Paywalls, vinyl, and other dead issues.

It’s been a longstanding bias of mine that the generation we call digital natives—the kids who’ve grown up practically hard-wired to the network—will steadily gravitate toward classic, analog, and tangible media and experiences, not merely as a fadish expression of hipsterism, but as a natural result of maturing tastes and dwindling leisure time.  One of the first posts I wrote for this blog, What I’d tell my own kids about piracy. Why scarcity is a good thing. made a case for the value of limiting one’s choices rather than indulging in a kind of media gluttony implicit in the presumed need to seek out illegal channels as though the legal ones had nothing to offer.  People shared that post a fair bit, homing in on the assertion that whatever is worth your time is also worth your money.

We are, of course, seeing some trends toward “old” experiences, like a renewed interest in vinyl records, which will not likely replace streaming and digital downloads but may indicate that fans are discovering (or rediscovering) that there can be more to enjoying recorded music than just hearing it.  Even the process of browsing in a store for LPs is one that I always considered a satisfying sensory experience prior to the invention of the CD. Like turning pages in a large picture book, with each album displaying about 160 square inches of cover art in contrast to the squinty 25 afforded by a CD jewel case.  I always liked that flipping through albums was a mostly silent activity other than faint woofs of air as one leaned each record forward. By contrast, the grating clack-clack of sorting through small plastic cases always sounded and felt to me more like work.

Once home with a new vinyl album one must perform a few steps in collaboration with a mechanical object, some motion which beg a gentle touch that imbues the preparation with an almost ritualistic quality, complimenting the sense of time set aside to listen actively to new music.  For all the convenience of digital access, it doesn’t always satisfy the human need to experience life beyond the perfunctory.  Fast food is convenient and cheap, too; but there’s a reason it doesn’t replace fine dining just as there is a reason a fine meal assumes a certain presentation and atmosphere to complement the meal.  And for experiences—yes, even content—that are truly desirable, people are willing to pay when that is the only way to have them.

Certainly, The New Yorker magazine is fine-dining as publications go, and it turns out that its readers are very much willing to pay for it—even online.  According to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at the Wall Street Journal, when The New Yorker began experimenting with a paywall that would go up once a visitor had accessed a limit of six free stories in a single month, readership increased rather than declined.  “Instead of deterring readers, the number of unique visitors rose to 9.7 million in October 2015 from 5.5 million a year earlier, the month before the paywall was implemented, …” reports Trachtenberg.

I can’t say I’m surprised that, despite the conventional free-culture “wisdom” that’s been shouted at the market for nearly two decades, we find evidence that consumers are not only capable of recognizing the qualities they want in “content” but are even willing to pay for it.  Granted, the readership of The New Yorker is a devout audience that has been cultivated for more than a century, and it is currently the only property in the Condé Nast portfolio to so far experiment with a paywall. But for the same reasons a new vinyl store opened in my local mall while other retail is shuttering, the market may yet prove that there is no one new, digital model that entirely disrupts and replaces all that has come before.  Just maybe the producers and consumers of high-value journalism, music, film, TV, etc. will be best served by various combinations of new and old that are a little more complex than just putting stuff out there, signing up for an digital ad service account, and selling merch on the side.

In contrast to The New Yorker, the equally venerable publication The Atlantic was the first to “go digital”, according to this 2011 article by Lauren Indvik for Mashable.  In January of  2008, The Atlantic dropped its paywall and developed a holistic, digital strategy for both publication and advertising.  As Indvik describes, the The Atlantic’s history as a platform for editorial made it a natural for the web, but the road to profitability involved a comprehensive and creative strategy to develop advertising “experiences” for premium brands across print, digital, events, and mobile.  “Digital has proved tough terrain for many traditional advertisers, who have been forced to compete against highly targeted search and display networks, such as Google’s,” writes Indvik.

