Tag: copyright

The Internet is Not (and never was) Paradise

I was reading an editorial the other day written by Stephen Witt for NPR shortly after the passing of John Parry Barlow in 2018; and it occurred to me that internet activists seem to fit one of two profiles—Mourners and Evangelicals. And both are full of shit.

Witt does an excellent job summarizing the early barefoot wanderings of the college-dropout, Grateful Dead lyricist, turned techno-libertarian prophet who would eventually co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation …

It was 1985, and Barlow, not a computer person, did not know what “online” was. But he wangled an Internet account out of a Stanford academic — they were not available to the general public at the time — and began to anonymously visit Deadhead forums on Usenet, one of the earliest hosts for Internet discussion. Despite an apparently fatal lack of any STEM education, Barlow grasped the technology’s potential. “I had a religious experience upon encountering what was a very small online environment,” he said. “I felt that what I was looking at was something profoundly different than anything that had happened in the history of the human race.

The spirit of Witt’s article Tech Utopianism And Our Walled Gardens: Is It Time For A Jailbreak? places it among the many laments for the internet as a paradise lost.  Like other articles of its kind, Witt’s homage to Barlow harkens to an ideal that never existed—a cybernetic Eden, where the purity of human mind and spirit might have remained unsullied had it not been for the original sin of commerce that cast us into the hyper-monetized, surveillance-capitalized, barely-civilized landscape dominated by today’s billion-dollar platforms.  

Not surprisingly, Witt alludes to the fact that copyright infringement was a foundational rite of the new cyber-religion evangelized by the prophets; and it is just a little too perfect that, as an ambassador of the Dead (the most famous band to encourage bootlegging its live performances) Barlow and disciples viewed intellectual property theft as a pathway to the promised land …

… if information was instantly reproducible at no cost, only by creating barriers to open communication between private individuals could the now-artificial scarcity of copyright be maintained.  A true cyberlibertarian — and perhaps we should call him an anarchist — Barlow took the extreme position, denying that the state had the authority to limit peer-to-peer communication. This necessitated an abandonment of the concept of intellectual property, even if that proved corrosive to both the profit margins of large corporations and the meager income streams of small songwriters, including Barlow’s own.

I will admit that my cynicism here is colored by the fact that a world resembling an endless Dead show is my own version of Hell, but personal taste is also germane to the broader point that utopias always fail because they presume to impose a monolithic world view on everyone.  (One man’s Paradise is always another’s Purgatory.)  And that presumptuousness is certainly a running theme wherever digital activism embraces the anti-copyright agenda—too often insisting that all artists must adopt the “sharing” attitude espoused by The Grateful Dead, overlooking the nagging bugaboo that choice is the foundation of liberty.  

So, in regard to the internet writ large, Witt’s elegy fits the profile of the Mourner’s view of cyberspace—a resignation to the fact that utopia is gone and can never be rediscovered, and that any hope of building Paradise anew should be abandoned.  We cannot return and so might as well unplug. 

But while the Mourners have discarded the hope of returning to the Eden that never existed, their idealistic rhetoric remains in Activist 2.0—the Evangelicals, who now defend the status quo of the corporatized internet despite the fact that it allegedly destroyed the original garden in the first place.  The Evangelical is easy to spot.  She still clings to that original Barlowian sacrament of “sharing” content and responds to any proposal to protect copyright owners by declaring that [Insert policy here] will destroy the internet as we know it! 

Of course, the whole narrative is a lie—from Barlow’s catharsis to the present battle over the “soul” of the web.  As investigative reporter Yasha Levine states very pointedly…

…the truth is that EFF is a corporate front. It is America’s oldest and most influential internet business lobby—an organization that has played a pivotal role in shaping the commercial internet as we know it and, increasingly, hate it. That shitty internet we all inhabit today? That system dominated by giant monopolies, powered by for-profit surveillance and influence, and lacking any democratic oversight? EFF is directly responsible for bringing it into being.

