Tag: Featured

A Quick Update on the Display Right

In a recent post, I described how the “server test,” established in the Perfect 10 case, obliterates the display right for visual artists on the internet. I further opined that the “server test” is an irrational standard and also stated that Perfect 10 may not be the final word on the matter. For recap, the Ninth Circuit held in Perfect 10 that in-line linking (also known as “framing”) images on a website without actually hosting (i.e. copying) those images does not infringe the author’s right of public display.

A new case before a U.S. District Court in Dallas this month (The Leaders Institute v. Magnovo Training Group) entails several IP and non-IP disputes between the litigants, including copyright infringement of the display right by means of “framing” plaintiff’s images to make them available on defendant’s website.  I’ll spare readers the long-winded details about these parties and their various disputes because they are not germane to the copyright issue.  What is compelling about this case, and potentially good news for visual artists, is that Judge Jane J. Boyle said the “server test” doesn’t make any sense to her either.  Here’s how she put it …

“…to the extent Perfect 10  makes actual possession of a copy a necessary condition to violating a copyright owner’s exclusive right to display her copyrighted works, the Court respectfully disagrees with the Ninth Circuit.  The text of the Copyright Act does not make actual possession of a copy of a work a prerequisite for infringement. To display a work, someone need only

show a copy of the work; a person need not actually possess a copy to display a work. And to display a work publicly, a person need only transmit or communicate a display to the public. 

Again, the person need not possess the display. For example, a person that went into a movie theater and used a video camera connected to the internet to broadcast a movie to the public would clearly be committing copyright infringement even though the person did not herself have a copy of the movie. Essentially, TLI’s framing scheme is like a live feed of Magnovo’s copyrighted website.”

Judge Boyle’s opinion seems to better conform to common sense than the “server test.” If a party displays a protected visual work, whether by in-line linking or magical incantation, that action alone should implicate the right of public display.  As mentioned in past posts, visual artists are easily the most-frequently infringed authors on the internet.  It’s so common that many photographers and other creators just starting out have all but abandoned any hope of controlling or being paid for their work.  And that’s exactly how the major internet platforms and the freeloaders want it—a market where creators feel grateful just to be exploited.

Opinions like Judge Boyle’s can be cited in future cases to eventually overturn the opinion in Perfect 10, so this is potentially very good news for visual artists as it would restore the intent of the display right in the digital market.   Add to this, the passage of the copyright small claims provision (H.R. 3945), and users might stop assuming every image they find is just there for the taking.

Why I’m Neutral (for now) on Net Neutrality

Let me start by saying I hate this issue. It’s exhausting to research and hardly a page-turner.  Still, I opened my big, cyber maw, suggesting to friends on Facebook that they might calm down about the news that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai intends to reverse the 2015 Open Internet Order, so I feel obligated to dig a little deeper and follow up. But the net neutrality story overflows with complexly tedious details—a potpourri of policy wonks and technical jargon dating back to the 1960s—that not only betray any attempt to identify an engaging starting point, but which also summon Macbeth’s ode to vanity as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. 

Because the neutrality story is complicated, nuanced, and dry, it is ideally suited to manipulation through the glib shorthand of social media.  If nothing else, it would be grand if people would stop trying to make policy by meme. On any issue. Ever.  After all, there is little point in coming to terms with Russia’s role in hacking our political process when we are clearly willing to hack ourselves on a daily basis.  The absurdity of sharing “neutrality” woes, which are largely misinformed, on a highly-manipulated platform like Facebook cannot be overstated.

The neutrality narrative doesn’t truly offer any good guys to cheer or bad guys to boo—just huge corporations (think of them all as bad guys if need be) that are variously at odds one moment and in collaboration the next. And though the issue has unquestionably been politicized, it is not a story with any clear lines that can be accurately drawn around the contours of party or ideology. (e.g. How many Dems would guess that their biggest judicial ally favoring the 2015 OIO is the late Justice Scalia?)  In the broadest sense, the debate is not about whether broadband internet access services (BIAS) should be held accountable for non-neutral practices; but rather a question as to whether they should be regulated in anticipation of potential malfeasance by the FCC or responded to upon evidence of malfeasance by the FTC.

In 2007, both agencies agreed that instituting “neutrality” regulation was premature, that the market was too nascent and fast-developing to know whether such regulation would have unintended negative consequences.  For what it’s worth, over the subsequent ten years, none of the major concerns, which are now being described as imminent, manifest in any substantive way.  For instance, many people share the talking point that (also in 2007) Verizon once blocked NARAL’s use of its platform for a mobile text campaign.  But, the salient details in that story are first, that Verizon’s original policy was not ideological—many corporations try to remain neutral on hot-button issues—and second, that Verizon actually backed down rather quickly under public pressure.  This market-based response to Verizon lends credence to the wait-and-see approach adopted ten years ago by both the FTC and the FCC.

