Tag: google

Zombie Jamboree – Google “Helps” Fight Piracy

You know the deal.  Kill one zombie while ten others are infecting hundreds more who in turn infect thousands until, well, you’re basically toast.  Not only because it’s Halloween but because I am so damn bored with the Whack-a-Mole simile to describe anti-piracy efforts, I’m switching to zombie fighting.  Even TorrentFreak uses the word resurrect in the title of this article to describe how one particular torrent site, FileSoup, is using Google’s database of takedown notices to re-establish live links to infringing material.  It’s a bit confusing for the non-techie (including me), and I won’t do a better job summarizing the mechanics than the TF article, but here’s the big picture as I understand it:

Google receives about 20 million requests per month from rights holders to remove links to infringing URLs.  I suspect those are requests from major rights holders like studios and does not include independent rights holders who don’t have the resources to send out notices in significant volume.  Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of takedown requests are legitimate and the DMCA is nearly useless for rights holders, Google and its PR machine continue to promote a general message that DMCA takedown requests are, by default, an attack on free expression.  To help reinforce this idea, the company dons a populist costume, claiming to be pro-transparency, and files all takedown requests with Chilling Effects Clearing House and produces a Transparency Report detailing the notices it receives. With the aid of so-called digital rights activists at The Berkman Center and the EFF, a publicly available database like Chilling Effects becomes a two-headed monster for both rights holders and the public.

First, as stated in an earlier post, the name and positioning of Chilling Effects is a pretty sleazy PR move designed to sustain that message that all takedown requests inherently violate free speech; and then, as a reporting “service,” these databases provide an efficient resource for prospective infringers to bring dead links back to life with relatively basic coding skills.  To quote TorrentFreak quoting someone from FileSoup, “We created a technology that crawls DMCA notices and resurrects the torrent webpage under a different URL so it can appear in search results again. It was rather complicated to sharpen it, but eventually it works pretty well. We will use it on FileSoup.com for all the websites we proxy.” 

Recently, Google rewrote its search algorithms to demote major pirate sites in the results queue, and this is a good thing. Despite having dragged their feet for years on taking such action and insisting search had no influence on pirate traffic, these demoted positions do seem to have had a mitigating effect already.  Of course, while giving a fist bump to rights holders’ with one hand, Google is using the other hand to feed links that have been lawfully removed by DMCA notice into a database that feeds this URL reassignment process to infringe exactly the same material against which Google can still sell advertising. 

And as bad as that is, I am even more concerned with the ideological agenda behind the more insidious message conveyed by an initiative like Chilling Effects that IP rights (or any other rights) infringe speech just because it’s the Internet. It is not wild speculation to say that the ultra-libertarian ideology of Silicon Valley’s elite envisions a future that looks and sounds populist and egalitarian for now, but that can become a real zombie apocalypse in just a few years.  In this zombie apocalypse story, everyone and everything is wired, and we’re all smiling at the free stuff on our devices and the conveniences brought to us by the Internet of things, and nobody notices that we’ve become commodities ourselves.  

Like a good horror movie, it begins subtly with consistent behaviors among the tech industry elite encroaching on various civil liberties.  Google does all it can to play fast and loose with piracy, and only so many people really care because they figure “it only affects big media conglomerates.”  Years later, Reddit balks at taking down stolen nude celebrity photos, and a few more people care about that because they begin to see this kind of rights infringement hits a little closer to home; those are people not companies.  Meanwhile, Google scans Gmail, and Facebook turns our connections, comments, and apparent interests into a commodity that can be traded like pork belly futures.  Then, Amazon exerts pressure on suppliers and labor with a monopolistic power we haven’t seen since John D. Rockefeller.  And because the pattern is asymmetrical and subtle, just like a zombie movie, we overlooked patient zero, which in this story was a song, illegally commoditized by a “file-sharing service” back in the early 90s.

Happy Halloween!

