This will hardly comes as a surprise, but the RIAA and other "anti-piracy groups" are still complaining that Google "isn't doing enough" to prop up their old and obsolete business models. The latest complaint? That Google's system only accepts a mere 10,000 DMCA takedowns per day and somehow that's just not enough. It turns out that this isn't actually true, but we'll get to that in a moment. Much of the article focuses on Dutch extremist anti-piracy group BREIN saying that the limit needs to go away. But there is this bizarre statement from the RIAA as well:

“Google has the resources to allow take downs that would more meaningfully address the piracy problem it recognizes, given that it likely indexes hundreds of millions of links per day. Yet this limitation remains despite requests to remove it,” RIAA noted.

In addition to unthrottling the URL limits, RIAA also says it wants to lift the cap on the number of queries they can execute per day to find infringing content.

“Google places artificial limits on the number of queries that can be made by a copyright owner to identify infringements.”

This seems wrong on a variety of levels. As we noted last year when the RIAA raised some of these complaints, part of the problem appears to be that the RIAA doesn't understand how Google's tools work. There are some technical limitations in terms of how many URLs a "trusted partner" using automated means can submit at once, but no actual limit on the number of URLs that can be submitted total. There's a practical reason for the setup: in case an automated system goes haywire, Google wants to be able to catch it. But that's it. It does not limit the searches or the ability to submit DMCAs. We asked Google for specifics, and they confirmed:

While there is no limit on the number of DMCA notices that a copyright owner or reporting organization may send us, we put safety limits on the number of automated submissions that partners can make at one time using our tools in order to protect our systems from technical problems. We increase these limits for partners who have demonstrated a consistent track record of submission quality and volume.

On top of that, there's the issue that takedown notices go through a review process before the takedowns happen, to hopefully weed out abuse. For the RIAA to compare handling of takedown messages to the automated process of searching is really bizarre. It's basically them saying they want to be able to automatically takedown any content with no review whatsoever. That's a massive problem for a variety of obvious reasons. Indexing the web for search is an automated process. Taking sites down requires at least some level of review, even if only cursory. Apparently, the RIAA not only misunderstands the tools available, but also the DMCA process itself.

Yesterday we had a post about Shashank Tripathi, the "internet jackass" who, posting under the name @comfortablysmug on Twitter, shared some bogus reports during Hurricane Sandy, such as claiming that the NY Stock Exchange floor was flooded and that the local power company was preemptively turning off power. The story has generated a fair bit of interest, and follow up discussions that are pretty interesting. I wanted to tackle three particular threads that have come out of the discussion.

• Greg Ferenstein at TechCrunch argues that I'm wrong in saying that public shame is as far as punishment should go for Tripathi. Instead, he argues that such speech should be illegal, because while other comments can moderate speech in normal times, at exceptional moments there somehow isn't time to understand that Tripathi wasn't being truthful:

  The case against public shaming is that, during a crisis, Twitter isn’t a magical marketplace of ideas, where citizens are given sufficient time to weigh competing claims and come to a reasonable conclusion. Adrenalin is pumping, there’s not enough time for credible sources to sniff out the truth, and people get hurt.

  To which I can only respond: who got hurt because of his tweets? The answer is no one. No one was busting out of their safe apartment to rush dangerously down to the NYSE to see the (non-)flooded floor. Yet, because of populist anger, it appears that at least one NY politician is pushing to press charges. I think this is bogus, and any smart prosecutor will note that the chances of success are slim at best.
  
  
• Moving on, Mathew Ingram at GigaOm raises a different question: whether it was even appropriate to out Tripathi. He fears that the backlash against Tripathi could go overboard and "community action against an anonymous troll" could all too easily turn into "a lynch mob." In some ways, this is the opposite argument of Ferensteins. Both are basically asking: "but what if this leads to harm?" They may be valid questions to ponder -- and we've certainly worried about the possibility of "lynch mobs" doing damage based on bad information. But I'm not convinced that should ever lead to the legal silencing of speech.
  
  Not surprisingly, there are a lot of emotionally driven opinions on all this -- in fact GigaOm had such a vociferous internal debate among writers/editors at the site that they published the internal discussion publicly.
  
