Techdirt. Stories filed under "video"

Police Follow Up Beating A 'Possibly Intoxicated' Man To Death By Seizing Witnesses' Cell Phones

Tim Cushing — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:52:00 PDT

How many law enforcement officers does it take to subdue one intoxicated man? In Bakersfield, CA, it takes nine: seven sheriff's deputies, two CHP officers and a police dog. It also appears that being publicly intoxicated and resisting arrest in Bakersfield is punishable by immediate death in the same county.

At this point, consider everything regarding the beating to be "alleged." After all, we don't have any conclusive evidence of what happened, despite two people filming it (and a handful of eyewitnesses) because law enforcement made sure every recording of the event (except one -- more on that in a bit) was seized as "evidence."

Also, keep in mind that David Silva, the thirty-three year old father of four who was allegedly beaten to death by nine law enforcement officers, was only allegedly intoxicated and violent. Evidence of his crime(s) disappeared along with the footage of multiple cops swinging batons. (I suppose this will be verified when the autopsy results are made public, presumably featuring a full toxicology report.)

Here's an eyewitness account of the beating:

At about midnight, Ruben Ceballos, 19,was awakened by screams and loud banging noises outside his home. He said he ran to the left side of his house to find out who was causing the ruckus.

"When I got outside I saw two officers beating a man with batons and they were hitting his head so every time they would swing, I could hear the blows to his head," Ceballos said.

Silva was on the ground screaming for help, but officers continued to beat him, Ceballos said.

After several minutes, Ceballos said, Silva stopped screaming and was no longer responsive.

The phones used to record the incident were seized by law enforcement as "evidence." As it's highly doubtful the sheriff's department is looking into charging a dead man with a crime, the only "investigation" possible would be a look into the actions of the officers at the scene. This also means the only criminal activity captured on film would be the officers'. Turning over the only copy of evidence to the perpetrators is generally considered to be a terrible idea. But when you've just witnessed nine law enforcement officers beat a man into unconsciousness (and eventual death), your normal citizen is probably going to think twice before telling another officer, "No."

But the witnesses held out as long as they could. The incident happened around midnight. The two witnesses who had recorded the event (a male whose name hasn't been released and Maria Melendez) were called back to their apartment by the sheriff's department. This was at 3 AM. At that point, the officers demanded they turn over their cell phones. They refused to do so without being served a warrant. The officers then detained them in the apartment, telling them they couldn't leave without turning over their phones.

Three hours later, the male turned over his phone, stating he needed to be to work in a couple of hours. The officers detained Melendez for nearly nine hours. The search warrant finally arrived around noon and Melendez relinquished her phone. The two witnesses were told they could pick up their phones the next day. When the unnamed male went to recover his, he found the timeframe had now changed to "months, even years" before he could get his phone back.

Two bits of evidence have made their way into the public, unimpeded by sheriff's deputies with endless amounts of time to waste and rights to violate. The first is a 911 call reporting the beating made by Salinas Quair, Melendez's daughter. This call alerted law enforcement to the fact that the (alleged) beating had been recorded, triggering the intimidating roundup (and detainment) of these witnesses.

There's a man laying on the floor and your police officers beat the [explicit] out of him and killed him," said the woman. "I have it all on video camera."

The woman continued:

"I am sitting here on the corner of Flower and Palm right now and you have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight Sheriffs. The guy was laying on the floor and eight Sheriff's ran up and started beating him up with sticks. The man is dead laying right here, right now."

The second piece of evidence, a security camera recording, was turned over by an individual who (unsurprisingly) has refused to go on camera or reveal his or her name. Here's KERO TV's (Bakersfield) description of the recordings' contents.

The grainy black and white video appears to show the alleged victim, David Silva, 33, lying on the ground. Another person is then seen walking up to Silva and attempting to pick him up. Both men appear to scuffle, and after a few minutes, Silva is seen being struck with an object.

Other cars are seen arriving at the scene with lights flashing on top of them. Several other men are then seen in the video, also striking Silva more than a dozen times with objects. Silva is then seen being taken into custody.

If you click through and watch the footage, at about 4:05 an officer can be seen taking a two-handed swing with a baton. Shortly thereafter, more officers arrive. One of the first to arrive also takes a two-handed swing with a baton. In all, nine baton-swinging officers showed up. A spokesman for the Kern County Sheriff's Office reassures everyone that the officers felt no need to deploy any of their other weaponry, as well as undercounting the number of respondents.

KCSO Spokesperson Ray Pruitt told 23 ABC it took 5 deputies, 2 CHP officers and a K-9 to subdue Silva.

Pruitt said officers were forced to use their batons to arrest Silva but no tazers, pepper spray or guns were used during the altercation.

His count is off. Here are the names of the Sheriff's Department personnel involved in the incident, as released by the Sheriff's Office.

The office did identify the officers involved in the arrest as Sgt. Douglas Sword and deputies Ryan Greer, Tanner Miller, Jeffrey Kelly, Luis Almanza, Brian Brock and David Stephens.

That's seven from the sheriff's department. The names of the two CHP officers have not been released. That's nine altogether, plus a police dog.

One has to wonder, though, how the officers were "forced" to use their batons. Perhaps some force was needed to subdue Silva, but with nine officers responding (and swinging), you'd think the tide would have turned in law enforcement's favor long before Silva lost consciousness. And how much "resistance" did Silva actually offer, considering the first officer on the scene was responding to a call from Kern Medical Center security who reported Silva as "passed out?"

End result: a man loses his life for being intoxicated. Nine officers ~~beat Silva senseless~~ take Silva "into custody," which in this case is synonymous with "attempt CPR and call an ambulance." Ironically, Silva was only a block away from Kern Medical Center, not that it did him any good.

Not content to limit its wrongdoing to a beating, deputies then barge into a home without a warrant and detain two citizens against their will, one of them for nearly nine hours, until the warrant they should have needed just to get in the door at 3 AM finally shows up at noon.

Now, all of the inarguable evidence is in the hands of the same people who would prefer it just went away. It will be tough for them to get away with simply deleting the recordings, but stranger things have happened to evidence that implicates law enforcement officers but has ended up in the possession of law enforcement. The recording can be termed "unrecoverable" or have inexplicably large gaps in the footage. Or the phone may be damaged during "processing." Sometimes, the evidence just vanishes conveniently and a lengthy internal investigation will unwind at a glacial pace until everyone loses interest.

There's a law enforcement problem here, and the problem is with the brand of "enforcement" that bypasses the law entirely. David Silva's death at the hands of police officers conjures up images of similar methods being deployed to subdue a schizophrenic homeless man in nearby Fullerton, CA. Kelly Thomas was beaten by several officers, resulting in a death by "mechanical suppression of the thorax." This one was caught on tape (via security camera), as well as captured more intimately by a microphone worn by one of the officers.

The people who witnessed this beating have nowhere to go. They can't trust the police and they've seen those who recorded the event quarantined in their home until they complied with the officers' requests to turn over their phones. If not for the constitutional violations committed by "law enforcement," the footage would already be publicly displayed. The longer the Sheriff's office delays in releasing this footage, the worse it appears. If this went down as described, there's no way law enforcement can hope to salvage some respect by attempting to downplay or justify the actions of these officers.

Even if Silva was putting up the fight of his life, he was intoxicated and was outnumbered 9-to-1. Any reasonable person would expect a suspect to be subdued before it got to the point where it became life-threatening. But any hopes of a reasonable outcome were discarded the moment that first two-handed swing connected.

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Silliest Argument Ever: Just Because A YouTube Paywall Launches It Means More Money Is Made

Mike Masnick — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:18:11 PDT

On Tuesday, as rumors were spreading about YouTube's plans to launch a paywall we reminded folks that Google had actually tried this twice before and no one paid. On Thursday, the folks at HuffPost Live had me join a video panel discussing this. What we didn't realize was at the very moment we were talking about it, YouTube had officially launched the program. You can see the discussion below, where I play the role of the lone dissenter who argues that this is a dumb idea: What annoys me about this is that everyone else was making the same silly arguments that were debunked over and over again on the newspaper side -- that paywalls lead to a higher quality product and more investment into the content. That's not true if no one pays. It's a pretty simple equation: if you, say, get 10 subscribers for $2/month, that's $20/month. That's not that much money. If you can make more than that in advertising, then you're better off advertising. Yet, time and time again in the video above you see people claim that it's somehow automatic that putting up a paywall will mean "more money" and "the end of free content" or "profits so that more investment can happen in video."

