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#SuryaRay #Surya Growing community of online activists is making life difficult for porn trolls. http://dlvr.it/30mp2F @suryaray

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The Copyright Alert System, an anti-piracy plan also known as “Six Strikes” which goes into effect the week of Feb. 25, is getting mixed responses from Internet activists who one year ago banded together to ward off the much-hated Stop Online Piracy Act.

CAS is an effort by content owners (mostly in the entertainment industry) to monitor public data on peer-to-peer networks for what they consider illegal sharing of their music, movies or software. Content owners can share the Internet Protocol addresses of alleged offenders to the accused’s ISPs, which then sets off a series of escalating actions in an attempt to put the kibosh on illegal activity. These range from emails with links to le…
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#SuryaRay #Surya At a NASCAR event on Saturday, debris created by a serious crash flew into the stands and injured a number of fans. As with many such events, a bystander caught the disaster on video and quickly uploaded it to YouTube, but within a matter minutes it was removed due to a copyright claim by NASCAR. It seemed like yet another case of a commercial entity taking advantage of copyright law to smother free speech — until Google reinstated the video and said NASCAR had overstepped its bounds. In this case at least, the search giant did the right thing.

The NASCAR crash followed much the same pattern so many news events do now, in the age of real-time and social media: moments after the crash occurred, there were multiple eyewitness photos and videos of the incident, including one particularly horrific one captured by university sophomore Tyler Anderson, who was sitting just to the left of the section that was hit by the debris — including a tire that flew off the race car in question. Soon, a link to the video on YouTube was racing through Twitter and other channels.

In this case, Google decided to over-rule NASCAR

Suddenly, however, the video was no longer available, and in its place was a standard YouTube message about the content being removed because of a copyright claim by NASCAR. This raised a host of questions for those who were trying to access it, including: How could the racing entity remove the video so quickly? Why didn’t YouTube protest that it should be protected by the principle of fair use, since it was a news event? And how could NASCAR claim that it had copyright over a video that was created by a fan?

When debris hits the crowd, NASCAR’s precious video rights should be superseded by the right of the crowd to tell their story.—
Cory Bergman (@corybe) February 23, 2013

The latter of those questions was answered a number of hours later, when YouTube reinstated the video and released a statement saying that partners such as NASCAR are only allowed to remove content that breaches their copyright, and the content in question didn’t pass that test (even though NASCAR asserts in the fine print when you buy a ticket that it owns everything fans produce while at an event). Said the YouTube statement:

“Our partners and users do not have the right to take down videos from YouTube unless they contain content which is copyright infringing, which is why we have reinstated the videos.”

The other two questions people had are even easier to answer. In a nutshell, Google provides its YouTube partners with an easy way to have content removed almost immediately: it’s a tool called Content ID, and it’s essentially a back-door to the YouTube content-management system. When a company like CNN or NBC or some other partner sees their TV shows or news clips being shared on YouTube without permission, they can submit a form and have it pulled down.

Copyright claims favor the owner, not the uploader

One of the main reasons why Google does this — and why it doesn’t bother (except in extreme cases) to protest or demand an explanation for takedown requests — is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA only gives services like YouTube “safe harbor” from copyright-infringement charges so long as the company acts quickly when it receives a takedown notice. In effect, there is virtually no leeway for protests or attempts to get a provider to defend their demands.

Prime example of DMCA abuse (which i lectured on today) mobile.theverge.com/2013/2/23/4022…—
Jillian C. York (@jilliancyork) February 24, 2013

As a number of observers — including Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — noted during the NASCAR incident, this is just one of the many ways in which the DMCA actually fosters bad behavior, or at least behavior that seems bad if you believe in free speech and freedom of the press. The fact that Google acted quickly to put the content back up is admirable, but it shouldn’t have to do this, and there are no doubt many other important cases in which it hasn’t that don’t involve something as attention-getting as a race-car crash.

And as Jason Pontin of MIT’s Technology Review pointed out in a recent essay on free speech in a digital era, our speech is to a large degree controlled by private corporations like Google and Twitter and Apple, and in many ways we are still coming to grips with what that means for us as a society.

_Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen_

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#SuryaRay #Surya The Hopper with Sling isn’t about “place-shifting,” says Fox. “It is piracy.” http://dlvr.it/2zyx5T @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya In reality, private organizations in the US can’t charge anyone with felonies. http://dlvr.it/2zywsl @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya Group that targeted 9-year-old downloader created Pirate Bay parody site. http://dlvr.it/2yphl3 @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya They don’t want Megaupload to “pre-litigate” its criminal case via Kyle Goodwin. http://dlvr.it/2yCssV @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya Copyright law is supposed to encourage creativity and reward artists but right now the system is a mess. Worse, the debate over how to change the law is dominated by bitter partisanship that makes real copyright reform impossible.

