Tag: TorrentFreak

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

TorrentFreak Still Selling Piracy as Ideology

I guess it’s pick on Andy at TorrentFreak week.  (Sorry, Andy. ) But a recent blog of his titled No Level of Copyright Enforcement Will Ever Be Enough For Big Media begs a response.

Citing TF’s decade of experience covering the piracy battles, Andy repeats a familiar narrative that because piracy will never stop, and because pirates will continue to innovate, the major rights holders will never stop wanting more “draconian” copyright laws—laws that will threaten internet freedom but will not mitigate piracy.  He says that history teaches us these laws will fail in their purpose but will continue to fuel “justifiable” outrage among users, making enemies of prospective consumers for creative works.  “No one wants a minefield of copyright law. No one wants a restricted Internet. No one wants extended liability for innovators, service providers, or the public. But this is what we’ll get if this problem isn’t solved soon. Something drastic needs to happen, but who will be brave enough to admit it, let alone do something about it?” he writes.

But brave enough to do what about what exactly?  Andy describes a landscape in which pirate technology is becoming more sophisticated and more accessible—even while he credits piracy with fostering affordable, legal services like Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, etc.  Aside from being historically inaccurate—because these streaming platforms were not a response to piracy—Andy doesn’t seem to notice that there is no solution to the problem he describes.  Because the crux of what he’s saying leads one to the conclusion that no matter how affordable and accessible a vast library of works becomes, people will still pirate—a lot.  So, the real title of his post should be No Amount of Free Content Will Ever Be Enough For Some Consumers.

The major flaw with the post is that it’s predicated on a longstanding bit of revisionist history written by the “file-sharing community,” which continues to repeat the campfire legend that piracy was a market response to the excesses and greed of Big Media.  But although the 1990s did reveal plenty that was wrong with major media corporations, I’m calling bullshit on the post hoc assertion that this was a significant factor in the adoption of Napster beginning in 1999.  People used Napster because it was cool and free, not because there was a collective sense of rebellion against corporate producers of music and movies.

I’m from the 80s. We bought a lot of music on vinyl and CD, and I don’t remember any of my peers feeling particularly ripped off by the industry—at least not any more than young people feel ripped off by everything.  But if Napster had been introduced while we were in college, I have every confidence we would have been all over it. A technology that turns a personal computer into a free jukebox?  Hell yes a bunch of teens and young adults are going to think it’s the coolest thing ever invented. And it will only be after some ethical doubt about stealing music creeps into someone’s consciousness that the rationalizations will follow—including the self-affirming lie that we’re only stealing from greedy corporations and not the artists. Right after a new band called the Red Hot Chili Peppers played our dining hall, we’d have been “Napstering” their songs and devising elaborately lame explanations for why “sharing” their music was better than buying it.

The false narrative that piracy represented a socially conscious response to corporatism morphed into the mantra per ad nauseaum that any measure proposed to mitigate piracy will always be the antithesis of “internet freedom.”  The underlying hypocrisy of this point of view is that it willfully ignores the fact that far from being an anti-corporatist “movement,” piracy merely enriched two different categories of corporatists—one, a group of outright thieves; the other, stakeholders in giant internet platforms.  As musician/activist David Lowery wrote in 2012, the new boss (Google, Spotify, etc.) is worse than the old boss (traditional labels, studios, etc.); and if Andy and the “file-sharing community” want to take credit for something, they can take credit for that.

Ultimately, though, Andy fails to recognize that as long as any rule of law—from copyright enforcement to a right-to-be-forgotten to an anti-trafficking provision—is described as anathema to “internet freedom,” there is no conversation to be had.  At least not with anyone who thinks as he does.  Because the logic he presents is that these harms are the price we pay for “freedom,” which is some ultra-libertarian, techno-centric nonsense long overdue for tossing into the Failed Ideas bin.  2017 demonstrated for many (though probably not enough) that the wildwestness of the internet isn’t exactly healthy for democracy—that just like democracy in physical space, freedom is actually sustained by certain boundaries.

Meanwhile, on a purely practical note—one I’ve alluded to the past—who are all these leisure-class consumers with so much time on their hands that they need to pirate content?  Just for filmed-entertainment, I can think of at least a half-dozen new titles that I haven’t had time to watch yet on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu; and by the time I get to those, there will be more material released.  The market is growing very rapidly, with the new streaming platforms developing some of the best new work ever made. But we can assume that piracy is also a greater threat to the streaming-only platforms than it is to traditional producers with other avenues of distribution.  Note that Netflix and Amazon top the list of plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed January 10th against the makers of Dragon Box—the latest in sophisticated piracy devices to enter the market.

