copyright | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Saving the records of our times

The World Wide Web describes our times. San Francisco’s Internet Archive aims to be the keeper of that history

The World Wide Web describes our times but it’s an incomplete document as sites, pages and posts are lost, deleted or edited. San Francisco’s Internet Archive aims to be the keeper of that history.

As example of how fragile our online records are is illustrated by the tale of Kevin Vaughan’s Pulitzer Prize nominated story describing a 1960s community tragedy for the Rocky Mountain News.

The 34 part piece captivated the newspaper’s readership when it was published in 2007 but two years later, the Rocky Mountain News went broke and the story disappeared along with the rest of the website. The Atlantic Magazine describes Vaughan’s efforts to recover and republish his story.

Vaughan’s efforts to recover his work are not unique, websites are constantly being shut down, accounts censored and social media posts deleted. In the Coweb, The New Yorker’s Jill LaPore describes how the Ukrainian militia leader responsible for shooting down MH17 promptly deleted the message showing the plane’s remains and how the Internet Archive preserved that damming post.

Last week in San Francisco the Internet Archive held their Building Libraries Together event where director Brewster Kahle described their efforts to preserve as much of the web as possible for future generations.

The Internet Archive itself is in a restored church that seems almost custom built for the organisation. In her New Yorker piece, essential reading for those wanting to understand the project, LaPore describes Kahle’s affection for the building.

He loves that the church’s cornerstone was laid in 1923: everything published in the United States before that date lies in the public domain. A temple built in copyright’s year zero seemed fated. Kahle hops, just slightly, in his shoes when he gets excited. He says, showing me the church, “It’s Greek!”

For the Building Libraries Together event, the Internet Archive had spread out a series of exhibits on the organisation’s activities that range from trawling the web through to scanning books, digitising movie reels, saving old video games and collecting TV news broadcasts.

One of the important functions the Archive does is create collections around major events – the capture of the MH17 shoot down was part their Ukrainian War collection – which illustrates the problem of ‘link rot’ as many sites set up around events such as the Occupy movement or the Ferguson protests are now dead or occupied by cybersquatters.

Running a service like the Internet Archive is labor intensive and in an expensive city like San Francisco where almost all the staff could be paid substantially better working in the tech sector and the pay isn’t exactly stellar.

Kahle jokes “because we can’t pay stock options, those who stay three years here get a statue made of themselves.

The statues line one side of the old church hall that also doubles as an event space and the server room. At the back of the auditorium are the computers themselves quietly flashing away each time the archive is being read.

For the presentations, Kahle bubbles away with his thoughts on the importance of preserving the Internet and Kalev Hannes Leetaru‘s presentation on data visualisation raised some important topics on copyright and communications which this blog intends to explore deeper in the future.

The final part of the night’s presentation was an award to the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, John Perry Barlow, for his work in trying to keep intellectual property open and accessible.

At the end of the night, the crowd left with their gifts and t-shirts and the exhibits had packed up.

One of the stand out exhibits was the virtual reality stand where an old lady tried an Oculus Rift headset for the first time, “this is wonderful. I just want to reach out and touch everything,” she cried.

Preserving that wonder and the promised possibilities of our time is possibly the most important thing The Internet Archive can do. In an era where many talk of open information but few genuinely practice it, we run the risk of leaving an information dark ages for future generations.

How we preserve a record of our times for future generations is a pressing concern. The Internet Archive is one step to solving that problem.

Links of the day: Connected cars and fast trains

CES, Connected cars, fast trains and copyright laws are today’s links

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas kicks off today with thousands of product announcements at what is by far the biggest technology convention in the world. No doubt news from the show is going to dominate the tech media for the rest of the week.

One of the biggest fields for tech vendors at CES will be Internet of Things with connected cars being in the spotlight with both BMW and General Motors leading the way.

GM unveil their connected car of the future

For some years GM have offered a connected car service with their OneStar system. At this year’s CES they’re showing how they intend to extend the service with more integrated social and navigation services.