Of course, the success of both The New Yorker and The Atlantic are entirely dependent upon the quality of the work on the page, even if the two entities commoditize distribution through different models.  And the only way to maintain that quality is either a sustainable high-value ad strategy or direct sales to consumers, or some combination of the two.  This was true before the free-culture rhetoric disrupted common sense, and it’s still true.

As New Yorker editor David Remnick says in the WSJ article, “Information doesn’t want to be free, it wants to get around freely.”  Or, as may be inferred from the renewed interest in the vinyl experience, maybe the creative and informative experiences consumers value cannot be described so homogeneously as “information” the way many tech-utopians chose to interpret part of Stewart Brand’s famous quote in order to justify devaluation of the work itself. Maybe consumers don’t demand that everything be free, just that it be good.

In a related story (as reported in The New Yorker of course), Kodak drew considerable crowds at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with the introduction of a contemporary version of the Super 8 camera.  Amid a bevy of entrepreneurs offering “smart” devices that consumers may prefer to leave “dumb”, Kodak’s debut of a new way to make old home movies on celluloid is an unexpected move that may actually work. Read the full story here.

Democracy Disrupted

A couple of posts ago, I reported that the organization Fight for the Future had facilitated enough comments sent to the Copyright Office regarding Section 512 of the DMCA that they “crashed” the servers.  In a follow-up email brimming with pride, the organization said this to those who contributed:

“Wow! In a matter of days you and nearly 100,000 other people told the U.S. Copyright Office about the urgent need for better Fair Use and free speech protections in the DMCA.”

I didn’t receive one of these emails, but my friend David Lowery did. And not because he said anything to the Copyright Office about the “urgent need for better Fair Use and free speech protections,” but because he and his colleagues tested the FFTF web form email blaster and published their findings on The Trichordist blog.  They found that the automated system did not verify email addresses or confirm that IP addresses were within the US; it also allowed multiple comments from the same source and as stated in the post, “we managed to post rapid-fire comments (less than three seconds between comments).”

As indicated in my other post, I really do believe you’d have to search long and hard to find 100,000 citizens who could properly explain the DMCA, let alone fair use doctrine; but to compound this nonsense, some astroturf organization floods a government server with automated messages that may represent anything from bots to foreign citizens to minors to the typically pavlovian American, who just clicks stuff that sounds really serious but that he doesn’t understand.  Democracy in action indeed.

I’ve made this point many times, but it’s one worth making often.  This type of automated “political action,” which in this case is funded by a very large industry, should be among the real digital-age phenomena that scares the hell out of people, regardless of the stated issue du jour.  Forget the DMCA for a moment and imagine it’s the pharmaceutical industry or petroleum or Koch Industries using the same exact tools to rally virtual citizens, sock puppets, non citizens, and literally anyone capable of believing a lie and clicking a mouse to flood the EPA or HHS on some matter that disfavors the public interest in the service of one industry’s bottom line. That’s not even coming close to the reason the first amendment affirms the rights of speech and the petition of government. And, yes, there is a history of obfuscation by big business since long before the internet, but automation seems uniquely suited to fostering the illusion that the people are the ones doing the speaking.

In The Trichordist post, Lowery indicates that if FFTF used the type of automation described above to flood government servers, it might have been illegal but was at least a well-funded monopolization of a system meant to allow all parties to comment on an issue. Hence the “crashing” that this organization is so proud of is tantamount to—you got it—chilling free speech.  One could of course say this about any online petition in theory, but isn’t it interesting that the last time we heard about crashing systems like this was over SOPA?  So, does this really happen because there are so many well-informed citizens who care more about “digital rights” than any number of more pressing issues? Or might it have something to do with the fact that the corporate interests in these cases also happen to be the world’s experts in automation and aggregation?  Maybe not.  Maybe there really are more Americans worried about whether or not some YouTube video is a “fair use” than are concerned with the economy, violent crime, security, real civil rights violations, etc.  And if that’s the case, then  there’s truly nothing left of the Republic worth fighting for, is there?

