Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

When hunting copyright trolls, well, trolls of any kind, the smaller the number to be hunted the better.

The Copyright Office is conducting the Section 512 Study, which it describes as:

The United States Copyright Office is undertaking a public study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the safe harbor provisions contained in section 512 of title 17, United States Code.

Enacted in 1998 as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), section 512 established a system for copyright owners and online entities to address online infringement, including limitations on liability for compliant service providers to help foster the growth of internet-based services. Congress intended for copyright owners and internet service providers to cooperate to detect and address copyright infringements. To qualify for protection from infringement liability, a service provider must fulfill certain requirements, generally consisting of implementing measures to expeditiously address online copyright infringement.

While Congress understood that it would be essential to address online infringement as the internet continued to grow, it may have been difficult to anticipate the online world as we now know it, where each day users upload hundreds of millions of photos, videos and other items, and service providers receive over a million notices of alleged infringement. The growth of the internet has highlighted issues concerning section 512 that appear ripe for study. Accordingly, as recommended by the Register of Copyrights, Maria A. Pallante, in testimony and requested by Ranking Member Conyers at an April 2015 House Judiciary Committee hearing, the Office is initiating a study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of section 512 and has issued a Notice of Inquiry requesting public comment. Among other issues, the Office will consider the costs and burdens of the notice-and-takedown process on large- and small-scale copyright owners, online service providers, and the general public. The Office will also review how successfully section 512 addresses online infringement and protects against improper takedown notices.

The Office received over 92,000 written submissions by the April 1, 2016 deadline for the first round of public comments. The Office then held public roundtables on May 2nd and 3rd in New York and May 12th and 13th in San Francisco to seek further input on the section 512 study. Transcripts of the New York and San Francisco roundtables are now available online. Additional written public comments are due by 11:59 pm EST on February 21, 2017 and written submissions of empirical research are due by 11:59 pm EST on March 22, 2017.

You can see the comments at: Requests for Public Comments: Digital Millennium Copyright Act Safe Harbor Provisions, all 92,398 of them.

You can even export them to a CSV file, which runs a little over 33.5 MB in size.

It is likely that the same copyright trolls who provoked this review with non-pubic comments to the Copyright Office and others posted comments, but how to find them in a sea of 92,398 comments?

Some simplifying assumptions:

No self-respecting copyright troll will use the public comment template.

grep -v "Template Form Comment" DOCKET_COLC-2015-0013.csv | wc -l

Using grep with the -v means it does NOT return matching lines. That is only lines without “Template Form Comment” will be returned.

We modify that to read:

grep -v "Template Form Comment" DOCKET_COLC-2015-0013.csv > no-form.csv

The > pipe adds the lines without “Template Form Comment” to the file no-form.csv.

Next, scanning the file we notice, “no last name/No Last Name.”

grep -iv "no last name" no-form.csv | wc -l

Where grep has -i and -v, means case is ignored for the search string “no last name” and in the file, no-form.csv. The -v option gives us only line without “no last name.”

The count without “no last name:” 3359.

A lot better than 92,398 but not really good enough.

Nearing hand-editing so I resorted to LibreOffice at this point.

Sort on column D (out of A to AI) organization. If you scroll down, line 123 has N/A for organization. The entry just prior to it is “musicnotes.” What? Where did Sony, etc., go?

Ah, LibreOffice sorted organizations and counted “N/A” as an organization’s name.

Let’s see, from row 123 to row 3293, inclusive.

Well, deleting those rows leaves us with: 183 rows.

I continued by deleting comments by anonymous, individuals, etc., and my final total is 146 rows.

Check out troll-mining.zip!

Not all copyright trolls mind you, I need to remove the Internet Archive, EFF and other people on the right side of the section 512 issue.

Who else should I remove?

Couple of reasons for a clean copyright troll list.

First, it leads to FOIA requests about other communications to the Copyright Office by the trolls in the list. Can’t ask if you don’t have a troll list.

Second, it provides locations for protests and other ways to call unwanted attention to these trolls.

Third, well, you know, unfortunate things happen to trolls. It’s a natural consequence of a life predicated upon harming others.

I have puzzled for years over how to explain the EC’s Human Brain Project. See The EC Brain if you need background on this ongoing farce.

While reading Reject Europe’s Plans To Tax Links and Platforms by Jeremy Malcolm, I suddenly understood the motivation for the Human Brain Project!

From the post:

A European Commission proposal to give new copyright-like veto powers to publishers could prevent quotation and linking from news articles without permission and payment. The Copyright for Creativity coalition (of which EFF is a member) has put together an easy survey and answering guide to guide you through the process of submitting your views before the consultation for this “link tax” proposal winds up on 15 June.

Since the consultation was opened, the Commission has given us a peek into some of the industry pressures that have motivated what is, on the face of it, otherwise an inexplicable proposal. In the synopsis report that accompanied the release of its Communication on Online Platforms, it writes that “Right-holders from the images sector and press publishers mention the negative impact of search engines and news aggregators that take away some of the traffic on their websites.” However, this claim is counter-factual, as search engines and aggregators are demonstrably responsible for driving significant traffic to news publishers’ websites. This was proved when a study conducted in the wake of introduction of a Spanish link tax resulted in a 6% decline in traffic to news websites, which was even greater for the smaller sites.
…

There is a severe shortage of human brains at the European Commission! The Human Brain Project is a failing attempt to remedy that shortage of human brains.

