Tag: Caitlin Dewey

Why is harassment in cyberspace different?

If a man overhears two women at the local coffee house advocating some point of view he doesn’t like and he then announces out loud that he hopes someone rapes and kills them, the management will toss him out on the street.  In such a scenario, patrons will applaud the ejection, and nobody in his right mind will suggest that this asshat’s right of free speech has been infringed. In fact, he is entirely free to find another location patronized by a fraternity of asshats, where they can pontificate on the virtues of rape and murder into the wee hours. But the coffee house owner has the right—even perhaps the responsibility—to bar this individual from ever entering the premises again. And I don’t think anyone would criticize this remedy to protect customers from his kind of harassment or disturbance.  But somehow, the calculus is different in cyberspace.

Washington Post tech writer Caitlin Dewey (someone I have sharply criticized for her copyright-related commentary) last week published a sobering account of independent game developer Zoë Quinn’s fight for justice in a criminal harassment claim against ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni.  Quinn is the figure at the center of the widely publicized, “gaming-community” scandal known as Gamergate in which she allegedly cheated on Gjoni with a game critic in trade for a positive review of a game she developed.  This allegation was initially published in the form of a vengeful, post-breakup screed written by Gjoni that Dewey describes as, “… a seven-part chronicle of their relationship, complete with annotated chat logs and lurid sexual details, and [Gjoni] promoted the links in a series of forums known for their antipathy toward female and progressive game developers.”

Gjoni’s online tantrum spawned what can best be described as a shitstorm in the gaming world—a digital tornado of harassment, feminism, and the hormonal idiocy of teenage boys.  It’s the kind of story that makes a rational person say, “Okay, everybody out of the goddamn pool!”  And I don’t really want to wade too deeply into the convoluted particulars of Gamergate itself—enough has been written about it—but the story does appear to provide instructive examples as to why law enforcement may be ill-equipped to address the often-serious problem of online mob harassment and assault.

As Dewey reports, Quinn filed charges against Gjoni in Boston municipal court, and once the judge was made to understand something about the nature of online mobs, Quinn was granted relief in the form of a restraining order that included barring Gjoni from further publishing anything about her. And there’s the rub.  Can the courts really enjoin anyone from publishing anything, even when the individual’s hope is to incite a mob response, and even knowing that some portion of that mob could be legitimately dangerous? Not easy.

In a move that ought to be familiar to those of us who follow the netizen playbook on rights, infringements, and responsibilities, Dewey reports that Gjoni took his “case” to the orangutan court of social media, arguing that the clause in his restraining order proscribing his writing publicly about Quinn could be “used to silence activists” (i.e. he played the free speech card). This naturally led to an increase in harassment of Quinn and people close to her as well as seeding an online campaign to raise money for Gjoni’s defense fund. On the one hand, Gjoni is clearly overstating the implications of a single restraining order; but as piggish as his actions may be, he’s not wrong that criminal liability stemming from his actions is problematic.

In short, the point Dewey is emphasizing—and she’s right—is that criminalizing online harassment, particularly inciting a mob response, poses legal challenges that leave victims like Quinn with few remedies.  There may be any number of grounds to sue Gjoni in a civil action, but the criminal aspect of his decision to publish his rude tome, even knowing it would trigger mass harassment including assault, is tricky because it does implicate questions of free speech.

Additionally, even gauging the toxicity of the “mob” itself  is clouded by a lot of juvenile noise.  In a story like this one, in which feminists question sexism in games, the activists are going to provoke a lot underage teens whose parents haven’t taught them that it’s not okay to post “I’ll rape and kill you” online. But law enforcement can offer very little in response to a deluge of nasty-but-benign trash talk.  Additionally, any contemporary activist addressing almost any issue must be able to cut through some volume of baiting and trolling, lest the harassment itself become the story rather than whatever conversation the activist is trying to have.  It’s just the new reality when everybody—including the knuckle-dragger—has access to a public megaphone.

But where law enforcement may be stymied, private companies are not.  As with the lead example of the coffee house, Internet platforms are private property, where the owners have as much latitude to impose codes of conduct as any private property owner in physical space. And it may be time for the mainstream social media platforms of the world—and their users—to realize that they are not the guardians of free speech they presume to be; free speech will be just fine with or without them.  These platforms, including gamer forums, are just private locations, where the management may determine when a customer is abusing his membership.  For instance, a user who writes, “I’m going to rape you to death” might be a good place to start.  Why kicking a guy off Reddit for doing that when we would commend the same remedy in the local coffee house is a contradiction yet to be answered.

It’s called being creative. On memes and copyright.

