Category: Culture

Does Google Claim Some Invalid Copyrights?

Photo by Harrisr

I assume it’s well understood by now that the biggest, corporate antagonist to intellectual property rights is Google. The company has backed an impressive array of academia, press, lobbying, and activism, all generally evangelizing the message worldwide that IP is fundamentally anachronistic in the digital age.  In response to this juggernaut, many a pro-IP advocate likes to underscore the hypocrisy that, despite all their PR on this issue, Google is no less a vigilant steward of its own intellectual property.  A favorite refrain, for instance, is the observation that the company isn’t about to “share” its proprietary, patented search algorithm even while its spokespeople continue to promote “openness” and other crunchy values.

I don’t personally begrudge Google protecting its intellectual property; I think they should.  But it’s hard not to get a bit heated when the assorted pundits, who either directly or indirectly help promote Google’s interests, take so much pleasure in displaying anecdotal evidence of alleged copyright abuse and overreach as though this problem is so rampant that we’re all just one litigation away from losing our right to use the internet.  But what if Google itself is making some dubious claims of copyright in some of its most widely-used works?

The next time you’re using Google Maps, Street View, or Google Earth, take a look in the lower right hand corner.  You will see a declaration of copyright, either for Google, for one of its partners, or both.  While these parties may absolutely claim copyright in the software, it’s not entirely clear that they can claim a copyright—at least in the US and Europe—in much of the imagery produced by these applications.  This is because the photo and satellite images appear to lack the modicum of “originality” required for protection.  In fairness, it must be noted that Google’s terms of use for these apps are quite liberal, mostly mandating attribution.

Maps & Charts

Maps and charts were two of three types of works (books being the other) protected by the first copyright act of 1790.  Near as I can tell, this is indicative of two things:  1) that American copyright doctrine had yet to evolve; and 2) that maps and charts were badly needed and very hard to make in the 18th century.   This utilitarian/incentive predicate to get cartographers and surveyors out into the water-moccasin-and-mosquito-filled wilderness does, with the hindsight of history, create a bit of a dichotomy with respect to the way copyright doctrine evolved by the end of America’s first century. In other words, until technology really began to shape the contours of the law.

For roughly the first half of the 19th century, it took a few cases for the courts to begin to draw lines separating copyright from its twin, patent law; and over time, jurisprudence on copyright increasingly coalesced around the principle of “originality of expression” rather than “sweat of the brow” to qualify for protection. Put simply, a work may take substantial labor and/or capital investment, but if it lacks at least some measure of human, creative expression, then it doesn’t generally qualify for copyright.  This principle was most recently solidified in the 1991 case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone, which held that the compilation of a phone book, though laborious, did not meet the minimum standard of “originality” to be eligible for a copyright.

The question of how much creativity is required met its first major challenge when copyright confronted photography in the case of Sarony v. Burrow-Giles (1884) involving a portrait of Oscar Wilde taken by New York photographer Napoleon Sarony in 1882. In a time when the prevailing sentiment considered photos to be merely a mechanical means to record facts, the Supreme Court ultimately had to consider what made Sarony’s image the expressive work of its author.

In that case, the Court held that Sarony’s choices of background, arrangement, pose, etc. to achieve a look that was purposely designed (i.e. not capturing a fleeting moment of independent reality) was sufficiently “creative” to sustain copyright in at least some photographs. The issue of copyright in photographs that do capture fleeting moments of reality (e.g. street photography or photojournalism) recognizes choices like position, focal length, timing, and framing as representing the minimum amount of human creativity required.

Fast-forward to the present, and cameras are everywhere, from satellites miles above the Earth to cellphones in the hands billions of people on the Earth, to specially-designed Google cars roaming the streets and taking 360˚ views of nearly every traversable corner of every town, city, and hamlet.  The app is impressive and extremely useful. I’m sure many of us have planned trips to places we’ve never been by using Street View.  But are the images copyrightable?  Probably not. At least not in the United States or any country where copyright doctrine evolved on the principle of “originality” to make a work eligible.

