Fan’s Rare Recordings Of Lost Beatles’ Performances Can’t Be Heard, Because Copyright Ruins Everything

Copyright

from the copyright-gets-in-the-way-again dept

There’s a story in the Daily Mail that underlines why it is important for people to make copies. It concerns the re-surfacing of rare recordings of the Beatles:

In the summer of 1963, the BBC began a radio series called Pop Go The Beatles which went out at 5pm on Tuesdays on the Light Programme.

Each show featured the Beatles performing six or seven songs, recorded in advance but as live, in other words with no or minimal post-production.

The BBC had not thought it worth keeping the original recordings, even though they consisted of rarely heard material – mostly covers of old rock ‘n’ roll numbers. Fortunately, a young fan of the Beatles, Margaret Ashworth, used her father’s modified radio connected directly to a reel-to-reel tape recorder to make recordings of the radio shows, which meant they were almost of broadcast quality.

When the recording company EMI was putting together an album of material performed by the Beatles for the BBC, it was able to draw on these high-quality recordings, some of which were much better than the other surviving copies. In this case, it was just chance that Margaret Ashworth had made the tapes. The general message is that people shouldn’t do this, because “copyright”. There are other cases where historic cultural material would have been lost had people not made copies, regardless of what copyright law might say.

Margaret Ashworth thought it would be fun to put out the old programmes she had recorded on a Web site, for free, recreating the weekly schedules she had heard back in the 1960s. So she contacted the BBC for permission, but was told it would “not approve” the upload of her recordings to the Internet. As she writes:

after all these years, with the Beatles still extremely popular, it seems mean-spirited of the BBC not to allow these little time capsules to be broadcast, either by me or by the Corporation. I cannot believe there are copyright issues that cannot be solved.

Readers of this blog probably can.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally published to the Walled Culture blog.

Filed Under: beatles, lost recordings, margaret ashworth, the beatles
Companies: bbc, emi

Hertz Still Refuses To Drop Prosecutions Despite Being Sued For Bogus Theft Reports

Legal Issues

from the fuck-our-paying-customers-said-the-company-emerging-from-bankruptcy dept

Hertz has dug its own hole. And it insists it hasn’t hit the bottom yet. The shovels will continue to be deployed until the litigation ends. This isn’t going to work out well for Hertz, but the company seems to have retreated deep into denial following lawsuits over its bogus theft allegations.

Hertz is facing a class action lawsuit featuring hundreds of its customers over its apparent inability to handle rental paperwork correctly. Rather than engage in due diligence when things don’t add up, Hertz apparently allows employees to pull the trigger on theft reports to law enforcement. It also has allegedly decided to convert local law enforcement officers into debt collection agents, referring any overdue rentals or uncollected fees to cop shops rather than pursuing these claims using its own personnel.

The end result has been hundreds of innocent renters being accused of theft… and not just in an “angry letter sent to their residence” way. Hertz has co-opted cops, turning mistaken conclusions about rental agreements into guns-out confrontations that have deprived renters of their freedom, jobs, and any hope of returning to a normal life after being falsely accused of auto theft.

Hertz continues to claim these allegations only represent a very small percentage of their customers. That may be so, but NO OTHER RENTAL CAR COMPANY IN AMERICA is facing similar accusations. That means Hertz has failed spectacularly at controlling its inventory. And it has allowed its own failures to be pinned on renters who’ve returned cars or extended rental agreements, subjecting them to the full force of law enforcement entities who’ve never met an accused person they couldn’t destroy.

It can’t even follow through on the things the head of the company said Hertz would do when the rental company started making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Back in April, CEO Stephen Scherr said he would start cleaning up the mess and making things right for people falsely accused of stealing rental cars. He assured an interviewer that the company was implementing new policies designed to prevent false theft accusations and “would look to settle with victims.”

A month later and nothing has changed, as Fox News reports. The promises made by the CEO appear to be as empty as its hundreds of false theft accusations.

Car rental company Hertz has yet to drop charges against any of the outstanding 40 cases of alleged car theft even after new CEO Stephen Scherr said the company would rectify such erroneous cases. 