On the positive side, I suspect a lot of this digital reactivism is wasted and that the internet industry may eventually discover that not everything is a numbers game.  For all the megabytes of outrage, what exactly does anyone think the Copyright Office is supposed to do with most of it? Responsibly vetted petitions have an important role to play in public policy.  But in a moment like this, it is the Register of Copyright’s job to consider the views of various stakeholders; and the comments that should be most influential will come from representatives of all sides who submit fairly long and well-reasoned statements based on actual knowledge of the law.

Ultimately, the Copyright Office recommendations to Congress on Section 512 may be 100 pages worth of analysis based on legal precedent going back to the beginning of the country. So, any petition to this particular office only carries so much weight in the first place; but how much attention does Fight for the Future imagine copyright experts will give to some boilerplate whinging about a doctrine they have grossly misrepresented to the signers of said petition?  And even 100,000 verified signatures would be small potatoes in a age when people will click on just about anything.  It probably wouldn’t be that hard to automate 100,000 “signatures” to lobby the White House to appoint Sponge Bob Square Pants as Ambassador to Fiji, but so what?  (Come to think of it, that petition would probably do quite well.)

There are an estimated 5.5 million jobs in the U.S. that directly depend upon the protection of copyrights. Meanwhile, every independent rights holder I have thus far encountered has effectively given up on the DMCA as a tool for protecting creative works online.  That’s a tangible problem, and one that does affect everyone because 5.5 million jobs supports a hell of lot more jobs than that in the overall market.  We could take this reality seriously, or we could keep finding ways to imagine that free speech is under siege and continue to allow the largest companies in the world to manipulate the political process with a little code and a lot of noise.

Cybercrime and Terrorism Sponsored by Your Candidate

If you were watching TV and a show came on called How to Hack Computers and Commit Credit Card Fraud with a lead commercial from Bank of America, you might think there’s something amiss.  Like, where does the network get off airing a show specifically teaching people how to commit crimes?  And did BofA really mean to be the sponsor?  If not, they must be pretty pissed off at the network.  And if they did mean to be the sponsor, we consumers should be pretty pissed off at the network and the sponsor, right? That’s how the world of media and advertising works. Except on YouTube.

Digital Citizens Alliance released a new report last month covering a familiar theme with an election-year twist.  As the organization has reported in the past, advertisers who spend money to place ads on YouTube are essentially cheated out of some portion of their media buy when their ads appear in conjunction with videos selling or promoting criminal or terrorist activity.  I and others have cited examples of mainstream American brands unwittingly sponsoring ISIS recruiting videos or clips teaching people how to deliver malware to steal identities and data.  But this new report by DCA called Fear, Loathing, and Jihad calls attention to the fact that all of the current presidential campaigns are in one way or another sponsoring these criminal or terrorist-produced videos.  From the report:

“How does the Kasich campaign, whose credibility is based on fiscal aptitude and efficiency, feel about their ads showing up next to a video by those actively committing financial fraud?”

“Support from young voters is the main reason why Senator Bernie Sanders is able to challenge Hillary Clinton. Why would he want a campaign ad showing up next to a video demonstrating how to “slave” the computer of a young male victim?”   

Political ads are a variation on the larger theme of poor-quality placement that affects all advertisers in the digital market, but DCA is not wrong to point out the uniqueness of these dichotomous pairings when we see American presidential candidates effectively hosting videos calling for jihad or selling fake IDs and other contraband. Moreover, in several cases the candidate’s ad buy may actually be putting money into the pockets of the criminal video makers. So, it’s not farfetched to say that you can donate twenty bucks to your candidate and that money can end up in the pocket of some homegrown, would-be jihadist by way of Google AdSense and the YouTube Partner program. Unfortunately, it seems that Google is about as diligent in vetting YouTube Partners to participate in ad revenue sharing as it is in mitigating copyright infringement on its platforms.