Neither the telcos (AT&T et al) nor the major platform providers (Google et al) deserve any benefit of our doubt. Companies operating in both sectors have been guilty at one time or another of non-competitive and non-neutral practices.  The simple way to view these players (and this includes popular platforms like Netflix) is that they’re all vying for our time and money (and personal data) and all looking for an edge over one another. Having said that, the 2015 Order by the FCC presently tilts the regulatory landscape in favor of the Googles of the world, and everyone spreading the word to “save neutrality” is doing the big platforms a big favor. This is folly.  As argued in older posts, I see no reason why Google and Facebook should be free to manipulate our web experiences, which they do almost constantly, while we pretend to have achieved “neutrality” by preemptively regulating BIAS providers, which have not been shown to substantively engage in non-neutral practices to date.

If we are going to have a coherent regulatory framework that protects consumers while encouraging investment in a bigger, better, and faster internet, this will almost certainly require bi-partisan leadership from a Congress willing to engage both the FTC and the FCC in the proposal of new guidelines based on the internet we have—and may realistically have in the foreseeable future. By contrast, there is an extent to which classifying BIAS providers under Title II in the 2015 Order was a politically expedient attempt to shoehorn the unprecedented and dynamic digital ecosystem into early 20th century regulatory guidelines by way of analogy.  And unfortunately, most analogies don’t apply.

Andrew Orlowski, who has been following the neutrality debate for a decade, describes in a 2015 article how unhelpful the usual analogies are to a sensible discussion about the way packet networking (i.e. data flow) actually functions.  “…the assumption that traffic management is the cause of service differentiation is itself a narrow and misleading assumption. If you take away traffic management from a network, the network wouldn’t suddenly become a Garden of Eden-like paradise. It probably wouldn’t work at all,” Orlowski writes.

In short, the network is never neutral.  Or to put it in prosaic terms, when your video stream hitches up, which happens from time to time, how would you know if it’s due to malfeasance on the part of the ISP or the imperfection of data traffic management somewhere on the network—or for that matter, wind in the wires?  Meanwhile, the position of the telcos, with which Ajit Pai agrees, is that the 2015 Order dissuades investment in broadband expansion that would not only make your video stream more reliable, but would bring still-needed connectivity to underserved regions of the country.

Write that off as corporate/Republican double-talk if you want, but stranded, private investment is a tricky animal; and in the U.S., we don’t build public, even in circumstances where perhaps we should. So, the reality we have is that nobody is going to invest billions in a better, faster internet without knowing how that investment will be recouped. In the early 20th century, when the country was first being fully electrified, those stranded investments were guaranteed a return by the government granting monopoly control of power distribution to the handful of investing corporations.

So, if the 2015 Title II Order cuts off certain revenue streams for BIAS providers, which it does, might the incentive to make stranded, broadband investments have come at the cost of some new form of monopolistic guarantee?  I have no idea, and we won’t likely find out; but there is historic precedent for that kind of arrangement. Meanwhile, as a company like Google diversifies to provide access via fiber, which would not be covered by the 2015 Order (even if it were to remain in place), what form of protection do consumers hope will emerge in a model in which a single company is simultaneously ISP and the largest advertiser/data-miner in the world?  Answer:  We’re nowhere near addressing that question.

And of course, the pervasiveness of the network will soon exceed our present experience, as we seem destined for better or worse to live among the “internet of things.”  I doubt there is any kind of reasonable, statutory framework that empowers either the FTC or the FCC to adequately protect consumers in a world where every aspect of daily life is networked through systems built by private enterprise. Perhaps, that’s an argument for the 2015 Order as a first step, but even if that were the case, the “debate” raging on social media is largely looking backward at what never occurred over the past 20 years, rather forward at what might occur over the next 20 years.

Admittedly, the epicenter of this debate is a matter of statutory interpretation with regard to the way ISPs function and the meaning of “information service” vs. “common carrier.”  Until the 2015 Order, BIAS providers (and only cable providers) were classified as “information services” under Title I of the Telecommunications Act.  At the same time, there are reasonable, common-sense arguments (including Scalia’s dissent in the Brand X case of 2005) for reclassifying these services as “common carriers” under Title II.  My own view, after reading Chairman Pai’s 50+ pages of legal argument on this matter, is that because he probably has the statutory argument on his side, this says more about the inadequacy of existing frameworks for effective cyber policy than it does about the current debate over neutrality.  Maybe that’s the issue we should address.