Loyola Law School Professor Justin Hughes, whose paper The Photographer’s Copyright I’ve cited before, discusses the legal distinctions that many of us intuitively assume—namely that functional imagery like surveillance and security photos, police crime-scene pictures, and satellite imaging are inherently different from the kind of works captured by photojournalists, art photographers, and even many amateur photographers with an eye for distinctive compositions.  Hughes opines, for instance, that most of the photographs museums take of their public-domain paintings to sell as postcards and posters are not legitimately protected by copyright because they are precise representations (copies) of the original that do not contain—indeed are not meant to contain—any original expression of the photographer. Hughes writes …

“With all these photographs — photographs of museum paintings, images captured at ATMs and by immigration officials stamping your passport, Google Maps Street View, aerial reconnaissance photographs—there is no originality to give rise to copyright. These images may have copyright in the few countries that still base copyright protection on ‘sweat of the brow,’ but not in the United States or most countries in the European Union.”

With regard to Google Maps, Hughes suggests that when we use the tool in map view, Google at least has some statutory/historical claim to protection of maps, and there is precedent for human choices—colors, line thickness, shading, etc.—in the rendering of maps to qualify for copyright.  But when we use the application in Satellite view with all the markings turned off, Hughes is somewhat doubtful about the claim of copyright made by Google and partner TerraMetrics.

In his analysis, he describes the amount of human and computational labor required to composite various photo assets and data in order to present the satellite images we see in the app, but the question of copyrightability would turn on the extent to which any of that labor constitutes original, human expression rather than “garden-variety choices” made for the purpose of rendering the best possible representation of a factual image. Or as Hughes puts it, “what a perfect satellite would see on a perfect day with absolute fidelity.”

At the same time, Arizona State University Professor Dennis S. Karjala, in his 1995 paper Copyright in Electronic Maps suggests that the rejection of the “sweat of the brow” theory after Feist could, as he puts it, “deny copyright protection to a variety of works whose optimal production, as a matter of social policy, may require some form of intellectual property right as an incentive.”  In other words, perhaps Google’s claim of copyright in some, or all, of these apps rests on the more utilitarian rationale we can assume was present in 1790 when maps and charts were first given protection.

Of course, the chance that anyone will challenge Google on any of these copyright claims seems about as as likely as a camel passing through the eye of a needle, but that’s about corporate power, not tested theory of copyright law.  Suffice to say, that considering what a daunting adversary to the copyright interests of millions of creators Google remains, it’s at least interesting to consider that its own copyright claims in this case might prove very weak if they were in a legal dispute with an entity that treated their IP exactly as they have treated the IP of others.

Solicitor General Says No Cert for “Dancing Baby” Case

 SCOTUS Photo by jgroup

After ten years and what must be thousands of attorney hours, the “Dancing Baby” case may have to do an about-face at the steps of the Supreme Court and, get this, actually go to trial. On May 5, the Solicitor General filed its brief recommending that SOCTUS deny a writ of certiorari in Lenz v. UMG, finding no basis for this Court to address the following question:

Whether a copyright owner may be held liable under Section 512(f) [of the DMCA] for sending a notification of claimed infringement based on a sincere but unreasonable belief that the challenged material is infringing.

At this point, the artist whose work was at the center of this case has been lost to the world (about this time last year); the baby is now a tween; and the case remains a hypocrisy-rich boondoggle, from its overall justification, to the particulars of the argument that the EFF has pursued, to the unavoidable misperception by some of the public that Prince personally bullied a fan.

Regarding the underlying rationale for Lenz, in the decade since it began (and not as a DMCA case by the way), no party has presented any solid evidence that rampant abuse of the DMCA takedown provision even exists. Yet, this has been the rationale and lead talking point riding on Prince’s purple coattails, trading on his fame to spotlight an incident that makes a poor example of actual abuse. Of course, the better examples don’t involve pop stars, cute babies, or major music labels.