Before you get angry, Europe is full of extremely fine brains. But that isn’t the same thing as saying they found at the European Commission.

Consider for example, the farcical request for comments, having previously decided the outcome as cited above. EC customary favoritism and heavy-handedness.

I would not waste electrons submitting comments to the EC on this issue.

Spend your time mining EU news sources and making fair use of their content. Every now and again, gather up your links and send them to the publications and copy the EC. So publications can see the benefits of your linking versus the overhead of the EC.

As the Spanish link tax experience proves, link taxes may deceive property cultists into expecting a windfall, in truth their revenue will decrease and what revenue is collected, will go to the EC.

There’s the mark of a true EC solution:

The intended “beneficiary” is worse off and the EC absorbs what revenue, if any, results.

Pamela Samuelson has posted a coherent and compelling narrative on why the Java API victory of Google over Oracle is a very good thing.

Here’s where she comes out:

…
Developers of software need some simple norms to live by. One such norm is that independent reimplementation of an API in one’s own original code does not infringe copyright. That’s the law as well as good public policy. The public has greatly benefited by the existence of this norm because anyone with a creative software idea can write programs that will run on existing platforms. The software industry has thrived under this norm, and the public has a wide array of choices of innovative programs in a competitive marketplace.

Put Pamela’s analysis to good use.

Ask at your next interview if the prospective employer agrees with Pamela’s post.

It’s 877 words and can double as an attention span test for the interviewer.

Ask before you leap.

Colleges Shouldn’t Have to Deal With Copyright Monitoring by Pamela Samuelson.

From the post:

Colleges have a big stake in the outcome of the lawsuit that three publishers, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications, brought against Georgia State University officials for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, now in its eighth year, challenged GSU’s policy that allowed faculty members to upload excerpts (mainly chapters) of in-copyright books for students to read and download from online course repositories.

Four years ago, a trial court held that 70 of the 75 challenged uses were fair uses. Two years ago, an appellate court sent the case back for a reassessment under a revised fair-use standard. The trial court has just recently ruled that of the 48 claims remaining in the case, only four uses, each involving multiple chapters, infringed. The question now is, What should be the remedy for those four infringements?

Sage was the only publisher that prevailed at all, and it lost more infringement claims than it won. Cambridge and Oxford came away empty-handed. Despite the narrowness of Sage’s win, all three publishers have asked the court for a permanent injunction that would impose many new duties on GSU and require close monitoring of all faculty uploads to online course repositories.
…

I expected better out of Cambridge and Oxford, especially Cambridge, which has in recent years allowed free electronic access to some printed textbooks.

Sage and the losing publishers, Cambridge and Oxford, seek to chill the exercise of fair use by not only Georgia State University but universities everywhere.

Pamela details the outrageous nature of the demands made by the publishers and concludes that she is rooting for GSU on appeal.

We should all root for GSU on appeal but that seems so unsatisfying.

It does nothing to darken the day for the broods of copyright vipers at Cambridge, Oxford or Sage.

In addition to creating this money pit for their publishers, the copyright vipers want to pad their nests by:

…
As if that were not enough, the publishers want the court to require GSU to provide them with access to the university’s online course system and to relevant records so the publishers could confirm that the university had complied with the record-keeping and monitoring obligations. The publishers have asked the court to retain jurisdiction so that they could later ask it to reopen and modify the court order concerning GSU compliance measures.
…

I don’t know how familiar you are with academic publishing but every academic publisher has a copyright department that shares physical space with acquisitions and publishing.

Whereas acquisitions and publishing are concerned with collection and dissemination of knowledge, while recovering enough profit to remain viable, the copyright department could just as well by employed by Screw.

Expanding the employment rolls of copyright departments to monitor fair use by publishers is another drain on their respective publishers.

If you need proof of copyright departments being a dead loss for their publishers, consider the most recent annual reports for Cambridge and Oxford.

Does either one highlight their copyright departments as centers of exciting development and income? Do they tout this eight year long battle against fair use?

No? I didn’t think so but wanted your confirmation to be sure.

I can point you to a history of Sage, but as a privately held publisher, it has no public annual report. Even that history, over changing economic times in publishing, finds no space to extol its copyright vipers and their role in the GSU case.

Beyond rooting for GSU, work with the acquisitions and publication departments at Cambridge, Oxford and Sage, to help improve their bottom line profit and drown their respective broods of copyright vipers.

How?

Before you sign a publishing agreement, ask your publisher for a verified statement of the ROI contributed by their copyright office.

If enough of us ask, the question will resonant across the academic publishing community.