All of that makes a huge assumption: that enough people will actually subscribe. Yet there's simply no basis for it, and yet people kept claiming it over and over again as if it had to be true. But we know it's not necessarily true, because we've already seen Google try exactly the same thing. Hell, let's take a look at the original Google Video, launched about six years ago, with a similar subscription offering: And now let's look at the new YouTube pay channels: It's basically the same thing, though, I'd argue that the original Google Video had even more brand name content. In 2010, when Google tried the exact same thing with YouTube, over the course of 10 days, they only got $10,000. I'm not against experimenting. And I'm not against models where people pay -- I think things like Netflix and Spotify and the like are really interesting business models. But, those work because of different factors: mainly a combination of convenience and a ton of content all together. People are paying for those because of the completeness of the offering. Here, people are being asked to spend between $1 and $10 per month for a single channel of content. It may work for a few specialized shows: Game of Thrones? Yeah, sure. But not many others.

This idea that people paying directly is the only "real" business model is just silly. The guy who did a video comment during the panel discussion who seemed to argue that this was necessary because it's "capitalism" doesn't understand economics. A bad business model is a bad business model.

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Justice Sotomayor Doesn't Want Cameras In The Supreme Court Because Americans Won't Understand

Tim Cushing — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 09:50:00 PST

This adminstration is having a hard time reaching its goal of being the "transparentest place on earth," what with its executive orders, state secrets and a whole lot of "as you were" in reference (deference?) to existing Bush-era policies. To make matters worse, Obama's appointees are proving themselves to be "team players" and blocking out much of the remaining sunlight.

Justice Sotomayor is pitching in with the "new transparency" (now available in black, charcoal and midnight slate!), reversing field on her previously stated opinions on cameras in the courtroom.

At her confirmation hearings in 2009, she said she was in favor of letting citizens see their government at work. “I have had positive experiences with cameras,” she said. “When I have been asked to join experiments of using cameras in the courtroom, I have participated. I have volunteered.”

Apparently, much like the rest of the administration, transparency is a great talking point in theory. In practice, however, it's a very different story.

She was singing a different tune a couple of weeks ago, telling Charlie Rose that most Americans would not understand what goes on at Supreme Court arguments and that there was little point in letting them try.

“I don’t think most viewers take the time to actually delve into either the briefs or the legal arguments to appreciate what the court is doing,” she said. “They speculate about, oh, the judge favors this point rather than that point. Very few of them understand what the process is, which is to play devil’s advocate.”

Now, while Sotomayor may be correct that many Americans don't understand the nuances of the Supreme Court, it's rather insulting to believe this ignorance should preclude them from observing the inner workings. After all, many Americans are ignorant of ins and outs of the entire political process, and yet, no one's suggesting (at least not legislatively) that they have their right to vote revoked. Not only that, but C-SPAN offers wall-to-wall coverage of the legislative process, something few people in their right minds would claim to understand in its entirety, but no one seems concerned that viewers drawing the wrong conclusions will somehow harm that process.

In fact, she doesn't really make an argument as to why cameras shouldn't be allowed into the courtroom. All she does is claim that the proceedings would fly over the heads of viewers. If she's concerned some of the real-time "devil's advocating" will be misconstrued, her fears are misplaced, to say the least. The public can misconstrue the intentions of the justices without a live feed, thank you very much.

And, if it's the public's understanding of the process she's worried about, wouldn't it make more sense to make the process easily accessed? It's pretty hard to increase knowledge without observation. It seems counterintuitive to dismiss the public as ignorant and think you're going to improve this by locking them out.

Unfortunately, it's not just Sotomayor making a 180 when actually faced with making a theoretical situation a reality. Justice Elena Kagan has also reversed her stance.

At her confirmation hearings in 2010, she said video coverage “would be a great thing for the institution, and more important, I think it would be a great thing for the American people.” Two years later, she said she now had “a few worries, including that people might play to the camera” and that the coverage could be misused.

Once again, we have fake fears covering for the government's natural tendency to do its "best" work behind closed doors. C-SPAN has seen its share of "playing to the camera," and yet, the American public is still better off having access to this coverage. And, if Kagan's worried the courtroom coverage might be "misused," she's apparently unaware that anything can be misused, whether it's press releases, public statements, speaking engagements, interviews, C-SPAN footage, etc. Worrying about potential "misuse" is an incredibly weak argument for opacity. Of course it will be misused. But it will also be beneficial to the general public. An open feed shows the whole story, which can then be used to punch holes in the arguments of those who misuse the information.

Oddly enough, the home of free speech and democracy is lagging behind countries like Canada and the UK in terms of cameras in these nations' highest courts.

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, which was formed in 2009, allows camera coverage. Last month, Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge, the head of the judiciary for England and Wales, announced that cameras would be allowed in appeal courts starting in October, after judges receive media training.

Lord Judge agreed with Justice Sotomayor, to a point. “I suspect John and Jane Citizen will find it incredibly dull,” he told a committee of the House of Lords. But that did not seem to him a reason to prevent them from trying to make sense of the proceedings.

Arguments in the Supreme Court of Canada have been broadcast since the mid-1990s, and more recently they have been streamed live on the Internet.

Owen M. Rees, the court’s executive legal officer, said the experience had been positive.

“The filming of the Supreme Court of Canada’s hearings has increased the public’s access to the court and its understanding of the court’s work,” he said. “Of course, each court must make its own evaluation of whether introducing cameras in the courtroom would be appropriate.”

So, we've heard the excuses (they're not actually "reasons") presented for keeping cameras out of the Supreme Court, but what's the real reason behind this resistance to cameras in the courthouse? According to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the problem may be with the justices themselves.

Chief Justice Roberts said he worried about the effect that cameras would have on lawyers and, perhaps more important, on the justices, who may have less self-control than their counterparts abroad.

“We unfortunately fall into grandstanding with a couple of hundred people in the room,” the chief justice said.

If true, then the American public is being cut out of the process in order to save the justices from themselves. This is completely backwards, to say the least. If cameras provoke this sort of response from the highest court in the land, then something needs to be fixed within the court itself. Trying to place the blame on the public for a perceived lack of comprehension or tendency to misuse information is wholly disingenuous. Our Supreme Court can, and should, follow the lead of Canada and the UK and stop treating US citizens as though they have no (comprehensible) horse in this race.

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Dear HBO, Disney, Netflix Et Al: Fragmenting Online TV Lets Piracy Keep Its Biggest Advantage

Leigh Beadon — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 07:01:09 PST

As surely as iPods will continue to outsell wax cylinders, the film and television industries are moving online. Really, the whole distinction of media that "is" or "isn't" online will sound ridiculous within a generation, and today's awkwardness is just an unavoidable transitional phase. Reluctance and momentum are keeping legacy structures intact, but in an increasingly ersatz manner that guarantees lots of anxiety at the big TV networks and movie studios. AVClub editor Todd VanDerWerff saw the signs everywhere during the recent Television Critics Association winter press tour:

For years, people who write about TV have been wondering just what the tipping point would be, when DVR usage, online streaming, and pirated viewing of TV broadcasts would become so significant that networks would essentially have to invent a new business model. The networks aren't at that point yet, but they're so close that everybody's talking about it with great confidence, as if the Internet hasn't thrown a great fear of the unknown into their souls. There's still far more money to be made in the old model, the sort of money that can still afford to produce big, ambitious shows like Revolution, as opposed to smaller-scale things like reality series and multi-camera sitcoms, than there is to be made under any new model. But the tipping point is almost here.

Is it ever. The news of big things happening with online service providers, especially Netflix, never stops pouring in. Though traditional analysts might recommend Disney start a cold war with Netflix, the companies instead recently entered an exclusive partnership to stream lots of content from Disney, Pixar and Marvel. There's only one part of that sentence I wish I didn't have to type: exclusive. It's a word that pops up all too much in recent news about evolving TV and movie business models.

Netflix has been stockpiling exclusive original content, including a lot of potential hits like the revival of Arrested Development, a new drama starring Kevin Spacey, a murder mystery produced by Eli Roth, a new Ricky Gervais series and more — all on top of deals like the one with Disney. Then there's the infamously closed-off HBO and its hoard of ultra-popular shows that can't be accessed without a full cable package plus an HBO subscription (and which also happen to be among the most pirated shows). HBO recently reached its own exclusive agreement, this time with Universal — to air the studio's films and keep them off of Netflix, along with the rest of the HBO catalogue. For at least ten years.

Paul Tassi has a good grasp on what this move really represents:

I think people are missing the larger idea of what's happening here, and that's HBO becoming the closest thing Netflix has to a direct competitor. The groundwork is already in place with the aforementioned Go service. Add in exclusive access to movies from all those studios, and $15 a month for HBO Go starts looking nearly as appealing as $15 a month for Netflix.

Basically, HBO is betting against cord-cutting, but also trying to compete in the online space, assuming that most people will keep their cable and pay extra for exclusive content plus digital access to that content. I can see that being true for a while (lots of people have both cable and Netflix), but it makes no sense in the long run. Eventually, HBO will be forced to offer some sort of online-only subscription.