I feel a little bit bad picking on Washington Post tech writer Caitlin Dewey as much as I have already, but it’s probably not as much as I would if I read her column with any purposeful frequency.  Unfortunately, given the subjects I write about, people like to send me links to her articles. And I read them. And then the voices in my head start yelling because she’s said something deeply ill-considered in a high-profile newspaper. And then typing happens …

So, one of Dewey’s recent observations concerns the possible extinction of “our favorite memes” from the Internet thanks to copyright enforcement by owners of the rights to the underlying images on which said memes may be based.  Specifically, she cites what is supposedly an Internet legend known as Socially Awkward Penguin, which originated on 4chan (snort-laugh).  The meme features a copyrighted image of a waddling penguin, originally captured by veteran photographer George Mobley, which has been remixed and repurposed to produce various funny (or not) aphorisms on the theme of awkwardness.

Now, I certainly won’t disagree with Dewey that the meme is a perfectly valid form of expression, though how much cultural importance we can ascribe to the medium, I suppose, depends very much on each meme and the context in which it is used.  For instance, I think I’m all set with the constant repurposing of that screen-grab of Gene Wilder flashing his Willy Wonka smirk as the predicate to every sardonic comment anyone cares to convey on any number of issues. And that gets to the real point about any expression, which makes use of existing material:  it doesn’t necessarily need to. And, guess what happens if, say, a meme maker respects the rights of the owner of the original work?  He or she communicates the same idea in some other way.  It’s called being creative.

Anyone who creates stuff will tell you that being forced to work around an obstacle — like not boosting someone else’s work — almost always produces something better than what was first imagined because the new work becomes a legitimately new expression. And this is likely to be just as true with a meme as with any other medium.  I’ve written about this theme before and have also cited a relatively recent work of scholarship called Working Around Copyright by Joseph P. Fishman at Harvard Law School.

The assumption made by those who’ve grown up with what they think is a new idea called “remix culture” is that creativity depends on unlimited use of existing works. But if SAP (Socially Awkward Penguin) was destined to become part of the digital-age vernacular, then there’s no reason to assume that this form of shared expression would have been diminished if the originator of the meme had taken inspiration from Mobley’s image rather than taken the image itself. Hence, the assertion that copyrights “stifle creativity” is an oxymoronic claim because the author who derives, works around, and creates anew will always be more creative than the author who copies and pastes.

Now, the legal story Dewey cites in order to justify the misleading headline saying that our favorite memes are being killed by copyright involves Getty Images, which manages the rights for Mobley’s original penguin photo.  Dewey writes, “In the past year, the company’s licensing agency, Getty Images, has ‘pursued and settled’ multiple infringement cases involving Socially Awkward Penguin, it confirmed to The Post. All of those actions were carried out in secret, with blogs and other posters agreeing to non-disclosure.”

We’ll get to the “secret” part in a moment, but suffice to say, one of these sites, German-based getDigital agreed to take down posted SAP memes from its blog and pay a back-dated license fee, but they refused to remain silent on the matter. Instead, getDigital published a blog post about its settlement with Getty, and this post is apparently the foundation of Dewey’s article.  From the big picture, we are meant to conclude that 1) Getty is randomly cherry-picking little sites who can’t defend themselves, which is meant to seem silly given the ubiquity of SAP on the web; and 2) that there is something truly sinister in that condition of silence regarding the settlement.  But as is so often the case when it comes to the Internet and copyright, commentary like this is predicated both on a misunderstanding of the law as well as an implied wishful thinking that it should work differently from the way that it does.  In addition to providing shoddy reporting on the actual issue, this also does a disservice to any site owner or blogger as to what they should and should not be posting.

So, to try to clear up the first part of the confusion in this story, most of us encounter memes on social media sites like Facebook. If we like them, we share them, they go viral, and it’s all a bit of harmless fun.  The reason Facebook is not liable for any infringement in these cases is that the site is protected by safe harbor provisions in the DMCA. These provisions — although they are often applied in a manner in which they were never intended — presently shield a site like Facebook because all or most of the content is uploaded by the users.  But these safe harbors do not apply to a publisher of content on his/her/its own site.  So, if the New York Times, which has editorial control over the content on its pages, publishes a Reuters photo without proper licensing, the NYT is liable for direct infringement of that photo.  Hence, this same rule applies to any site on which the owner controls the content, which would include the blog of getDigital, or even this blog because it is not a platform for UGC (User Generated Content). So, a rights holder like Getty will only go after sites on which the owner controls the content, and a lot of the big publishers know better than to infringe.

