Category: “DMCA License”

@scleland: The Huge Hidden Public Costs (>$1.5T) of U.S. Internet Industrial Policy

[Editor Charlie sez:  Scott Cleland takes an excellent deep dive into the “leechonomics” of the safe harbors afforded to the special people who are members of the Internet Association and the Digital Media Association.  This corporate welfare was most recently replicated in the punitive Music Modernization Act retroactive safe harbor bolstering profits from copyright infringement for the special people which passed the House Judiciary Committee on the same day that the Congress cut back the CDA 230 safe harbor for the same special companies and cut their profits from sex trafficking.]

This post introduces a new white paper here with a first-of-its-kind, cost-estimation model of the cumulative hidden public costs of U.S. Internet industrial policy* entitled: “Internet Platform Corporate Welfare and Leechonomics.” *U.S. Internet-first, industrial policy in the 1996 Telecom Act, effectively exempted only Internet companies from: all U.S. communications law, regulation, and public responsibilities; normal non-communications Federal/State regulation; and normal civil liability for what happens via their platforms and business models.

Nutshell Summary: Sweeping Government exemptions and immunities from risks and costs overwhelmingly favor zero-sum, parasitic policy arbitrage and corporate welfare, which perversely fosters unproductive “leechonomics.” U.S. Internet policy most incents platform business that maximizes arbitrage spreads, i.e. taking maximal societal risk that un-immunized competitors can’t take, where the benefits can be capitalized by platforms, and the costs socialized to the public (>$1.5T), because the government has only exempted and immunized platforms from normal accountability and responsibility for consumer welfare.

Read the post on The Precursor Blog

RIPE is the FIFA of the Internet and it Enables Europe’s Internet Crime — The Trichordist

This is a guest post by Volker Rieck. Mr. Rieck has spent considerable time investigating Private Layer a web hosting company that seems to be favored by many copyright infringing sites. Unfortunately Rieck’s investigation has been stonewalled by the quasi governmental organization RIPE. According to Wikipedia: “RIPE or The Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre […]

via RIPE is the FIFA of the Internet and it Enables Europe’s Internet Crime — The Trichordist

@neilturkewitz: Disruption, Fear and Slippery Slopes: Baby Steps in Building a Better Internet

The biggest story of 2017? To my mind, there is no contest — the broad emergence of an awareness that the irresponsibility masquerading as Internet freedom represented a threat to global societies and to cherished aspects of our humanity, and that a course correction was badly needed.

While recognition of the fact that rewarding lack of accountability would likely incentivize anti-social and illegal conduct took longer than it should have, such an awareness came to fruition throughout 2017. Whether motivated by concerns about sex trafficking or the prevalence of other internet-enabled crimes, fake news, foreign government interference in elections, monopoly or monopsony power, or the perceived political or cultural biases of platforms, the question at the end of 2017 wasn’t whether the current legal framework for platform responsibility should be amended, but how.

It became clear that the twin pillars upholding the current lack of accountability in the internet ecosystem — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and Section 512 of the DMCA, each of which was adopted at the dawn of the commercial internet, would need to be reexamined and a new framework established.

Read the post on Medium

Jack Morse: The secret, illicit [piracy] underside of Google Drive

 

[Editor Charlie sez:  From the “Stop Me Before I Infringe Again” Dept….]

Turns out that Google Drive is a whole lot less buttoned up than you may have thought.

The file-sharing service typically associated with spreadsheets and office life has a dirty little secret, and it’s one that our Mountain View overlords may not be so stoked on. Namely, the service is a haven for illegal file-sharing.

While those looking to score, say, pirated Game of Thrones episodes may first turn to big-name torrenting sites like The Pirate Bay, copyright scofflaws in the know are apparently taking advantage of the generous free 15GB of storage offered by Google Drive to host and share copies of popular movies and television shows. According to Gadgets360, which reviewed a host of DMCA takedown requests, copyright holders filed almost 5,000 requests in August for Google to pull material from Drive — compared to approximately 100 requests for file-hosting site MEGA and less than 12 requests for Dropbox.

The offending goods reportedly include both your standard video files as well as a unique twist on the file sharing MO: Instead of uploading entire movies or shows to Drive itself, people are dropping in scores of unlisted YouTube links.

 

Essentially, the idea is that unlisted links are less likely to be spotted by automated systems crawling for this sort of thing and are therefore less likely to be pulled. Putting a collection of those links in one Drive and sharing it over social media is like passing around a secret phonebook containing the listings for all your favorite pirated content.

Read the post on Mashable

@A2IM CEO Richard Burgess Calls Out YouTube’s Lyor Cohen

[In response to Lyor Cohen’s blog post, ‘Five observations from my time at YouTube’]

I applaud and second Cary Sherman’s “Five Stubborn Truths…” response as well as Irving Azoff and David Israelite’s later comments.

Here is an independent label perspective.

Dear Lyor,

Many of us hope that you will be able to change the culture at YouTube to become more artist friendly and transparent. We understand that it takes time to shift corporate culture especially one as established as Google’s. Unfortunately, there are some entrenched alternative facts that are repeatedly regurgitated by YouTube and need to be corrected.

Read the post on A2IM