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How Copyright Enforcement Robots Killed the Hugo Awards
- miahi 14y agoIt is way cheaper to ban everything in sight than have the copyright holders' lawyers banging at your door for infringement. All the rest is just bad support, but ustream are covered by their terms: "[...] we also reserve the right to terminate the Site, Services or your access thereto at any time and for any reason". Using this kind of service as your unique way to broadcast is not the way to go. Next time you are using a free service with such terms, google for all the other similar services and use them as well. "Always have backups" applies everywhere.
- antoinevg 14y agoCheaper until everyone follows the advice to take their business elsewhere. Then what?
- Evbn 14y agoElse where? When the copyright cartel has all vendors under under their control...
- briandear 14y agoYeah, that pesky cartel, trying to protect their stuff. How dare they! This case isn't a case of the copyright cartel -- the content producers gave permission for usage. It's a case of inferior software being used. Copyright law isn't the problem, shitty software is. UStream ought to have a way to pre-authorize content to prevent this stuff from happening in the first place. They should have been more aware of the quirks of their system and planned accordingly. This is just an example of bad technical leadership on the Ustream team.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoMaybe. Until nobody is banging on your door because they don't trust you to provide the service you say you are going to provide. Notwithstanding fair use (which really takes a judge to decide), it wouldn't be hard to come up with a list of clips that will be shown and get promotional permission to show them. These are essentially free ads, FFS! Alternative: maybe it's time for some good fair-use cases to be heard.
- acabal 14y agoDefinitely ridiculous. But this creates a case for hosting your own stream, instead of relying on a capricious 3rd party who is too scared of media cartels to serve its customers properly. It might be a little more work to set up, but that's the price you pay in today's hyper-litigious copyright-mad world.
- lambada 14y agoYes, it is more work but also in terms of the bandwidth to serve these awards via their own service it would be far more expensive (not to mention hard to maintain reliability of service). Yes, I suspect most of us could pull a basic stream together pretty quickly, but that stream would likely not be up to the standard that would be expected of such a prestigious ceremony.
- windle 14y agoExactly why we need Bittorrent Live to take off. P2P live video streaming can help bypass shoddy bots.
- rabidsnail 14y agoHate to rain on your parade, but ISP-level NAT is coming (it's already here on mobile) and it breaks P2P. Hole-punching doesn't work, you can't manually open ports, and they don't support UPnP. If everyone is behind a nat who is left to tunnel through? Why, a central platform! Skype already went down this road.
- jordanthoms 14y agoHopefully ISPs will be smart enough to provide native ipv6 before they start doing NAT on their ipv4 addresses.
- rabidsnail 14y agoGiven that they're all also cable tv providers, I'm not sure how smart providing ipv6 would be.
- WildUtah 14y agoCopyright enforcement didn't kill the broadcast. Choosing an incompetent streamer killed the broadcast. The streamer still hasn't even responded to the users and organizers. There are a lot of streaming providers that want your business. Choose better next time.
- lukejduncan 14y agoI think it's a fair statement for one big reason: this isn't an isolated case. You can find hundreds if not thousands of examples on YouTube of legitimate fair use being censored because it's more financially prohibitive to piss of lawyers who want to sue for everything than customers who want to use your service. Could they have used a different streamer? Sure. Would this have still happened? Probably not but who knows. Does this represent a trend in copyright enforcement? Yep.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoAny streamer becomes incompetent once takedown notices start arriving. Competent streamer becomes economically infeasible. Every time you hear a song on the radio you should remember: this was brought to you by people who also happily destroy everything good in this world, everything worthy.
- rabidsnail 14y agoWe're not talking about a high school football game here. Ustream must have known that they were carrying the Tony's, and should have had a human in the loop.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoIn my experiences, manual backoffice that lets a human in a loop is rarely implemented (at all), rarely works and is frequently broken. This is because the development process stimulates features and automation and such a backoffice has to touch every system while bypassing many checks. It's a perrenial pain in the ass. So I expect a lot of companies and processes to lack "Plan B" entirely.
- hcarvalhoalves 14y agoIt's easy for the author to say that "dumb robots, programmed to kill any broadcast containing copyrighted material, had destroyed the only live broadcast of the Hugo Awards". What he ignores, though, is how easy it is for them to get sued about copyright infringement. That's what copyright law creates: fear, uncertainty and overly complex, confusing DRM systems.
- eurleif 14y agoI don't know of any law which would require Ustream to actively monitor broadcasts for copyright violation. Do you?
- rmc 14y agoNo law explicit, no. But there is loads of laws they may break and loads of ways many rich companies could sue them if they didn't use bots like this.
- icebraining 14y agoI don't see any. As long as they comply with DMCA takedown requests, they should be under safe harbor status.
