We’ve written about CreativeAmerica a few times. This is the astroturfing operation set up by the major Hollywood studios, pretending to be “grassroots.” Of course, as we’ve noted, they can’t seem to find very many supporters at all. In the entire month of November, when there was a ton of news about these issues, it appears that a grand total of 161 new people signed up for its letter-to-Congress offering. In contrast to that, folks protesting SOPA were able to get over a million emails sent to Congress and over 87,000 phone calls in just one day. And how did that happen? Because those of us opposed to SOPA and PROTECT IP just asked our communities, and they did so.
The major Hollywood Studios do the same… and they get 161 new supporters over an entire month. It’s kinda pitiful, but it really shows how little the public supports Hollywood in this campaign to censor the internet.
Either way, it appears that Hollywood is now trying to do what it does best: buy support. Since its efforts to just rally the troops directly has failed miserably, it’s kicking off a big ad campaign, buying TV commercial spots on both broadcast and cable TV. The commercial itself is incredibly misleading and repeats a bunch of the standard myths:
It also goes with the standard scare tactics of “evil content theft.” It’s amazing that the industry bigwigs still haven’t figured out that no one believes that claim (well, other than some folks in Congress). Either way, it’s yet another example of the stark contrast in how the public views this bill. Those in favor have to buy their support, while those opposed just talk to people and tons of people speak out. One of these days, perhaps folks in Congress will realize that these people vote.
A few folks pointed out Bruce Iglauer’s opinion piece in the Chicago Tribune, urging support for PROTECT IP. It’s a little odd, because the piece never mentions SOPA at all, and applauds the “introduction” of PROTECT IP (PIPA), despite that happening many months ago. Either way, while I’m sure that Iglauer, an old school indie label founder and operator, means well, his arguments make almost no sense. First, he runs through all the usual tropes about how “you wouldn’t steal a stick of gum.” Of course, that should be a sign that perhaps (just perhaps) something is different online. Instead, people like Iglauer, after fundamentally recognizing digital works are different, then pretends they should be treated the same. Then it’s time for strawmen:
This kind of theft is often rationalized as “all musicians are rich anyway” or “all the record companies are ripping off the musicians” or “music should be free.”
Thing is, almost none of these arguments are regularly used by those worried about PIPA and SOPA. I’ve never heard anyone say that “all musicians are rich anyway.” And while I’m sure someone, somewhere, may have made those latter two arguments, they’re far from common, and not the reason most people are opposed to this overly aggressive, draconian legal mess.
He then goes on to knock down the strawmen he set up, pointing out that many musicians are poor. Um. Yes. That’s how it’s always been. That’s got nothing to do with copyright infringement. In fact, the internet has allowed many, many more musicians to make money from their works than ever before. In the past, most artists made nothing (or went into debt). Now it’s much, much easier to make some money. That seems like progress. But Iglauer seems to be suggesting that copyright should be welfare for artists who can’t succeed. I don’t see how that makes much sense. He puts forth some sob stories of artists who don’t make much money and then proudly states that “about one dollar of ever four that my company takes in is paid to a musician or songwriter.”
Is that really something to be proud of? Perhaps it beats the much lower royalty rates of the majors, but for artists adopting new platforms like Kickstarter and TopSpin, they can retain the vast majority of money that people pay for their stuff. That seems like a good opportunity for artists. Though, perhaps not for Iglauer.
Later, he laughably calls the IFPI’s piracy estimates “the most conservative estimates.” That’s ridiculous. The IFPI’s estimates are not conservative in any way, and are based on the group’s desire to push for more draconian copyright laws and enforcement.
Finally, he fails to acknowledge even a single reason why so many people are up in arms about PIPA and how it is overly broad and leads to a very high likelihood of abuse and censorship. Reading this, all I can think is, there’s a label that failed to adapt to changing times and now thinks that it’s the government’s responsibility to fix his business mistakes. Sorry, Bruce, but that’s not the way things should work.