But will even that be enough? Here's where we get back to the exclusivity problem. All these exclusive deals are serving to fragment a market that doesn't yet have clearly defined rules for delivery. Exclusivity is a great thing for creators to sell, and a great thing for businesses to leverage, but in this transitional phase for distribution models, it's harming everyone involved by making sure piracy retains its biggest advantage: comprehensive access. Networks have always had exclusive shows, but they all ended up in the same place — your television, delivered through a single antenna. Then later you needed not just an antenna, but a cable, to get everything. Then later you needed to pay more for specific cable channels to get certain shows — and lo and behold, those shows were among the first and most widely pirated.

The knee jerk reaction to piracy's unflagging popularity is to assume that, as the mantra goes, "people just want everything for free." But as the evidence that pirates buy more media has continued to pile up, that idea has been stripped of its credibility.

As some people have been pointing out for years, piracy's real advantage lies elsewhere: convenience, selection and availability. Piracy is currently the fullest realization of the internet's potential as a culture-machine: virtually any movie, any TV series, any song, any obscure documentary or bootlegged live performance, all accessible to anyone. No need to subscribe to multiple different providers; no release windows or geographical barriers. The fact is that no other means of obtaining media has matched piracy in terms of sheer selection and accessibility, so naturally it has never gone away, even though it has many significant flaws like spammy sites and spotty quality control.

I'm not saying everyone should hand everything to Netflix — only that service providers, studios, networks and everyone else involved need to employ a little game theory and figure out how to move the business forward to everyone's benefit. This means partnerships that allow more sharing of content, new infrastructures that make delivery and payment more seamless, and the undeniably challenging elimination of geographical restrictions and other obsolete licensing concerns. As the world moves away from the captive audience and towards a culture of infinite choice, expecting people who want comprehensive access to buy multiple different subscriptions from multiple different companies is tragically foolish. The culture machine has been built; pirates shouldn't be the only ones using it properly.

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Iran's Latest Aggressive Censorship Plan: Block All Audio & Video Files

Mike Masnick — Mon, 8 Oct 2012 09:49:07 PDT

It's no secret that the Iranian government has a bit of an uncomfortable relationship with the internet. First of all, it's trying to build its own internet, at which point it supposedly would like to block out that "other" internet completely. It's also pretty aggressive in censoring various sites it doesn't like. Over the past few days, it's apparently gone a step further. While there were plenty of reports about it blocking YouTube, someone who prefers to remain anonymous sent over this story, saying that Iran's Filtering Committee (IFC) has started blocking all kinds of audio-visual files, based on filetype:

Then, on October 4, 2012, the IFC began preventing files hosted on servers outside Iran from entering the country by blocking specific file extensions. At the time of writing, this policy applies to all MP3, MP4, AVI and SWF files. This kind of filtering was used after the controversial presidential elections of 2009, amidst harsh crackdowns on freedom of information, and coincides with Iran's current economic crisis and the ensuing protests.

Apparently, those blocks do not apply to those files hosted within the country -- just those from foreign sites. Still, that's a pretty extreme move: blocking all of those files takes away a significant part of the audio-visual part of the web. The article highlights a number of Iranians complaining on Twitter about how these blocks are having a severe negative impact on what they do. Still, it's yet another warning for what happens when a government can aggressively filter the internet in extreme ways.

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White House Goes Too Far In Asking Google To Pull Controversial Video

Mike Masnick — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 03:08:25 PDT

Last week, we reported on Google's decision to block access in Egypt and Libya to the controversial, hate-mongering video that's been cited as leading to the violent reactions in the Middle East. We wondered if this was the right move, noting the seriousness of the violence and the ridiculousness of the video. However, Paul Levy's thoughts on this make sense. While we may worry about what line Google may draw, it is a private company and it's not doing this due to government pressure, but as part of it's own decision:

Its removal is not the same as deferring to government censorship, and as much as I hate to give mob violence the satisfaction of an effective heckler’s veto, we cannot expect that online service providers will never remove material simply because it is deemed offensive by wide swaths of the population. Moreover, I can’t help but wondering if the violent response isn’t just what the film-makers were hoping for. So by leaving the image on its site so that we can understand the controversy, while taking it down where broad access to the material is likely to cause the greatest harm, Google has made a comprehensible judgment.

As such, even if we disagree with the choice, it's a defensible choice.

However, things may have crossed the line late last week. There were reports that the White House strongly suggested that YouTube pull the video entirely. Of course, they didn't come out and say that exactly, but rather suggested that YouTube "review the video to see if it was in compliance with their terms of use."

But when it's the White House suggesting that, it's a pretty clear situation in which the President is applying pressure on a private company to censor speech. Of course, we've seen this before, though not with the White House directly. Four years ago, we saw Senator Joe Lieberman similarly pressure YouTube to start blocking "terrorist" videos on YouTube. Lieberman, of course, loves to pressure private companies into blocking speech. He did similar things to try to censor Wikileaks and even pushed some bad legislation to try to increase censorship powers of the federal government.

Either way, the White House putting pressure on Google has troubling implications, even if we agree that the video in question is a hate-mongering disgrace. As various free speech activists told Politico (link above) there are some troubling implications here:

"There's no indication that the government is questioning the right of these idiots to make that repellent film. On the other hand, it does make us nervous when the government throws its weight behind any requests for censorship," the American Civil Liberties Union's Ben Wizner said in an interview Friday.

"I am actually kind of distressed by this," said Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Even though there are all these great quotes from inside the White House saying they support free speech....by calling YouTube from the White House, they were sending a message no matter how much they say we don't want them to take it down, when the White House calls and asks you to review it, it sends a message and has a certain chilling effect."

Google, for its part, has actually stood up to the White House on this one, and said that it won't pull the clip, though it had begun blocking the video in India and Indonesia, where they determined the video itself was illegal, and the company needed to comply with local laws.

Of course, all of this is unlikely to have much, if any, impact on the violence and anger. And that's part of the problem and the ridiculousness with arguing for censorship. It seems quite likely that a very large percentage of those involved in the mob violence to this haven't even seen the video themselves. Caving in to censorship "hints" from government doesn't actually hide the content or calm much anger. In fact, it's likely to just draw more attention to it. The video is despicable and the reaction to it is horrifying on a number of levels. The loss of life is massively upsetting, especially over something so stupid. So I can certainly understand the instinct to try to "do something," and to reach for the easiest target: censoring the video. But not only would it be completely ineffectual, it opens up a whole host of other problems. Dealing with hate speech by seeking to censor it almost always just encourages more hate speech (and even more idiotic violent reactions). It may be an "easy" thing to do, but it's no solution to deep-seeded problems. It just creates new problems.

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YouTube Restricts Access To Anti-Islam Movie Trailer In Egypt And Libya

Timothy Geigner — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 19:58:00 PDT

Unless you have been living under a rock the past few days, you're likely aware of the violent protests in Egypt and Libya on American missions which have resulted in several deaths, including that of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. The apparent flashpoint for these protests was a movie trailer on YouTube for what is by all accounts a horribly offensive and insensitve film about Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. We've seen similar stories in the past over website content, but this incident takes things to a whole new level.

Today we learned that YouTube has taken the step of restricting access to the video in question in both Egypt and Libya. When asked about it, YouTube responded with the following statement.

"We work hard to create a community everyone can enjoy and which also enables people to express different opinions," YouTube said by e-mail. "This can be a challenge because what's OK in one country can be offensive elsewhere.

This video -- which is widely available on the Web -- is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube. However, given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt we have temporarily restricted access in both countries."

While I understand why YouTube is doing this, I think it's misguided for two reasons. First, stupid and hateful as the video in question reportedly is, blocking access (potentially seen as taking it down in Egypt and Libya) can be interpreted to mean that the fault for what's happening is in part with the video itself. It isn't. The guilt for this violence is not in some stupid video. It isn't even in the massive protests in the Muslim world against the video (though I'd probably suggest they learn about the Streisand Effect). The guilt for the violence and death belongs on the thugs and murderers who committed it. End of story. This is especially true when the company has acknowledged itself that the video does not violate YouTube's terms of service.

The EFF agrees.

It is easy to understand why YouTube might feel compelled to act in response to the rioting over this video, especially after three U.S. embassy employees were killed in the Libyan city of Benghazi, but the blame for the violence lies not with the video, but with the perpetrators. Once YouTube has made the decision to pro-actively censor its content, they start down a slippery slope that ends in YouTube Knows Best moral policing of every video on their site. It is disappointing to see YouTube turn its back on policies that have allowed it to become a such a strong platform for freedom of expression. We hope that this new-found enthusiasm for pro-active censorship is a temporary aberration rather than a sign of things to come.

The second reason is that YouTube's move is almost certainly equal parts too late and ineffectual. As the company's statement itself noted, this video is and already was all over the internet. Censoring the video now is a bit like covering your ears and eyes as your house burns around you. The problem of religious intolerance and violent reactions to it is going to exist whether you acknowledge it's there or not. Nobody is served by trying to pretend the hateful attitudes in the video don't exist. And it isn't like the protests have ceased now that YouTube has restricted access in those countries. The cat is already out of the bag. All you've done now is open the door to blocking videos based on people deciding to be offended with little to no effect on the violence at hand. So what was the point?

