Tag: EFF

The EFF is Full of It on Indie Register of Copyrights

Photo by GlobalIP

Okay.  I’m not remotely surprised that the EFF & Co. don’t like the bill H.R. 1695 to make the Register of Copyrights a presidential appointee rather than an employee of the Librarian of Congress.  And I’m way not surprised that they’ve written a post which only thinly veils this bill as a power grab by the Trump administration. This despite the fact that the proposal dates back, on paper, to at least 2014 and well before that in general discussion among copyright experts.

I won’t repeat the historic context I’ve already written to explain why this legislative move makes sense, but instead I have selected some choice pull-quotes from the EFF’s post because, well…I just can’t help myself.

EFF:  The Copyright Office is supposed to focus on a pretty mundane but important job: registering copyrightable works….In the past decade, however, the Copyright Office has played an increasingly central role in policymaking…

Bullshit.  Sorry there’s just no other way to respond to this.  Although the Copyright Office was created within the Library of Congress in 1897 in order to serve a largely clerical function, even the first Register, Thorvald Solberg, was a respected expert on copyright law and played a role in helping to craft the 1909 Act.  Every Register since has performed an advisory function to Congress, the courts, and the public; and the USCO has grown in size, scope, and dimension commensurate with the growth in complexity of copyright law and the wide range of media production and distribution capabilities.

The EFF acknowledges that the USCO does not make copyright policy, but instead suggests that making the Register an Executive appointee will only make the Office more vulnerable to special interests.  This, despite the fact that, the EFF has been party to smearing the USCO as already beholden to “special interests” under the current organizational regime.  As they repeat in this post …

EFF: – and it has not been a neutral advocate.

Here, the EFF is citing a “report” published by PublicKnowledge that provides no statistical data to support the conclusion that the USCO has fallen prey to “regulatory capture” by major rights holders.  Instead, the report cites anecdotal “evidence” composed more of opinions than substantive debate.  For instance, they repeat…

EFF:  For example, one former Register famously stated, “[c]opyright is for the author first and the nation second.” 

She did say that. And she was absolutely right. And only detractors like the EFF made the statement “famous.”  As explained in this post, the Register was on solid ground, both with regard to functional common sense (i.e. the public doesn’t get what the author doesn’t first create) and with regard to philosophical precedent for the IP clause in the Constitution.  This is just the anti-copyright crowd leveraging a general lack of historical knowledge to manufacture a conflict that doesn’t exist.

EFF:  In sum, we’ll have a Register, and a Copyright Office, that is accountable only to the President and the special interests that helped get them approved in the first place.

This may be my favorite because, as mentioned, it’s seeking to trade on current contempt for the Trump administration in order to rally protest against this bill.  What’s particularly amusing about this one is that the most common “villain” in the copyright battle is Hollywood; and in case anyone hasn’t noticed, Hollywood isn’t exactly BFFs with the new president.  At best, one might call the relationships between this White House and many industries, including Silicon Valley, “complicated.” So, let’s try to assess policy on the merits where we can, shall we? The rationale for making the Register of Copyrights an Executive appointee is solid, it’s the result of years of consideration, and it will remain sound policy no matter who occupies the White House.

Will the EFF Tolerate Any Copyright Enforcement?

 

Maybe the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation could save themselves a lot of repetitive work if they just write a blanket statement declaring once and for all that they believe copyrights should never be enforced online in any context whatsoever.  Because no matter what proposal they encounter, it seems they will always grab their box of fridge-magnet hyperbole and cobble together a statement designed to make it sound underhanded and nefarious.

Of course we’ve come to expect that if a proposed copyright measure is legislative, the EFF will call it something like “government overreach.” But apparently, if a proposed action is part of a voluntary initiative by industry, they’ll call it “shadow regulation.”  That’s exactly how Jeremy Malcolm, Senior Global Policy Analyst for the EFF, refers to a recent agreement in the UK reached by Microsoft, Google, and representatives of major copyright holders. Brokered by the UK Intellectual Property Office, the parties negotiated a voluntary “code of conduct” with the purpose of demoting search results for URLs that have received a certain (undisclosed) number of DMCA takedown notices.