We’ve pointed out, more than a few times, that it seems like so many of the big “terrorist plots” that the FBI has been “breaking up” (to tremendous fanfare and press coverage) really appear to be the FBI’s own terror plots. It appears we’re not alone in that assessment. The Guardian recently had an excellent article highlighting these same concerns:
Critics say the FBI is running a sting operation across America, targeting ? to a large extent ? the Muslim community by luring people into fake terror plots. FBI bureaux send informants to trawl through Muslim communities, hang out in mosques and community centres, and talk of radical Islam in order to identify possible targets sympathetic to such ideals. Or they will respond to the most bizarre of tip-offs, including, in one case, a man who claimed to have seen terror chief Ayman al-Zawahiri living in northern California in the late 1990s.
That tipster was quickly hired as a well-paid informant. If suitable suspects are identified, FBI agents then run a sting, often creating a fake terror plot in which it helps supply weapons and targets. Then, dramatic arrests are made, press conferences held and lengthy convictions secured.
But what is not clear is if many real, actual terrorists are involved.
While we always get attacked whenever we use the word “entrapment” to describe these kinds of cases, it appears that at least some of the folks charged in these cases are going to try to claim entrapment in court. It may be tough to find a sympathetic court, considering many of those involved did effectively say they would take part in an attack. But if every part of it was orchestrated and paid for by the FBI… then the whole operation seems questionable. The real issue is why this is a tactic the FBI uses. It’s almost as if they feel the need to “create” fake plots to stop just to justify their existence (and very, very large budget).
The issues of SOPA/PROTECT IP and censoring the internet are slowly creeping into more mainstream news sources. PBS Newshour hosted a brief debate, mostly focused on the recent domain seizures. The debate was between Steven Tepp, the former Copyright Office official, who jumped ship to the world’s largest lobbying organization, the US Chamber of Commerce (who, along with the MPAA has been leading the charge in getting SOPA and PROTECT IP approved) and Larry Downes, author and consultant, whose excellent work on both the domain seizures and SOPA/PIPA we’ve mentioned repeatedly. Unfortunately, as you might expect in 10 minutes, it’s hard for anyone to get into much depth. I think Downes made a key point early on in noting that these domain seizures are almost entirely “symbolic,” since the sites themselves aren’t seized.
But what I really wanted to focus on was how Tepp misleads with statistics. This is a specialty of the US Chamber of Commerce, and Tepp plays exactly to expectations here. First, you can watch the full 9 minute video, if you’d like:
And let’s call out the specific examples of how Tepp misleads with stats:
“The scope of the problem is unbelievably huge. Rogue websites — those dedicated to the theft of American intellectual property, our creative and innovative products — get over 53 billion visits every year. That’s 9 visits for every human being on the face of the earth. And they’ve been estimated to do at least $135 billion in harm to legitimate businesses. The products they sell are made in completely unregulated facilities, and can often be, not only shoddy, but harmful to consumers’ health.”
So much misleading in one little paragraph. Lets start with the 53 billion claim. Guess what? It’s from a US Chamber of Commerce-funded study by an anti-piracy monitoring company called MarkMonitor. And the details suggest serious problems with the study. First, the study itself was based on Alexa, widely considered the least accurate web traffic measuring tool out there. Second, the number of “visits” to any site is an especially meaningless number — especially when trying to discuss the actual economic impact of such visits. Who cares how many visits there are if we don’t know anything about what people do on those sites?
Third, a large percentage of those visits all come from three sites: RapidShare, Megavideo and Megaupload. These are three cyberlockers that the industry has declared as “rogue,” but which have significant legitimate purposes. Rapidshare, in particular, has been repeatedly ruled to be perfectly legal, both in Europe and in the US. The company follows DMCA takedown rules and has plenty of legitimate uses. Including Rapidshare in these calculations makes the whole thing a joke. And none of those sites are involved in “selling” counterfeit goods that put US citizens in harm’s way.