“When you have the CEO that knows what the damages were and the pain and harm visited upon these victims […] and when he went out there saying that this is going to get resolved, we’re pushing it behind us, all right,” Attorney Francis Malofiy told FOX Business. “He has to follow through on his word and he failed to do so.”

Lawsuits it is, then. If the CEO won’t act, then he’ll just have to take his litigation lumps with the company he oversees. Hertz hasn’t made anything better for itself in the meantime, issuing statements alleging that it’s impossible to withdraw bogus theft reports because doing so would somehow harm its relationship with the many, many law enforcement agencies it has misled over the years.

This all reeks of corporate chicken-shittery. It’s all a bunch of in-house lawyers and ineffective company officials looking busy doing nothing until it becomes clear what their exposure is. Hertz’s reputation should be severely damaged, both with the general public and the law enforcement agencies it converted into collection agencies via unsupported theft allegations. Hopefully, the ongoing lawsuits will burn both Hertz’s lawyers and its gutless company figureheads to the ground.

Hertz didn’t have to be this way. But this is the way it is and now it’s doing whatever it can to escape taking accountability for its actions. No matter what Hertz says, no other car rental company is facing the same accusations. Something is very wrong at Hertz. But no one with the power to change things is willing to place themselves at risk. The only thing Hertz principals are willing to sacrifice is its remaining customers.

Filed Under: rental cars, theft
Companies: hertz

Very, Very Little Of ‘Content Moderation’ Has Anything To Do With Politics

Content Moderation

from the that's-not-how-it-works dept

It’s truly amazing how focused people are, in discussions on content moderation, on the claims that “content moderation is censorship” and that it’s primarily “suppressing” political speech. That’s not how it works at all. Honestly, the origins of most content moderation efforts were around two major things: (1) spam prevention and (2) copyright infringement. Over time, that’s expanded, but the major categories of content moderation have little to nothing to do with “viewpoint” discrimination, no matter what Texas seems to think.

Casey Newton has a good post exploring Facebook’s latest transparency report where he highlights how little moderation has anything to do with people’s viewpoints.

An important thing to focus on, whether you’re an average user worried about censorship or recently bought a social network promising to allow almost all legal speech, is what kind of kind of speech Facebook removes. Very little of it is “political,” at least in the sense of “commentary about current events.” Instead, it’s posts related to drugs, guns, self-harm, sex and nudity, spam and fake accounts, and bullying and harassment.

To be sure, some of these categories are deeply enmeshed in politics — terrorism and “dangerous organizations,” for example, or what qualifies as hate speech. But for the most part, this report chronicles stuff that Facebook removes because it’s good for business. Over and over again, social products find that their usage shrinks when even a small percentage of the material they host includes spam, nudity, gore, or people harassing each other.

Usually social companies talk about their rules in terms of what they’re doing “to keep the community safe.” But the more existential purpose is to keep the community returning to the site at all.

I dug into some of the numbers, and if we just look at “content actioned” over the last couple years, it appears that spam is still the major focus. Facebook removed 1.8 billion pieces of content it judged as spam in just the fourth quarter of 2021. It also removed 1.6 billion “fake accounts” (Facebook requires accounts to be associated with real humans). You get to much smaller numbers for other categories, like 31 million pieces of content removed for “sexual activity,” 16.5 million pieces of content dealing with sexual exploitation, and another 2.1 million around “nudity and physical abuse” involving children. 16 million pieces of content dealt with for terrorism (which was way up). 26 million pieces of content were deemed problematic for “violent and graphic content.” 6.8 million were dealt with over “suicide and self-injury.” And 15 million for “hate speech.” Another 9.5 million were around “bullying and harassment.”

Even if you assume that some of the listed categories above were political, the numbers are still dwarfed by the spam and fake accounts issues that are the vast majority of content that Facebook’s moderators need to deal with. Putting this all in graphic form, you realize that content moderation is almost entirely about spam and (for Facebook) dealing with fake accounts. It is not, generally, about being “censors.” (Copyright seems to be part of a separate transparency report).