Maybe Google Means “See No Evil”

Yesterday, Google chairman Eric Schmidt was interviewed on public radio and simulcast on Google Hangouts.  WAMU’s Diane Rhem threw softballs, slow and over the plate at Schmidt, providing a friendly platform for the chairman to evangelize the many ways Google makes the world a better place.  Coincidentally, I happened to be editing the following:

For those who don’t know, ChillingEffects.org is a database and website managed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Berkman Center for Internet & Society.  It is a presumptive watchdog over the presumptive misuse of DMCA takedown notices — the implication being that free expression is “chilled” whenever such an abuse takes place.  In principle, this might seem like a reasonable thing for the EFF to oversee; after all, we don’t want free speech to get chilly, even if there is diminishing hope that speech is necessarily getting anymore valuable in the digital age.  But it turns out that whenever, say, Google receives a DMCA takedown notice for a link to infringing material, every one of these complaints is sent to ChillingEffects so that users are, in principle anyway, able to read the details of the complaint from the notice sender.   So for example, if you were to search the term “Expendables III,” which was weeks ago leaked before its theatrical release, you would find among the search results a notice from Google that reads as follows:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

In many cases, the link to the complaint will not provide the user with much information, and it’s a bit of a mystery what most users might do with the information anyway.  After all, if you’re the creator of a file like a YouTube video that is taken down by a rights holder, you can have access to the information needed to rectify the fault, if indeed it was a false claim.  What’s truly obnoxious about this notice, and even the name ChillingEffects itself, is the not-very-subtle implication that DMCA takedowns are by default abusive and generally chill free expression. Ya see what they did there?  And by they, I mean Google, which funds ChillingEffects to no one’s surprise I’m sure.  Now, enter the Hollywood hacked photo scandal and a twist on that story that, as Eriq Gardner recently wrote for The Hollywood Reporter, “might reveal something about Google’s policies toward flagged copyrighted content.”

What Garder is referring to is the fact that former Kate Upton beau, Detroit Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander, delivered via his attorneys takedown notices identifying 461 URLs that were hosting racy photos of him and Upton. Of those URLs, Google removed links to 51%, drawing a distinction, according to Gardner, between nude photos and racy-but-clothed photos, irrespective of the fact that all of the photos in question were indeed stolen and are being published without permission.  Never ones to lose an opportunity to be complete tossers about copyright, Google is supposedly relying on an untested legal theory that the copyright holder of a selfie can only be the button pusher at the time of the taking.  This seems hardly relevant with regard to the matter of just acting like decent human beings; if images are known to be stolen, and the subject(s) of those images request that your for-profit search business remove links to them, you ought to do it on principle alone.  But this is not the mindset of the web industry despite its many self-aggrandizing proclamations as the engineers of social change for good.

Google seems to be concerned with a much higher principle than invading the privacy of a baseball star, a supermodel, or frankly you or me, and that’s the principle of doing whatever the hell it wants without consequences.  I think Gardner is right and that Google would love nothing more than a court case to affirm its position that these photos, though acquired illegally, are not the intellectual property of Mr. Verlander and that he, therefore, has no right to request their removal under DMCA.  This could even prove to be technically accurate; the copyright owner of a photo is the individual who exercises sufficient creative control (not the button pusher), so these images could still be the intellectual property of Miss Upton if indeed they were hacked from her account.  But that doesn’t mean Google isn’t benefitting from traffic driven by a prurient interest in seeing photos that were stolen and believed to be secure by their owners.  And Gardner also raises a valid point about ChillingEffects when he writes, “Google has in effect provided a road map for any voyeur looking for sites that refuse to remove stolen photos.”

All of this falls within the scope of the broad agenda maintained and well-funded by the Internet industry to foster a policy of “anything goes.”  As long as we allow them to gloss over privacy invasions, infringements on intellectual property, and profiting from social harm in the name of free speech, we only end up harming free speech in the long run.

Google Unveils New Shiny Object in D.C.

If Disney built a miniature version of one of its theme parks in the middle of Washington D.C. and populated it with lobbyists and government affairs specialists, people would go berserk.  And rightly so.  But will there be any public reaction be to the new 54,000 square-foot fun zone Google,Inc. officially opened on July 15 with a grand party attended by lawmakers?  That’s not a typo.  It’s fifty-four thousand square feet for 110 employees.  I’d like to say that each employee needs 489 square feet for his/her Google-scale ego, but that would be unfair.  In fact, according to this article in Bloomberg, all that space is a giant advertisement for Google products and for Google’s role in the continuum of technological and scientific information. And there’s nothing wrong with that message.  That’s what lobbyists are supposed to do, and at least part of the time, they speak the truth.  But as Google is now the fifth largest lobbying corporation in the nation, it should at least be noted that when it comes to dangling shiny objects in front of lawmakers, they’ve got ample game.  As such, I hope we can now dispense with the whole “Washington is in Hollywood’s pocket” gibberish and attempt to look at conflicting issues on their own terms.

See article in Bloomberg here.