That’s why it’s a relief to see a new group enter the debate. In the last six months, a growing number of figures on the political right have been taking aim at our broken copyright system and offering some very sensible solutions.

The arrival of these conservative reformers, who join longtime liberal copyright critics, means the U.S. may at last get to have an honest debate over the best way to compensate content creators.

The current mess

It’s worth recalling just why the copyright system is so troubled in the first place and and who is responsible. For starters, note that U.S. copyright has ballooned from its original term of 28 years to the life of the author plus 70 years — meaning a young novelist or songwriter’s work is now likely to stay locked up until the year 2143 or beyond.

There is no justification for these absurd copyright terms other than as a form of corporate welfare to the entertainment industry. The Constitution’s rationale for copyright in the first place is to “promote .. useful Arts.”  It’s inconceivable that an artist will not pick up her pen unless she is promised 100+ years of copyright protection.

While the terms are a problem, copyright enforcement is a mess too. This is partly because Congress gave copyright owners a very big stick that lets them seek $150,000 every time someone takes their content without permission — even if the infringement led to zero economic loss. The chance to impose such big penalties for a trifling offense has led to a spate of abusive lawsuits by copyright trolls who target bloggers or file mass “John Doe” complaints intended to embarrass gay porn viewers.

Despite all this, copyright infringement still remains widespread. Call it “sharing” or call it “theft” — however you describe it, people keep helping themselves to content without offering a dime to the writers, musicians or film makers who made it.

To justify this behavior, pirates point to the mendacity of the entertainment industry to say, in effect, that content owners have it coming to them.  There is some validity to this (especially as the industry often shortchanges the artists it purports to stand for) but it doesn’t address the underlying issue: how should we pay content creators? If we agree on having a copyright system in the first place, it needs to work in a way that allows writers, musicians and photographers to make a living.

Right now, what we have instead is a copyright system that is unfriendly not only to consumers but often to individual creators as well. While big companies can flex legal muscles to chase copyright violators, the law doesn’t offer authors a simply way to seek payment when someone blatantly rips them off.

Unfortunately, for now, the debate over how to fix copyright remains dominated by industry lobbyists on one side and piracy apologists on the other. The result is an unhealthy stalemate in which those who propose a middle ground risk being labeled as a thief by the industry or as a stooge by its critics.

The conservative case for copyright

The copyright debate is not entirely controlled by the ideologues, of course. In the last decade, scholars and journalists (Lawrence Lessig, Bill Patry, Cory Doctorow and Mike Masnick to name a few) have made eloquent arguments about reforming the law.

The problem is that these copyright critics come from the same world; they’re all liberals with ties to Silicon Valley. This has made it easy for the entertainment industry to caricature them and for Washington to ignore them.

Now, though, the case for copyright reform is being made by figures on the right as well. Last fall, the famous judge and law-and-economics scholar Richard Posner declared copyright terms to be too long and warned that poorly defined fair-use rules can have “very damaging effects on creativity.”

This conservative critique heated up significantly in January when a Republican memo in the House attacked over-reaching copyright laws as an assault on laissez-faire capitalism. The entertainment industry soon stepped in to smother the memo and get its author fired but the memo’s contents are still resonating.

In late January, the American Conservative published a lengthy feature on “crony copyright” that repeated the memo’s economic arguments and also reported that the Tea Party and the Heritage Foundation are taking a growing interest in IP reform. Since then, the right-wing _Washington Times_ printed an op-ed criticizing the White House for trying to use copyright to control public domain photographs.

So what does all this mean? The significance is that copyright reformers have powerful new allies and fresh intellectual ammunition. While the left has relied on cultural arguments to attack the copyright system, the right makes a compelling case based on economics.

Chance for a grand bargain

This conservative conversion to copyright reform comes at a crucial time. The rise of sites like Twitter and Tumblr mean it’s easier than ever to share images, music and movies. In this context, copyright that lasts more than a hundred years makes even less sense and the opportunity for abusive lawsuits is even greater.

