-like experience to our lives.

Enter the Facebook feed and Tweetdecks and all those stories of great interest shared by people you love, trust, admire, etc.  There’s no way any of us is reading all of those stories unless we have nothing else to do, so do we pick and choose among them? Or do we just gloss over nearly all of it?  And is all this glossing — my friend calls it “gisting” — better than ignoring the apparently substantive content altogether and sticking to a favored news source. Is skimming over fragments of stories actually changing our brains?  According to cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, all this gisting may be harming our ability to engage in what she calls “deep reading.”

In this interview, Wolf talks to Robin Young, co-host of the NPR program Here & Now.  To quote:

YOUNG: You had a great line. You said TV produced soundbite culture; online reading is producing eyebite culture.

WOLF: Yes, I’m afraid that what we’re becoming is so inured to seizing the most salient word that we are literally eliminating the music, the thoughts in between those words, some of the most precious aspects of written language.

Wolf wonders if we are not evolving what Young summarizes in her intro as “digital brains.”  And I think this is more than just a generic term for our times, but is rather an appropriate reference for precisely what Dr. Wolf feels may be lost if what we’re witnessing is really a stage in evolution.

If you think about what any audiophile will tell you is wrong with digital music, it’s that all sorts of nuance no longer exists for the contemporary listener to a typical MP3, for example.  Overtones, undertones, and various other sounds are far too subtle to be captured by mass-production, digital sampling; and in a very similar way it seems to me, Wolf is concerned that our own habit of sampling disparate text might make us deaf to the music of written language or at least impatient with it.  Wolf describes her own experience after a period of 5 to 8 hours of screen-reading per day and being unable to return to a favored novel by Herman Hesse.  She states that it took two weeks of purposeful effort to reform those temporarily dormant connections in her brain.

Wolf is less concerned with adults than with children who have yet to build that neurological foundation, which  enables us not only to engage with richer texts, but even to enjoy them.  To hear the whole symphony, if you will.  She is quick to say that she does not advocate turning back the clock and cutting kids off from technology.  “We have to equip our children with 21st-century skills. But at the same time, we must know how to form those reading circuits that allow what I call deep reading. It takes years to form in a child, and it takes milliseconds in us to use. And those milliseconds don’t just come naturally; we have to learn to use them.”

History Loop: Film & Copyright

Last weekend marked an anniversary in copyright and film history.  On August 24, 1912, the 1909 Copyright Act was amended under the leadership of New Jersey congressman Edward Townsend to protect motion pictures as a medium distinct from photographic works.  In the century that has since passed, filmed entertainment became, and continues to be, one of the most important products made in the United States, both culturally and economically.  That extending copyrights to protect the medium itself was a legislative move of unprecedented value to society is, I believe, beyond question.  Yet, for those who know their film history, 1912 does unavoidably draw the mind to American cinema’s uniquely turbulent beginnings.  While it may be tempting, as certain critics read what follows, to vilify copyright law because of the players involved at the time, that would be missing the more subtle idea that we may be witnessing a historical remake of sorts with a very different cast of characters.

From the earliest days of working motion picture technology, the craft, the business, even the film stock itself was volatile.  “The flickers,” as they were called, literally used to explode, but people made and watched them anyway, using projection booths lined with sandbags to mitigate potential mayhem.  What better metaphor could one possibly find to express the passion Americans feel about their movies?  Just as they were called “vulgar” at the turn of the last century while audiences viewed them in secret, today we still love the movies even when we’re complaining about them. And the number of Americans who work in some way related to the technology of moving images is far too varied and nationally dispersed to be described by the single word Hollywood.

But before there was a Hollywood, the center of American motion picture production was indeed New Jersey, and the major producers grew as extensions of the manufacturers and patent holders on the technologies that made film possible.  There is no getting past the fact that these business owners were ruthless men or that the Townsend Amendment, proposed as it was by a New Jersey representative, was almost certainly one component of a tactical design to maintain exclusive ownership of all production and distribution.  While it is not unreasonable to say that contemporary, independent filmmakers are courageous, it’s worth noting that around 1912, being “indie” could get you killed.  In fact, the studios we think of today as “Hollywood” were all founded by independent filmmakers, some who risked life and limb to defy an illegal cabal known as The Patents Company, comprising producers like Edison, Vitagraph, Biograph, Kalem, and Selig.  Also known as The Edison Trust, these producers attempted to use injunctive power to control production based on certain patent claims.  One particularly flimsy claim was ownership of a process called The Latham Loop, which rationally parallel’s the contemporary move by Amazon to patent the process of photographing items on a white background.

