Category: Copyright

Techdirt’s Masnick reveals own irrelevance.

Mike Masnick, editor and founder of Techdirt often writes like a smug frat boy, substituting scorn for ideas, and is frequently careless about fact-checking. This may be be why his mantra sounds sillier every day, as he bangs on about all that is wrong with just about anyone who believes copyright still plays a role in the digital age.  Seriously, other than die-hard myrmidons, is anyone still listening to what he’s saying?  Because he’s in danger of becoming the poster child for everything that is wrong with the very things he purports to defend.

Most recently, Masnick revealed his capacity for carelessness when he wrote this blog post about an event he did not attend, focusing on two words taken way out of context, and then making no effort to confirm the basis of his tantrum.  The subject was a recent conference hosted by the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, which included panelist Sandra Aistars, CEO of Copyright Alliance. (I have worked with both organizations.) Masnick claims in his post that Aistars was “insisting that the efforts for copyright reform are really coming ‘from criminal elements’ and that no one in ‘any sort of innovative sector’ is actually on board with copyright reform.”  Had Mike bothered to wait for the video of that meeting, he might have heard  the following, in which Aistars adds to her recap of 40 years worth of debate and discussion on copyrights thus:

And an element that goes a little bit further than what we’ve heard before and almost seeks the entire elimination of intellectual property protection, and that element I think is coming in its most aggressive form not from any sort of innovative sector in any business, but is coming more from the, I’ll call them “criminal elements,” cyberlockers, entities like that who support and benefit from cyberlockers, and they are not interested intellectual property in any way, and I think those of us who rely on intellectual property in our business lives are just collateral damage. 

So, in case any Techdirt readers (or editors) need that simplified, Aistars is making a very clear distinction between real innovators — whose voices she welcomes and has always welcomed to any discussion — and actual criminals who really don’t deserve a seat at the table.

And speaking of not deserving a seat at the table, people who are incapable of presenting ideas that challenge the imagination beyond cheap sarcasm and false reporting have clearly lost contact with the nuanced evolution of this ongoing debate.  In other words, when you just start making shit up as an excuse to keep calling everyone who supports copyright a “maximalist” (whatever the hell that means), it might be a sign you’ve run out of things to say.  By coincidence, I happen to be on my way to attend a similar event hosted by CPIP as I write this, and all of the topics for discussion are written humbly in the inquisitive and not in the conspiratorial imperative that guys like Masnick like to imply.  Experienced adults are trying to solve problems and come up with new ideas; and all the sniping from the kids’ table doesn’t speak well  for the cause of the Internet as a medium for enlightened discourse.

UPDATE:  It looks like while I was writing the above, Mike updated his own post in order to both reveal the full quote in context and then stand by his bizarre assertion.  All I can say is that perhaps what Aistars ought to have said is that the copyright debate is being skewed by a criminal element and also some really stupid people.

Jennifer Lawrence in a Nude of Her Choosing

I had to call attention to this article by Megan Garber, writing for The Atlantic about Jennifer Lawrence’s nude photo shoot for Vanity Fair.  The photo itself is brilliant as is Garber’s analysis of it. Lawrence’s calling the hacking of her private photos a “sex crime” is entirely reasonable. And I am reminded why I care about copyright, why it still matters in the digital age, and why those who say, “Forget it, you’re fighting against the future,” are at least lazily cynical and at most hopelessly corrupt.  Permission is the foundation of copyright, just as it is the foundation for respecting another person enough not to “share” photos of her that she did not choose to distribute.  Permission is fundamental to civilization, yet somehow, the principle has been given a bad rap, treated as some sort of elitist barrier we must cross if we are to be free to play with these gadgets.  And I have no qualms asserting that this idea of permissionlessness, which has been championed as a digital-age value does emanate from a sexist psyche.  Permission deserves more attention than it gets.  Permission is the difference between a regrettable one-night stand and a rape.

Lawrence is talking about ethics. She’s talking about law. She’s talking about, essentially, decency in the age of digital reproduction. And she’s also, of course, talking about the tensions that inevitably exist in a world mediated by images. The line between objectification and empowerment is a notoriously thin one, particularly for women. Is that short skirt—or that low-cut shirt, or that nude Snapchat—liberating, or something else? In an environment saturated by images and therefore expectations, where does control end, and victimhood begin? “She” versus “her,” subject versus object … images, whether sent or stolen, capture all of those things.

Read Megan Garber’s full article here.

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.