With Tumblr Sale, Verizon Continues To Stumble In Bungled Pivot Away From Telecom

from the ill-communication dept

So for years we've been pointing out that Verizon's attempt to pivot from grumpy old telco to sexy new Millennial ad brand hasn't been going so well. Oddly, mashing together two failing 90s brands in AOL and Yahoo, and renaming the coagulated entity "Oath," didn't really impress many people. The massive Yahoo hack, a controversy surrounding Verizon snoopvertising, and the face plant by the company's aggressively hyped Go90 streaming service didn't really help.

By late last year Verizon was forced to acknowledge that its Oath entity was effectively worthless. And this week, Verizon issued a statement saying that it would be selling Tumblr to WordPress owner Automattic after a rocky ownership stretch. Rather amusingly, Verizon tries to suggest that this was all part of some ingenious master plan:

"Today’s announcement is the culmination of a thoughtful, thorough and strategic process,” said Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan. “Tumblr is a marquee brand that has started movements, allowed for true identities to blossom and become home to many creative communities and fandoms. We are proud of what the team has accomplished and are happy to have found the perfect partner in Automattic, whose expertise and track record will unlock new and exciting possibilities for Tumblr and its users."

Except there's nothing "thoughtful, thorough, or strategic" about any of this. Tumblr you'll recall was bought by Yahoo for a cool $1.1 billion in 2013. Bored with the slow ROI of broadband and hoping to challenge Google and Facebook in the ad space, Verizon bought most of Yahoo for $4.48 billion in June 2017. And while Verizon didn't announce how much it sold Tumblr for, reports suggest that the company was effectively forced to almost give Tumblr away for less than $3 million after it spent much of the Spring looking for a suitor. Yes, great job, everybody.

None of this is what you'd call "thoughtful." But it does once again emphasize how telecom giants eager to jump into the online ad space often have no idea what they're doing. Companies like Verizon are good at two things: running networks, and lobbying government to hamstring broadband competition. Every time Verizon has tried to stumble outside of its core competencies (whether it's running its own app store, its VCast apps, or the Go90 fracas), Verizon has fallen flat on its face, because as a government-pampered telecom monopoly, innovation, disruption, and pleasing customers are alien phrenology.

Verizon's ownership of Tumblr is most notably marked by the company's decision to ban porn on the platform (and anything even vaguely determined to be naughty), driven both by FOSTA and Verizon's more puritanical management. That decision drove the site's most creative users away in droves, though new owner Automattic says the ban is likely to remain in place.

A big part of Verizon's attempted pivot to Millennial video ads was courtesy of newer executives like Lowell McAdam and Hans Vestberg. Their predecessor, Ivan Seidenberg, believed that Verizon should remain focused on what it does best (sometimes): building better, faster fiber networks. Seidenberg was a big reason for the company's $24 billion push into pure fiber with "FiOS." McAdam and Vestberg came in, froze most of those deployments, then tried to turn a legacy telco into Google by mashing together a few failed 90s internet brands. It's not working, and anybody who is surprised by that hasn't watched Verizon do business.

Filed Under: tumblr
Companies: automattic, tumblr, verizon, yahoo

Everyone Creates: New Empirical Data Shows Just How Much The Internet Has Enabled A New Creative Economy

from the it's-not-tech-v.-hollywood dept

Visit EveryoneCreates.org to read stories of creation empowered by the internet, and share your own! »

Just last week we announced our new site EveryoneCreates.org, in which we showcase stories of people who rely on the open internet and various internet platforms to create artwork of all kinds -- from music to books to movies to photographs and more. It appears that we're not the only ones to be thinking about this. The Re:Create coalition has just now released some fantastic economic research about the large and growing population of people who use internet platforms to create and to make money from their creations. It fits right in with the point that we made, that contrary to the RIAA, MPAA and its front groups like "Creative Future," the internet is not harming creators, it's enabling them by the millions (and allowing them to make much more money as well).

Indeed, the report almost certainly significantly undercounts the number of content creators making money on the internet these days, as it only explores nine platforms: Amazon Publishing, eBay, Etsy, Instagram, Shapeways, Tumblr, Twitch, WordPress and YouTube. Those are all great, and probably cover a decent subset of creators and how they make money -- but it leaves off tons of others, including Kickstarter, Patreon, IndieGogo, Wattpad, Bandcamp, Apple, Spotify and many other platforms that have increasingly become central to the way in which creators make their money. Still, even with this smaller subset of creative platforms, the study is impressive.

14.8 million people used those platforms to earn approximately $5.9 billion in 2016.