The central hypocrisy in Lenz, other than the decade-long fishing expedition, which I tried to summarize in this post, is that the EFF has gone to great lengths to argue that a rights holder should be held to a very high standard of “knowledge” while the organization conversely advocates that no platform owner or ISP can ever know about infringement, or much of anything else, that occurs via their services. In simple terms, the EFF asserts that if defendant UMG did not conduct a fair use analysis of the “dancing baby” video, that this fault alone meets the statutory definition of “knowing misrepresentation,” which is a much stricter standard than general error.

The EFF has shouted repeatedly—and no doubt it will continue to shout—that no ISP or platform service provider can “police all the activity” on the web. This premise is generally accepted by rights holders, both large and small, and it is of course a foundation on which the compromises of the DMCA were born in 1998. Yet, this same organization has now leveraged a decade’s worth of litigation to evangelize the message that rights holders ought to be able to monitor, without error, DMCA filings that number in the tens of millions. And if an error is made, even after it is corrected according to statutory process (i.e. by counter-notice), the fault still rises to the standard of “misrepresentation,” which carries a burden of damages. The fact that damages, in this case, would mean that UMG would have to pay the EFF for the cost of its expedition is an absurdity that is hard to overlook.

In the brief filed by the Solicitor General recommending that SCOTUS deny cert in Lenz, the opinion specifically cites what it calls a “significant legal error” in the way in which the statute has thus far been interpreted. Section 512(c) of the DMCA lays out the manner in which a takedown notice must be filed, including a statement of “good faith belief” that the use in question is infringing. Section 512(f) provides for the types of relief for damages that either a rights holder or a user may seek if a wrongly-filed notice or counter-notice meets the standard of “knowing misrepresentation.”

The EFF has sought to argue that because UMG failed to do a fair-use analysis of the “dancing baby” video, this amounted to “knowing misrepresentation.” I and others have already commented on the inherent subjectivity of fair use that makes this argument problematic whether a rights holder does the analysis or not; but here’s what the SG brief says with regard to the statute itself:

“Petitioner … assumes that the phrase ‘misrepresents under this section’ in Section 512(f) ‘includes a misrepresentation that one has formed a good-faith belief required under Section 512(c). But that is not what the statute says. Although Section 512(c) specifies a number of representations that a takedown notice must contain, the only representation that (if knowingly false) can give rise to liability under Section 512(f) is the representation that the challenged material ‘is infringing.” If petitioner’s video did not actually constitute a fair use, respondents’ statement that the video was infringing was not a ‘misrepresentation,’ whether or not respondents conducted any fair-use inquiry before sending their takedown notice. [Emphasis added]

The court of appeals’ analysis thus contains a significant legal error, and one that could give rise to unwarranted Section 512(f) liability in case where the challenged material actually was infringing. This case does not provide a suitable vehicle for correcting that mistake, however, because the error potentially benefits petitioner and respondents have not sought review of that aspect of the court of appeals’ decision.”

In reference to the words emphasized above, this is an important distinction. If a rights holder specifically instructs employee(s) filing notices to avoid all fair-use analyses in an act of “willful blindness,” this is typically held to be equivalent to “knowing misrepresentation” under the law. Merely screwing up, missing, forgetting, overlooking, etc. does not rise to that level. Moreover, common sense says that the DMCA was designed to be an extra-judicial, compromise solution to the inevitable reality that users of ISPs would infringe copyrights. Such a solution could not have assumed that rights holders would never make a mistake or that a mistake would be tantamount to “knowing misrepresentation” implicating damages.

Meanwhile, wherever courts do seem to find acts of “willful blindness” among platforms and ISPs (e.g. Backpage and Cox), the EFF is consistently on the service provider’s side, unwaveringly defending safe harbor shields as though they are inalienable rights rather than conditional provisions. And by the same token, we are not likely to hear the EFF argue that a user who files a counter-notice to restore a file—a party more likely to err than a rights holder like UMG—ought to be held to the same “knowledge” standard they’re seeking in this case. Because, as the SG brief observes, Section 512(f) applies to “misrepresentation” by a filer of either a notice or a counter-notice. So, users might want to be careful what the EFF wishes for on their behalf.