  
• However, I think the most important and insightful piece on this entire story comes from Heidi Moore at the Guardian who put the whole story in perspective by making a few key points that were missed by almost everyone arguing about the story.
  1. If you looked at Tripathi's other tweets, it became really obvious really quickly that he was posting crap/jokes -- mostly for the semi-amusement of his few thousand followers. For example he fake retweeted a bogus tweet from Goldman Sachs saying: "In a city underwater, the vampire squid is king" and similarly fake retweeted Barack Obama's account saying that NYC residents should eat their dogs if they run out of food. These aren't particularly funny, but it sort of puts in context the kinds of tweets he was posting, such that you could see how his followers would mostly know that he was just tweeting stupid stuff not to be taken seriously.
  2. Given that, the real problem here was not with Tripathi acting like a jackass clown, but with professional journalists and organizations -- including the National Weather Service and CNN -- who retweeted his other bogus tweets, lending them a veneer of truthfulness where none existed.
  3. Moore also points out that this is nothing like a "fire in a theater" situation because there is no harm. Hell, as she points out, there is no "theater" where the fire is supposedly being claimed here:

     For one thing, where was the theater? People in New York were largely trapped at home. Were they really going to run screaming into the streets, unable to handle the idea of the New York Stock Exchange being flooded? Were emergency responders going to stop answering calls to ferry over to the Stock Exchange to prevent water damage to the floors? Would people turn off their generators, hoping to save power for the day when stocks could be traded again? No, no and no.
     
     As one fund manager at a $6bn hedge fund concisely put it on Twitter: "Is it really the end of the world if the floor floods? This is just getting stupid."

  4. She notes that if anyone should be called out here, it should be the journalists who repeated the tweets without any sort of confirmation. To those who say that it was in the heat of the moment, even that is questionable. Sure, there was as rush for journalists to be the first to retweet some news, but that's an issue for the journalists to deal with. Most people were just hunkered down dealing with the storm, not rushing off to deal with any of this. And if those journalists had done even the slightest research, they would have realized the tweets were bogus -- either by looking at his full feed, or even looking at how others had responded to his tweets. Moore makes a strong case:

     Here's the thing: while what Tripathi did was stupid, inappropriate, ill-timed and loathsome, the reaction to it was entirely out of scale to the actual offense. The truth is, Tripathi had a relatively small niche on Twitter. His influence would have been limited had not journalists on Twitter been desperate for information to share, regardless of provenance.

     He was not the person who affixed those headlines atop legitimate news sources: journalists, who should have checked their sources and did not, used their power of the press to popularize the claim and bring it into people's homes. The decision to publish Tripathi's information was made by journalists, even when his persona and the nature of the information called for skepticism.

     In fact, the first responses to his tweet on the NYSE, from non-journalists, were as follows: "That's bullshit"; "What are the sources for your links?"; "confirmed by whom?" and "you are a liar."

I think the three stories above show a variety of different responses, with Moore's being the most compelling by far (and that's not to criticize either Ingram or Ferenstein -- both of whom I know and consider to be friends). However, it does show how complex some of these issues really are. It's really easy to see something like this as black and white, mainly by looking at things from a single perspective, without the context. Guy tweets bogus information in the middle of a crisis? String him up! Except... when put in context, perhaps what he did was silly and childish, but was it the real problem? Probably not. That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with outing him through old fashioned journalistic sleuthing (it's a different story if it had been via subpoena... though that's a whole different post).

But in the end, I stick with the principles that more speech tends to be a good thing -- and free speech should be encouraged, even if that speech is Tripathi's tweets in poor taste. Remember, free speech doesn't mean that you're free from the consequences of that speech, and Tripathi is dealing with the consequences. Similarly, outing him through old fashioned journalism is also free speech. Finally, all of the ongoing discussion is more free speech. In none of this did anyone get hurt, and (hopefully) no one should need to get charged under the law. Things seem to work just fine without resorting to the judicial system.

Some of you youngsters may not remember what really kicked off the big "net neutrality" fight over the past few years. It was back in 2005, when then AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre suggested that internet companies should pay a second time to reach users. This was particularly nefarious. What Whitacre was suggesting was actually that AT&T get to double charge everyone. That's because the way it was (and still) is that everyone pays for their own bandwidth -- including the big internet services like Google. However, the way Whitacre was describing it, the bandwidth you got only paid for half the transit. That is, you only paid for your bandwidth from your premise to "the cloud" but not back out to any end machine. That that bandwidth was paid for by whoever owns those end machines was entirely ignored. So the plan was not just that Google would pay for its own bandwidth, but that Google would also pay for your bandwidth to get Google to your computer (ignoring that you already paid for it).