Let's repeat that. The internet -- which some legacy entertainment types keep insisting are "killing" content creators and making it "impossible" to make money -- enabled nearly 15 million people to earn nearly $6 billion in 2016. And, again, that doesn't even include things like Kickstarter or Patreon (in 2016 alone, Kickstarter had $580 million in pledges...). In short, just as we've been saying for years, while those who rely on the old legacy gatekeeper system of waiting until you're "discovered" by a label/studio/publisher and then hoping they'll do all the work to make you rich and famous, maybe that's a bit more difficult these days. But, for actual creators, today is an astounding, unprecedented period of opportunity.

This does not mean that everyone discussed here is making a full-time living. Indeed, the report notes clearly that many people are using these platforms to supplement their revenue. But they're still creating and they're still making money off of their creations -- something that would have been nearly impossible not too long ago. And, just as the report likely undercounts the size of this economy due to missing some key platforms, it also misses additional revenue streams even related to the platforms it did count:

It is impossible to determine an average income for members of the new creative economy, because earnings vary so widely for each platform. As previously stated, this analysis includes only a single source of income for each of the nine platforms. For instance, based on the current data, we include a YouTube star’s earnings from YouTube but not revenues as influencers or advertisements on other social media platforms.

Also interesting is how the report found that creators are spread all over the US. While California, New York and Texas have the most creators, even those with the "smallest" numbers of creators (Wyoming and the Dakotas) still had tens of thousands of people using these platforms to make money. And, yes, in case you're wondering, the study excluded big time stars like Kim Kardashian using platforms like Instagram to make money, focusing instead on truly independent creators.

This is especially important, as it's coming at a time when the RIAA, MPAA and their friends continue their nonsensical claims that these very same internet platforms are somehow "harming" content creators, and that laws need to change to make it harder for everyday people to use these platforms to express their artwork and to make money off of it. It's almost as if those legacy gatekeepers don't like the competition or the fact that people are realizing they don't need to work with a gatekeeper to create and to make money these days.

So, once again, it's time to dump the ridiculous myth of "tech v. content." That's not true at all. As this report shows, these tech platforms have enabled many millions of people to earn billions of dollars that's only possible because they're open platforms that get past the old gatekeeper system.

Share your story at EveryoneCreates.org to let policymakers know how important an open internet and fair use is to your own creativity.

Filed Under: copyright, creative economy, everyone creates, internet, platforms
Companies: amazon, automattic, etsy, indiegogo, instagram, kickstarter, patreon, shapeways, tumblr, twitch, wordpress, youtube

Facebook Algorithms Take Down WordPress Lawyer's Post About Idiocy Of Algorithmic Takedowns

from the that's-an-exclamation-point dept

We've had a lot of talk lately about the idiocy of automated content blocking, whether done by Facebook or by big movie studios like Warner Bros. issuing automated DMCA takedowns on its own site. Paul Sieminski*, the General Counsel for Automattic, was asked by Corporate Counsel magazine for his opinions on the WB takedowns (warning: possible registration or paywall). In it, Sieminski notes:

In the first six months of 2016, WordPress received 4,258 DMCA takedown notices, 9 percent of which were rejected as abusive, according to the company's Transparency Report. And though those numbers are nowhere near the volume of, say, Google, the costs of those abuses are high, Sieminski says. "There's really a big chilling effect on speech, especially controversial speech, because there's a very handy tool to use to remove that type of reporting from the internet," he says. "And as a company, we have to invest in the human resources … to sift through the mountain of notices we get."

There are some more interesting quotes in there as well. Having himself featured in Corporate Counsel Magazine seems like reason enough for a Facebook post, so Paul posted a link to the story on Facebook as well, with a little blurb noting how it was "fun" to be quoted, and how such automated takedowns "happen hundreds of times a day, but make the news only occasionally."

Can you guess what happened next? Of course you can...

Facebook's automated takedown algorithms decided that Paul's brief post and link about how bad automated takedowns are... got taken down, because irony lives. Facebook claims that posting about automated takedowns and how they're problematic somehow violates its Community Standards. Obviously, this is a mistake (yet another one) by Facebook's autotakedown system, but it really does help highlight the point of how problematic this kind of system can be, when perfectly legitimate speech is silenced, because a bot thinks it's bad.

* Full disclosure: Automattic recently sponsored & hosted our event on copyright reform, and Paul was our main contact there for that event.