So, for everyone who insists that there should be no content moderation and that everything should flow, just recognize that most of what you’d be enabling is… spam. Lots and lots and lots of spam. Unfathomable amounts of spam.

To make this more explicit, I put all of the other categories together and made this chart:

So, yeah. You want content moderation. You need content moderation.

Content moderation is not about censoring political views.

Filed Under: content moderation, spam, transparency report
Companies: facebook

Daily Deal: Speedy Mag Wireless Charger for iPhone

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The Fast Mag Wireless iPhone Charger is a chic, modern wireless charger for your iPhone. It features a built-in magnet and metal plate, which sticks securely to your phone to prevent it from sliding off. Fast Mag features built-in safeguards against overcharge The addition of Fast Charge technology enables your phone to rapidly charge from dead to 100% of its battery life in just 30 minutes. It comes in 3 different colors and is on sale for $49.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

FTC Politely Asks Education Companies If They Would Maybe Stop Spying On Kids

Privacy

If you hadn’t noticed, the U.S. doesn’t give much of a shit about this whole privacy thing. Our privacy regulators are comically and intentionally understaffed and underfunded, we still have no meaningful privacy law for the Internet era, and when regulators do act, it’s generally months after the fact with penalties that are easily laughed off by companies rich from data over-collection.

That apathy extends to kids’ privacy, of course. For years, online education software vendors have engaged in just an absurd level of data over-collection and monetization, with massive data repositories culled via everything from facial recognition to keystroke tracking and deep packet inspection.

During COVID, it became increasingly clear that many of these companies were blocking students from participating in online education if they weren’t willing to agree to extensive monitoring and monetization. In direct response, the FTC last week announced the agency had issued a new policy statement reminding these companies that COPPA still exists.

In short, the FTC warned educators and companies about collecting more data than they need, implementing some basic levels of privacy and security standards (half a million Chicago area student records were leaked due to ransomware attack recently), selling data they collect, and restricting privacy conscious student and parent access to educational software:

“Students must be able to do their schoolwork without surveillance by companies looking to harvest their data to pad their bottom line,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Parents should not have to choose between their children’s privacy and their participation in the digital classroom. The FTC will be closely monitoring this market to ensure that parents are not being forced to surrender to surveillance for their kids’ technology to turn on.”

Unlike the broader dumpster fire that is adult data collection and monetization on the Internet, kids are at least semi-protected by the sloppy mess that is COPPA, a law that was intended to protect kids’ privacy, but was so poorly written as to create all manner of unintended consequences.

The FTC policy statement notes that edu-software companies that fail to adhere to the COPPA Rule may face potential civil penalties, “and new requirements and limitations on their business practices aimed at stopping unlawful conduct.”

The problem of course is that the FTC is tasked with everything from policing accuracy in bleach labeling to protecting folks from scams. But the U.S. is an absolute scam-infested mess, and we (and by we I mean industry lobbyists who want government to be a toothless subsidy machine) have consistently ensured the FTC lacks the staff, resources, or authority to actually do its job on privacy or much of anything else.

So when it does act (which generally involves slam dunk cases and the lowest hanging fruit) the punishment can be laughed off as a minor cost of doing business. And that’s assuming litigation doesn’t wind up eliminating the fine altogether later on when the press and public aren’t paying attention.

That said it’s clear that the current FTC is actually taking this stuff seriously, which is an improvement from outright apathy of years’ past. The DOJ and FTC recently not only hit Weight Watchers with a $1.5 million fine for “illegally harvesting” personal health information of children, they required the company delete the data collected, and scrap the technology used to collect it.

Filed Under: coppa, kids, privacy

Minneapolis Pays $1.5 Million Settlement To Man Who Accidentally Shot At Cops During George Floyd Protests

Legal Issues

from the you're-supposed-to-be-a-public-servant dept

Following the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the streets of the city erupted in protest. Police responded accordingly. Which is to say indifferently. Rather than rein in the violence that had triggered the protests, many officers felt they needed to make protesters pay for their ungrateful response to racial bias and police violence.