This misread of the statute, in the opinion of the brief’s authors, is a key reason why the Solicitor General recommends denying cert—because the Supreme Court is a “court of review, not a court of first view.” In theory Lenz v. UMG could keep dancing for quite some time—right through Holden Lenz’s college years, annual tributes to the late Prince, legislative revision of the Copyright Act itself, and who knows what kind of changes among various web platforms and ISPs.

Net Neutrality Fight Brews

Composite sources by zmiter & maximmmmum

When the President of the United States disses fundamentals from climate science to the separation of powers, it is admittedly a very difficult time to debate any issue outside the gravitational pull of so much regressive momentum. Amid a flurry of truly dangerous policy reversals, the storm now brewing over the issue of Net Neutrality will doubtless be subsumed by the broader narrative of “Trump rollbacks,” but this generalization only clouds our ability to assess what’s actually happening in an already obscure area of cybernetic policy. Especially through the chaos of social media. (Add to this, the recent kerfuffle over the FCC possibly taking action against CBS for a joke made about Trump by Stephen Colbert, and we’ve got a whole circus, but we’ll stick with Net Neutrality for the moment.)

First, let us pause to acknowledge this dichotomy: the fact that we choose to interact in a walled garden like Facebook as complicit lab rats in that company’s grand data experiment while posting declarations that the web must remain “free” and “open” is a delusion that must be reconciled before considering an issue like Neutrality. Free and open are nice words and easy to support with a mouse click, but what’s really at stake here?

The order that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai proposes to reverse—for the moment anyway—is not actually Net Neutrality itself; and the real question before us is whether the chairman will merely deregulate or will instead live up to any of his prior testimony and help to shepherd a more effective and comprehensive policy aimed at achieving Neutrality principles. As noted in my last post on this subject, the FCC rules only affect ISPs, and if we truly want an internet that protects all parties great and small, then a coherent and consistent regulatory framework must be pursued for edge providers as well.

In practical terms, it seems to me that there is little value in saying that ISPs (AT&T, Comcast, etc.) may not discriminate via broadband while edge providers (Google, Facebook, etc.) are free to discriminate via algorithm. And in simple terms, this was the crux of Pai’s dissent in passing the 2015 order which placed ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act, giving the FCC power to regulate these providers as “utilities.”

It is important to remember that Net Neutrality is a goal and not a specific policy doctrine. Its principles go back to the days of dial-up, and as attorney and expert Mitchell Lazarus argues in his blog, regulating ISPs as “utilities” through the 1990s was a key reason why we had more competition among this class of providers than we do today—when most markets are served by a monopoly or duopoly at best. But, in an earlier post from October 2014, Lazarus also explains why placing ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act alone would not achieve Neutrality—partly because internet traffic simply does not ebb and flow like phone service for which Title II was designed. Lazarus writes …

“An ISP’s capacity is, after all, finite. At peak times it may not be able to accommodate 100% of all potential content – email, Facebook posts, Netflix video, VoIP calls, people working from home, casual browsing. At those times, some discrimination must necessarily occur in allotting access to providers. The question, then, is how to ensure that the discrimination is ‘fair’. An effective non-discrimination rule would give an ISP managing a traffic overload clear guidance on which bits to send on and which to hold back in every possible situation. More than that, a proper rule would let the ISP program in algorithms that make these decisions automatically, on the fly.”

So, Chairman Pai’s plan to reverse the rule placing ISPs under Title II does not in itself “roll back Neutrality” because one cannot roll back what has not been achieved. Having said that, it seems that Lazarus would not endorse reversing the Title II status so much as adding to it “…a rule that requires the ISP to open its channels (cable or phone line or fiber) to competing ISPs.” These competitors would pay to use the channels, and consumers would once again have options to switch ISPs if they become dissatisfied with the service, according to Lazarus’s assessment.