I'll be clear again: every description of the video in question suggests that it is cartoonishly crafted and inflammatory bigotry. But it doesn't violate YouTube's TOS, it is speech, and taking it down was a poor decision made in fear. That isn't the way I expect a company like YouTube to behave.

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Want To Shake Down Cloud Music & Video Providers? Patent For Sale!

Mike Masnick — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 13:33:00 PDT

When we talk about patent trolls, what many people don't recognize is how often many of these patents get passed around to and from different entities, often until someone sees an opportunity to force lots of companies into licenses, or to sue them. Failing that, many companies often feel compelled to buy ridiculously broad patents, just to keep themselves from being sued. Whole businesses have been built up around the practice of basically selling these patents, in which they more or less are selling people a right to shake down others. Except that kind of stuff rarely is talked about in the public. Michael Robertson, however, passed along an example of one that we thought might be worth exploring. An operation called Capital Legal Group is going around "shopping" an excessively broad "cloud storage patent" for sale, highlighting that it's already identified three infringers, with more expected soon.

I'm sure they reached out to Roberston, since he runs a cloud content service, though they certainly don't indicate if they think he's infringing directly. The full pitch is embedded below, but here are some highlights:

To date, we have identified three infringing systems. Claim charts are available upon execution of a confidentiality agreement. Because the market is growing, we anticipate more and more infringing systems to come on to the market regularly.

Translation: here's a chance to shake down lots of players, because it's a broad "cloud storage patent" that is going to cover all sorts of stuff that companies are going to be doing because it's basically describing how cloud services work. Of course, in a rational world, this would be evidence that the patent in question should never have been granted, as it was clearly a next obvious step in the advancement of the technology, rather than any sort of breakthrough that needed protection.

The patented technology is applicable to storing video, audio (e.g., music) and other digital objects in cloud storage. Thus, the patented technology is applicable to remote digital video recording (DVR) services and other such services wherein the user selects content (e.g., television show, radio shows, etc.) to record (at some point in the future) and the system records the selected content on a server which is accessible by the user, for example, via the Internet or a wireless network.

As indicated in the Wall Street Journal, "the global market for 'the cloud' is expected to soar in the next several years, but cloud computing isn't just for big businesses; consumers use it regularly too, for storage and productivity." As the need for audio and video storage increases, new players, such as Comcast, are now entering the market. Consequently, the offered portfolio provides a fantastic opportunity for significant revenue and/or increased market share to any buyer.

In other words, this patent is hella broad, and is going to cover something quite obvious (DVRs, but "on the internet"). That courts have started (finally) becoming suspect of patents that take something already known (a DVR) and just basically add "on the internet" to it, isn't mentioned in the sales pitch, of course. Later, the pitch document again highlights how ridiculously broad the patent is, by noting that it counts towards content accessed from any device, and this it's "critical to the future of audio and video distribution." This is, simply, nuts. What's described in the patent is no breakthrough or revolutionary step forward. It's just the basics for how a reasonable engineer would build such a service. Put 100 engineers in the room and ask them to build a remote DVR, and I bet most of them would "accidentally" infringe on this patent. That's not about copying the idea or "stealing" the idea. It's about a broad idea that is obvious, getting locked up in a patent so someone can cash in for not doing anything.

Oh yeah, did we mention the current patent holder isn't doing anything with it? Right:

The patents are not licensed and have never been litigated. The patents are not encumbered and the seller does not need a license back.

No license back means for all the talk of how critical and important this is, the "inventors" (and I use that word loosely) did absolutely nothing with it. And if it's never been licensed or litigated, that means there's no evidence that whatever's in the patent has ever even been seen by anyone doing work in this field, let alone used to further the market. Thus, the idea that these patents are "critical" to the market is flat out laughable.

The patent itself is 7,921,221, on a "Method and apparatus for obtaining digital objects in a communication network." Yeah, seriously. Surely something like that must have been filed back in the dark ages, right? Nope. 2008. Because back then, no one knew how to obtain digital objects in a communications network. This isn't innovation, this is a lottery ticket to shake down the companies who actually do innovate.

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Patent Troll Claims That Showing A Video With A Static Ad Next To It Infringes

Mike Masnick — Wed, 8 Aug 2012 06:30:41 PDT

Jeff Roberts has the story of how a patent troll named Mobile Transformation LLC has sued Buzzfeed for patent infringement, claiming that its patent (6,351,736) covers the fact that Buzzfeed has both an embedded video and a static ad on certain pages. From the lawsuit:

More specifically, and by way of non-limiting example, the www.buzzfeed.com website uses an embedded flash player to present a first data type of a video file of "Boris v Romney" along with the presentation of advertising data of a second type that includes a static image advertisement for "Sour Patch Kids," for example.

For purposes of Claim 64, when a web browser of a client device displays the Defendant Website, the web server that serves the Defendant Website downloads both the video file (first data type) and the static image advertisement (second data type). The web server that serves the Defendant Website then executes executable code created by Defendant’s content authors/website administrators. The executable code includes both the first and second commands for the presentation of the first and second data types, respectively. The executable code couples the presentation of the first and second data types. That is, because the first and second data types are linked together via executable code, the presentation of the first data type causes the presentation of the second data type, automatically. The web server that serves the Defendant Website presents the first data type to the web browser of the client device. Namely, video file of "Boris v Romney" is presented along with the static image advertisement for "Sour Patch Kids." Thus, the presentation of the video file causes the presentation of the static image advertisement, though not necessarily always in that order.

Assuming that Buzzfeed hasn't changed its post, the description in the lawsuit appears to be in error. It claims that the web server downloads both the video and the advertisement. But, the video is an embed from YouTube and the advertising on the page is served from DoubleClick. In other words, the "Defendant Website" downloads neither of the items in question, contrary to the lawsuit's claims.

But, more to the point, the claims in the lawsuit seem ridiculous even if both were served by Buzzfeed. Having a static ad appear next to a video is not what this patent was intended to cover. Even the patent itself describes a system of playing a video advertisement next to a music file -- a completely different situation and purpose. Besides, while embedding videos certainly came out well after this patent came along, the idea of ads running next to videos is hardly new or innovative. The problem here seems to be that the patent examiners, Eric W. Stamber and Mussie Tesfamariam, let a ridiculously broad claim through that the company is now using to file lawsuits over something crazy obvious (having both videos and ads on the same page) that it contributed nothing to.

Buzzfeed is hardly the only lawsuit that Mobile Technologies LLC has filed either. The company has been a busy little bee. The sites it's sued include Wetpaint, Publishers Clearing House, Glam Media, Evolve, BabyCenter, Hollywood.com, DailyMotion, ProjectPlaylist, Justin TV and Radar Online, among many others. Oddly, I see that one of the inventors listed on the patent is Lior Cohen, which is the name of Warner Music's CEO. I'm going to assume that this is not the same Lior Cohen, however. The patent was originally held by Adware LI Inc., and was then assigned to Everad, who later assigned it to EIP Company LLC. There isn't an official assignment to Mobile Technologies LLC in the USPTO database, but that doesn't mean anything. It could not yet be recorded or there may be shell companies involved or a licensing deal or who knows what. Either way, it's yet another example of a mysterious patent holder with a broad patent using it against something completely different than what the patent is supposed to be about, and going after a ton of companies in the process.

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Why Are New Zealand Prosecutors Seeking To Suppress All Images & Video Of Megaupload Raid?

Mike Masnick — Tue, 7 Aug 2012 10:13:00 PDT

As lots of publications are reporting, over in New Zealand, Kim Dotcom took the stand to testify about how the police treated him during the raid on his home as part of the international effort to seize and shut down everything related to Dotcom and Megaupload. I have no idea if the claims he makes of being kicked and punched and the like are accurate. I'm sure his detractors will question how trustworthy the testimony is. Frankly, I have no idea how accurate it is.

But here's the thing that I find most interesting. Buried all the way at the end of the Stuff article linked above is the following line:

The Crown is seeking for all images and CCTV footage from the raids to be suppressed.

To me, that seems like a point that should be made up top. If Dotcom is being inaccurate in his descriptions, then wouldn't showing the video and images that prove him wrong basically destroy all of his credibility and help the government with their case? The fact that they're trying to suppress that very evidence certainly lends credence to his claims, and (at the same time) calls into serious question the conduct of law enforcement during the raid.

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How Much Would It Cost To Pre-Screen YouTube Videos? About $37 Billion Per Year...

Glyn Moody — Tue, 29 May 2012 22:00:45 PDT

Last week we reported that videos were currently being uploaded to YouTube at the rate of 72 hours every minute, and asked how anybody could expect Google to pre-screen such a deluge. Techdirt Insider xenomancer has gone a little further by working out how much it would cost to screen that material for potential copyright infringement, doubtless something the media industries would love to see imposed.