Moreover, people need to understand — and Dewey makes this mistake in her article — that money has nothing to do with it!  As mentioned in this post about a friend who found herself in some trouble with a photographer, it doesn’t matter if the use of a work is in any way related to commerce or revenue for the site owner that uses the work.  While commerce may indeed influence the remedies sought by a claimant, money has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not a work has been infringed.  This  is one of the most common misconceptions out there, and it has only been exacerbated by the apparent “freeness” of the Web.  I say apparent because none of this Web stuff is free; it’s just that most people don’t pay attention to the nature of the trade that is happening (but that’s another subject).

As for the settlements between Getty and any site owners, I recognize that secret is a truly dirty word in this age when people have convinced themselves that the Internet provides transparency, but non-disclosure is a pretty mundane, standard practice when settling civil cases of this nature.  The plaintiff agrees not to sue — that’s what a settlement is — but it is in the plaintiff’s interests not to publicly reveal the terms of the settlement for any number of reasons, namely that its right to negotiate with a future defendant not be affected by the terms of prior settlements. With an entity like Getty and a case involving visual media, it’s not exactly like settling with a medical device company that demands silence about some negligence causing physical harm.  That’s nasty stuff.  But this is not that kind of “secret.” It’s just basic practice in many areas of civil litigation; and if you were a plaintiff, you’d probably want the same conditions.

I know there is a lot of noise about rewriting copyright law in the age of the Internet, but it is patently absurd to expect — and self-defeating to hope — that such revision would result in such a shapeless body of law as to condone the free-for-all we perceive the Internet to be and perhaps even think should persist.  But neither the interests of commerce nor those of creative expression are particularly well served by this agenda; and perhaps tech pundits who presume to comment on copyright issues should first get their facts straight before once again claiming that some favored form of expression is being “killed” by this body of law. The meme, for better or worse, can continue to amuse, inform, annoy, or even misinform for years to come, and it can coexist with copyright even without revision. And we’ll all be just fine.  It’s called being creative.

On a side note, Getty does make many of its images freely available to embed as shown above for publishers like bloggers.  What do you think, “Sound of Music Penguin?”

Periscope Piracy and the Tao of Tech Writers

Last December, a few glasses of Rioja and I wrote a pretty grumpy rebuttal to Washington Post tech writer Caitlin Dewey, accusing her of cheerleading for media piracy.  A few respondents, including Dewey herself, said that I was unfair, that her article about The Pirate Bay was merely reporting facts without editorial.  Of course, with certain styles of communication, it can be very difficult to tell the difference between dishonesty in intention and ignorance of how one sounds.  Is the author choosing her words carefully in order to engage in a zen-like OpEd, in which she advocates an agenda without clearly declaring so?  Or is the author unaware that her words have connotation and tone that imply a point of view she doesn’t really have?

Here’s the sound of straight reportage by Rhiannon Williams for The Telegaph:

“Game of Thrones is the most illegally-downloaded TV programme internationally, accounting for a quarter of all pirated downloads from 100 torrent sites. The programme was downloaded over 1.4 million times between January and February this year – nearly 50 per cent more than its nearest rival The Walking Dead.”

And here’s a work of unequivocal editorial by Grace Dent for The Independent.

“Fans wanted to see all-new Game of Thrones right then, right now. The fact that this was plain theft, or that it might offend lots of their beloved actors, producers and TV bigwigs made no difference. Morals? Ethics? Who are you, the Dalai Llama? It was the weekend, time for some “me time”, and Game of Thrones fans – with Britain topping the list for thievery – wanted to shove all four episodes instantly into their greedy snaffling eye-holes.”

And here’s Caitlin Dewey writing about the new phenomenon of using Periscope to live stream an episode of GoT:

“…tens of thousands of people pirate that show every day — but the mere possibility of more people live-streaming has HBO running scared. The company promptly declared Periscoping “mass copyright infringement,” despite the utter lack of any audience approaching “mass.” And yesterday, the company sent a series of takedown notices to Periscope over GoT. Which is extra-peculiar, since HBO usually takes a pretty chill stance toward “Game of Thrones” piracy.

This, however, is piracy of a totally different breed. There are no torrents, there are no files, there are no thumbdrives or DVDs. That makes Periscope a bit of a challenge — not terribly dissimilar from the era when VCRs threatened TV.”

It is admittedly a little hard to tell if Dewey is only reporting or also commenting here.  Is she aware of her provocative choice of words, or is she just being careless?  For instance, HBO does not have a “chill stance” toward GoT piracy; the company, like any other rights holder, has a strategic stance, which wise or not, is entirely at their discretion.  Thus, there is nothing peculiar, from either a strategic or legal perspective, about making distinctions between one form of piracy and another. So, by suggesting that all piracy of GoT ought to be viewed equally in HBO’s eyes, Dewey is expressing an opinion, and a very unconsidered one to boot.