Fourth, that “estimated to do at least $135 billion in harm,” is a totally made up number. The US Chamber of Commerce cites a different MarkMonitor report to support that. But it’s not actually a report or a study or anything like that at all. Instead, it’s promotional “white paper” (read: sales pitch) from MarkMonitor entitled “Seven Best Practices for Fighting Counterfeit Sales Online.” That report does say that “criminals” setting up ecommerce storefronts “will likely cost legitimate businesses $135 billion in lost revenue this year.” But it doesn’t source that number. Notably, other statistics in the report are sourced. Which makes you realize that the $135 billion is basically made up. But Tepp doesn’t mention that.
Fifth, he focuses on “the products they sell.” This is the really slimy part, for which Tepp should be ashamed (if the man had any shame at all). The obvious implication of all of this is that when you tie together these disparate numbers — you’ve got 53 billion visits to sites selling counterfeit goods that may be harmful to consumers. We’ve already pointed out that the 53 billion is bogus — but it’s even more bogus when combined with this final sentence. That’s because that same MarkMonitor report that gave us the 53 billion, also notes that the traffic to sites selling counterfeit goods is a minuscule percentage of the 53 billion. Specifically, the same report says that the sites selling counterfeit goods receive merely 87 million per year… or 0.1642%. That’s not 16.42%. Or even 1.642%. It’s 0.1642% of the total. In other words, the sites actually selling counterfeits… seem pretty small.
Sixth: even that exaggerates the problem — because even then you’d have to assume that every one of those sites involves selling counterfeits that are shoddy or harmful. But that’s crazy. Most counterfeits are merely replica versions, that are passable. They’re not harmful in any way. So now we’re talking about significantly less than 0.1642% of the big scary 53 billion he’s talking about. Basically, the 53 billion, besides being meaningless in general, has no connection to the rest of the claims about losses and harm to consumers. It’s complete and utter bunk.
What you have here is that Tepp and others are taking a real, but tiny problem: mainly an exceptionally small number of counterfeit drugs, and then pretending that the “harm” is broad and applying it to sites already judged to be perfectly legal, because some people use them for copyright infringement. The reports he relies on actually show what a tiny problem this is, but tries to mask that by lumping a bunch of totally disparate things together, from the tiny percentage of fake drugs out there… to the already judged to be legal cyberlockers like Rapidshare.
Tepp’s misleading bogosity doesn’t stop there. He then goes on to claim that these sites “steal jobs.” Um, how? But beyond the rhetoric, lets get back to the misleading numbers. Later on he states:
“Another study, earlier this year, showed that 19 million Americans have jobs that rely on ‘IP-intensive industries.’ This is a huge part of the American economy. 60% of US exports are from ‘IP-intensive industries’ and $7.7 trillion dollars are output from ‘IP-intensive industries.'”
This one we’ve attacked head on before. The intellectually dishonest bit here is easy to spot. It’s the reliance on “IP-intensive industries.” Not IP. The “study,” if you can call it that, involves the biggest maximalists teaming up to fund a report that defines “IP-intensive industries” extremely broadly and then pretends that everything that comes from such industries… is because of strong IP laws. That’s ridiculous, because you know who’s included in the “IP intensive industries”? Basically every tech company — including all of those which are fighting against these crazy new laws.
Tepp is being intellectually dishonest in the extreme here, suggesting that the only reason that the broadly defined “IP-intensive industries” are so successful is because of IP law. But that’s showed to be bogus quite simply. As CCIA has done for years, it uses the very same methodology to show that exceptions to IP contribute more to the economy than IP laws themselves. You can’t except one report without accepting the other since the methodologies are identical. There are only two logical conclusions from this: (1) the suggestion that those jobs, exports and output numbers are due to IP are complete bunk or (2) Tepp and the US Chamber of Commerce really believe we should do away with IP completely, since his own favored methodology shows that the less IP laws we have, the greater the output. So which is it, Steve?
Either way, Tepp is being painfully intellectually dishonest throughout the entire interview, citing facts and figures that are misleading in the extreme, if not completely bogus. What’s unfortunate is that none of the press that lets Tepp speak his mind ever calls him on these ridiculous claims.