Most of the calculation is straightforward, but there's one key variable: the kind of person who will do the screening. You can't just use random people off the street, or starving artists, or bored software engineers, because the crucial question they must answer is: does too much of this video infringe on somebody's copyright? Only one class of person is qualified to answer that, and hence to take on this job: judges. Or, more specifically: horribly underpaid judges who happen to be extremely efficient at determining the copyright status of each video they watch and choose, of the little free will they have, to consider all video uploaded.
Using the fact that the average pay for a judge in Silicon Valley is apparently $177,454, and that based on the volume of uploads and number of hours in a working day, a mere 199,584 judges would be required as screeners, this gives us the final figure for the cost of checking properly those 72 hours per minute: $36,829,468,840 per year.
Interestingly, Google's revenue for 2011 was $37,905,000,000.

Absurd as this calculation may be, it does reveal the key problem with unthinking calls for YouTube videos to be pre-screened for possible infringement: only suitably-qualified individuals can do that, and eventually you run out of them. In other words, attempts to police rigorously online materials are doomed to fail by the nature of the copyright system itself. Basically, copyright does not scale.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

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YouTube Uploads Hit 72 Hours A Minute: How Can That Ever Be Pre-Screened For 'Objectionable' Material?

Glyn Moody — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:24:00 PDT

YouTube has announced that 72 hours of video is now being uploaded to its service every minute. Earlier this year, the statistic was that 60 hours of video was uploaded to its service every minute:

In 2007 we started at six hours [of uploads per minute], then in 2010 we were at 24 hours, then 35, then 48, and now...60 hours of video every minute, an increase of more than 25 percent in the last eight months.

This year, a 25% increase will probably take around around six months. In other words, the rate at which uploads occur is accelerating. Presumably at some point things will level off, but there's no sign of that yet, and it's not hard to see YouTube video uploads hitting 120 hours a minute or more.

Now consider the calls from some governments that Google and others pre-screen user-generated material. Just how do they think anyone can do that when every second there's one or more hours of new material flooding in? The challenge is particularly acute for video, which does not lend itself to automatic screening, unlike text, say. Such machine-based approaches are still extremely rough, and will either let through material governments want censored, or else err massively in the other direction, blocking all kinds of harmless footage.

As Google's latest figures for YouTube demonstrate, the mismatch between what governments want and what is possible is only going to get worse, thanks to Moore's Law and its analogs for storage and bandwidth. It's not clear how this is going to be resolved, but with more and more politicians calling for "something to be done", the chances of a good outcome based on rational policy making don't look good.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

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The Rise Of Geek-Focused Online Video Networks

Mike Masnick — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 19:39:00 PDT

There's been a really interesting trend going on recently. For all the talk about how the entertainment industry must be dying (it isn't), a whole bunch of internet-aware celebrities are wholeheartedly embracing the internet as a new video platform -- and this includes a bunch of folks we've written about before. The first to make a big splash was Felicia Day, who already has been hugely successful in building a massively popular online-only video program, while also being thoughtful about new business models. On April 2nd, she and some friends -- including folks like Wil Wheaton, Veronica Belmont and Paul & Storm, -- launched the awesomely named Geek & Sundry, which includes both her existing show, The Guild, and a variety of others (including Wheaton's Tabletop, which looks awesome).

That same day, Chris Hardwick, of the Nerdist (or, I guess we should now call it "Nerdist Industries") launched his special YouTube channel with a variety of shows of its own:

While some of the programming is based on already-existing Nerdist properties, most of it has been specifically conceived for the Nerdist YouTube channel. For instance, "Face to Face with 'Weird Al' Yankovic" brings in the beloved song parodist (and frequent Nerdist guest and contributor) to interview celebrities, and "Ain't it Cool News with Harry Knowles" will adapt the infamous film gossip site to a filmed talk show. Hardwick will also host "Chris Hardwick’s All Star Bowling," a bowling competition/comedy show with a nod to Hardwick's father, champion bowler Billy Hardwick. Nerdist will also stream episodes of the legendary sketch show "Kids in the Hall," with new interviews and segments hosted by Hardwick.

The Nerdist YouTube channel will also incorporate adaptations of Nerdist podcasts, and plenty of wild cards, most notably: "Neil Patrick Harris’ Puppetopia," "Gif Gif City," "Cute Things Exploding," "Weird Shit From Japan," "Untitled Rob Zombie Project" and "Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson," a video version of the podcast hosted by the famed astrophysicist.

While I note that there's a lot of overlap between these two worlds (Wheaton and Hardwick are good friends and used to be roommates, and I'm pretty sure Hardwick is friends with Paul & Storm too), it seems pretty cool that they're both starting to flood YouTube with cool content.

Amusingly, when I first started writing up this post, I was going to mention all of the cool things that Kevin Smith has done with his Smodcast network, but I was realizing that was just audio. Well, no matter. Just as I was reading up on the details of the other two networks, I saw the news that Smith was launching Smodcast Internet TV -- his own online video network too! Perfect timing, Kev.

Like both of the other networks, the plan here is to take some existing shows (in this case, from the Smodcast network), and then add some new ones as well.

Who knows if all of these (or any of these) will survive, or even thrive. But, the awesome thing is that they can do these things and just see what happens. They don't need to go through gatekeepers. There are no gatekeepers anymore. They can blaze their own path and find out for themselves what works and what doesn't work -- and we're talking about a bunch of folks who all have pretty long histories of really embracing what the internet allows, so I'm excited to see where these experiments go, and I'd imagine we're going to see plenty more like this. Some will succeed, some will fail. But you have to be blind to think that creativity or the industry is struggling. People who can't help but create cool and amazing things suddenly have many more tools at their disposal for creating, distributing, promoting (and, yes, monetizing) content than ever before, and tons of new opportunities are opening up.

Anyone who thinks that the entertainment industry is in trouble isn't paying attention. The rest of us are over here checking out all sorts of cool new content, which didn't require a big studio exec deciding whether or not it deserved to be on TV.

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Holocaust History Preserver Shoah Foundation's Patents Being Used To Sue Google, Facebook, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon

Mike Masnick — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:43:27 PDT

The Shoah Foundation is the very famous organization put together initially by Stephen Spielberg in the 1990s to interview and record video histories of the Holocaust before those who lived through it -- either as survivors or witnesses -- died off. Most people recognize that this was a tremendously important historical project, that involved over 50,000 interviews. In 2005, the Shoah Foundation became a part of the University of Southern California. The organization has continued to do incredible work, but it appears that it's in the process of tarnishing its reputation in a massive way by allowing its patents to be used in a series of patent troll lawsuits (while trying to avoid being associated with the dirty work).

The details are a little complex, and it took some work to track them all down, since it involves some shell companies and passing things around. As far as I can tell, no one else has yet reported on this story, but it's shameful to see the Shoah Foundation associated with patent trolling. During the 90's, however, the Shoah Foundation did apply for and get a series of patents (listed at the bottom of this story), mostly around the idea of cataloguing and managing a library of digital assets.

In 2010, USC and the Shoah Foundation offered to sell an "exclusive license" to the patents via Ocean Tomo -- the patent auction house that is a goldmine for patent trolls. Ocean Tomo pitched the patents as being useful for companies "designing, using or selling database management systems," but what they probably meant is that they would be useful for non-practicing trolls who wish to sue such companies. Later that year, the deal was done for $7 million, a portion of which went to Shoah -- who still retains ownership of the patents in question.

In discussing the decision to auction off a license, rather than sell the patents outright, USC's John Sweet told the press that the license had been sold to a practicing entity:

"it was a party that would actually use the patented technology, not a company that buys up patents in order to simply sue alleged infringers."

He also told the press, "We don't want bottom fishers."

Guess what they got? Fast forward a year and a half or so, and it comes out that it's Altitude Capital Partners who holds the licenses on those patents (for what it's worth, USC insists that the patent license was actually purchased by an operating company, who later sold the rights to Altitude -- but no one seems willing to name this other company). If you don't know Altitude, think Intellectual Ventures before there was an Intellectual Ventures. It calls itself a private equity firm, but it mainly invests in patent lawsuits, which usually run through a series of shell companies. In this case, the license was given to Digital Innovations LLC (a subsidiary of Altitude) who put the patents in its own subsidiary called Preservation Technologies LLC.

And then Preservation LLC started suing. Late last year, Preservation used some of the 11 patents from USC Shoah to sue Google & YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, Sony, Dish and Amazon, Hulu, Dish again and Facebook again. Below I've embedded the specific complaint against Facebook (pdf). As with most patent lawsuits, the complaint itself isn't that enlightening beyond naming the parties and the patents.