- mikeash 14y agoUntil a *AA gets tired of them "taking advantage" of the law and sues them into oblivion... won't even matter that they were on the right side of the law.
- icebraining 14y agoIt's not that clearcut: https://torrentfreak.com/rapidshare-not-guilty-of-copyright-infringement-us-court-rules-100520/ https://torrentfreak.com/rapidshare-not-guilty-of-copyright-...
- A1kmm 14y ago
- scdoshi 14y agoMaybe http://www.tapin.tv/ http://www.tapin.tv/ could have filled in when the official stream went down. Crowdsource the stream?
- mtgx 14y agoP2P WebRTC can't come soon enough.
- HoLyVieR 14y agoWith Flash you can use the RTMFP protocol to do the exact same thing (stream audio, video and data in P2P). It's just not a very known technology. If you really can't wait for P2P technology for browser you can check it : http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/. As far as I know, it's the only way to do true P2P in a browser.
- mtgx 14y agoAutomated copyright enforcement like what Ustream has and Youtube's ContentID are horrible. Imagine what would happen if the rightholders cartel manage to pass a treaty like ACTA, where ISP's are responsible for user's watching behavior. It doesn't seem too far off to think that they will implement an automated system like this, too, and then you'll find yourself banned from visiting a large portion of the Internet.
- jorgem 14y agoSomeday, somehow, someone will take down the Super Bowl or the World Cup final off "network television". I don't know how it will happen exactly -- maybe part of the network stream will go over the internet on it's way to/from a satellite feed, or something. That day, the shit will hit the fan.
- rabidsnail 14y agoThere's no way the NFL is going to distribute their video over a public platform. CDN, yes, but CDN's don't have the same pressure from copyright holders that public platforms do, and don't fingerprint.
- rabidsnail 14y agoThey do video fingerprinting with Vobile, which probably found a match and triggered an automated takedown. Ustream is incompetent, but Vobile is the villain here. http://www.ustream.tv/blog/2010/07/16/launch-of-improved-measures-to-protect-copyright-holders-and-vobile-integration/ http://www.ustream.tv/blog/2010/07/16/launch-of-improved-mea... http://www.vobileinc.com/ http://www.vobileinc.com/
- SeanLuke 14y agoIt seems to me that the basic problem was that the Hugo awards decided to broadcast using a service provider without a contractual arrangement. Is the Hugo really that low-rent? If you're doing something big, always draw up a contract. Otherwise you're subject to terms like... https://www.ustream.tv/terms-popup https://www.ustream.tv/terms-popup [see sections 11, 12, and 13]
- memset 14y agoLots of people are saying that this is not evidence that copyright is evil; only overreaching enforcement is. I'd submit that, increasingly, these two ideas are indistinguishable. I'm very much in favor of copyright (after all, I make a living by creating protected works) but as automated and over-reaching enforcement like this becomes the norm, it is increasingly difficult for me to defend this position. Unfortunately, I don't know what the "next best alternative" to copyright protection is. That is, what kind of system would one need to protect us from these kinds of incidents?
- rabidsnail 14y agoNo monopoly protection at all, and all culture would be funded by kickstarter (or clones).
- krichman 14y agoThis would work just fine for, say, Louis CK, but how would unknown/new artists earn any money at all?
- antidoh 14y agoWork as waiters and barristas and software developers until their art pays the bills. Just like now.
- briandear 14y agoWhat's your address? I want to help myself to all of your stuff. So what if you've worked for it. I want it so I should have it. Private citizens ought not have the right to retain ownership of anything. Everything should be free right? So let's start at your house. It's cool though, you can have a kickstarter to buy new stuff. I might even chip in $5.
- derleth 14y agoI want the right to root through your mail and remove anything that belongs to me. You can trust me because not trusting me means you're stealing from me, and stealing is wrong.
- beedogs 14y agoI'm starting to think the concept of "intellectual property" is more trouble than it's worth. A lot more trouble.
- briandear 14y agoThe irony is that you wouldn't have the Hugo awards with no IP protection. The publishers wouldn't publish any of the books because there'd be no profit and the writers wouldn't write because they'd have to get jobs doing something else because the writing wouldn't pay the bills. Why the hell should someone's creation not be protected from theft? If I write an amazing novel, why should it be ok for someone else to put their name on it and distribute it everywhere? Why shouldn't I be allowed to sell products using someone else's logo? Without IP protection, you don't have IP and you won't have any incentive for people to try and create something better. I wouldn't work years on a project only to have some jackass steal it.
- cturner 14y agoThere were books published before copyright existed, and would be if copyright was removed. With only a handful of exceptions, successful writing isn't enough to make a good living under the current regime, where writers make money by having a day job. As with music, publishers who make money, not creators. Copyright infringement isn't theft, and no amount of tough talk will make it so.
- nnethercote 14y agoLawrence Lessig is saying "I told you so" right now.