Malcolm correctly observes that Google was already using DMCA data to demote certain sites in its search results, but the EFF is still sounding alarm bells over two factors in the development of this agreement:  1) that the meetings themselves, and some of the agreed-upon terms are secret; and 2) that the agreement was allegedly reached in response to an “explicit threat” by the UK government to take legislative action if the parties could not come to terms.   So, referring back to my original accusation, if the government mandates that platforms mitigate copyright infringement, the EFF thinks it’s wrong; and if the platforms voluntarily collaborate with rights holders to mitigate copyright infringement, the EFF still thinks this is wrong.  See where I’m going with this?

The EFF complains that “the public” is not represented in these “shadow regulation” agreements—an accusation that earns a cartoon double-take because this proclivity for exaggeration only feeds the illusion that the public has any say in the operation of these search companies in the first place.  We have a measure of market power, as we do with all companies, but Google and Microsoft do not seek public debate on the manner in which their search algorithms function or are adjusted. And it should be obvious to users by now that Google’s search results reflect some combination of Wikipedia, paid priority, and popular trend—none of which guarantees that the most relevant or best-quality results will top the list every time.

How good is search these days anyway?

With regard to my last post about advertisers seeking better value online, and the role of fake news in that story, I happened to do a Google search for the term “pizzagate.”  And what do we get?  Results #3 and #4 are both utterly bogus sites designed to attract users who may be inclined to believe that Hillary Clinton really was running a child sex ring through a D.C. pizzeria. Y’know, because search quality.

Result #4  pizzagate.com is a classic example of what happens when some opportunist buys a URL based on a trending topic and then populates a page with keywords, videos, images, and links that optimize SEO in order to generate revenue with traffic to posted ads. It’s a site full of garbage that probably makes its registered owner some money, but which provides no social value of any kind; and it sits above the fold on the first page of Google’s search results because that’s how the system works.

This capacity to manipulate search results—all in the name of unfettered “innovation”—has done considerable harm to journalism, scientific knowledge, authors of creative works, local businesses, major advertisers, users, and even the democratic process itself.  So, unless Google and Microsoft have ready solutions for improving all of that, the EFF can spare us its hand-wringing over the search-result demotion of websites that engage in chronic copyright infringement.  Yet, Malcolm writes, “[Google] must be very careful that its acquiescence to this shadowy regulation doesn’t escalate into a series of capitulations to copyright holder demands.”  Fridge magnets.

As reported yesterday, Google may be about to “capitulate” to new advertiser demands because (hold onto your beers) this is all just business. People really should stop pretending the internet industry is something special—as if the decisions made are not business decisions and as if those business decisions are not going to require negotiation with other business interests and with government.

But because we’re talking about the internet, the EFF and others seem to imagine that the public enjoys general oversight—as if Google were Congress.  We’re just customers, either happy with the services or not.  If anything, the pervasiveness of Google’s control over so many aspects of the digital market should be a far greater concern than whether or not the company agrees to work with rights holders to mitigate infringement. And in fairness, this is where the EFF’s strengths as a public advocate seem best directed.  Real issues of concern like privacy should give that organization plenty to do, particularly in the current political climate, but copyright enforcement really isn’t the side door to social injustice they keep portraying it to be.

In general, copyright enforcement in the digital age benefits consumers and creators just like it did before the digital age. The only players who substantially benefit from zero enforcement are the major web platforms, and the EFF should stop doing PR (even if it’s not their intent) for these multi-billion-dollar companies. Meanwhile, if the platform owners and creative industries collaborate to foster a more legal, fair, and sustainable digital market for creative works, this will benefit consumers, creators, and economies overall.