But what's really troubling here is the idea that the Shoah Foundation -- an organization designed to do good and help preserve videos and history -- is now closely associated with patent trolling. Yes, there are a number of intermediaries in between the two, in order to provide some buffer, which I'm sure is supposed to "protect" Shoah from the blowback of patent trolling against a ton of internet companies that offer video online. But the complaints even call out the fact that the tech was developed by the Shoah Foundation. And Shoah still owns the patents in question. Shoah may never have meant for the patents to be abused in this manner, but it sold the license without any such restrictions and was happy to take the money, even knowing how the patents could (and likely would) be abused to attack innovative companies. The statement about them not wanting "bottom fishers" looks pretty ridiculous in light of what happened. If they didn't want bottom fishers, they should have made the license conditional on use. That they did not do so is their responsibility -- and thus USC Shoah should shoulder a significant portion of the blame for allowing the patents to now be used in such a fashion.

I asked USC and Shoah for a comment, and after handing me off to a variety of different people, I finally got this non-statement, which refused to answer nearly all of my questions:

USC owns a portfolio of patents for indexing and searching digital video libraries. USC licensed the portfolio exclusively to an operating company, while maintaining the right to use the patented inventions for research and education purposes. Subsequently, the operating company transferred the license to another entity. USC has learned that the current license holder has brought litigation relating to the patents. USC has no say or financial stake in the litigation.

In other words, "we don't want to talk about this." They especially appeared to have no interest whatsoever in responding to the query of whether or not such actions fit with the mission of the Shoah Foundation.

What's odd about all of this is why Shoah retained "ownership" here -- and if it did so in any real way. The deal that USC/Shoah did with Ocean Tomo was hailed as groundbreaking, in that they auctioned off a license, rather than selling the patents outright. USC/Shoah claims it kept ownership of the patents because it needed it to continue operating. But that makes no sense. Similar to the transfers of copyrights in cases like Righthaven, "ownership" of a patent is tied to the specific rights: the right to exclude and the right to sue. It appears that Shoah gave up both of those in their entirety, so retaining the "patent" is meaningless. They could have done the identical deal, in which they sold the patent, but included a license-back to Shoah for the life of the patent. I asked USC if among the rights it retained with "ownership" was included the ability to revoke the license and stop such lawsuits. At the time of posting, USC has not responded. Thus, either it does have that right and chooses not to use it -- in which case it has even greater culpability for these lawsuits -- or it really didn't retain any "ownership" of the patents in question at all. In which case the whole "we just licensed" it thing was nothing more than a PR stunt to allow for such patent trolling.

If USC/Shoah wants to proudly retain ownership of these patents, then they also need to take responsibility for how the patents are being (ab)used to shake down companies. They can try to talk a good game about being hands off and having no financial stake in the litigation effort, but that's because they already collected the cash. If the patents are being used for trolling, and USC/Shoah still owns them, then USC/Shoah has to bear the responsibility for how they're being used. That it seeks to distance itself from the lawsuits filed over patents that it still claims to own is an incredibly weak response and shows just how shameful an action this was.

The real shame in all of this, though, is that the legacy of Shoah is now tarnished by patent trolling. You would hope that the organization would think better than to have its good name sullied with such anti-innovation practices. Trying to shakedown companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon and Facebook for building their own digital library platforms... just seems wrong, and against the sharing spirit of the Shoah Foundation. An organization like that should be celebrating platforms that make it easier to preserve video and oral histories, rather than suing them. If Shoah really said that the patents wouldn't be used to sue others, then it should have made that explicit in the license. As things stand, Shoah owns patents that are being used for trolling. If it's not a troll itself, due to the licensing shell game, it clearly knew what it was getting into and enabled such nefarious trolling. It's too bad, as I've donated to Shoah in the past, but there's no way I'd donate again to an organization that has been involved in patent trolling.

USC Shoah should issue an apology in the strongest terms possible for what happened -- and this should be a reminder to everyone that even if patents are granted with the best of intentions, down the road, things may change. Shoah let greed get ahead of its mission and now its reputation will be forever tarnished for allowing such anti-innovation practices to happen with its own patents.

The patents in question:

6,199,060: "Method and apparatus management of multimedia assets"
6,581,071: "Surveying system and method"
5,813,014: "Method and apparatus for management of multimedia assets"
6,092,080: "Digital library system"
6,212,527: "Method and apparatus for cataloguing multimedia data"
6,574,638: "Method and apparatus for cataloguing multimedia data using surveying data"
6,549,911: "Method and apparatus for cataloguing multimedia data"
6,353,831: "Digital library system"

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UK Trying To Censor Parody Video About The 2012 Olympics

Mike Masnick — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 10:42:03 PST

We've discussed for many years how the Olympics has a ridiculously overaggressive approach to attacking free speech for those who criticize or mention aspects of the Olympics without permission. In most locations that host the Olympics, special extraordinary laws get passed against specific expressions around the Olympics that go beyond ordinary restrictions on speech. London, it seems, has been particularly willing to bend over backwards to appease the International Olympic Committee.

Take, for example, this story of a simple parody video about the 2012 Olympics that has been taken down over claims it violates the Olympics' IP rights. The video is clearly a parody, making use of the 2012 Olympics' creepy mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, to show them in what appears to be a London riot (using some computer graphics work). The original video got about 90,000 views before being taken down. As the link above notes, there is no right to parody in the UK, so while it may be legal to have the video taken down, it's still ridiculous. The site linked above, LiberalConspiracy.org, insists that it'll keep posting the video if it gets taken down. But, as of the time I write this, I'm embedding the working version of the video, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's gone before too long. Honestly, the video seems pretty tame. Perhaps the Olympics thinks it hurts its "brand" to have such a video, but it sure seems like censoring parody videos does a hell of a lot more reputation damage to the Olympics than a silly parody video of its mascots.

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MIPCube Looking For Startups Disrupting The Video Market

Mike Masnick — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:17:54 PST

For a few years now, we've been attending and/or partnering with Midem, the big music industry conference. The same folks are now also doing MIPCube, a similar conference focusing on TV and video. We're partnering with them on their MIPCube Labs event, similar to the equivalent program at Midem, where a bunch of startups get to present their disruptive ideas, and the ones voted the best by a panel of judges will win some awards. If you're involved in an innovative or disruptive startup that is changing the face of video, TV or film, you should apply to take part -- and hurry up since you have to apply by February 29th (I know that link says the 20th, but it's been extended!):

MIPCube Lab is the only start-up competition to be tightly integrated into the TV industry and its future. It provides a global platform for start-ups to get feedback from the most powerful and innovative decision makers in the TV business and obtain funding from the finance community.

Having seen the Midem Labs competition evolve and grow over the years, and seen lots of great companies present through there (including folks like Kickstarter and SoundCloud), these events can be really worthwhile for startups, so check it out.

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Universal Music Takes Down 50 Cent's Official YouTube Video

Mike Masnick — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:14:00 PST

Remember how the music labels like to say that everything they do is for the sake of the artists on their label? Yeah. Then remember how Universal Music had 50 Cent's own personal website declared a pirate site? It seems that UMG quite frequently works against the interests of its artists -- both big and small. It's no secret that 50 Cent and his label (UMG-owned Interscope) are in a state of constant disagreement. But what happens when 50 Cent decides, on Christmas Day, to release his latest "official" video? Universal Music takes it down. 50 Cent's own YouTube account put up the "official video" for the song "They Burn Me," but within hours, if you went to that page, you saw the following: We've been hearing lots of similar stories lately of UMG being pretty quick on the trigger to take down videos, even ones that its own artists have been releasing. The label got a lot of attention over the bogus takedown of the MegaUpload video, but it seems like UMG pretty much feels free to take down videos all the time, even those that the artists they're claiming to "protect" want up.

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UMG, MegaUpload Case Gets Even Stranger; Will.i.am Says He Didn't Authorize A Takedown

Mike Masnick — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:13:32 PST

Things keep getting stranger with the legal dispute over the whole Megaupload song. As you may remember, Megaupload hired a bunch of celebrities to say nice things about Megaupload, which the company turned into a song and video. Universal Music flipped its lid and issued a takedown, claiming that there was a performance from singer Gin Wigmore, which they held the copyright on. MegaUpload then sued Universal Music. At the same time, singer will.i.am's lawyer claimed that will.i.am sent a takedown also, saying that the singer had never agreed to the project.

Almost none of this made sense. We'd heard from various sources that Wigmore doesn't even appear in the video at all and had nothing to do with the song. Furthermore, the will.i.am stuff was really confusing. First of all, if he hadn't agreed to this, why did he say things about how wonderful MegaUpload is on video? He must have agreed to do that. Second, even if he didn't agree to it, at best there's a contractual claim there and/or a publicity rights claim. There's simply no copyright claim. His words are not his to copyright, as they're not fixed in any medium. Whoever made the video would hold the copyright -- which, in this case, is MegaUpload. Even more ridiculous was the notion, floated by some in our comments, that will.i.am's contract with Universal grants them automatic copyright, which is why UMG could issue a takedown. Again, this makes no sense for a variety of reasons. First, the same reason as above, without the works being fixed, there's no copyright in those words for will.i.am to assign to Universal. Second, UMG can't claim copyright on everything someone says. Third, even if this preposterous claim was true, will.i.am still would have no right to send a takedown, because he wouldn't own the copyright either. UMG would.

