How Copyright Enforcement Robots Killed the Hugo Awards

http://io9.com/5940036/how-copyright-enforcement-robots-killed-the-hugo-awards

by cenazoic • 14 years ago

249 62 14 years ago

miahi• 14 years ago

It is way cheaper to ban everything in sight than have the copyright holders' lawyers banging at your door for infringement. All the rest is just bad support, but ustream are covered by their terms: "[...] we also reserve the right to terminate the Site, Services or your access thereto at any time and for any reason". Using this kind of service as your unique way to broadcast is not the way to go. Next time you are using a free service with such terms, google for all the other similar services and use them as well. "Always have backups" applies everywhere.

antoinevg• 14 years ago

Cheaper until everyone follows the advice to take their business elsewhere. Then what?

Evbn• 14 years ago

Else where? When the copyright cartel has all vendors under under their control...

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

Maybe. Until nobody is banging on your door because they don't trust you to provide the service you say you are going to provide. Notwithstanding fair use (which really takes a judge to decide), it wouldn't be hard to come up with a list of clips that will be shown and get promotional permission to show them. These are essentially free ads, FFS!

Alternative: maybe it's time for some good fair-use cases to be heard.

acabal• 14 years ago

Definitely ridiculous. But this creates a case for hosting your own stream, instead of relying on a capricious 3rd party who is too scared of media cartels to serve its customers properly. It might be a little more work to set up, but that's the price you pay in today's hyper-litigious copyright-mad world.

lambada• 14 years ago

Yes, it is more work but also in terms of the bandwidth to serve these awards via their own service it would be far more expensive (not to mention hard to maintain reliability of service). Yes, I suspect most of us could pull a basic stream together pretty quickly, but that stream would likely not be up to the standard that would be expected of such a prestigious ceremony.

windle• 14 years ago

Exactly why we need Bittorrent Live to take off. P2P live video streaming can help bypass shoddy bots.

vidarh• 14 years ago

I'm reasonably confident it won't take much to beat the standards set by having copyright enforcement bots taking the thing offline.

kitsune_• 14 years ago

I don't get it... you will always end up using infrastructure that belongs to someone else when streaming.

rorrr• 14 years ago

If it's your own server, the best they can do is send you a DMCA claim.

rabidsnail11• 14 years ago

How to do it using Amazon (scales automatically): http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/De...

WildUtah• 14 years ago

Copyright enforcement didn't kill the broadcast. Choosing an incompetent streamer killed the broadcast. The streamer still hasn't even responded to the users and organizers.

There are a lot of streaming providers that want your business. Choose better next time.

lukejduncan• 14 years ago

I think it's a fair statement for one big reason: this isn't an isolated case. You can find hundreds if not thousands of examples on YouTube of legitimate fair use being censored because it's more financially prohibitive to piss of lawyers who want to sue for everything than customers who want to use your service.

Could they have used a different streamer? Sure. Would this have still happened? Probably not but who knows. Does this represent a trend in copyright enforcement? Yep.

guard-of-terra3• 14 years ago

Any streamer becomes incompetent once takedown notices start arriving. Competent streamer becomes economically infeasible.

Every time you hear a song on the radio you should remember: this was brought to you by people who also happily destroy everything good in this world, everything worthy.

rabidsnail11• 14 years ago

We're not talking about a high school football game here. Ustream must have known that they were carrying the Tony's, and should have had a human in the loop.

meatsock• 14 years ago

there are lots of good things on the radio that aren't related to the DRM-heavy corporate world, and always will be as long as I can help it. not every artist bows to the RIAA, just all of the ones you've been exposed to through their influence machine.

if it's the case for you that every time you hear a song on the radio you are reminded of the excesses of the intellectual property patrol, I humbly suggest changing the channel to your local non-commercial station. perhaps you'll hear something you like.

btilly• 14 years ago

The streamer may or may not be incompetent, but the copyright bot issue is real. I am not a lawyer, but my reading of http://images.chillingeffects.org/512.html section g.2.C is that they are legally NOT ALLOWED to put the material up until 10 days after receipt of a counter notice if they wish to maintain their DMCA safe harbor.

If my reading of that statute is right (I'd give that about even odds - but feel free to read it for yourself), even a competent streamer would have had to do the takedown. The statute does not say how quickly the takedown has to be, it merely says "acts expeditiously". So any competent provider will have an automated procedure, and once that procedure is triggered, that's it unless the copyright holder takes it back, or 10 days passes.

I just love the irony that it is Neil Gaiman who it happened to. He has long been a vocal proponent of copyright maximalism, and his positions on this are sufficiently extreme that I refuse to ever again buy anything that he has written.

Update: I've left the last paragraph untouched, but I decided to look for Neil Gaiman in his own words on copyright. And I ran across http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI which demonstrates that I'm remembering his "grumpy" period but he's since been educated that "online piracy" is not so bad.