According to Google’s own Terms and Conditions, a prospective Partner must upload “advertiser friendly content”, and here’s what the company says might be considered unfriendly:

Content includes, but is not limited to:

•Sexually suggestive content, including partial nudity and sexual humor

•Violence, including display of serious injury and events related to violent extremism

•Inappropriate language, including harassment, profanity and vulgar language

•Promotion of drugs and regulated substances, including selling, use and abuse of such items

•Controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphic imagery is not shown

Now, my own read of those conditions would want to to see them applied with considerable latitude given that plenty of high-quality satire, news reporting, and entertainment is likely to implicate any number of those descriptions.  But if Google is not able to, for instance, separate the combat-related humor in videos made by the veterans group Ranger Up and an ISIL recruiting video—or a video made by some jerk showing people how to invade a girl’s privacy through her computer—then maybe those conditions are really not conditions so much as they’re just a bunch of words Google universally ignores.

DCA states that when their reports and the news media have brought attention in the past to this same issue, YouTube has made an effort to remove ads from many offending videos, but the report also implies that this type of action is a band-aid in response to momentary pressure.  Just like infringing material is restored as fast as it is taken down, ads continue to be linked to videos that no brand—let alone any political candidate—would choose to sponsor.

Although advertisers do have a measure of control in setting parameters to properly target their ads, the automated nature of the system is nothing like the control advertisers have with traditional media buys.  As the report states, “Let’s be clear: Google is not giving advertisers the opportunity to veto undesirable videos, but to opt-in and minimize the possibilities of ads showing up in undesirable places.” As we see in the context of rights holders and the DMCA, Google’s own financial incentive is grounds to play ignorant and incapable and to shift the burden to everyone else.  Again, to quote the report, “Right now, the best thing you [campaign operative] can do is report the videos to YouTube, which may pull these videos down. Google has deputized all of us to do the work it can’t…or won’t.”

Speaking of incentive, why the leadership of Google does not display the basic human decency or corporate responsibility to delete these videos as clear abuses of their service is inexplicable beyond basic greed.  Because let’s be grown-ups:  free speech doesn’t even enter this conversation. Speech does not protect criminal activity, incitement to violence, or training in the commission of crimes; and it sure as hell does not protect the video productions of violent extremists whose agenda fundamentally betrays the natural rights philosophy upon which free speech is predicated. And more prosaically, any private company is within its right to provide or not provide content based on its own internal judgments without violating free speech.  But there’s the rub.

It seems that YouTube is in sort of a logical pickle, trapped between its safe harbor status from liabilities like copyright infringement and what could become a growing demand to guarantee quality impressions to the advertisers who pay all of the company’s bills.  In order to avoid liability for the millions of user-caused copyright infringements on the platform, YouTube has to maintain that it is blind to the content on its servers prior to a specific notification. Meanwhile, the advertisers (and frankly the public) would be better served if YouTube were to make a serious effort to remove videos that are clearly dedicated to promoting or abetting the commission of crimes and acts of terrorism.  But the more YouTube exerts this kind of editorial control, the thinner their veil of ignorance becomes, which can then expose the company to liability for copyright infringement and other abuses of its platform.  Meanwhile, as the monopolistic YouTube hovers in this limbo raking in millions, the advertisers, rights holders, and public are not well served.

The DCA report states that this year the presidential campaigns will spend $1 billion in digital advertising, with Google, Facebook, and Twitter receiving most of that revenue.  For perspective, the report explains that if Google takes the same percentage of that billion as it made from all digital US advertising in 2015, it will earn $387 million from campaign spending alone. Meanwhile, the company that claims to provide the tools of political transparency to the public is anything but transparent on this matter according to the report.  “We have no idea how much Google and YouTube make from videos marketing illegal or illicit activities,” the report states. “Google has fought back against elected officials and regulators who’ve asked questions about the money. So far, the company has been successful at keeping its numbers a secret.” Maybe the point at which political campaign dollars are being split 45/55 between Google and terrorists is the moment when federal regulators decide to get serious.