MegaUpload, has now hit back. It notes that Gin Wigmore does not appear in the song, did not write the song, and has absolutely nothing to do with the song. The company had apparently spoken to her about participating, but eventually went with Macy Gray instead. So the claim that this is under UMG copyright because of Wigmore doesn't appear to be true. Furthermore, MegaUpload provided the contract signed by will.i.am (embedded below), allowing them to make use of his words... the company's boss claims that will.i.am personally insists that he did not authorize a takedown. That raises questions about whether or not will.i.am's lawyer was confused or if he was just acting on his own.

"On December 12, 2011, I spoke directly with will.i.am about this issue, and he personally advised me that he absolutely had not authorized the submission of any takedown notice on his behalf."

In the meantime, it looks like the judge is skeptical. Judge Claudia Wilken has given UMG until the end of the day to respond and explain the takedown...

Either way, this is going to remain quite the fascinating case to watch.

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Does A Particular Project Need To 'Make Money' Directly To Be A Success?

Mike Masnick — Thu, 3 Nov 2011 13:33:25 PDT

Over at Step2, composer Kevin Clark has posted a fascinating case study concerning how he created "Cucumbers & Gin," a "music video" of a violin piece he composed. You can see the video below: In his case study, Kevin discusses how they raised funds to produce the piece via Kickstarter. But what struck me as interesting is that Kevin notes that, in the end, he did have to pay some out-of-pocket money to get the video made, but he still considers the entire experience to be a success. Why? Because of a large number of non-monetary benefits that came out of it, which are already opening up new opportunities and which will make it much easier to succeed in the future as well:

Why is it a success story?

Because a ton of good things came out of it. New connections with talented artists, a film to highlight my work and the violinist's, new audiences for the work (the staff at Noteflight for a start) and a list of 34 people who've already given money to support my work (including a fair number of complete strangers). It's also given my closest friends and family a taste of what it's like to write checks to make these things happen - that will make it easier the next time around when I'm looking for more money. That's really valuable.

Also, because I successfully managed a kickstarter project I've become a kind of resource to other artists who are thinking about doing similar things. This hasn't led to any revenue yet, but it has led to some great conversations, helping on awesome projects, and again, more connections and potential audience and supporters for my next project.

I think this is an interesting point that often gets lost in these discussions. Not every specific project needs to be directly "profitable." Many work as a way to build the framework for future successes. Hell, that's the very basis for marketing. You spend money in the hopes that down the road it pays off. Marketing is always an expense, but in the long run, you hope that it's indirectly profitable. Those who seem to insist that every project must be directly profitable are missing out on a ton of opportunities to lay the groundwork for profitability down the road.

As we do with our posts about case studies on Step2, we're turning off the comments here, but urge you to head on over to Step2 to take part in the discussion there.

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Homage Is Expensive: Rihanna Pays Up To Settle Photographer's Lawsuit

Mike Masnick — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:18:31 PDT

We've been covering the lawsuit filed by photographer Dave LaChapelle because the video for Rihanna's song S&M appeared to mimic some of the ideas found in some of his photographs: Of course, we thought that there was an idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law that says you can't copyright the idea -- just the expression. So we thought that a judge would make quick work of the case. Instead, the judge confirmed what we already suspected: the idea/expression dichotomy is a total and complete myth, and the case could move forward. This was reasonably troubling for lots of folks -- though certainly for Rihanna.

So it came as little surprise that Rihanna has "settled" the lawsuit with LaChapelle, meaning that she gave him a bunch of cash to go away. The lesson in all of this? Homage is expensive. You're best off not bothering.

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Another Day, Another Story Of Police Lying... Only To Be Found Out Due To Video Of The Incident

Mike Masnick — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 08:36:30 PDT

We just had a post about how a video of police showed that they lied in arresting a guy. Josef Anvil points us to a similar, but slightly different, story that took place in Chicago. In this case, Debra Green was in a car in a funeral procession, yelled at the driver of a car who was weaving in and out of the line of mourners' cars. Turns out the driver was an off-duty cop, Sylshina London, (rushing to get to work) who decided to arrest Green for misdemeanor battery charges. On what basis? Well apparently London claimed that Green threw a bottle at her and hit her in the face. Green was actually convicted.

The problem? It took a year and a half, but investigators finally realized that some of the incident was caught on police video... and it showed that London's window was shut at the time she claimed Green threw a bottle and that bottle hit her head. Even worse, London repeated that story under oath in court as part of what got Green convicted. Cook County prosecutors have now dropped the conviction and have apparently filed charges against London instead.

It's stories like these that, once again, remind people why it should be encouraged to film police -- and why honest police shouldn't have a problem with it.

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DailyDirt: You Can't Believe Everything You See

Michael Ho — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:00:00 PDT

We've mentioned some interesting CGI work before, but the field of advanced video processing just continues to be amazing. Big Hollywood budgets won't be necessary if CGI software keeps getting better and better. Here are some cool clips we've seen.

Fix your shaky home movies with some image stabilization software. A nice benefit from military research to make your kid's first birthday videos watchable without Dramamine. [url]
Being John Malkovich could be a lot easier than crawling down some dark tunnel. Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.... [url]
Disney and Carnegie Mellon researchers are working on software to make animated faces look more realistic. And actors will eventually need to be Andy Serkis. [url]
This HDR video system merges three simultaneous images to obtain some really cool-looking shots. The software that creates these videos lets the director choose some nice lighting effects. [url]
To discover more tech-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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A Response To Felicia Day On How Video Gets Funded In A Fragmented, Digital World

Mike Masnick — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:23:03 PDT

Mark asked us to weigh in on an interesting post on Google+ by Felicia Day, wondering about the future of video content. Day, of course, has been quite successful in embracing the online community as well as new and different business models. She lays out the question in response to the news of Fox and others deciding to delay legal options and how that's likely to drive more people to unauthorized file sharing. She notes that, from a business perspective, this seems scary, but she also seems to recognize that it's reality (rather than denying it, as some people do):

There is a basic principle working here (scary, if you're in the TV business) that I've personally been dealing with on The Guild with a mere 2 DAYS! delay of releasing content: People want content immediately, wherever they like to view things. They don't care if you're trying to pay production bills, they don't care if it's the only way to fund things, they want it NOW, they want it CONVENIENT to them personally. Whether this is a reasonable attitude or not, it's what people are used to in this day of streaming on demand, and it's only going to get worse, because cord-cutters are getting more and more common. Long view=not good.

From there, she picks up on the trend of cord cutting we've been discussing, echoing to some extent Wil Wheaton's recent comments about the backwardness of many in the TV business today:

To me, the cable box seems like Tower Records 10 years ago, or Borders just 2 years ago. Look at how music and books have shifted to digital, on-demand purchasing. Cable companies are the "brick and mortar" place for video, and that business is dying. People don't have enough time for 140 channels, they have enough time for maybe 10 shows, that's it. Why pay 140 bux a month to watch that many shows when you can buy them individually? Or stream The Wire on Netflix for 8 bux a month, because you missed it the first time? Or play a video game? Or just surf the net?

But then she asks a final question, which is basically, "but how will we continue to produce videos" in this world? I should be clear: she doesn't seem to be doing this in the same "but you must save us" way some in the industry have done. She's just asking an honest question she has about where the world is going, because she's unsure:

So my question is: What happens to all those shows when they fragment like that? Who is gonna pay to produce them? What is the future? (And "funded by viewers" model is not the answer, only 1% of people ever really contribute, and the up-front costs of producing video are WAY higher than making a record or a book, etc. Believe me, I understand this personally.)

First off, one quick point before delving into the larger question: the whole "only 1% of people ever really contribute" claim is a common one, but I think it's a misleading one. While it lets some people write entire books on evil free riders, it's really meaningless. If you can get more than production costs out of that 1%, the fact that it's just 1% really doesn't matter, right? And, no, I'm not saying it's easy to cover production costs from 1% -- it's not for most productions. But I'm just showing that 1% by itself, without context, is meaningless. What if, for example, that 1% is made up of super wealthy patrons who are happy to fund the full production? Or, more realistically, what if those 1% are people who represent companies willing to buy advertising? Just because it's 1% doesn't mean you can't have a viable business model. The % is meaningless. All that matters is the absolute dollars.

But on to the larger point of what happens to video in a fragmented world? Well, I sense that it's going to be awesome. As with music and books, it will allow all kinds of niche productions to show up, which would simply never make it at all in a "network" world. In fact, this is already happening -- and Day's been a part of some of that with things like The Guild and Dr. Horrible. As for how to fund it, well, again there are a variety of options. One of the things that changes is that there's no longer "one clear path," but that hardly means there's no way to make money. It may take more experimentation, but there are all sorts of options, mostly involving a hybrid of models.