Driving the crashless car

While we fixate on the driverless car of the future, the next few years are going to see the technologies be incrementally introduced into our motor vehicles. A good example of this is BMW’s Active Assist that CNET writer Wayne Cunningham claims he could not crash.

The story points out Active Assist isn’t affordable in today’s cars but undoubtedly much of this technology will be standard in many automobiles by the end of the decade.

California starts work on its high speed railway

Cars aren’t the only thing in the news with California turning the first soil in its Los Angeles to San Francisco high speed railway.

This troubled project has been years in the making and it’s not expected to be completed until the end of the next decade at a cost of over 60 billion dollars. An interesting aspect in the story is how communities in California’s Central Valley region are pinning their hopes of an economic resurgence from the project.

Google takedown notices explode

While cars and trains are being reinvented, the entertainment industry is still struggling with its disruption. Torrent freak reports Google is being overwhelmed with movie industry take downs notices.

As the story suggests, this campaign is hurting Google’s relationship with the movie industry.

Playing in the big boys’ sandpits

Businesses using social media, cloud computing and web 2.0 services need to be careful of being shutdown without notice.

The Cool Hunter is a site whose mission is to “select and celebrate what is beautiful and enduring from all that is sought-after in architecture, design, gadgets, lifestyle, urban living, fashion, travel and pop culture.”

In posting cool stuff they find on the web, Cool Hunter always runs the risk of copyright infringement complaints as people have the unfortunate habit of slapping images up onto the Internet without permission from the rights holders.

Last August Cool Hunter’s founder Bill Tikos found the site’s Facebook account had been wiped for ‘repeat copyright infringements’ without warning or recourse.

Anybody following this site won’t be surprised to read this – an exposed nipple can get you thrown off Facebook faster than you can say “New Yorker cartoon” or “it’s only a porcelain doll, for chrissake!” – so one can only imagine the paroxysms of rage that alleged copyright infringement sends Facebook’s puritan bureaucrats into.

It’s not just nipples at Facebook though, thousands of small traders have seen their accounts arbitrarily suspended on sites like eBay and PayPal.

Google too are quick to suspend businesses from their local and search services without warning or recourse. Usually business owners only notice they’ve been locked out when they log into their control panels only to find a terse message that their account has been suspended.

What usually follows is a Kafkaesque tale of trying to understand exactly what they’ve done wrong and how to get their accounts reinstated. In some cases the businesses get cryptic messages saying their accounts are still in breach while others get no response at all. In a few examples, the offending page goes back online only to be shut down again a few days later.

Rarely does someone in this situation find a calm, helpful voice to explain exactly what they have done wrong and how to fix it.

This hostile attitude is a result of the “hands off customer service” model of web 2.0 companies and it’s their biggest achilles heel as, paradoxically, customers and users take to social media to complain about bizarre and arbitrary account suspensions.

For some, like Cool Hunter, it’s a monumental pain and loss of a valuable platform while many of those small eBay and PayPal traders may have thousands of dollars tied up in suspended accounts they can’t access.

Unfortunately this uncertainty is the cost of doing business on social media sites and it’s one of the reasons why owning your own business website is essential.

When you choose to use one of these service, understand you’re playing in the big fat kid’s sandpit and you risk him throwing a tantrum and chucking your toys out of the playpen.

Simply put, don’t base your business on Facebook, don’t keep all your money in PayPal and always have a plan B.

Television rights and clouds

The challenge technology brings to information hoarders.

The Australian Federal Court today handed down their appeal decision in the latest twist in the Optus TV Now copyright case where the National Rugby League claimed the telco’s online recording service breaches the sporting body’s copyright.

Reversing their colleagues earlier decision, the judges found the TV Now service does breach the League’s copyright.

The Court’s reasoning is because the service plays a part in creating a recording the copies cannot be considered an individual’s personal copy to be watched at a later time – therefore they aren’t protected under the personal use provisions of the Copyright Act.

It’s going to be interesting to see where the line is drawn that a computer program or cloud service is infringing copyright.

Could be that copying a video of a football game to Dropbox, Google Drive or Evernote is a copyright breach by those services?

Perhaps online back up services like Carbonite or iCloud could infringe copyright as they automate the copying process?