Anyone who has ever loaded a film camera or projector knows that one must make loops above and below the film gate in order for the celluloid to pass smoothly, advancing one frame at a time.  The Patents Company laid claim to ownership of this process — a claim that was rejected — and since they could not rule by law, they employed other methods, including intimidation and violence to stop independent projects by such filmmakers as Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures.  A common practice, according to the pioneer director Allan Dwan, was the use of snipers to fire at the cameras to disable production, but there were also assaults and shootings of production workers.

The storybook version of film’s migration to California is all about sunshine and the accessibility of varied locations, but a more acute motivation for the westward trek was the independents’ need to get away from the Patents Company and their heavies. Allan Dwan is among the best witnesses to this transitional time, beginning his career on the East Coast, then establishing one of the earliest California studios, Flying “A” Studio in La Mesa, CA.  He explains in Peter Bogdanovich’s wonderful collection of interviews Who the Devil Made It? that it was smart practice to film scenes in remote locations because proximity to a railroad put your crew within reach of Patents Company goons sent across country to break up the shoot.  Additionally, because of this persistent threat, many of the gun-wielding cowboys and gangsters in those two-reelers were in fact gun-wielding cowboys and gangsters, who served as both production security and as background characters.  Dwan tells the story of one encounter with a Patents Company thug, who arrived one day in La Mesa:

 “We took a walk up the road to talk it over.  I hadn’t been out of college for too long and was in good physical shape. So I wanted to get him far enough out of town to see if I couldn’t beat his brains out. We stopped at a bridge over an arroyo where people had thrown some tin cans.  There was a bright one sitting out there, so to impress me he whipped a gun out of his shoulder holster and shot at the can and missed it by about five yards. I pulled out my gun and hit the can twice, and that afternoon he left town. He was accompanied to the depot by my well-armed cowboys.”

Of course, Dwan and his contemporaries went on to become part of the studio system, which produced just about every classic motion picture that ever made a fan or  budding filmmaker fall in love with the movies.  Yes, business was still business, and as in all business, there were villains and heroes and plenty of prosperity and heartbreak to go around; but the important shift with the triumph of Hollywood over the Edison Trust was a move away from technology-based claims on the right to produce toward competition among the studios predicated on the talent they could get under contract. And from the late 1930s to the late 1960s, this system produced an extraordinary volume of films, including at least a few titles that will be on any enthusiast’s desert-island list.  This contract-based system laid the foundation for the next inevitable phase in the industry — name recognition and the transfer of power to individual artists.  Yes, this began with movie stars, and to be sure, not every actor is a great director or producer, but the breakup of the studio system coincides with the ability of individual artists in several disciplines to control their work based on their capacity to draw a crowd.  As a result, most feature films today are produced by hundreds, if not thousands, of independent production companies.

A century and some change since the Townsend Amendment, we’re reviewing copyright and arguing about its relative value in a time antithetical to all that the Latham Loop represents.  Where once manufacturers who held patents on technology tried to hyperextend their control over creative works, today’s manufacturers and technologists are driven to put more and more means of production in the hands of every prospective filmmaker in the world.  As such, arguments made in the blogosphere and in congressional chambers say that low-cost digital capture technology combined with Internet-enabled distribution models means that copyright loses relevance in this “new market.”  But what I find interesting at this moment in history is that it seems to me those who assert such claims are making the same mistake as the Patents Trust Company — looking at films as though they are produced by the tools rather than the people who wield the tools.  Affordable, digital cameras and free distribution on YouTube have nothing to do with the value of a film being protected under copyright. What’s being protected by copyright is what a film makes us feel; and so this recent anniversary, though it pays some reluctant homage to men of dubious intent, is indeed a celebration of the American filmmaker.