More on Automatic Copyright Filtering

In my last post on the topic, I closed asking to whom we should look to develop a set of norms for fair use in digital media. The EFF and others have spared me of that burden and have produced a set of principles covering fair use in "user generated media." The set of principles is here and an extremely useful set of examples are here. The video examples show that immense engineering problem with automatic copyright filtering and I encourage you to check them out for a couple laughs, too.

Quick Link

The Economist's special report on innovation covers many topics that will be of interest to readers of this blog. Be sure to check out the article linked to in the right hand column.

Google's Policy Chief on YouTube Copyright Filtering

Harvard's Berkman Center has a brief video by the head of Google Public Policy, Andrew McLaughlin on the new YouTube copyright filtering tool.

McLaughlin addresses the concerns many have raised about the automatic filtering's effect on fair use. According to him, if a fair use is flagged as infringing, YouTube/Google will "rely on communication" between the claimant and uploader. If this doesn't resolve the issue, YouTube's lawyers will "make a judgment call." This would seem to be a shift from the historic practice of courts adjudicating fair use.

But in a way, I don't know if we can blame Google. The DMCA and litigious copyright owners have placed them in this position. McLaughlin says he hopes that a sort of "common law will develop." That is, a commonly accepted set norms and practices will allow for a lower transaction cost between claimants and uploaders. Perhaps this will emerge, but it is going to need leadership. To whom shall we look?

Spreading US Copyright Law without Even Knowing What that Means

MSNBC is running a story about the US Trade Representative's goal of negotiating a new intellectual property pact which would benefit the American companies who export their IP.

The money quote is from the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Montana Senator Max Baucus:

"Ideas are America's true currency and if we want to be economically competitive, strong protections for U.S. intellectual property are key."

As readers of this blog will know, you cannot copyright ideas. Though the dichotomy between expression (qualifies for copyright) and ideas (not allowed copyright) is subtle, as a protector of the Constitution and exporter of American legal systems, I would hope Mr. Baucus would review it.

Anyways, as I wrote in the beginning of this nearly year old blog, America started as a "pirate nation" which didn't respect the intellectual property of others. However, as a net exporter, we are now using our hegemonic position to push our ideals of copyright onto other nations and people who don't have the same historic background.

Automatic Copyright Enforcement

Yesterday, Google introduced its automatic copyright filter for YouTube. The service will compare user-submitted content against copyright owner-submitted content. Content submitted by users which matches that of the copyright owners will be flagged for either: blocking, promoting or revenue sharing.

As I have said before, a binary solution to a non-binary problem is dangerous. The issue of copyright is not black or white - principles like fair use make copyright a subjective matter of which a computer is not the best judge.

According to Gigi Sohn at Public Knowledge, a few seconds of matching will not be sufficient to block the submitted video, but because fair use can be much longer than a few seconds (think about the documentary Outfoxed), this places a previously absent burden upon YouTube users.

Before these binary solutions, copyright owners needed to challenge reuses they thought were not fair use. Now, citizens need to justify their fair use.

Arriving Late and Ill-Informed

Here's a post by someone who, as far as I can tell, has zero formal legal training. Further, he has neither done any empirical studies on YouTube nor researched the studies which have been done.

In his ignorance, he writes:

...by YouTube's own rules, YouTube cannot exist. And yet it does.

How do we reconcile YouTube's official hard-line position on copyright with the reality that 90% of the content on their site is clearly copyrighted and clearly used without permission?

Had he any legal training or done any research into work by those who do, he would know that:

1. The lawyers at the EFF have been able to defend the fair use of YouTube videos and,
2. Studies have shown that 90% of videos on YouTube are non-infringing.

Free Culture in the NYT

The New York Times has a nice article on Students for Free Culture.

"Humanizing" Open Source Software

A while back I lamented the oftentimes poor design of open source software and how it retards adoption. See the post here.

Now, a much more accomplished post is available here where the author outlines best and worst practices. Check it out.

Quote of the Day

Ask yourself this: if Linux didn't exist, would Google? Would Facebook, without that and PHP, the free scripting language that even people like me can scrape by in (my PHP is about as good as my French), and Apache, the free web server, and MySQL, the free (and open source) database? "Free" underpins a huge amount of effort on the internet now, and that translates into real world commerce: Amazon uses those free building blocks too for its business, which is largely about shipping atoms, not bits.

From the Guardian.