Filed Under: algorithms, automated takedowns, copyright, dmca, paul sieminski, social media
Companies: automattic, facebook

More Evidence That Tons Of DMCA Takedowns Are Bad News... And That People Are Afraid To Counternotice

from the it's-a-real-problem dept

Earlier this week, we wrote about a major new study that revealed that a ton of DMCA takedown notices are clearly faulty, and how that shows just how messed up the DMCA's notice-and-takedown provisions are in giving tremendous incentives to send notices with absolutely no punishment for filing bogus takedowns. The legacy music industry and its supporters keep claiming that the fact that there are so few counternotices is evidence that there's almost no abuse. In fact, in the legacy music industry filing we wrote about earlier today, they even had the gall to claim that the real abuse is in the counternotices themselves.

As more and more comment filings to the Copyright Office about the DMCA process are being released, there's increasing evidence that the legacy entertainment industry's claims are, simply, full of shit. The latest is the excellent comment filed by Automattic (the folks who make Wordpress), whose Wordpress.com offering hosts over 80 million websites. The company notes that even while hosting so much content, the majority of the time the company spends dealing with DMCA notices is... dealing with the bogus ones:

We put a great deal of resources toward processing takedown notices because we take our responsibilities under the DMCA seriously. We aim to respond to all inbound takedown notices within 48 hours, exceeding the law’s requirements. But a significant portion of the resources we put towards our DMCA program are aimed at combating the shortcomings of the notice and takedown system. For example, we spend significant effort reviewing and trying to weed out overbroad and abusive DMCA takedown notices, so that our users’ speech isn’t needlessly censored. This is a real cost to us, and diverts resources from more productive uses, like improving the products and services we offer our customers.

As with the study we highlighted earlier this week, Automattic notes that a huge number of notices it receives are invalid. First, it notes that approximately 29% of notices simply aren't valid notices in that they fail to meet the criteria laid out by the DMCA for what constitutes a valid notice. Then, another 10% of notices do meet the criteria to be an official notice, but are "clearly false or mistaken." And that's based on their own review of the notices. So, approximately 40% of all DMCA takedown notices the company receives are bogus. But, contrary to what the legacy industry folks and their shills are saying, Automattic notes that very few people file counternotices, out of a fear of being sued, and they're concerned about how this leads to censorship of perfectly legal speech.

Our statistics bear this out. As discussed below with respect to Subject No. 30, our statistics show that about 10% of the notices of claimed infringement we receive are otherwise valid but are clearly false or mistaken. But we receive many fewer counter notifications than that—only about one-half of one percent of the total number of notices we receive. We think this ratio shows that the low number of counter notifications is not the result of a correspondingly low number of false and mistaken assertions of infringement, but instead results from the concern that sending a counter notification is likely to result in costly litigation, even if that litigation would ultimately turn out to hold that no infringement had occurred. The company notes that out of a batch of approximately 1,700 "valid" but bogus notices, only 113 counter notices were sent. Most people just don't bother out of fear of getting sued.

The company also highlights just how broken Section 512(f) is -- which is the section that is supposed to be used against bogus takedowns. But as we've written about in the past, it's basically a dead letter. There are almost no examples of 512(f) being used successfully against someone for sending a takedown... with the one exception being Automattic! As we wrote about, a few years ago, Automattic actually sued over egregiously bad DMCA notices and even won a case, but... it was by default, because the notice sender just ignored the lawsuit. In the other lawsuit, it could never actually find the plaintiff who sent the bogus censorious takedowns.

The company also provides a number of actual examples of bogus DMCA takedown notices to get beyond just the statistical aspect and to prove the problem is real:

• A medical transcription training service that used forged customer testimonials on their website submitted a takedown for screenshots of the fake testimonials in a blog post exposing the scam.
• A physician demanded removal of newspaper excerpts posted to a blog critical of the physician, by submitting a DMCA notice in which he falsely claimed to be a representative of the newspaper.
• A model involved in a contract dispute with a photographer submitted a series of DMCA notices seeking removal of images of the model for which the photographer was the rights holder.
• An international corporation submitted DMCA notices seeking removal of images of company documents posted by a whistleblower.
• A frequent submitter of DMCA notices submitted a DMCA notice seeking removal of a screenshot of an online discussion criticizing him for submitting overreaching DMCA notices.

As the company notes, each of these were clearly bogus, but since 512(f) is basically useless, it would be a complete waste of time to sue over them.

It's good to see companies sharing this kind of information, and it tracks closely with what the study from earlier this week said, which was based on a different corpus of data. So, yeah, when the legacy guys claim there's no abuse, they're simply full of shit.

Filed Under: abuse, censorship, copyright, counternotices, dmca, dmca 512, notice and takedown, safe harbors, wordpress
Companies: automattic

Wordpress Takes A Stand Against Abusive DMCA Takedown Notices; Others Should Pay Attention

from the platforms-shouldn't-just-be-takedown-remailers dept

Automattic, the company behind blogging platform Wordpress, continues to prove that just because the issuing of DMCA takedown notices has largely been handed over to automated processes, the response doesn't need to be similarly robotic.