I'm glad I found this out. I'll have to start buying his books again. (Yet another example of how I can form an opinion, and hold it for years after the facts behind that opinion stopped being true. If I didn't do this kind of follow-up research, I would have never known.)

icebraining3• 14 years ago

That's only true if it was a DMCA takedown notice. If it were their only copyright detection systems - which I think it's more likely - it doesn't apply.

zepolud• 14 years ago

Not so sure about him changing his mind. A couple of weeks before the interview you posted, Gaiman was discussing the freedom of information on his blog. Pretty much all he had to say was to compare information to pizzas: "Pizza wants to be free. Concentrate on liberating pizza from evil pizzerias." This is so extremely shallow (or disingenuous) that I lost a lot of respect for the guy.

slaven• 14 years ago

I think you're suggesting to choose a streamer that not only has bots identifying infringing content, but also is then reviewed by a pool of copyright-law-savvy humans for validation to prevent false positives. Not sure if that will scale.

hcarvalhoalves2• 14 years ago

It's easy for the author to say that "dumb robots, programmed to kill any broadcast containing copyrighted material, had destroyed the only live broadcast of the Hugo Awards".

What he ignores, though, is how easy it is for them to get sued about copyright infringement.

That's what copyright law creates: fear, uncertainty and overly complex, confusing DRM systems.

eurleif• 14 years ago

I don't know of any law which would require Ustream to actively monitor broadcasts for copyright violation. Do you?

rmc2• 14 years ago

No law explicit, no. But there is loads of laws they may break and loads of ways many rich companies could sue them if they didn't use bots like this.

hcarvalhoalves2• 14 years ago

I know the paranoia copyright laws create on companies.

rabidsnail11• 14 years ago

It doesn't matter whether you broke the law if you go broke defending yourself. And good luck raising money with a lawsuit hanging over your head.

scdoshi• 14 years ago

Maybe http://www.tapin.tv/ could have filled in when the official stream went down. Crowdsource the stream?

mtgx2• 14 years ago

P2P WebRTC can't come soon enough.

HoLyVieR• 14 years ago

With Flash you can use the RTMFP protocol to do the exact same thing (stream audio, video and data in P2P). It's just not a very known technology.

If you really can't wait for P2P technology for browser you can check it : http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/. As far as I know, it's the only way to do true P2P in a browser.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

Automated copyright enforcement like what Ustream has and Youtube's ContentID are horrible. Imagine what would happen if the rightholders cartel manage to pass a treaty like ACTA, where ISP's are responsible for user's watching behavior. It doesn't seem too far off to think that they will implement an automated system like this, too, and then you'll find yourself banned from visiting a large portion of the Internet.

jorgem• 14 years ago

Someday, somehow, someone will take down the Super Bowl or the World Cup final off "network television". I don't know how it will happen exactly -- maybe part of the network stream will go over the internet on it's way to/from a satellite feed, or something.

That day, the shit will hit the fan.

rabidsnail11• 14 years ago

There's no way the NFL is going to distribute their video over a public platform. CDN, yes, but CDN's don't have the same pressure from copyright holders that public platforms do, and don't fingerprint.

rabidsnail11• 14 years ago

They do video fingerprinting with Vobile, which probably found a match and triggered an automated takedown.

Ustream is incompetent, but Vobile is the villain here.

http://www.ustream.tv/blog/2010/07/16/launch-of-improved-mea...

http://www.vobileinc.com/

SeanLuke• 14 years ago

It seems to me that the basic problem was that the Hugo awards decided to broadcast using a service provider without a contractual arrangement. Is the Hugo really that low-rent?

If you're doing something big, always draw up a contract. Otherwise you're subject to terms like...

https://www.ustream.tv/terms-popup [see sections 11, 12, and 13]

memset• 14 years ago

Lots of people are saying that this is not evidence that copyright is evil; only overreaching enforcement is.

I'd submit that, increasingly, these two ideas are indistinguishable.

I'm very much in favor of copyright (after all, I make a living by creating protected works) but as automated and over-reaching enforcement like this becomes the norm, it is increasingly difficult for me to defend this position.

Unfortunately, I don't know what the "next best alternative" to copyright protection is. That is, what kind of system would one need to protect us from these kinds of incidents?

rabidsnail11• 14 years ago

No monopoly protection at all, and all culture would be funded by kickstarter (or clones).

krichman2• 14 years ago

This would work just fine for, say, Louis CK, but how would unknown/new artists earn any money at all?

briandear3• 14 years ago

What's your address? I want to help myself to all of your stuff. So what if you've worked for it. I want it so I should have it. Private citizens ought not have the right to retain ownership of anything. Everything should be free right? So let's start at your house. It's cool though, you can have a kickstarter to buy new stuff. I might even chip in $5.

beedogs• 14 years ago

I'm starting to think the concept of "intellectual property" is more trouble than it's worth. A lot more trouble.

briandear3• 14 years ago

The irony is that you wouldn't have the Hugo awards with no IP protection. The publishers wouldn't publish any of the books because there'd be no profit and the writers wouldn't write because they'd have to get jobs doing something else because the writing wouldn't pay the bills.

Why the hell should someone's creation not be protected from theft? If I write an amazing novel, why should it be ok for someone else to put their name on it and distribute it everywhere? Why shouldn't I be allowed to sell products using someone else's logo? Without IP protection, you don't have IP and you won't have any incentive for people to try and create something better. I wouldn't work years on a project only to have some jackass steal it.

cturner• 14 years ago

There were books published before copyright existed, and would be if copyright was removed.

With only a handful of exceptions, successful writing isn't enough to make a good living under the current regime, where writers make money by having a day job. As with music, publishers who make money, not creators.

nnethercote• 14 years ago

Lawrence Lessig is saying "I told you so" right now.

How Copyright Enforcement Robots Killed the Hugo Awards

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