Internet “enshitification“, as veteran journalist and privacy advocate Cory Doctorow describes it, it started decades before TikTok came on the scene. Older millennials remember the good times of Napster, followed by the much worse times when Napster was sued into oblivion along with Grokster and the rest of the P2P sharing ecosystem, until we were left with a handful of label-approved products and sterilized by catalog. streaming platforms like Pandora and Spotify. Three cheers for corporate copyright litigation.
In his new book The Internet Scam: How to Take Advantage of Computing Media, Doctorow examines the modern social media landscape, cataloging and illustrating the countless failures and shortsighted business decisions of the big tech companies that operate the services that promised us the future but only gave us more Nazis. We have both an obligation and a responsibility to dismantle these systems, Doctorow argues, and a means to do so with greater interoperability. In this week’s Hitting the Books excerpt, Doctorow examines the fallout from lawsuits against P2P sharing services, as well as the role played by the Millennium Copyright Act’s “notice and takedown” reporting system. Digital and YouTube’s “ContentID” scheme in modern streaming. sites.
Extracted from by The Internet Scam: How to Take Advantage of Computing Media by Cory Doctorow. Published by Verso. Copyright © 2023 by Cory Doctorow. All rights reserved.
Take advantage of computing resources
Damages arising from the notification and removal itself do not directly affect large entertainment companies. But in 2007, the entertainment industry itself designed a new, more powerful form of notification and takedown that manages to inflict direct damage on Big Content, while amplifying the damage to the rest of us.
That new system is “notice and stay down,” a successor to notice and takedown that monitors everything each user uploads or writes and checks to see if it is similar to something that has been marked as a copyrighted work. This has long been a legal goal of the entertainment industry, and in 2019 it became a feature of EU law, but in 2007, the notice and suspension made its debut as a voluntary amendment to YouTube, called ” Content ID”.
Some background: In 2007, Viacom (part of CBS) filed a multibillion-dollar copyright lawsuit against YouTube, alleging that the company had encouraged its users to infringe its shows by uploading them to YouTube. Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, defended itself by invoking the principles behind Betamax and notice and takedown, arguing that it had met its legal obligations and that Betamax established that the “incentive” for copyright infringement did not create liability for technology companies (remember that Sony had advertised the VCR as a means to violate copyright law by recording Hollywood movies and watching them at friends’ houses, and the Supreme Court decided it didn’t matter).
But with Grokster hovering over Google’s head, there was reason to believe this defense might not work. There was a real possibility that Viacom could sue YouTube out of existence; In fact, profanity-laced internal Viacom communications, which Google dug up through the legal discovery process, showed that Viacom executives had been hotly debating which of them would add YouTube to their business. private empire when Google was forced to sell YouTube to the company.
Google achieved a victory, but was determined not to end up in a mess like the Viacom case again. He created Content ID, an “audio fingerprinting” tool that was presented as a way for rights holders to block or monetize the use of their copyrighted works by third parties. YouTube (at first) allowed big rights holders to upload their catalogs to a block list and then scanned all users’ uploads to see if any of their audio matched a “claimed” clip.
Once Content ID determined that a user was attempting to publish a copyrighted work without the permission of its rights holder, it queried a database to determine the rights holder’s preference. Some rights holders blocked any uploads containing audio that matched theirs; others chose to keep the advertising revenue generated by that video.
There are many problems with this. In particular, there is Content ID’s inability to determine whether a third party’s use of another person’s copyright constitutes “fair use.” As discussed, fair use is the set of uses that are permitted even if the rights holder objects, such as taking extracts for critical or transformative purposes. Fair use is a “fact-intensive” doctrine, that is, the answer to “Is this fair use?” It is almost always “It depends, let’s ask a judge.”
Computers cannot separate fair use from infringement. There is no way they can do it. That means the filters block all types of legitimate creative work and other expressive speech, especially work that uses samples or quotes.
But it’s not just creative borrowing, remixing and transformation that filters struggle with. Much creative work is similar to other creative work. For example, a six-note phrase from Katy Perry’s 2013 song “Dark Horse” is effectively identical to a six-note phrase from “Joyful Noise,” a 2008 song by a much lesser-known Christian rapper named Flame. Flame and Perry spent several rounds in court, with Flame accusing Perry of violating her copyright. Perry ultimately prevailed, which is good news for her.
But YouTube filters struggle to distinguish Perry’s six-note phrase from Flame’s (as do executives at Warner Chappell, Perry’s publisher, who have periodically accused people who post clips of “Joyful Noise” of Flame of infringing “Dark Horse” by Perry). Even when the similarity is not as pronounced as in Dark, Joyful, Noisy Horse, filters routinely hallucinate copyright infringements where none exist, and this is intentional.
To understand why, we first have to think of filters as a security measure, that is, as a measure taken by a group of people (platforms and groups of rights holders) who want to prevent another group of people (uploaders) do something they want. do (upload infringing material).
It’s pretty trivial to write a filter that blocks exact matches: labels could upload pristine, losslessly encoded digital masters of everything in their catalog, and any user who uploaded a track that was digitally or acoustically identical to that master would be blocked.
But it would be easy for a video uploader to get around a filter like this: they could simply compress the audio slightly, below the threshold of human perception, and this new file would no longer match. Or they could trim a hundredth of a second from the beginning or end of the track, or omit a single measure from the bridge, or any of a million other modifications that listeners probably won’t notice or complain about.
The filters do not work with exact matches: instead, they use “fuzzy” matches. They don’t just block things that rights holders have told them to block: they block things that are similar to those things that rights holders have claimed. This confusion can be adjusted: the system can be made more or less strict about what it considers a match.
Rights groups want matches to be as loose as possible, because somewhere there might be someone who would be happy with a very garbled, truncated version of a song, and they want to prevent that person from getting the song for free. . The vaguer the match, the more false positives. This is a special problem for classical musicians: their performances of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart inevitably look very similar to the recordings that Sony Music (the world’s largest classical music label) has claimed in Content ID. As a result, it has become almost impossible to make a living from classic online performance: your videos are blocked or the advertising revenue they generate is diverted to Sony. Even teaching classical music performance has become a minefield, as Content ID blocks carefully produced free online lessons or, if the record label is feeling generous, the lessons are left online but the advertising revenue they earn is they siphon off a giant corporation, stealing a music teacher’s creative salary.
The notice and takedown law did not give rights holders the Internet they wanted. What kind of Internet was that? Well, although the entertainment giants said all they wanted was an Internet free of copyright infringement, their actions (and the candid memos released in the Viacom case) make clear that blocking infringement is a pretext for an Internet in which entertainment companies can decide who. a new technology can be created and how it will work.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-the-internet-con-cory-doctorow-verso-153018432.html?src=rss