For years, of course, we've talked about how the new business models are built off of the formula of connect with fans, while giving them a valuable scarce reason to buy, and that certainly applies to video as well. In the past, for example, we've listed out 10 forms of scarcities that can help you figure out good "reasons to buy," and most of them apply to video as well. Let's take a look:

Access: This remains a huge one, of course. We mentioned a study in the past where 19% of music fans said they would pay anything to meet their favorite star. That's hyperbole, of course, but people are willing to do crazy things to meet their favorite stars. With a video, you could make it even more interesting by doing things like offering up the opportunity to be "an extra" on a shoot or something. How much would fans of The Guild pay to show up in an episode, even if briefly?
Attention: Here's an obvious one. When you have an audience, their attention is a scarcity that can be sold. Day, for example, has had success selling sponsorship deals for The Guild. That's an example of selling attention, and is basically the way lots of video (hello, network TV) has been funded for ages. Just because that attention is now online, it doesn't mean that the value of that attention goes away. Yes, it's absolutely true that online video attention isn't valued nearly as high as attention on TV, but it doesn't always have to be that way. And, there are even a few examples of shows online being able to command higher rates than shows on TV.
Authenticity: This isn't necessarily something you sell directly, but the more authentic you are, the more people will respond to that. Again, it's something that Day has mastered as well (as you can even see in the post that she wrote and her discussions on the matter both on Google+ and Twitter). Follow Day on either platform and it's just oozing with authenticity, and what that does is really build up her core and loyal audience. While she may say that only a small percentage will actually pay, never underestimate the ability of truly loyal "true fans" to help you figure out how to make money. Authenticity has a way of increasing such fans.
Exclusivity: This can be a tricky one, because some people think it means "locking stuff up" to make it exclusive. But we're talking about other forms of exclusivity, which don't involve pissing off other people. How about the ability to buy an old prop from a show? Or a chance to play WoW with the cast of The Guild. These are things that can very reasonably be exclusive. Day has done some stuff with offering The Guild slightly earlier, and as she notes in her post, that just seems to upset people. Doing anything that involves this kind of artificial exclusivity can be tricky -- especially when it's something that has a social component. While The Guild is a broadcast video, part of any really successful cultural content is the fact that you share it/discuss it with others. That's what makes it culture. Limiting when people can see content can actually take away value in that it harms that form of "sharing" (no we're not talking about "piracy" here). The ability to discuss a favorite show with others is, in many ways, part of the appeal. Taking that away through fake exclusivity can backfire.
(New) Creation: Any work before it's created is still scarce. Another way of looking at this is effectively the ability to do custom or commissioned creations. Imagine an offering where you could write a "fan" script of your favorite shows (within reason, of course). How many people would jump at the chance?
Tangibility: A scarcity that still sells. Never doubt the potential for tangible merch to sell. While it's something of a joke that people (falsely) claim that the business model we suggest for everyone is "sell t-shirts," that doesn't mean you should ignore the potential of t-shirts. They can be quite lucrative (and, yes, for all the people asking, we really will be restocking our own t-shirts soon).
Time (saving or making): If you can help people save time or make more time, people will often pay. This is one that may be a bit tougher to apply to TV, but I'd be interested in hearing suggestions. I know that some podcasting products have things like "double time" that let you listen to the same podcast at a (pitch-corrected) sped up pace. I wonder if there would be a market for "sped up" video too? Perhaps not, but just tossing it out there for brainstorming.
Convenience: Day mentioned this in her post. People want convenience above all else. This part is less about what an individual show can do, probably, and more about the platforms. If Netflix/Hulu/YouTube/BitTorrent/some-other-platform can make a work more convenient, then it becomes important to figure out how to embrace it... or else your fans will go there without you.
Belonging: Never, ever underestimate how important a sense of belonging can be to a group. This can be manifest in a variety of ways (including some listed above). But it certainly opens up opportunities for things like fan clubs, where a small subscription fee gets you cool "extras." This also goes back to the tangible merch as well. One part of belonging is showing off that group you belong to.
Patronage: This one is still looked down upon by some, and it's rarely a good option if you're betting entirely on it, but serious opportunities can come out of just asking people to support an artist -- especially one who really connects with the fans in an authentic way. Sure, perhaps only 1% of the people will be willing to act as patrons, but combined with other things listed above, you can build a really strong business model.

That's just my quick pass on thinking through some ideas for where video goes. Will some video productions fail as the market heads in this direction? Absolutely. But that's the nature of what happens when platforms and markets change. Radio stories more or less went away in an age of television, and TV found certain types of stories worked better on TV than they did on radio (and some worse). So things changed. And that will certainly happen online during this transition as well. But I can't see how it's likely to be worse or more limited. There's a ton of opportunity out there, and I have no fear that all sorts of unique and workable solutions are coming about for video.

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Idea/Expression Dichotomy Is Dead; Judge Allows Photographer's Lawsuit Against Rihanna To Move Forward

Mike Masnick — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:23:56 PDT

Well, this is unfortunate. Back in February, we wrote about what seems like a positively ridiculous lawsuit from photographer David LaChapelle, against the singer Rihanna for her video S&M. LaChapelle claims that scenes in the video infringe on certain photographs he's taken. You can see some of the comparisons here: As I noted when the lawsuit was first filed, I couldn't see how this passed the idea/expression dichotomy test. Copyright is only supposed to protect the specific expression, not the "idea." And all of these looked like similar ideas, but I couldn't see any direct copy of an expression. Apparently, the judge in the case disagrees. The judge rejected Rihanna's motion for dismissal, saying that it seems likely that the video infringes on protectable expression. If that's true, then there is no idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law anymore. Basically, if a judge wants to pretend an idea is the specific expression, he or she can.

For instance, the court pointed out that the video's "Pink Room Scene" and LaChapelle's "Striped Face" photograph both feature women dominating men in a domestic scene. That subject is not protectable, the court noted, because "the subjects flow naturally from the chosen idea" of sadomasochism.

But the particular way that Rihanna's video portrayed the scenes--including the set, wardrobe, "generally frantic mood" and lighting--was "substantially similar" to LaChapelle images, even if all the details were not identical, the court concluded.

"Both works share the frantic and surreal mood of women dominating men in a hypersaturated, claustrophobic domestic space. Thus, I find that an ordinary observer may well overlook any differences and regard the aesthetic appeal of “Striped Face” and the “Pink Room Scene” as the same," Judge Shira A. Scheindlin wrote in her decision.

General frantic mood? General frantic mood?!? How is that a fixed expression? And it's not that not all the details were identical. It's that the details are extremely different.

The judge is apparently also not a fan of fair use:

The judge dismissed Rihanna's fair use defense out of hand, saying it was so misguided and "unavailing" that the pop singer failed to raise a fair use defense at all.

I'm not sure that sentence makes any sense. At the beginning it says the judge dismissed her defense, but at the end of the sentence it says she failed to raise the defense. But, still, it seems like you could make a really strong fair use case here, if you actually believe that there is protectable expression being copied (which I still don't). The purpose seems totally transformative. The amount used seems tiny. And the impact on the market for the photographs seems like it's only likely to be positive, not negative. How wouldn't there be fair use here?

Of course, this is good news for the other photographer making very similar claims against Rihanna, as well as plenty of other photographers who think someone somewhere has done something marginally similar to their work.

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TSA Agents Continue To Lie And Say You Can't Photograph Or Videotape Checkpoints

Mike Masnick — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 08:39:51 PDT

The TSA recently reiterated that it is entirely legal to photograph or videotape airport checkpoints and security screenings:

Please be assured that TSA’ s goal is to protect passenger’s rights, including the right to record at passenger screening checkpoints, while ensuring that passenger screening operations can take place in an effective and efficient manner.

While the TSA may be telling the press that... it appears they forgot to tell the actual TSA agents on the ground who continue to threaten people for filming their activities.

The latest incident took place in Baltimore. The videotape was uploaded on July 10.

The action starts at 1:24 when a woman is videotaping the checkpoint process, waiting for her husband to walk through.

A TSA supervisor confronts her, telling her she is not allowed to videotape the checkpoint.

But she continues to videotape, asking him for a document that confirms it is not allowed.

He tells her he doesn’t have the time to show her, but will gladly call police and then have her removed from the airport.

At 3:16 in the video, a second TSA screener storms up and tells her to stop videotaping, but she continues to do so. When she continues to question their authority, the second TSA screener tells her she is allowed to videotape on the other side of the metal detectors but not once she is inside the checkpoint area.

That, of course, is not true.

These kinds of stories seem to keep popping up every week or so. Even more ridiculous, the guy in the video who claims he's the supervisor says that the checkpoint is "classified." Later, a second TSA official says she has to delete the video. None of that is true. In fact, it's outright ridiculous.

Later, the TSA agents appear to be entirely vindictive, asking for ID so they can write up a report. When asked why, the agent says he finds the questions asked "particularly... disturbing" because "there were children in the background" and the guy had asked whether or not the naked scanners could see his penis.

Once again, it seems like the TSA is making a mockery of the Constitution.

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