One Minneapolis resident, Jaleel Stallings, found himself caught in the literal crossfire. A Minneapolis PD riot response team patrolled city streets in an unmarked van, hoping to catch rioters in the act or, at the very least, ring up a bunch of people on curfew violations. Stalling’s lawyer — representing him in his criminal case — was able to obtain body cam footage from officers manning the unmarked van that rolled up on his client.

The recordings show cops behaving at their worst, intent on punishing the public for daring to consider its policing efforts inadequate. Officers operating from the unmarked vehicle were firing indiscriminately at anyone caught out in the open, egged on by fellow officers and their direct supervisors.

Before the white, unmarked cargo van of the Minneapolis Police Department drove down Lake Street, an officer gave Sgt. Andrew Bittell his orders: “Drive down Lake Street. You see a group, call it out. OK great! F*** ’em up, gas ’em, f*** ’em up.”

Bittell turned to his SWAT unit in the van and said, “Alright, we’re rolling down Lake Street. The first f***ers we see, we’re just hammering ’em with 40s,” according to body camera footage described in court documents. He was referring to “less lethal” plastic projectiles sometimes called rubber bullets or 40mm launchers or rounds.

This indiscriminate act ended up costing Stallings his freedom. They opened fire on a nearby parking lot, hitting Stallings in the chest. Stallings, understandably (and accurately), believed he was under attack. The lawful gun owner returned fire with his pistol.

Shortly thereafter, Stallings realized he had been shooting at MPD officers. He then did what any responsible citizen would do: he tossed his gun out of his reach and dropped facedown on the ground to await the arrival of officers. In response for his efforts to atone for his mistake (a completely justifiable mistake, at that), Stallings was attacked by MPD officers who kicked and punched him for more than 30 seconds before arresting him on a long list of charges that included second-degree attempted murder. Stallings fought these charges while recovering from multiple injuries, including a fractured eye socket.

The officers lied about Stallings’ actions, claiming he “ran away” and raised a struggle while being handcuffed. The officers never stated — in their reports or statements to investigators — that they had beaten Stallings, even after he had been handcuffed. More contradictions would have followed but the officers were ordered to turn off their cameras nine minutes after the recordings began.

Stallings was acquitted of all charges following a jury trial. He then sued the officers for rights violations. Nearly two years after he was brutalized by thugs looking to inflict violence on people protesting police thuggery, Stallings is getting a payout from the city of Minneapolis.

The city of Minneapolis has agreed to pay $1.5 million plus costs and attorneys’ fees to Jaleel Stallings, an Army veteran who sued the city after being acquitted on the grounds of self-defense after he was charged with shooting at Minneapolis police who first fired marking rounds at him.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the FBI are investigating the incident, which took place five days after the police murder of George Floyd. 

The city is spending citizens’ money to make Stallings whole, but it’s unwilling to do without letting itself off the hook for causing the problem and buying its way out of it. Like far too many lawsuit settlements, this one allows the city and the PD to walk away from this without admitting they’ve done anything wrong.

The city will not admit guilt or take responsibility as part of the agreement with Stallings, which still has to be approved by the Minneapolis City Council.

What should be viewed as direct condemnation of the MPD’s actions that night will now be little more than a budget line item. It will be swept away by the passage of time like so many lawsuit settlements before it, allowing the MPD to pretend it’s not the home to several problematic officers, and the city to pretend it hasn’t utterly failed to engage in meaningful oversight of law enforcement agencies that are supposed to answer to it and are obligated to act as public servants.

Filed Under: jaleel stallings, minneapolis, minneapolis police, police brutality

Copyright As Censorship: Abuse Of The DMCA To Try To Delete Online News Is Rampant

Copyright

from the of-course-it-is dept

Online platforms often give access to digital material that is under copyright. If any of that content is infringing, then potentially the platform would be liable as well as the person who uploaded it. Online companies naturally want to be immune to the consequences of any copyright infringement committed by their users. However, companies in the copyright industry also demand the ability to protect their copyright material.