In fact, the lack of recording media to which Dewey alludes is just one reason why Periscope is very much dissimilar to the Betamax case, which is what she means when she refers (and is also editorializing) to “the era when VCRs threatened TV.”  She’s correct that a DMCA takedown request is meaningless in a situation where no data is stored that can be “taken down,” but her general thesis (if there is one at all) appears to be that Periscope represents a potential form of mass piracy that lurks in muddy legal waters with regard to copyright.  And I doubt this is the case because the use of Periscope in this manner rather clearly infringes on the right of public performance — an illegal broadcast — which is territory fairly well covered by copyright law.

For readers who haven’t heard, Periscope is a live streaming app owned by Twitter that enables just about anyone with a smart phone to live stream whatever is in front of the lens.  So, what happened with Game of Thrones was that some users pointed their cameras at their TV’s  during the broadcast of a recent episode, and a whole bunch of people watched the show via the app on their handheld screens.  Yes, it’s a pretty lame way to view a multi-million-dollar, high-production-value TV show, and Dewey says as much at the end of her article.  But neither she nor I are copyright attorneys, so we’re the kind of writers who should try to be careful about making mashups of caselaw, particularly those that are entirely unrelated to the story at hand.

For instance, Dewey’s two comparisons to the VCR are meaningless distractions in an article about  a technology like Periscope. The right to time-shift by recording broadcasts for later viewing (i.e. the decision in the Betamax case) involves privately stored media that has both legal and functional limits — limits that stop the program recorder from infringing on the right of public performance.  For instance, you may record Game of Thrones on your VCR, DVR, or even some other medium for viewing alone or with friends and family later, but you may not exhibit that recording in, for example, a public theater or coffee house, either for free or for money, and you certainly may not broadcast it.

The right to record for the purpose of time-shifting bears no resemblance to a technology that enables live broadcast to hundreds or thousands or potentially millions of viewers.  The functional differences are observable by common sense and don’t require any knowledge of copyright law.  That said, my colleague Terry Hart, who does know something about copyright law, explains, “The drafters of the 1976 Copyright Act clearly anticipated that new communications technologies would allow the exploitation of works without any copies changing hands. They created a new right of public display to apply to static works like books and images. And they drafted the right of public performance to include transmission and communication ‘by means of any device or process.'” Citing the 1965 Supplementary Register’s Report on the General Revision of U.S. Copyright Law, Hart also shares this:  “… in certain areas at least, ‘exhibition’ may take over from ‘reproduction’ of ‘copies’ as the means of presenting authors’ works to the public, and we are now convinced that a basic right of public exhibition [later replaced with the word display] should be expressly recognized in the statute.”  So, not only is copyright likely well-armed for a technology like Periscope, but it’s been anticipating the need for at least half a century.

Dewey also grazes the subject of transformativeness with regard to using Periscope; and this might raise some interesting questions. If I live stream a TV show, or even a live performance, while making commentary along the way, or if I turn the whole thing into a new work of performance art, would the use be transformative?  Probably. But that does not mean every use in this manner would be a fair use when judged according to the four factors applicable in such cases.  Every use would have to be judged individually; so, just streaming a football game with your own commentary, for instance, would probably fail with regard to assessing the amount of original work used and the potential economic harm to the original.

More broadly with regard to Dewey’s style of commenting on these matters is that she sounds to me like someone sponsoring a general point of view predicated on the idea that when technology makes a particular process or behavior possible, the relevant legal framework must be dismantled in order to “make way for progress.”  Maybe that’s not her view, but I do think articles written in her style, and bearing an imprimatur like The Washington Post, feed this general attitude among readers.  And whether we’re talking about Periscope or any other innovation, this perspective forgets the purpose of legal frameworks in the first place. After all,  “Progress” has been the generic excuse of every vested interest that ever wanted to get away with doing harm in the pursuit of personal fortune. “Progress” has been the argument for pollution and poor working conditions, too; and that’s why we create legal frameworks that say, “Bullshit, you’ll have to figure out a way to make money without dumping sludge in the river.”  At least we try to do this.

So, if Caitlin Dewey’s point is that copyright law is indeed unclear with regard to an application like Periscope, then is she presenting her story by way of identifying a legal loophole in need of closing?  I doubt it.  As with her article about The Pirate Bay “creating the Internet,” as we know it, I’m at least confused as to what point she’s making at all about copyright, piracy, or technology.  Because in the absence of a clearly stated opinion, one looks to reporters for straight facts, and that doesn’t quite seem to be her bag either.   After all, the article is titled,  The future of online piracy is easy, free and already in your pocket.  In my experience, that headline is what we call advertising.