We’ve talked about CreativeAmerica, the astroturfing group set up by the major Hollywood studios, pretending to be a “grassroots effort” in favor of SOPA & PIPA. A month ago, we challenged the group’s claim that it had “sent 100,000 letters to Congress.” Turns out that wasn’t true. They had sent 4,191, and then about 33,000 people had “signed a petition” that the group had set up. The math by CreativeAmerica is that each thing sent out three letters: one to your Congressional Representative and one to each of your two Senators. Of course, petitions are mostly ignored. Letters have only slightly more weight — and based on Creative America’s own math, they really only had about 1,400 people sign their letter.
We are writing to ask you for help on an issue that is one our top business priorities ? content theft on the Internet, which is a major threat to the strength of our business. Our major guilds and unions are joining us in the fight to keep our businesses strong so that the tidal wave of content theft does not kill jobs. But if the current trend continues, it?s not too strong to say that this threat could adversely affect our business relationship with you.
Grassroots effort? When NBC Universal’s General Counsel, Rick Cotton — who famously once claimed that piracy was destroying the lowly corn farmer, since people who watch pirated movies don’t eat popcorn (or something) — is threatening suppliers who don’t sign on? That’s not grassroots. That’s just insane. Now, it’s true that Cotton wrote this carefully such that you can read it to suggest it means that if this law doesn’t pass, NBC Universal’s business will be in so much trouble that it has to shut down or cut off deals with suppliers. But it seems pretty clear that the obvious implication is: sign this or we may no longer do business with you.
But, given that “the big guns” at NBC Universal are pushing all their suppliers to directly sign (or else!) the letter found at CreativeAmerica’s site, you might think that a lot more people would have signed on. Especially over the last month, with SOPA making so much news. So we went and checked.
It appears that 4,673 letters have been sent. A month ago it was 4,191. That’s a grand total of 482 new letters sent since we last checked almost a month ago. That means in a month, with this story making major news every which way… and the major studios putting a lot of marketing muscle behind it and even threatening partners to sign on, they only rustled up 482 more signatures. And, since CreativeAmerica claims that each person who signs really sends 3 letters, we should divide that by three.
That gives us 161 new signatures (actually 160.666666 etc — which makes me wonder what happened to that extra third of a person). 161. In a month.
Meanwhile, a real grassroots campaign turned out one million emails to Congress and 87,834 calls in one day. It should be clear at this point that the public clearly does not support SOPA/PIPA, and no amount of “faking it” is driving any public support.
Senator Joe Lieberman, taking a break from his usual schedule of trying to stamp out all things Wikileaks-related, returns to his old anti-terrorism stomping grounds, sending out a letter to Google CEO Larry Page, expressing his concern that not enough stuff is getting labeled “terrorism.”
He bases his request on the old “because someone did something once” argument that has served the DHS and TSA so well. (See also: “See something. Say something.” because that one time a guy reported a vehicle with a bomb. See also: please remove your shoes and step into the Pornoscan because one time that guy tried to light his shoes on fire and that other time a guy had bomb-laced underwear.) Recent “lone wolf” terrorism suspect Jose Pimentel was, like so many other people in the world, a blogger. Lieberman apparently believes that the prevention of future acts of terrorism should be turned over to the blogosphere in the form of an option to “flag” a blog as containing “terrorist” content.
“Pimentel’s Internet activity – both his spreading of bomb-making instructions links and his hate-filled writings – were hosted by Google,” Lieberman wrote.
“On his site www.trueislam1.com, Pimentel stated, ‘People have to understand that America and its allies are legitimate targets in warfare. This includes facilities such as army bases, police stations, political facilities, embassies, CIA and FBI buildings, private and public airports, and all kinds of buildings where money is being made to help fund the war.’ As demonstrated by this recent case, Google’s webhosting site, Blogger is being used by violent Islamist extremists to broadcast terrorist content,” Lieberman continued.
