Tag: Fight for the Future

@tessamakeslove: A Pathetic Case of Rebranding: Fight for the Future Is Lying to Us, Again!

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed almost twenty years ago, in 1998. At the time, it was mainly intended to protect ISPs and telecom companies from being legally liable in case infringing materials found their way onto their equipment or cables. Telecom companies were in dire need of such legislation because they were putting a lot of money into very expensive infrastructure, and needed traffic to justify the expenses.

When YouTube came into existence, its success depended on the ability to attract massive amounts of viewers. Providing access to infringing materials helped their cause greatly, and YouTube gladly took advantage of the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provisions. As Sam Gustin writes, ‘YouTube founders knew illegal content was driving explosive growth.’ (See also, Viacom vs. YouTube/Google: A Piracy Case in Their Own Words.)  Legal or moral aspects of copyright seemed to matter very little to the excited businessmen who were in it for the big prize.

Google (um, Alphabet) who owns YouTube today is no stranger to profiting from copyright infringement, either….

To accomplish its business and existential goals, Google absolutely needs to lie and trick people. Not only they spend massive amounts of money on lobbying, they also fund and support various organizations that smell like freedom on paper but in reality, are only there to push the anti-copyright and anti-culture agenda.

Enter Fight for the Future.

Last month, I jumped on my chair with surprise after seeing this tweet:

Thing is, TPP is horrible. But so is Fight for the Future.  I can’t possibly blame the musicians for jumping on this tour. FFTF’s rhethoric would confuse anybody who is not very familiar with what their seamy anti-artist and copyleft side. But it needs to be said. Fight for the Future IS the machine! It is a machine fighting against another machine over money, simple and cynical. Fight for the Future vs. TPP is like Monsters vs. Aliens.

The depth of human indecency permeating this particular case of “righteous” rebranding is astounding, and I think it’s important to set the record straight. It’s a matter of principle and existential truth.

Read the post on Tessa Fights Robots

@keithkup: Fighting for the Future by Misrepresenting the Past

It’s generally well known by those following copyright issues, that the U.S. Copyright Office is engaged in a study of Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the provisions of the Copyright Act that provide for (among other things) the notice and takedown process and Online Service Provider (OSP) safe harbors.

Unfortunately, one group – Fight for the Future (FFF) – seems to be doing its best to disrupt and derail the Copyright Office’s efforts and to make people think that the process is “rigged against the public interest.”

For example, during the Copyright Office’s request for written comments period, they, along with YouTube channel ChannelAwesome, orchestrated a last-minute campaign in which they urged their followers to protest DMCA abuse by submitting comments to the Copyright Office which were generated merely by clicking on the “I’m in” button at www.takedownabuse.org. While they did suggest that submitters could alter the model comments on the site, in fact relatively few actually did. (I should point out that the site no longer provides model comments.)

The campaign resulted in so many comments being submitted in such a short period that it crashed government servers and made it very difficult for interested parties to review all the comments.  FFF could have notified its followers earlier so that the comments were not submitted at one time.  Better yet, since virtually all the comments were identical, they could have simply submitted a petition with 80,000 or so names included, rather than 80,000 identical submissions that crashed the system.

More recently FFF posted a blog that misrepresented the two-day section 512 roundtable discussion that occurred in San Francisco in an effort to get its followers upset enough to rail against the process, the Office and others, like the Copyright Alliance, who simply do not share many of FFF’s views.  I know because I was there.

Read the post on the Copyright Alliance site.