Hence, the too-common refrain that we might “destroy the internet as we know it” is an odd rhetorical tactic insofar as it is not at all clear, from any point of view, why the internet we have is something worth preserving.  As a general observation, why is it rational to assume that the function of the internet, which has largely been ceded to the management of Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al, is exactly perfect as is and should never be changed?  By what measure, other than Big Tech’s profits, have we supposedly achieved our digital apotheosis?

Never mind the fact that protests against any type of copyright proposal invariably resort to hyperbole and disinformation (see claims that Article 13 will “kill memes”), but even if some new proposal were to change the internet, so what? As naive as I think the Barlow-worshipping purists were/are in the first place, we can at least all agree that their internet is not the internet we have, that the internet we have is dominated by big corporations and, therefore, hardly sacred.

That being the case, contemporary digital activists should drop the quasi-religious overtones when debating policy—stop talking about the internet as though it were holy ground that cannot be disturbed.  It is worth keeping in mind that every time the artists and creators have inveighed against their rights being trampled by the big internet platforms, the digerati have presumptuously lectured them that “change is good.”  Indeed it can be good.  And right now, what needs changing is the internet as we know it.

Might As Well Be Bots

So, I don’t engage very often via Twitter, but once in a while, I respond to something that catches my attention and then usually regret spending time responding to the responses.  Last week, I noticed that Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda—the face, voice, and tweetdeck of anti-Article 13 activism in the EU—posted an odd tweet, and I replied … 

Because, of course, even if Tumblr’s efforts to use AI to identify pornography are a) accurately reported; and b) laughably ineffective, it is misleading for Reda to suggest that this folly is particularly instructive to the purpose or eventual function of Article 13.  What she means to imply, of course, is that any comparable technology, which may be used to identify content that allegedly infringes copyright on a large platform like YouTube, will result in the same kind of errors that are reportedly happening on Tumblr.  

I consider this tweet to be scare-mongering for many reasons, but here are three simple ones:  1) existing technologies currently in use for identifying copyrighted material is already better than whatever is being described in the Tumblr/porn example; 2) it is needlessly defeatist to say that these technologies can never be improved and/or supported by human oversight to alleviate error; and 3) if any copyright ID system is too aggressive and error-prone, the rights holders advocating Article 13 aren’t going to like it either.  All of which leads me to conclude that calming down is more rational than, once again, declaring that the internet needs to be “saved.”

So, Reda and I had a brief exchange in the service of nothing (i.e. the reason I don’t like the forum), and went our merry ways.  But I did notice that at least one of the “users” who liked and retweeted one of Reda’s responses to me looked an awful lot like a bot.  The account was a handle and an avatar, it had just a few followers, and its tweetdeck was almost exclusively about the evils of Article 13.  So, while scrolling that thread and wondering whether the account might be a bot programmed to RT anti-Article 13 stuff, I saw this tweet posted by a different account with zero followers…

And this prompted a new thought.  What difference does it make if a tweet like the above is posted by a bot or a real person?  Because if social media platforms like Twitter train real people to respond with pavlovian certainty to any given issue, they might as well be bots.  Either this individual simply doesn’t know that the platforms he says will be “destroyed” are the biggest of big corporations; or he is so well trained to respond to certain signals, that he’ll just remain blissfully unaware of his own cognitive dissonance.  Or he’s a bot.  

Either way, same result.  Some other bot, or mindless person, or ten-year-old child repeats the unfounded assertion that, for instance, the legislative language is “vague,” and boom—it’s now a fact.  Why would anyone take some anonymous tweet at face value which claims that a body of legislative language—in any area of law—is vague?  Because they want to believe it, and the desire to perpetuate that narrative is sustained by knowing diddly squat about the legislative language itself.

When the hyperventilating saga that was the anti-SOPA campaign peaked in early 2012, the internet giants still enjoyed a general benefit of the doubt that they had built platforms that were truly making global democracy work better.  (And that they had built these platforms out of the goodness of their hearts!)  So, all those anti-SOPA headlines warning people not to let anyone “break the internet” were understandably hard to counter with any kind of cool reason.