The emergence of a combined liberal and conservative case against the current copyright system offers the chance to reach a grand bargain. Specifically, there is now an opportunity to create shorter copyright terms and to fix the enforcement regime so that it doesn’t permit content owners to wield a $150,000 hammer over every infraction. In return, a more balanced copyright law would help to undercut many of the moral justifications that lead people to turn to piracy in the first place.

_(Image by Viorel Sima of Shutterstock)_

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#SuryaRay #Surya Plagiarism. Copyright infringement. Traffic hijacking. These are all terms publishers like to use when someone excerpts their content without permission, whether it’s Google News or The Huffington Post. Some digital publishers have different words for it, however: they prefer to call it curation, or aggregation, or just old-fashioned blogging. The latest iteration of this long-standing debate came on Tuesday, when a piece at Digiday about rampant aggregation triggered a Twitter back-and-forth between editor Brian Morrissey and Business Insider founder Henry Blodget.

In his post at Digiday, entitled “Surviving the Media Aggregation Economy,” Morrissey argues that we are trapped in a digital-media environment based on boosting pageviews to draw more advertising, and that this has “taken publishers hostage.” Publishers like Business Insider, he says, have taken this approach to its logical conclusion and generate a lot of their revenue by repurposing content created by others. In one case, Business Insider posted a screenshot of a Digiday post along with a paragraph lifted from the original, and put a new headline on it. Says Morrissey:

“The result: It generated 224 pageviews for the Digiday story. Along the way, BI banked another 1,500-plus pageviews — and that many ‘welcome ad’ impressions along with multiple banners and a ‘native’ video ad. Meanwhile, Digiday’s original post — thought up and executed by our staff — got 2,500 pageviews. Is this a fair trade?”

It’s more efficient to aggregate than create

Morrissey goes on to note that Blodget likes to brag about how efficient his publishing platform is, and how his site gets an average of 180,000 pageviews per day per employee — orders of magnitude larger than many traditional media players such as the _New York Times_ or Bloomberg. But the Digiday editor says much of this efficiency is driven by Business Insider’s repurposing of content created by others (Note: We’re going to be discussing alternate forms of monetization for content at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17). As Morrissey puts it in his post:

“Based on my experience, I can’t help but wonder if BI’s “efficiency” is bought at the expense of others. It’s like European countries bragging about low defense spending while relying on the U.S. to do the heavy lifting through NATO. It’s easy to be efficient when you draft off others.”

The debate expanded to Twitter when Blodget responded to Morrissey’s complaint, and suggested that if the Digiday editor was concerned about the screenshot of the images that appeared in the original, Business Insider would be happy to take them out. But Morrissey said his point was that the whole approach is wrong:

Business Insider argues Digiday should be grateful

Blodget argued that publishers like Digiday should be interested in exposing their content to as many different readers and potential readers as possible, and therefore Morrissey should be glad that Business Insider excerpted the post and included a link — something the Business Insider founder compared to a story that appears at Google News, or to the _New York Times_ running a story based on a _Wall Street Journal_ scoop:

Morrissey said that he was happy to have sites link to his content, provided they drove readers in substantial enough numbers, and that he was a big fan of the aggregation site Mediagazer as well as LinkedIn’s content portal. But in his post he noted that Business Insider had gotten close to 100,000 pageviews from content “aggregated” from Digiday, while the latter got a relatively minuscule 14,000 pageviews from Business Insider’s links.

Aggregation is a reality, whether we like it or not

It’s probably fair to say that versions of this debate have been going on for almost as long as the web has been around: questions about “link juice” and the “link economy,” in which traffic driven by an aggregator is supposed to make up for the alleged insult of excerpting their content, and so on. The Huffington Post used to be the poster child for what some have called “over-aggregation,” but now that mantle seems to have passed to Business Insider. And some believe that regardless of whether or not such behavior is legal or permitted under copyright law, it is unethical:

As I’ve tried to point out before, aggregation or curation is a fact of life in the digital age — just as record companies have had to learn to live with rampant downloading and sharing of music, publishers of all kinds are trying to get used to the idea that their content is no longer under their control. In some cases, aggregation fulfils a useful function, as it did in one notorious case involving a Forbes post by Kashmir Hill that was based on a _New York Times_ feature. In other cases, the usefulness is debatable.

As Morrissey points out in his piece, until the financing model for online media involves something other than pure pageview-driven advertising revenue, aggregation is unlikely to stop. The only protection is to have content whose value can’t be summed up in a screenshot or a paragraph excerpt, and a relationship with your readers that is based on more than just how many pageviews you can generate.

_Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Zurijeta_

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