Whether or not the monopolistic state of the ISPs can be reversed or mitigated, the same problem exists on the edge provider side of the equation, with a company like Google owning most of search and advertising in the U.S. and Europe, along with one Amazon, one Facebook, etc. It seems to me, we consumers cannot expect an effective approach to the goals of Neutrality without meaningful and complementary regulation by both the FCC and the FTC of both ISPs and edge providers.

In a nutshell, the FCC’s job is to protect consumers vis-a-vis access to the web while the FTC’s job is to protect consumers as we interact with edge providers once we’re on the web. And it is unclear at the moment what happens when a company functions as both access and edge provider.

It’s mostly about corporate interests for now.

Be prepared for this fight to at least sound existential in the rhetoric to follow from places like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Be prepared for the story to be positioned as an Obama-for-People v Trump-for-Corporations narrative—and for the Neutrality tornado to fling about all manner of unrelated topics (did someone say SOPA?). But for now, this battle seems to have more to do with very large corporations on both sides—and very little to do with consumers. Mostly it’s over the issue of who is going to pay for what.

Large users of broadband—Netflix is the world’s leader—are not the companies that invest in the physical hardware to expand access, speed, and reliability. And there is an extent to which the ISPs, which do make these investments, see Neutrality regulations as keeping the access prices paid by these huge edge-provider services artificially low. There is more to learn on this subject as the story unfolds; but this follow-the-money line of inquiry is likely more accurate than taking at face value the story that the Obama-era rules were providing meaningful consumer protections.

Net Neutrality & Copyright

In both real and fictitious ways, the Neutrality fight is likely to implicate copyright and the interests of rights holders. Because Neutrality principles are based on the premise that universal access to the web is a civil right, remedies for online infringement like throttling speeds or account termination become unavoidably intertwined in the public debate over Neutrality. This may foster exaggerated and misleading headlines claiming that major rights holders (i.e. Hollywood) are against Neutrality. But there is no underlying reason why copyright enforcement cannot coexist with Neutrality principles, and I worry that persistent confusion will rally creators to lobby against their own self-interests.

In this guest post, for Hypebot, No Internet, No Music: Why Musicians Should Care About Net Neutrality, Will Meyer has the right spirit but is making an important error in my view. The understandable instinct to assume that President Trump wants to gut protections for independent creators obscures the fallacy in which Meyer seems to conflate edge provider Facebook with the ISPs affected by FCC rules. He writes, “… the truth is Facebook isn’t free. We pay with our data and we must pay with our dollars if we want the algorithm to take our bands seriously.” Absolutely right. And, in a slightly different context, Ajit Pai said essentially the same thing in his dissent over former Chairman Wheeler’s proposal to place ISPs under Title II.

More relevant to Meyers’s concerns is the fact that Pai specifically noted that having two separate regulatory regimes for ISPs and edge providers only entrenched the market advantage of the latter, which goes directly to the heart of some of Meyers’s observations about using Facebook for promotion of his band. This does not mean Pai gets a free pass; it means creators need to look way beyond the rhetoric to follow how the policy will affect them.

Evolving Neutrality policies in both the U.S. and abroad should be closely watched by copyright interests because the statutory frameworks can make a difference with regard to enforcement. Neutrality is meant to protect access and dissemination of legal activity online, and there is an extent to which the public debate becomes mangled by those who view both broadband and access to unlicensed content (i.e. piracy) as interrelated “rights.”

As indicated in previous posts, I advocate a wait-and-see approach to Chairman Pai’s policies, not because I inherently trust his view; but because the 2015 framework for ISPs doesn’t really seem to achieve the consumer-facing goals that people think it does. Unfortunately, this probably won’t stop the hyperbole from flying in every direction, which is unlikely to help the development of a more coherent policy.