Today, though, it is curious—if not a little bit frightening—that even after the fallout from stories like Cambridge Analytica, the “Save Your Internet” battle cry is still effective in the current opposition to Article 13.  It is, after all, a reprise of the same digital dirge that was so effective seven years ago; but surely, this general call to arms cannot jibe with what we’ve learned over the past two years about major platforms and a number of paradigms not worth saving.

In 2011, I wondered how many non-constituents were marshaled to stop American legislation (SOPA/PIPA) in its tracks.  How many foreign citizens? How many children?  How many bots?  Because, as David Lowery has detailed in a multi-part post, the methods employed by Big Tech to sway public policy may be one of a handful of legitimate threats to democracies around the world.  And on this topic as to who—or what—is being rallied to action, TorrentFreak published a new post that misses, or purposely obfuscates, a very important distinction.  Andy calls hypocrisy on the IFPI for criticizing Julia Reda’s shout-out to children in this tweet:  

Andy compares Reda’s appeal to children to the fact that major copyright interests have often launched initiatives to educate kids about copyright and piracy.  “…it’s pretty ironic that IFPI has called out Reda for informing kids about copyright law to further the aims of ‘big tech companies’. As we all know, the music and movie industries have been happily doing exactly the same to further their own aims for at least ten years and probably more,” he writes.   

But the differences between Reda’s targeting kids on social media and the kind of initiatives Andy refers to are substantial and significant.  At a very basic level, educating children about how copyright works may be offensive to the pirates out there, but copyright has been part of the legal fabric of Europe and the U.S. for a couple of centuries, so it’s not exactly propagandist to explain its function in age-appropriate ways to groups of schoolchildren.  And given the fact that plagiarism can end someone’s college or university career, the foundations of copyright are in no way anathema to general education.  Outreach to schools on the subject of piracy and copyright tend to include the following lessons or discussions:

  1. education about the skilled people who make the movies, music, etc. people enjoy.
  2. a message that taking things without paying for them is both illegal and wrong.
  3. a message that respecting creators falls under the principle of the golden rule.

While these themes may be antithetical to pirate rationalizations for mass infringement, they’re not exactly outliers to the fundamentals that most people try to teach their kids. (Substitute creator for farmer, and the discussion will be very similar.)  In contrast to the implications of Reda’s tweet, major rights holders don’t generally engage children via Twitter to take direct action aimed at promoting or stopping specific legislation.

Though nobody can doubt that when organizations like movie studios fund education programs in response to piracy, the effort is industry-serving, but those types of broad initiatives do not compare to an elected official addressing teens and tweens on social medial and telling them (untruthfully) that YouTube won’t work anymore because of a policy those kids are not going to understand. And that fairly well sums up what I think about all of this—that the so-called defenders of “the internet,” who appeal to democratic principles in that effort, consistently demonstrate exactly why “the internet” isn’t worth defending.  

Photo source by davincidig

You’re Watching Too Much TV—All Because of Copyright!

An editorial appeared in The Hill written by Martin Skladany, associate professor of law at Penn State.  Titled To curb dangers of media consumption, let’s reconsider copyright law, the article comprises an incoherent litany of social complaints; but to the extent one can glean any thesis from its dissociated and unsupported declaratives, I suppose it would be the following:

“…excessive copyright protection has turned art – which is meant to inspire us intellectually and support us emotionally, to enable us to cope with the uncertainty of life and the finality of death – into a glossy corporate weapon that Hollywood wields to effectively imprison vast swaths of society.  ‘We the people’ are ‘doing time’ in front of a screen.”

In sum,  Skladany thinks Americans have become mush-headed and morally depleted (as evidenced by our vitriolic political climate) because we are watching too much filmed entertainment; and the underlying cause of this addiction is strong copyright law, which enables “Hollywood” to keep us hooked on their “glossy” (i.e. frivolous) wares.  I have to say, as someone who’s never seen Game of Thrones and is more likely to be found reading than watching TV, that Skladany is behaving like a highfalutin prig; and in doing so, manages to make a hash of copyright law, art, filmed entertainment, journalism, and the topic of media gluttony all at the same time.  