A Free Press Needs to Be Expensive

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Photo by stocksnapper

As a follow-up to my last post, I see that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has (not surprisingly) also accused the News Media Alliance (NMA) of petitioning the incoming administration to “weaken fair use doctrine” and, by extension, threaten press freedom itself.  Granted, in contrast to Mike Masnick’s ad hominem style on Techdirt, when EFF obfuscates, they usually write a more sober, mature-sounding article, but readers should not be mesmerized by the parlor trick.  Because they’re still not telling the whole truth.

At a time when Americans are suddenly realizing that professional journalism may be more important—and more under siege—than ever, both citizens and advocacy groups like EFF should remember that good journalism is expensive.  If we don’t want news to devolve entirely to the glib gotchas of Twitter, then somebody has to invest in the reporters, researchers, editors, etc. who develop the skills and experience to cover stories with integrity.  In order to make those investments possible, to say nothing of profitable, publishers have to retain the right to protect and exploit the products of this labor through distribution models of their choosing.  So, while fair use doctrine is unequivocally necessary for journalism, this reality is not in conflict with the need for news publishers to protect their copyright interests at the same time.

Frankly, in light of the fact that the anti-copyright policies advocated by EFF and similar organizations have played a substantial role in creating information havoc, like the fake news problem, I think when it comes to the press, these groups ought to be rubbing gravel in their hair—or at least sent to their rooms to think about what they’ve done. Years of blind—and greedy—advocacy of anything goes under the ambit of the First Amendment is a major reason why real journalists have to compete with bogus ones,  and why news organizations continue to have their investments threatened by various platforms and tech interests that appropriate their work.

In the EFF’s version of accusing the NMA of trying to weaken the fair use doctrine, they  set up a straw man and then point to a bunch of unrelated “evidence” to support the accusation.  As stated in my last post, the NMA’s white paper does not seek any revision to the fair use principle, but it does call into question the relatively recent, broadening interpretation of the “transformative” standard within fair use analyses.  The EFF article might give readers the impression that this standard is a well-grounded and longstanding legal principle, but that simply isn’t the case.

If we bracket the “transformative” standard between the first major application in Campbell (1994) and the most high-profile, current case, Google Books (2016), we see that we’re dealing with two very different meanings of the word “transformative.” ”Transformativeness” in Campbell entails a use to create a new expression while “transformativeness” in Google Books entails a use to create a new service that is not an expression. While both uses can be valuable, and even described colloquially as “transformative,” it is misleading to suggest that the case law in which this standard has been applied is consistent, given the divergent meanings of the term.

It is the application of the latter standard that is of concern to many rights holders, including news publishers. This is because the latter interpretation substantially alters the original intent of fair use, which is to favor the First Amendment, to a more generalized standard of “creating some new thing,” which may not be a form of expression at all. It is also worth noting that most uses by journalists have always been protected by fair use principles that existed prior to the introduction of the “transformative” standard by Pierre Leval in his 1990 Harvard Law Review paper.

The truly insidious part of this story is that the EFF has been directly responsible for morphing fair use doctrine in both the courts and the court of public opinion.  With its decade-long boondoggle in Lenz v UMG, and its chronic implication that fair use is the antithesis of copyright (rather than an important component of copyright), the EFF fails to recognize that its advocacy in this regard can be more harmful to free expression and a free press than the concerns it claims to address.  While the organization defends the role of aggregators and other platforms that make uses of works they did not author, the EFF ignores some of the very negative results of this policy, which have become starkly manifest in recent weeks.

For instance, the violent assaults on a Washington, DC pizzeria as the consequence of fake news is not exclusively a story about criminal instigators and idiot readers. It is symptomatic of a disease caused when serious journalism is given equal footing with the ravings of every crackpot or miscreant with a keyboard.  This trend has been toxic for the press, and it is naive to think that defending every use and every expression on First Amendment grounds has not been an aggravating factor in this case.

In some instances, news aggregators do not merely provide access to news, but they often strip news of context or substance by repackaging segments in a manner that may be good for driving traffic but do disservice to the goals of journalism.   Press freedom is utterly meaningless unless we support a professional press, and the News Media Alliance is correct to observe that relatively recent distortions of the fair use principle have played a role in threatening that professionalism.