Even if Optus doesn’t appeal the case to the Australian High Court, the decision will almost eventually tested there by someone else.

Many of the spokespeople – along with and their apologists in the sports and business media – have argued this is about the law falling behind technology.

The court covered this in paragraphs 18 to 25 of the judgement linked above and the judges are quite clear the law was written to be technology neutral.

Calls now to “reform” copyright law in light of the TV Now and AFACT – iiNet cases to “bring the law up to technology” are disingenuous.

While there’s no doubt legislation could be tweaked, there’s the real threat any “reforms” driven by the pleading of the copyright industries and their tame journalist friends will result in more restrictions and damage the take up of modern technologies.

One can’t blame the rights holders for trying to maximise their income, they have to feed the remorseless hungry beast that is modern professional sport – although one wishes they didn’t keep bleating “think of the children” to justify their actions.

We’ve previously seen how sports organisations have felt threatened by every new technology and the profits these new tools have delivered them.

The latest wave of change is no different, although the glory days of sports rights may be another symptom of a changing economy and 1980s thinking.

Hopefully the sports organisations and rights holders won’t be allowed to kill the potential of the these technologies before new business models are allowed to evolve.

You hold us harmless

How the terms of social media sites risk your assets and their business

Social media site Pinterest was recently caught in one of the ongoing quandaries of social media – the ownership of content.

The subject is tricky; social media sites rely on a vibrant community of users posting news and interesting things for their online friends.

Unfortunately many of things social media users post are someone else’s property, so almost every service has a boilerplate legal indemnity term like Pinterest’s.

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold Cold Brew Labs, its officers, directors, employees and agents, harmless from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses, including, without limitation, reasonable legal and accounting fees, arising out of or in any way connected with (i) your access to or use of the Site, Application, Services or Site Content, (ii) your Member Content, or (iii) your violation of these Terms.

Facebook have similar terms (clause 15.1) as do LinkedIn (clause 2.E) and Tumblr (clause 15). Interestingly, Google’s master terms of service only holds businesses liable for the company’s legal costs, not individuals.

Boilerplate terms like these are necessary to provide at least an illusion of legal protections for investors – those venture capital investors, greater fool buyers or punters jumping into the latest hot technology stock offering need a fig leaf that covers the real risk of being sued for copyright infringement by one of their users.

The risk in these terms shouldn’t be understated; by agreeing to them a user assumes the liability of any costs the service incurs from the user’s posts. Those costs don’t have to be a successful lawsuit against the service, it could be something as minor as responding to a lawyer’s nastygram or DMCA takedown notice.

Of course, none of the major social media platforms have any intention of using these indemnity terms; they know that the first time they go after a user all trust in the service will evaporate and their business collapse.

Somewhere among the thousands of social media services though there is going to be one that will pull this stunt. Strapped for cash and slapped with an outrageous claim for copyright damages, the company’s board will settle then send out their own demands to the users responsible.

Those “responsible” users – probably white, middle class folk sitting in somewhere in the US Midwest, South East England or North Island of New Zealand – will be baffled by the legal demand that requires them to file a defense somewhere obscure in California or Texas and will go to their lawyer friends.

When the lawyers tell them what it means their next step will be to their local news outlet.

The moment the story of a middle class person facing losing all their assets hits the wires is the moment the entire social media business model starts to wobble.

In many ways what the social media sites are trying to do is offset risk.

Risk though is like toothpaste. Squeeze the tube in one place and the pressure moves elsewhere.

By laying off a real risk by using legal terms the social media sites create new, even bigger risks elsewhere in their business.

The dumb thing is these terms really don’t protect the services anyway – it’s unlikely the typical social media user will have anything like the assets to cover the costs of a major copyright action by a rich, determined plaintiff.

It’s going to be interesting to see how many services still have these indemnity clauses in 12 months.

For the industry’s sake, the big players will need to have ditched these terms before that first dumb attempt to claim damages from users hits the wires.

When tails wag dogs

Have essential functions taken over business?