Carl Malamud tweeted on 29 March 2016:

Hate takedown bots, both human and coded. If you’re going to accuse somebody of theft, you should make it personal.

in retweeting:


Mitch Stoltz
‏@mitchstoltz

How takedown-bots are censoring the web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/03/29/how-were-unwittingly-letting-robots-censor-the-web/ …

Carl has the right of it.

Users should make the use of take down notices very personal.

After all, illegitimate take down notices are thefts from the public domain and/or fair use.

Caitlin Dewey‘s How we’re unwittingly letting robots censor the Web is a great non-technical piece on the fuller report, Notice and Takedown in Everyday Practice.

Jennifer M. Urban, University of California, Berkeley – School of Law, Brianna L. Schofield, University of California, Berkeley – School of Law, and Joe Karaganis, Columbia University – The American Assembly, penned this abstract:

It has been nearly twenty years since section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act established the so-called notice and takedown process. Despite its importance to copyright holders, online service providers, and Internet speakers, very little empirical research has been done on how effective section 512 is for addressing copyright infringement, spurring online service provider development, or providing due process for notice targets.

This report includes three studies that draw back the curtain on notice and takedown:

1. using detailed surveys and interviews with more than three dozen respondents, the first study gathers information on how online service providers and rightsholders experience and practice notice and takedown on a day-to-day basis;

2. the second study examines a random sample from over 100 million notices generated during a six-month period to see who is sending notices, why, and whether they are valid takedown requests; and

3. the third study looks specifically at a subset of those notices that were sent to Google Image Search.

The findings suggest that whether notice and takedown “works” is highly dependent on who is using it and how it is practiced, though all respondents agreed that the Section 512 safe harbors remain fundamental to the online ecosystem. Perhaps surprisingly in light of large-scale online infringement, a large portion of OSPs still receive relatively few notices and process them by hand. For some major players, however, the scale of online infringement has led to automated, “bot”-based systems that leave little room for human review or discretion, and in a few cases notice and takedown has been abandoned in favor of techniques such as content filtering. The second and third studies revealed surprisingly high percentages of notices of questionable validity, with mistakes made by both “bots” and humans.

The findings strongly suggest that the notice and takedown system is important, under strain, and that there is no “one size fits all” approach to improving it. Based on the findings, we suggest a variety of reforms to law and practice.

At 160 pages it isn’t a quick or lite read.

The gist of both Caitlin’s post and the fuller report is that automated systems are increasingly being used to create and enforce take down requests.

Despite the margin of reported error, Caitlin notes:

Despite the margin of error, most major players seem to be trending away from human review. The next frontier in the online copyright wars is automated filtering: Many rights-holders have pressed for tools that, like YouTube’s Content ID, could automatically identify protected content and prevent it from ever publishing. They’ve also pushed for “staydown” measures that would keep content from being reposted once it’s been removed, a major complaint with the current system.

There is one source Caitlin uses:

…agreed to speak to The Post on condition of anonymity because he has received death threats over his work, said that while his company stresses accuracy and fairness, it’s impossible for seven employees to vet each of the 90,000 links their search spider finds each day. Instead, the algorithm classifies each link as questionable, probable or definite infringement, and humans only review the questionable ones before sending packets of takedown requests to social networks, search engines, file-hosting sites and other online platforms.

Copyright enforcers should discover their thefts from the public domain or infringement on fair use are on a par with car burglars or shoplifters.

What copyright enforcers lack is an incentive to err on the side of not issuing questionable take down notices.

If the consequences of illegitimate take down notices are high enough, they will spend the funds necessary to enforce only “legitimate” rights.

If you are interested in righteousness over effectiveness, by all means, pursue reform of “notice and takedown” in the copyright holder owned US Congress.

On the other hand, someone, more than a single someone, is responsible for honoring “notice and takedown” requests. Those someones also own members of Congress and can effectively seek changes that victims of illegitimate takedown requests cannot.

Imagine a leak from Yahoo! that outs those responsible for honoring “notice and takedown” requests.

Or the members of “Google’s Trusted Copyright Removal Program.” Besides “Glass.”

Or the takedown requests for YouTube.

Theft from the public cannot be sustained in the bright light of transparency.

‘Dancing Baby’ Wins Copyright Case by Laura Wagner.

From the post:

A baby bobs up and down in a kitchen, as a Prince song plays in the background. His mother laughs in the background and his older sister zooms in and out of the frame.

This innocuous 29-second home video clip was posted to YouTube in 2007 and sparked a long legal proceeding on copyright and fair use law.

In the case, Lenz v. Universal — which has gained notoriety as the “dancing baby” lawsuit — Universal Music Group sent YouTube a warning to take the video down, claiming copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Then, Stephanie Lenz, poster of the video and mother of the baby, represented by Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued Universal for wrongly targeting lawful fair use.

Today, eight years later, a federal appeals court has sided with the dancing baby.
…

If you need more legal background on the issues, consider the EFF page on Lenz v. Universal (links to original court documents), or the Digital Media Law page, Universal Music v. Lenz.

The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) should be amended to presume fair use unless and until the complaining party convince a court that someone else is profiting from the use of their property. No profit, no foul. No more non-judicial demand for take downs of any content.