To address this tension, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides online companies with a “safe harbor” in the US, provided they fulfil certain conditions, which includes taking down infringing material when they are made aware of its presence on their servers. This “notice and takedown” system allows the copyright industry to seek out material on sites, and send notices to the relevant Internet companies claiming that there is an infringement, and demanding that it should be taken down. The person who uploaded the material can make a counterclaim under the DMCA. This may trigger a lawsuit from the company claiming copyright. If it doesn’t, the material will be put back up.

Although the safe harbor approach is designed to provide a balanced solution to the requirements of both the copyright industry and the online service providers, it masks a deeper inequality that is typical of the copyright world. Takedown notices are generally sent by lawyers or specialists who carry out this operation all the time, often thousands of times a day, using automated systems. They know the details of the law. Under the DMCA they are only required to provide a statement that they have a “good faith belief” that the use of the copyright material is unauthorized.

The recipients of takedown notices are usually ordinary members of the public. They are unlikely to have any legal training, and yet must respond to a formal legal notification if they wish to make a counterclaim. In addition, their counterclaim must include contact information – probably the last thing that an individual wishes to hand over to a company threatening them. Finally, and most problematically, the counterclaim must include a statement “under penalty of perjury” that the material was taken down by mistake. This is in contrast to the much weaker “good faith belief” that the original takedown notice requires from the notifier. Many will quail at the thought that they risk being convicted of perjury. The end result is that most people will simply accept that their material is removed, even if it was legal, for example under fair use.

This unbalanced nature of the system makes it ripe for fraud, whereby people falsely claim to be the owner of copyright material in order to get it removed from a Web site. Among the millions of removal requests stored on the Lumen database, Shreya Tewari – a Berkman Klein Center Research Fellow on the Lumen project – found nearly 34,000 takedown notices that “appear to be attempts to misuse the DMCA notice-and-takedown process”:

The notices I found use the “back-dated article” technique. With this technique, the wrongful notice sender (or copier) creates a copy of a ‘true original’ article and back-dates it, creating a ‘fake original’ article (an article that is a copy of the true original) that at first glance appears to have been published prior to the true original. Then, based on the claim that this back-dated article is the ‘original’, the copiers send a DMCA to the relevant Online Service Providers, alleging that the true original is the copied or ‘infringing’ article and that that the copied article is the original article — requesting the takedown of the true original article. The wrongful notice sender then removes the fake original url after sending the DMCA request, likely in order to ensure that the article does not stay online in any form. If the takedown notice is successful, this means the disappearance from the internet of information that is most likely to be legitimate speech.

The post on the Lumen database blog has some interesting statistics about such takedown notices: 34,000 removal requests were sent by just 30 different notice senders, targeting 550 domain names, mostly online news sites. The material targeted generally concerned allegations of “misconduct, corruption, sexual harassment and other allegations against the same set of individuals”. It looks like the DMCA’s powerful takedown provision was being used to wipe embarrassing news articles from sites around the world.

An entire business sector, called “reputation management”, has sprung up to offer this kind of service. Specialists use DMCA takedown notices as a way of intimidating sites, and persuading them to remove material that is inconvenient for the reputation management company’s client in some way. According to a post on the Rest of the World site:

The industry has thrived, in part thanks to the effectiveness, ease, and low cost of making complaints using the DMCA. Hosting providers often lack the capacity or interest to investigate every complaint, and, under the law they can be held liable for contributing to the infringement of copyright, if it’s later proven, which can be very costly. Often, they simply comply with these requests.

The copyright industry’s success in obtaining a DMCA takedown process that is so easy to abuse, especially to silence voices and censor material, means that true and important information can be removed from the Web fraudulently and unjustifiably.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.

Filed Under: back dating, censorship, copyright, dmca, reputation management, takedowns

California Assembly Unanimously Passes Blatantly Unconstitutional Bill To Allow Parents To Sue Websites Because Their Kids Are Depressed

Policy

from the stop-it-stop-stop-it dept

Have politicians all gone mad? On the Republican side, we have Texas and Florida trying to stop websites from moderating content, while on the Democratic side, we have New York and elsewhere trying to blame them for not moderating content. And then we have… California. Back in March we had warned about AB 2408, ostensibly a “bi-partisan” bill from Republican Assemblymember Jordan Cunninghan and Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks. This bill shows that even when Democrats and Republicans team up to try to regulate the internet, they make an unconstitutional mess of things.