Lieberman also points out that Youtube already has this option (thanks to Liberman’s tireless complaining), so it would logically follow that Blogger enforce the same limitations. In fact, he pretty much states that the same people that can prevent forest fires can also prevent terrorism (i.e. “You,” meaning “all of us”), only in this case it can be done with a simple click of the mouse.
“The private sector plays an important role in protecting our homeland from the preeminent threat of violent Islamist extremism, and Google’s inconsistent standards are adversely affecting our ability to counter Islamic extremism online.”
Oh, wait. We can’t actually stop terrorism. We can only flag “Islamist extremism,” which for some people could mean the site quotes the Koran. For others, all it might take is a few angry words delivered by certain foreign types. And for others, all they need is the urge to start pushing buttons.
This is another attempt by a politician to shove the culpability for terrorist acts onto the shoulders of hosting platforms. By all means, Google could add a “Report as TERROR” button to its blogging platform, but does anyone not named Lieberman actually believe that this will ever prevent a future act of terrorism? I’d rather potential terrorists bogged themselves down in the minutia of blogging (endlessly checking stats, rescuing legitimate comments from the spam container, arguing with pesky commenters, following incoming links back into malware deathtraps, gaming their Technorati rating, etc.) than actually, you know, doing terrorist stuff.
There’s also the fact that “flagging something as something” has got to be the most ineffective deterrent ever devised, whether you’re trying to stomp out spam or to do something more difficult, like save the world from “Islamist extremism.” Not only will whoever’s policing this new banhammer have to deal with a new set of false positives, this also puts Google in the awkward position of trying to decide if the blogs reported are actually harmful or just some random person spouting a bunch of untargeted nonsense.
And if Google does decide to start doing this, odds are that there will be a bunch of racially-motivated clicking going on, which will only add to the “noise” side of the signal-to-noise ratio. Once you start shutting down a particular religion based on clicks — all because the federal government demanded it — you’re asking for all sorts of trouble in the First Amendment arena. Uglier than this is the fact that asking for a “Report” button is yet another punt by those in charge of keeping this country safe. The implicit statement seems to be “We can’t figure out how to stop terrorists so we’re leaving that to you,” which would make this no different from every previous foiled terrorist attack. It’s not the DHS, TSA or air marshals that stop terrorists. When they’re not being foiled by their own incompetence, they’re being taken down by fellow passengers. A plea for a “Report as Terrorism” button has all the hallmarks of another windmill tilt in the hopes of appearing to be doing “something.”
Ah, the Authors Guild. I don’t think there’s any group out there that has done more to hold back authors and important innovations that those authors need. Any new technology or innovation that comes along, the Authors Guild reflexively freaks out about it. Full text search to help you find books you might want to buy? Not allowed. Letting ebook readers use crappy text-to-speech to read aloud? The Authors Guild makes up a mythical “audio right,” and threatens to sue. Then, of course, this is the same Authors Guild who is suing Google for scanning books and suing five universities for making it easier for students to access orphaned works.
So I guess it should come as no surprise that the group is now freaking out about Amazon’s extremely limited “lending library” feature for ebooks. The service lets Kindle owners “borrow” one book a month for free. To appease potentially angry authors and publishers, Amazon made it clear that this doesn’t actually impact revenue to publishers.
The “vast majority” are there following an agreement with the publishers to include the books for a fixed fee, while “in some cases”, Amazon said it was purchasing the title under standard wholesale terms each time it is borrowed, “as a no-risk trial to demonstrate to publishers the incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents”.
The Authors Guild’s response is to continue to portray itself as out of touch and clueless on important innovations. It suggested that none of the books in the “lending library” are there legitimately. And it doesn’t care that Amazon still pays when the books are borrowed. Because the Authors Guild’s out of touch views also seem to include a scorched earth provision, where any new innovation they don’t like must be destroyed if it ever so slightly changes the way people enjoy books.
Zauber Paracelsus points us to a Kotaku report of the National Gang Intelligence Center’s National Gang Threat Assessment for 2011. Kotaku specifically takes the report to task for its inclusion of Second Life as a tool used by gangs to communicate and recruit. While that in and of itself is pretty funny, the whole section on technology is worth a read for the “what the crap?” moments.