A recent Business Insider examination of how patent “aggregator” Intellectual Ventures works is a good example of one of the problems in modern business – essential ancillary processes have overtaken doing business itself.

Intellectual property rights are an important part of doing business, however what should be an adjunct to doing business has consumed many enterprises.

As the Business Insider article point out, Intellectual Ventures has become some sort of modern day privateer, extracting loot from hapless companies that cross its path.

This problem with intellectual property is part of a larger problem with lawyers, where they have been given too important a role in business.

In any civilised society lawyers are essential and carry out an important role but in western society over the last fifty the scope of the legal system has expanded so dramatically that now the legal tail wags the business dog.

Today company directors, business owners and entrepreneurs live under the shadow of breaching some obscure law that they had no inkling existed. Of course, the lawyers can help with this.

A similar thing has happened in the financial world, accountants have also moved from being an essential adjunct of business into being at the centre of most enterprises.

Much of this explosion in lawyering and accounting has been due to the increased role of government in our lives; each time a new law or regulation is enacted it makes it harder for the average person, or business owner, to understand the system.

A cynic can argue this is by design but most government actions are intended to address some injustice or flaw in society. The problem is there are always unintended consequences.

One can also argue that the increased growth in business overheads like lawyers, accountants and patent attorneys is because of fat, prosperous business conditions.

So maybe what western business has seen in the last fifty years has been because of a favorable market place; politicians have introduced a morass of often contradictory financial and legal rules because they know business, and society, can afford it.

Now times have changed and both business and society can’t afford unnecessary overheads it will be interesting to see exactly how our laws and regulations evolve to respond.

Maybe they won’t and we’ll see a black economy develop where whole groups of society ignore the rules, dispense with lawyers and accountants and hope for the best. This would not be good.

Possibly we’ll see legislatures and courts winding back and reigning in some of the more silly and egregious excesses as they recognise society can’t carry the burden and remain productive.

Whatever happens we can be sure the lawyers, accountants and people like Intellectual Ventures will fight hard against any change that reduces their status and income.

Paying the piper – the cost of the internet’s walled gardens

The web’s walled gardens have a real business cost

With the web increasingly dominated by four major, and many minor, fiefdoms the cost of being part of those groups is gradually becoming clear.

As part of Facebook filings in advance of their public float they published the key agreements with their developer partners including that with games provider Zygna, technology journalist Tom Foremski has a disturbing look at Facebook’s conditions that illustrate the costs and risks.

In terms of the costs, Tom identifies Clause 2.1 of Facebook’s “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” – shown as Annex 1 in the Developers as probably the biggest price for all content creators;

… you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

So by sharing something on Facebook, you grant Facebook the right to do what they like with what you’ve created. That’s something worth thinking about.

For anybody trying to make a living off Facebook, it’s important to consider they also retain the right to throw you off the service at any time. From clause 4.10 of the Statement Of Rights Annex;

If you select a username for your account we reserve the right to remove or reclaim it if we believe appropriate (such as when a trademark owner complains about a username that does not closely relate to a user’s actual name).

So get into a trademark dispute with a big corporation – and often their lawyers cast a very wide net on potential similar spellings – and your account is shut down.

There’s also the specifics of the Zynga agreement that should concern anyone investing in the games company. Right at the beginning of the agreement we see this clause;

The parties further acknowledge that Zynga is making a significant commitment to the Facebook Platform (i.e., using Facebook as the exclusive Social Platform on the Zynga Properties and granting FB certain title exclusivities to Zynga games on the Facebook Platform). In exchange for such commitment, [*] the parties have committed to set certain growth targets for monthly unique users of Covered Zynga Games.

So Zynga is closely tied into the fortunes of Facebook, we knew that on a business level but now we know just how deep and binding the agreements are.

We should be clear, all the major social media and online services have similar clauses on intellectual property and copyright infringements; there’s no shortage of businesses who’ve been caught out by eBay or Paypal and plenty of people found their Google accounts shut down by their obsession with real names.

For all businesses the message is clear – be careful before committing totally to one online platform or another. Should you end up in a dispute, or find you’ve backed the wrong service, it may be a very costly process to get your company off that platform.