On Monday — the same day that the 11th Circuit rejected all of the most important parts of Florida’s social media content moderation bill as clearly, easily, obviously unconstitutional — California’s Assembly voted unanimously, 45-0 (though with a whole bunch of abstentions) to move forward with AB 2408.

The bill is very much in the traditional “but think of the children!” mode, and would allow parents to sue any “social media platform” if that parent believes the social media site resulted in the child becoming addicted.

The operative part of the bill says that social media sites have “a duty not to addict child users.” But what the hell does that even mean? While part of the bill says that this includes not using or “selling” a child’s data, another part says that “the development, design, implementation, or maintenance of a design feature, or affordance” cannot lead to addiction that creates any kind of harm.

But, we live in a time where any time anything bad happens, people who don’t want to take responsibility immediately blame the social media tools that were used. So, now, any time any of the painful or harmful things that tons of teenagers have gone through basically forever happens, parents can sue social media companies and blame them. Eating disorder? Self harm? Depression?

Those all happened long before social media existed, but under this bill, if your kid has any of that, you can sue social media companies for damages. This will open up a flood of absolutely frivolous lawsuits.

It also remains an obvious unconstitutional mess, even if you believe that the bill is well-intentioned. At that link, 1st Amendment litigator Adam Sieff explains why, even if the law is meant with the best of intentions, it’s not even remotely constitutional:

The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that the First Amendment protects publishers’ decisions to select, arrange and promote content to audiences as a basic exercise of their editorial control and judgment. The protection applies regardless of the medium of communication publishers use to convey information, whether they run a newspaper, cable network, website or social network. And the court has expressly held that the amendment applies to online speech and content moderation practices.

Critically, the rule prevents California, or any state, from enacting a law that would penalize an internet publisher for exercising its judgment about what kinds of content to publish and promote to its audience, just as it prevents California from enacting a law punishing a newspaper for its decisions about what to print on the front page.

It makes no legal difference that social media platforms often create algorithms to apply their editorial judgments. An algorithm is just a set of pre-programmed editorial rules that reflects value judgments made by real people about the kind of content to display and promote. 

To punish a platform’s algorithmic promotion of popular content is, as a constitutional matter, no different than punishing CalMatters for recommending stories to particular users based on their browsing and reading history. Nor, ultimately, is it any different from punishing a tabloid magazine for publishing prurient content on its front page.

So much of this and similar laws seem to be driven by this weird moral panic that anything bad must be blamable on social media. There is little evidence to support this. And, indeed, it misses the complexity of all this. Just to take one example explicitly called out by the bill: eating disorders. As we have shown, multiple studies have argued that merely blaming talk related to eating disorders actually has done more harm than good, and that allowing the conversation to flow often leads to more “pro-recovery” content. The research also showed that attempts to ban such content don’t work because the people who want to talk about eating disorders are going to find a way to do so no matter what, even if they have to make up new words and phrases to make it work.

So if you’re a social media platform how do you deal with this? If you want to avoid lawsuits under this law, you’re likely to shut down any such content and discussions. But that won’t help, because kids will keep having those discussions, they’ll just come up with code words for it. And, because of that, it will be even harder for those trying to help those kids to recover to find and participate in those conversations.

The end result: websites getting sued in more frivolous lawsuits, and kids at even greater risk than before.

The only people this “helps” are parents who don’t want to accept some responsibility if their kids run into problems. That’s not to say that when kids have problems it is the parents’ fault. Sometimes that may contribute to it, though often it’s independent of that. But parents are so scared of anyone thinking they’re bad parents, that it’s quite tempting to have a target like a big social media company to sue.

This is an unconstitutional garbage law that is designed to appease guilty parents in the midst of a moral panic.

The bill still needs to pass the Senate and have the governor sign it, so if you live in California, reach out to your state Senator now and ask them to oppose this. Even if it’s well intentioned, it will do a lot more damage than good.

Filed Under: ab 2408, addiction, blame, buffy wicks, california, jordan cunningham, moral panic, social media