In the key findings of the report (PDF and Embedded Below) the NGIC lays out its primary concern over the technology used by gangs:
Gangs are becoming increasingly adaptable and sophisticated, employing new and advanced technology to facilitate criminal activity discreetly, enhance their criminal operations and connect with other gang members, criminal organizations, and potential recruits nationwide and even worldwide.
Basically, the concern is that the internet has allowed gangs to move outside neighborhoods and cities and spread their influence throughout the world. That can be a concern for law enforcement, but do we really need to worry this much about it?
Gang members routinely utilize the Internet to communicate with one another, recruit, promote their gang, intimidate rivals and police, conduct gang business, showcase illegal exploits, and facilitate criminal activity… Social networking, microblogging, and video-sharing websites – such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter – are now more accessible, versatile, and allow tens of thousands of gang members to easily communicate, recruit and form new gang alliances nationwide and world wide.
So here the NGIC lays out some more specific concerns over the use of social networking. Yet, aside from the criminal activity portions of this complaint, the same could be said of any group that is trying to spread its message. Take for instance the recent Occupy Wall Street movement. It started in New York and has now spread throughout the US primarily by the use of the same social network sites listed as used by gangs. Looking further back at the Spring Uprising in the Middle East and Africa, they too used social networking to build their protests. It should really come to no surprise to anyone that the same tools used by peaceful groups would also be employed by gangs and other violent groups.
Luckily, the report does not go as far as suggesting any kind action plan on just what to do about this technology employed by gangs. Based on recent actions in the US, such as that taken by BART, we would probably see more calls for removing anonymity, expanded monitoring capabilities and the ability to shut off such services if they are used by gangs and their members. Much like the attempts to thwart piracy through legislation such as SOPA/PROTECT-IP, such a move will not stop any law breaking group or person from doing what they do. Such a move will only harm the law abiding citizens and groups that rely on such tools for communication. This is a lesson that many people in the government continue to fail to learn.
It’s the most unintentionally hilarious video of the year… Viacom has put out one of the most ridiculous “anti-piracy” propaganda videos yet, complete with debunked stats, ridiculous claims, ominous music… and lots and lots of Viacom employees admitting that they’re too clueless to adapt to a changing marketplace, and begging you to give them money so they can keep their jobs. Seriously. As the video goes on, the claims get more and more ridiculous, to the point where someone even threatens that if you don’t keep buying Viacom products, Spongebob might no longer exist. And, really, that’s the hilarious part. So much of the video is just people begging others to save them. They beg people to give them money. They beg the government to save their jobs. Nowhere, however, do they talk about actually adapting. Nowhere do they talk about making use of what the internet provides to build bigger audiences, to promote better, and to better monetize. Because that’s the kind of stuff that Viacom just doesn’t do. It just begs others to cover up for its own business failures.
Remember, this is the same company where the CEO made $84.5 million last year (a $50 million raise). I’d embed the video here, but remember that Viacom is trying to sue YouTube out of existence, so they didn’t put it up on YouTube… in fact, they didn’t put it up in a manner that lets you embed it anywhere. So you’ll just have to go to Viacom’s website and watch the video directly there yourself… costing Viacom’s bandwidth. They could have gotten that bandwidth for free if they’d just posted the video to YouTube… but, as we’re told in the video, “free” is “stealing.” And it destroys jobs. Except for Viacom’s CEO. He’s doing okay.
To hear some people tell it, “cyber bullying” is some huge and awful problem where “something” needs to be done. It’s a classic moral panic situation, but usually seems to involve parents totally overreacting. We’ve pointed out in the past that kids don’t view it as bullying and now some new research from the folks at Pew have pointed out that online bullying and general “meanness” really isn’t all that common. Yes, it does happen. And it sucks for those who are the target of such bullying. But that’s no reason to overreact and need to pass crazy legislation to wipe out the First Amendment in some quixotic effort to outlaw being mean.