That didn't go over so well with people, and got particularly ridiculous when Mike McCurry, running an AT&T lobbying effort, insisted that Google didn't pay a dime for its bandwidth. For rather obvious reasons, he refused my proposition that he agree to pay Google's bandwidth bills.

Either way, it appears that the brilliant minds at AT&T have been trying to devise a new way to present such a plan that doesn't leave them so open to charges of being greedy double chargers -- and they may have found it by focusing on the mobile world, with their new love of "tiered" and "capped" plans that limit how much bandwidth you actually get. What they're going to do is charge app makers a fee to offer their services to you in a way that the data doesn't count against your cap. They describe it as an "800 number for the mobile internet."

"A feature that we're hoping to have out sometime next year is the equivalent of 800 numbers that would say, if you take this app, this app will come without any network usage," Donovan said on the sidelines of a mobile-industry conference here. It's far from clear how willing technology companies would be to pay wireless carriers for data use. Mr. Donovan said there was interest from companies who could use the feature to drum up new business from customers wary of using data-heavy services like mobile video.

This is nefariously brilliant. People associate 800 numbers with toll-free phone calls, so it's kind of like that... except it isn't anything like that at all. It's just a way to get companies to pay for the data connection you're already paying for. But the end result is exactly like what Whitacre wanted five years ago: get the app providers to pay double for bandwidth. Karl Bode summarizes the whole ridiculous plan as only he can (via that link above):

The end result is the same, with AT&T imposing bizarre tolls on content companies to obtain preferred customer status, picking winners and losers while retaining power in the wireless ecosystem.

It's an idea we're sure AT&T will pitch as a cost-saving endeavor for consumers, but given this is AT&T, you'd be naive to think cost savings will be in the equation. You'll still pay the same data rates, content companies will now just pay a fee to obtain preferred "reduced cap impact" status, then pass the higher development costs on to you. It's a ridiculous and dangerous idea, and the fallout will likely be similar to AT&T's "free ride" comments. AT&T executives either don't care how bad these ideas make them look, or don't realize it thanks to too many isolated meetings at headquarters packed with telco-think yes men.

Eventually you start to think that AT&T executives should just stop thinking before they hurt someone or themselves. If AT&T put half as much energy into running a top-flight network with quality support as they did cooking up hare-brained troll toll schemes -- they might just stop coming in last place in all major customer satisfaction studies.

This is really just another reason why the telcos are pushing so hard to move users into unnecessary tiered plans -- because they can't pull off scams like this on unlimited data plans nearly as easily.

You may recall that, four years ago, the Kevin Martin FCC pushed through (despite massive complaints from people) some incredibly meek media ownership rule relaxations. As you may know, there were existing rules that said the same company couldn't own a newspaper along with a local TV station. The reasoning behind this was the fear that a single operator of both the paper news and broadcast news would dominate the local news dissemination business and could influence the public too much. Of course, in the age of the internet, that seems really silly. And the FCC's rule change was incredibly minor. As we wrote at the time:

In the top 20 media markets, newspapers can merge with a single radio or TV station -- but not if that TV station is one of the top 4 stations in that market. In other words, newspapers who are struggling to get beyond just being newspapers can finally expand into other media areas. I can't understand why people are freaked out about this. At best, a newspaper can now own a tiny radio or TV station. The fear of only one point of view getting through is totally laughable for a variety of reasons. First, there are more sources of media than ever before in history -- by a long shot. To think that a single TV station or newspaper can dominate the conversation is laughable. Second, since it can't involve a top 4 TV station, it's hard to believe that this new entity will have all that much dominance in the market.

But people still went crazy about this and lawsuits were filed. Over in the Third Circuit, a court has now dumped the new rules on what appears to basically be a technicality. Apparently, the FCC ""failed to meet the notice and comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act" to make this change. The standard procedure requires 90 days of response time, but Kevin Martin only gave people 28 days to comment.

Again, this whole thing seems pretty silly. Even if people still rely on broadcast news, this simply isn't going to have that big of an impact.

We've covered a few different recent stories of various sports leagues or professional sports teams trying to limit how journalists and photographers can report on their games, and have even covered cheeky attempts to get around such restrictions by having reporters cover events from home while watching on TV. Now, a whole bunch of you have been sending in variations on a story in the UK, where the Southampton football team apparently has decided to ban photojournalists from taking images of matches, instead telling newspapers they need to buy photos from the team's "official" photographer.