More about Dragon Box in a future post; but for now, I can’t help but think that editorials like this one from Andy are sounding a little out of touch—a bit “clinging to old models” if you will. Piracy itself may not be on the wane, but the rationales used to justify it sound weaker than ever in context to the changing media market and in context to some of the hard realities of what many call “internet freedom.”  So, to the extent Andy’s post is a call to action, whatever action he imagines cannot proceed based on a history that never really happened.  It’s time to put away the childish thing that says piracy = freedom.

Photo by cienpies.

White Noise Story Generates White Noise on Copyright

TorrentFreak recently reported a story about Australian music technologist Sebastian Tomczak receiving several copyright claims on a work he created and uploaded to YouTube. The work itself is ten hours of white noise he recorded using the noise generator built into the audio application Audacity. Tomczak’s interest, as described by Andy at TF, is “listening to continuous sounds of various types, and how our perception of these kinds of sounds and our attention changes over longer periods — e.g. distracted, focused, sleeping, waking, working, etc.”

After Tomczak posted his video to YouTube, it was targeted by four rights holders claiming his track as their property; and all of these entities availed themselves of the Content ID option to monetize his video. Initially designed as a compromise solution, a Content ID account is available to rights holders who meet certain conditions, which enables automated identification of a work being used by another YouTuber. Once flagged, the account holder has the option to let the use go, request a takedown, or monetize the use by sharing in any ad revenue generated by the use. Needless to say, the system is not perfect, and among its flaws is that it may misidentify a work. Not surprisingly, many of the comments attached to the TF story viewed the white noise example as yet another example of the unfairness of copyright, though some of the comments are more appropriately critical of YouTube. Because to the extent anyone can give this particular incident much consideration at all, it really is a YouTube problem, not a copyright problem.

Keep in mind that in the world outside the demolition derby of the internet, claiming a copyright and defending a copyright are not necessarily the same thing. If Mr. Tomczak and the “publishers” making a claim against his video were squaring off to litigate, I would hope that attorneys for all parties would advise that nobody has a reasonable copyright claim in white noise. White noise by itself does not meet the minimum standard of originality for copyright and is no more protectable than an A-Flat. As much as critics like to claim that copyright is a legal system woven from pure whimsy, it isn’t quite so random in practice as it may seem when filtered through the internal policies of a business like YouTube.

And here’s a bombshell observation: the internet is brimming with people who figure out how to game the system to generate money for themselves. It could be some guy making click-bait fake news, or it could be one of these “distribution” companies that automate the process of monetizing content with which they have no relationship. This seems to be the nature of the claimants in Tomczak’s case, and these businesses are all over the web—offering to distribute your music, art, films, etc. for you. Just upload and wait for the money to arrive.

As an aside, I can tell you that when a friend of mine captured a serendipitous video that went viral, he was chased pretty aggressively by two or three of these companies offering to monetize the clip for him. These businesses were eager enough to get hold of him that they called friends and relatives in various states in their frenzy to get his video clip into their system ASAP—all for one clip in a universe of trillions of clips. Clearly, it’s a numbers game. If they can license x number of clips and monetize them for y dollars, then it’s worth the investment of z time chasing after people like my friend. There’s nothing wrong with what these companies do, per se, but they shouldn’t be confused with traditional rights holders—and certainly not with the interests of professional creators.

It should be obvious that these automated, or semi-automated, distribution systems would leverage the sound-matching capability of YouTube’s Content ID system and that they will inevitably monetize files that belong to other people. In fact, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that there’s money to be made by using a cover of a song to try to monetize a track uploaded by the original artist. In July last year, I noted that singer/songwriter Bob Seger’s work was not on Spotify but that a whole catalog of covers by Bob Segar were available and are just good enough copies of Seger’s sound that many listeners might not immediately notice. In a similar way, what’s to stop an “innovator” from using a nearly-matching track to syphon money away from a creator who’s put her music on YouTube to monetize for herself? Suffice to say, copyright isn’t the bug in the system. The system is ideal for scammers and predators.

If there’s an unscrupulous way to squeeze a few dollars out of the advertising revenue stream flowing through the web, somebody’s already doing it. The extent to which Tomczak’s example is loosely predicated on the DMCA is a distraction from the larger picture—that this kind of chicanery is not the fault of copyright law but is more profoundly the realization of the free-for-all, pirate ethos that folks like TF’s fans have long advocated for the web. Piracy is a multi-million-dollar black market that, among other things, teaches people how to profitably game the system. So, it’s curious to see TF readers complain about legitimate copyright owners in context to a story in which a) no copyrights actually exist; and b) the false claimants against Tomczak’s video are doing exactly what the pirate sites do all day long—monetize work somebody else produced. As I wrote in my response to Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde in 2015, this is the internet you asked for. And it’s full to bustin’ with white noise.