There is much more to this epic tale of mind-numbing minutiae, so the above is just a snapshot of why I’m neutral (for now) about the likelihood that the 2015 Order will be reversed.  Behind the political rhetoric and scary memes, the truth is that nobody really knows what the effects of the Order might have been, but we do know the Order wasn’t in place for the first two decades of our using the internet, and neutrality principles were largely sustained by other forces.  In short, the Title II Order is not in itself net neutrality, so its reversal does not end net neutrality.

Is a Revenge Porn Bill Next?

When nude photos of celebrities were leaked and distributed all over the internet in 2014, Jennifer Lawrence, as one of the victims, called it a “sex crime.” Meanwhile, the idea that the platforms themselves bore much responsibility to remove the image was met with mixed responses. The leadership at Reddit was so high on the fumes of its own utopian bullshit that they compared governance of the site to that of a democratic nation which should not impose moral choices on its citizens. Into that bro-publica climate, Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) introduced a bill in July 2016 that would make “revenge porn” a federal crime. The usual defenders of the web raised the same red flags, asserting that even a well-intended bill of this nature would lead to over-censorship online. Then, little was heard about this proposal, except perhaps inside the Beltway.

But suddenly, the landscape is very different, and I would not be surprised if we see movement on some type of “revenge porn” bill in 2018. In light of the head-spinning litany of sexual-assault allegations in the news, the general dilution of Silicon Valley’s political clout, and what seems like the inevitable passage of the SESTA bill, Rep. Speier’s bill might make relatively smooth progress toward ratification next year. If nothing else, it’s easy to imagine Congress passing this kind of legislation in a scramble to get on the right side of the historic shift we’re witnessing with regard to sexual harassment in every context.

Meanwhile, you might have missed the news that Facebook’s recently proposed an internal “solution” to combat revenge-porn, which was appropriately scorned, if not outright mocked, because it requires trusting their “trained” team with your intimate photos so they can protect you. These are the same guys who couldn’t do the math on Russians buying American political ads with rubles. Activist and author Violet Blue wrote a great piece for Endgadget describing why Facebook’s counter-revenge-porn proposal is not wearing any clothes. “The process presumes the victim has these photos in the first place, and cavalierly ignores that this person is living in a nightmarish hellscape trauma that is in no way re-experienced by handing the instrument of their terror to an anonymous, unaccountable, possibly grey alien Facebook employee,” she writes.

The Speier Bill

It’s actually a misnomer to call H.R. 5896 a “revenge porn” bill because revenge porn is a specific act, usually perpetrated by angry ex-boyfriends who get back at women who’ve broken up with them by distributing nude or sexually-explicit imagery they might have made together as a couple. Speier’s bill, titled the “Intimate Privacy Protection Act,” bypasses the issue of motive altogether and merely states that anyone who distributes intimate images—the language defines these explicitly—of adults with “reckless disregard for the lack of consent” of the subject could potentially face federal charges.

Often, the harm does not end with mere embarrassment. Instead, the images may serve as the predicate for a sustained, emotional assault by a male cyber-mob hounding a female victim, labeling her a “slut,” “bitch,” “whore,” and so on. Cites that trade in unauthorized intimate images may extort payments from victims for removal of their images, but there is little to stop the images from migrating virally once online. As such, remedies for removal are nearly impossible, and any effort on the part of the victim to extricate herself from the “hellscape,” as Violet Blue puts it, is more likely to exacerbate the emotional trauma than to ameliorate it.

As an aside, yes, every kind of sex education in the world ought to include a segment on the hazards of making intimate images with networked devices. It’s hard to believe that anyone is still naive enough to think that images created on smart phones, etc. can be kept private without substantial risk. But that kind of personal awareness does not preclude criminalizing the decision by an individual or entity to distribute these images without permission.

Thirty-eight states plus the District of Columbia have some type of law criminalizing “revenge porn,” but given the geographical irrelevance of internet distribution, it seems only reasonable to proscribe the conduct as part of the federal criminal code. Assuming this bill does see any action in 2018, we can expect the usual suspects—EFF, PublicKnowledge, Techdirt, et al—to cry havoc and declare once again the danger that such proposals pose to free speech on the internet.

Whether this chorus will be joined by major platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter may not be as predictable as it would have been just a year ago. I suspect these companies are all recalibrating how to spend their political capital now that public sentiment is less inclined to give them carte blanche; and distributing intimate images without permission is not a “cause” most people are going to support. Regardless, when it comes to the various harms that can be caused via cyberspace, it seems the public is catching on to two realities: 1) that an internet policy doctrine based on the natural goodness of people is utter folly; and 2) the tech companies are in way over their heads.