Thankfully, some of the newspapers covering the latest match felt that was ridiculous, and chose to respond in some rather creative ways. The Plymouth Herald, who was covering the visiting team, decided to employ someone to draw cartoons of key moments in the match, rather than using the official photographs:

Perhaps even more amusing? Some reports point out that The Sun covered the game by carefully making sure to never mention Southampton or any of its players. Well played.

For decades, the US has had certain "media cross-ownership" limits to prevent, for example, a single company from owning both a local broadcast network and a newspaper. These rules came about back when those two were basically the only source one could go to for local news. But, of course, that's not true any more (at all). Instead, you've got local media that is struggling, and perhaps it does make sense for them to not be forced into only playing in a single medium. So, for years the FCC has tried to loosen media ownership rules, leading to complaints from people who still don't seem to recognize that the internet is a pretty big competitor these days with the old media companies. In 2007, the FCC came up with a compromise that very marginally loosened media ownership rules: basically, in just the top 20 media markets, a newspaper could merge with a single radio or TV station but not if that TV station was one of the top 4 in the market. In other words, there was no way this minor loosening of the rules was going to lead to some feared situation of one company dominating the media landscape.

But, still, lots of people protested that suddenly all our news was going to come from Rupert Murdoch, and politicians looked to invalidate the rule while lawsuits were filed. A judge eventually banned putting the rules into effect, but an appeals court has now temporarily lifted the ban. While some are still complaining about this, the impact is likely to be negligible at best. As Editor & Publisher explains:

It's safe to say that Tuesday's Third Circuit action -- which could prove only a temporary lifting of the ban -- won't set off any buying binge among newspapers.

For one thing, nobody is going to lend newspapers money to buy media these days. That lesson's been learned until the next bubble comes around. And even if a newspaper had the jack to swing a deal, there's little point in spending it on the fourth-place -- or worse -- broadcast outlet in town.

Back in 2008, we wrote about Amazon's questionable demand to book publishers that if they wanted to offer print-on-demand books, they had to use Amazon's own POD solution. A few months later, a class action lawsuit was filed, and after a judge refused to throw out the case, it looks like Amazon quickly agreed to settle (thanks Achura). Unfortunately, from the wording of the agreement, even though this was filed as a class action, it's not clear if it only applies to this one publisher or others as well. It is worth noting that Amazon is allowing the publisher to keep using alternative solutions and also agreed to pay the legal fees of the publisher. Amusingly, a monetary reward was on the table, and the publisher turned it down -- and wanted it written into the settlement that it refused to take money -- but Amazon didn't want that mentioned in the official settlement. Still, it seems unfortunate that at least one publisher had to go through all this trouble just to use the print-on-demand offering of its own choosing. And, while it's great for this one publisher, it leaves out the fact that many others caved in and agreed to deals that required them to only use Amazon's solution.

Watching the Associated Press implode in public is, frankly, a bit disappointing. Here's an organization that has tremendous assets that could be put to amazing use in the creation and dissemination of online news... and it's basically doing everything backwards. Zachary Seward is posting some of the details of the AP's plans, as outlined in a memo sent to AP members, starting with its plan to hold back some of its content from the wire service. To be honest, without seeing the details, my first thought was that this could make a bit of sense. After all, the whole concept of a "wire service" online doesn't make much sense. It was designed to get news out to a number of different sources to make sure that all newspapers could cover some key stories. But when anyone can access any news online, redistributing the identical story to a bunch of different websites really seems rather pointless.

So I had hoped this was a recognition of the fact that this aspect of the AP's business didn't make much sense any more, and maybe (just maybe!) the AP was finally getting down to the business of learning how to use the web for what it's good at, rather than pretending it still needs to do what is no longer needed.

No such luck, unfortunately.

You see, the AP's plan is all about locking up content. The reason some content won't go out on the wire is because the AP (incorrectly) believes that it can hoard the content and get all the traffic, and thus it will screw over its members by not giving them the content. If I were a member paper, this would be the point at which I quit the AP. The AP is effectively saying "you'll get the content that doesn't matter, and which everyone has, and we'll keep the good stuff."

And, it gets even sillier, as the AP admits that it expects all its member papers to link back to this content that the AP will seek to control at the expense of its members, in order to generate Google juice to the AP's site, off the backs of its member papers. I can't see how this will help members at all, though it's likely to piss them off.

Perhaps that's a good thing, though the execution is bizarre. The AP's members may be a part of the problem, but trying to convince them that the AP hoarding content is better for them, and expecting them to buy it, seems like a long shot.