For one thing, I have no idea on what authority he declares that the purpose of art is to “inspire us intellectually and support us emotionally, to enable us to cope with the uncertainty of life and the finality of death”?  Really?  Is that what Bukowski is doing?  Or David Lynch? Or Banksy?  Or Shakespeare for that matter?  Artists may hope to inspire intellectually at times—though certainly not always—but if indeed they were merely the self-help gurus Skladany seems to think they should be, their works would be intolerably tedious. 

If Skladany wants to propose that entertainment and news reporting have merged in a way that is unhealthy for journalism, that would be a hard premise to refute and certainly makes a worthwhile discussion on its own. Or if he wishes to opine on the not very original theme that “low art” tends to be more popular than “high art,” that’s also a separate conversation, albeit a purely academic one.  But neither of these topics justifies lumping all content that appears on all screens into a single category, labeling it “corporate mind control” and then, bizarrely, diagnosing copyright law as the underlying infection causing a social disease.

Like other academics of his ilk, Skladany refers generically to “Hollywood” as though all filmed entertainment emanates from a monolithic institution—one which is allegedly doing our thinking for us.  This is oxymoronic, like saying “Democratic Party Conspiracy,” because just like Democrats couldn’t organize a conspiracy of two, the diverse range of television and motion pictures in the market represent thousands of individuals with a million competing and interrelated ideas, aesthetics, values, egos, agendas, and resources. 

Some of those individuals are brilliant, funny, poignant, serious, etc. and have a talent for expressing themselves in ways that deserve to shape our thinking.  We call this art.  And the way of madness lies in Skalandy’s arrogant implication that we can parse which of these expressions comprise the “better” art in context to his assault on copyright law.  Or to put it another way, I think the world would be better off without reality TV, too, but copyright law has nothing to do with the fact that more people have seen The Apprentice than the oeuvre of Francois Truffaut.

It is unclear whether Skladany means to be imposing a value judgment about what he considers to be the “art” and “non art” among all motion pictures and television; but clearly he harbors such an opinion, or his perspective would make even less sense than his presentation.  He writes, “Reducing copyright’s excessiveness will hurt professional reporters and non-corporate artists to a degree, but, more significantly, it will also level the playing field with corporate entertainment.”  (I’ll let the “hurt to a degree” go for the sake of the larger point.)

By “excessive” copyright law, Skalandy refers solely to the duration of protection—certainly it is the only example he presents—and it is frankly impossible to fathom how shortening copyright’s terms would “level the playing field” and thus enable the “art” of filmed entertainment to better compete against the “non art” of filmed entertainment.  And this is assuming that all “art” content comes from independent creators while all “non art” comes from corporations, and as though no symbiosis exists between these two worlds.

Of course, parsing the “good media” from the “bad media” does not appear to be Skladany’s real goal.  It’s not that we’re watching too much low-quality material in his view, it’s that we’re watching too much, period—spending far too many hours glued to whatever the digital-age version of the boob tube is in lieu of more admirable pursuits like “volunteering” or “going to social events.”   This is where he truly wanders off on thought safari as pertains to copyright law.  I mean, even if we consider his opinion to be valid in this regard, what in blazes does copyright have to do with it?  I was going to watch Jessica Jones tonight, but now that the copyright terms are shorter on that show, I guess I’ll go volunteer at the homeless shelter.  Seriously?

Skladany is free to opine that Americans ought to be engaged in more useful activities than watching stuff on screens, but nothing about his credentials as a law professor, nor anything in this editorial in The Hill, suggests that he has anything fresh to add to that particular conversation, which began shortly after the first TVs were sold.  This is just one of several examples illustrating his lack of intellectual discipline, choosing instead to toss a bunch of haphazard ingredients into an anti-copyright casserole, serve it up half-baked, and expect people to eat it.  Or as my friend Neil Turkewitz stated in his response to yesterday, “…it may be the worst ‘academic’ piece I have ever read.”  

There is much more one could write in response to Skladany’s editorial, not least would be to rebut its underlying theory that weakening copyright would “level the playing field” rather than simply weaken individual authors.  But as he has not provided even a hint of support for this premise, it seems sufficient for now to say that he is simply wrong.