Category: .

At Yahoo I worked for Ian Rogers. A valuable thing I learned from him is that informed optimism is empowerment.

If you feel despair, you’ll give up. If you feel confident that a solution exists, you’ll keep working until you find it. Optimism is the difference. If you can find optimism in a difficult situation, you have a chance of finding a path.

Sometimes things are really hopeless and you can’t find optimism. If you can’t find optimism it’s time to leave.

Yahoo was a sinking ship. Every day there was more bad news. While I was struggling to keep Webjay alive inside of Yahoo I had few reasons for hope, and it was often hard to find optimism. The next generation product vision for Webjay was the nugget that eventually grew into Yahoo Web Player. That next generation vision had great support and ultimately consensus. So I was able to find optimism by choosing to let the old vision die in order to turn the new vision into a reality. Webjay couldn’t have lasted, because it was a silo. Yahoo Web Player had real durability because it looked outward onto the whole web. Getting Yahoo Web Player built was a bigger and better mission. My optimism wasn’t just the best I could come away with, it was for a genuine advancement.

I am applying this method to my work related to the DMCA. Where many people on the left wing of digital politics feel things are hopeless, I feel things are just not easy. When I posted that copyright is not broken, it was because I have been able to find optimism.

From a 2009 article in PC World New Zealand

Google notes that more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.

Take that with a grain of salt: it’s for New Zealand in 2009.

TorrenFreak:: Should Bogus Copyright Takedown Senders Be Punished?

Every week copyright holders send out millions of takedown notices to websites all across the Internet. While the majority of these claims are legitimate, a healthy percentage are not. These “errors” can cause serious harm to the public, but the senders are never held responsible for their mistakes. Perhaps it’s time to punish repeat senders of bogus takedown notices?

One of the problems is that many rightsholders use completely automated systems to inform Google and other sites of infringements. They swear under penalty of perjury that their notices are correct, but this is often an outright lie.

Since most websites simply don’t have the resources to check the validity of these bogus notices, content is then censored in error.

My dream solution is to reduce liability of web sites with regard to notices from copyright holders that have a record of bogus notices. Let sites move notices from these companies to the bottom of the pile to be processed last. Reduce maximum lawsuit awards by a fixed percentage each time a bogus notice is received.

Mike Linksvayer on the sweet spot for listening to music on YouTube:

I’ve spent many hours listening to YouTube, not watching. There appears to be a sweet spot for long-lived (large catalog) bands that are unpopular enough to have never been on a major label or imitator (nothing gets taken down nor monetized) but popular enough that lots of their catalog is uploaded. The main problem with YT for me is that nobody has gotten around to uploading much or even anything from many great but too unpopular bands.

The Ex is an example of a band in that sweet spot that I’ve been listening to a lot recently.

There’s a dynamic similar to orphan works. For huge acts like The Beatles it’s well worth the time for somebody to issue takedowns. But for smaller acts like John Fahey or Bill Monroe it’s less likely that somebody will take the trouble.

Also, live performances of public domain compositions by acts on the level of Fahey or Monroe are out of reach of takedown requests. These recordings are spotty, but some are good enough.

TorrentFreak: Anti-Piracy Outfits Think Megaupload, Demonoid & BTjunkie Are Still Alive

In January this year Megaupload was taken down by U.S. authorities. In the space of a few hours the entire site was completely wiped out and the news made dozens of headlines that continue to break to this day.

But while seemingly everyone knows that Megaupload no longer exists, the likes of IFPI, BPI, Sony, Warner, Universal, EMI, The Publisher’s Association, Microsoft, and adult company Vivid (to name a few) are absolutely oblivious. To this very day these companies are sending takedown demands to Google ordering the company to remove links to content on Megaupload.com that hasn’t existed, at the least, for almost nine months.

What this shows is that anti-piracy companies aren’t even bothering to check content anymore – they’re simply searching Google, firing off notices without a second thought, and then expecting the search giant to clean up the mess.

I wonder what practical steps could be taken to fix this problem.

If Google could penalize companies posting takedown requests for bogus requests, the complainers would take more care with accuracy. But Google can’t do that as far as I know. Google has just as much liability for a copyright infringement notification comes from somebody with a spotty record.

If Google could cap requests from an entity, the entity would have an incentive to spend their quota wisely. But it can’t.

What’s to stop a company from sending takedown requests for every URL on the web and letting Google figure out the difference?

/via Mediaor

I challenge you to do your regular music listening on YouTube. Instead of firing up iTunes or Pandora, use YouTube. This is only for music – viral puppies not allowed.

The Algorithmic Copyright Cops: Streaming Video’s Robotic Overlords: As live streaming video surges in popularity, so are copyright “bots” — automated systems that match content against a database of reference files of copyrighted material. These systems can block streaming video in real time, while it is still being broadcast, leading to potentially worrying implications for freedom of speech.

Fixme: tweak the notice and takedown process to be compatible with live streams. The ordinary pace is too slow – the site takes an item down immediately but don’t put it back for ten days.

One trivial improvement is a programmatic delay. Set a two hour timer for the takedown on receiving the request. But this neuters the takedown process and makes it useless to copyright owners.

Ideas?

News stories about copyright often pop up in the technology press. The subtext is usually like: “here’s how deeply broken copyright is.”

Don’t believe the subtext. Copyright is not broken in any sense that matters.

Copyright is in the process of adapting to changes in information technology. The process of adapting will take a longish time. The process started in the 1980s, which led to passage of landmark legislation such as the DMCA in the 1990s. In the years 2000-2010 the DMCA safe harbors were tested and defined in detail, and internet sites went from flat defiance of the law to grudging compliance. That’s 25 years of progress. I imagine 25 more will complete the job.

Copyright is not a monolithic thing that can be fixed with a sweep of the hand. It is a large body of law and common law. Nobody in any stable government, whether a judge or legislator, is empowered to make deep changes. Even the most powerful can only make tweaks.

These tweaks pile up and very slowly turn into major change. The process is like a glacier carving out a valley one grain of dirt at a time.

We are riding on that glacier, so it is hard to see the changes. That problem is caused by how small we are in the universe. As individuals we want change to happen at a pace that’s convenient to our perceptions, like the dramatic arc of a 30-minute sitcom. You can step out of that limitation if you choose.

When you see a story about how broken copyright is, it’s part of the glacier’s movement. Maybe the impact will be an improvement in how copyright owners and web sites communicate. Maybe the impact will be slightly more fair treatment of uploaders. Whatever it is, it will be small, so you will be tempted to think it’s too small to matter.

http://youtu.be/xUHQ2ybTejU shows the musical structure of J.S. Bach’s “crab canon”. It’s a great example of the value of notation-based annotation synchronized in time with audio.

/via Dan Krimm.

Mark Boas on hyperaudio:

Hyperaudio is a series of technologies built upon the foundations of HTML5 audio which aim to make audio a first class citizen of the web. In particular, but not exclusively, we are concerned with the spoken word.

What Hyperaudio hopes to achieve:

1. make audio searchable
2. make audio linkable
3. make audio navigable
4. dynamically generate audio
5. convert speech to text
6. represent audio visually

When we represent spoken audio as text we immediately start to open up the content. People can see at a glance what that content is. Transcripts then, underpin much of the work undertaken under the Hyperaudio umbrella so far. As soon as we convert speech to text we are immediately able to scan, search and link to that content. Add timings and we can use that transcript as a form of navigation. We can call these hyperlinked transcripts hyper-transcripts.

My Music Hack Day version of hyperaudio – hypermusic – is at http://gonze.com/blog/2012/02/16/proof-of-concept-for-hyperaudio-notation/.