Its latest transparency report shows it has rejected 43% of the DMCA notices it has received as either incomplete or abusive. Contrast this to almost any other platform where the initial response is to take down content/links first and work backwards from there. (Contrast this further to services like YouTube and Soundcloud, where content is subjected to automated pre-screening that seems to result in just as many illegitimate "removals.")

Automattic's DMCA process is anything but.

We carefully review each notice to ensure it’s formally complete, and includes all information required by the DMCA, before taking action. Notices that don’t meet the requirements of the statute are included in ‘notices rejected as incomplete.’

We also may decline to remove content if a notice is abusive. “Abusive” notices may be formally complete, but are directed at fair use of content, material that isn’t copyrightable, or content the complaining party misrepresents ownership of a copyright.

In an effort to keep the worst abusers "honest" (or at least warn others performing the same intermediary functions), Automattic continues to maintain a "Hall of Shame" highlighting issuers of bogus takedown notices.

So, there's at least one major platform that has its users' backs -- something it has taken as far as the filing of lawsuits against serial abusers. And it's one of the few that will actually try to determine whether or not the usage of the disputed content falls under fair use. Automattic seems to have learned from its past mistakes, and now it's attempting to hold rightsholders and their representatives to the same standard it applies to itself. If content is going to be removed, the person(s) making these demands need to hold up their end of the bargain.

DMCA abuse isn't likely to stop anytime soon. The process to issue notices continues to become more streamlined, which puts even more non-infringing content at risk. On top of that, the automated processes used to compile lists of "infringing" URLs continues to be error-prone. This wouldn't be an issue if the companies providing these services to rightsholders spent a little (or any) time giving the notices a once-over before sending them out. The failure to do so not only has the potential to remove non-infringing content, but also to screw the same people they're supposed to be protecting -- not just in terms of reputation, but also financially.

A brief perusal of DMCA notices issued to Google finds multiple examples of non-infringing content being targeted by flaky automated processes. It also shows rightsholders are being billed for largely useless takedown requests filled with URLs covered in previous requests by the same company.

This recent request by IFPI Latin America contains 237 URLs --- 236 of which were already delisted in response to earlier requests.


This is far from uncommon and pretty much amounts to double billing. Even in cases where rightsholders pay a monthly or yearly fee rather than per DMCA takedown, it's still wasted money. While it's obviously easier to let machines do the work and humans to collect the paychecks, nothing about an automated copyright takedown notice process contributes anything towards healthier respect for the idea itself, or the creations protected by it.

Automattic, on the other hand, will continue to gather respect from its users and potential customers around the world simply by refusing to lay out a WELCOME mat for our new DMCA robot overlords.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, dmca abuse, transparency report, wordpress
Companies: automattic

Turkish Censorship Order Targets Single Blog Post, Ends Up Blocking Access To 60 Million Wordpress Sites

from the if-single-bullet-misses,-deploy-uranium-enriched-warhead dept

There is no such thing as "targeted censorship." Discuss. (h/t to Techdirt reader wereisjessicahyde)

Last week, a Turkish court ordered an access ban on a single post in the vast sea of more than 60 million individual blogs on WordPress. But for many users, that meant their Internet service providers blocked WordPress entirely.

A lawyer and Turkish Pirate Party member tracked down the root of the sudden ban on all of Wordpress: a court order seeking to block a single blog post written by a professor accusing another professor of plagiarism. This post apparently led to several defamation lawsuits and the lawsuits led to a court order basically saying that if blocking the single post proved too difficult, fuck it, block the entire domain.

It is the second sentence in the order, however, that caused the complete ban of WordPress in the country. “If the access to the single page cannot be possible due to technical reasons,” it reads, “block access to wordpress.com.”

According to the Daily Dot's Efe Kereme Sozeri, this tactic has often been deployed by Turkish government censors when outsmarted by the internet. If the targeted URL proves difficult to block, court orders demand ISPs block entire domains as Plan B.

This is Turkey's inelegant "solution" to a problem it shouldn't be trying to solve. Sozeri points out that its domain blocking efforts have, somewhat oddly, made oft-affected US tech companies much more responsive to its censorious demands.

The reason that Turkey had to request Google, Facebook, and Twitter to remove content is because they use SSL certificates, which secures users’ communication with their servers. (SSL certificates are what allow the implementation of HTTPS.) They’re technically quite difficult to intercept, but these companies still bow down to Turkey’s requests. Why? Because Erdoğan has completely banned access to their domains time and again when they failed to comply.

In order to continue doing business in Turkey, these companies have acquiesced to multiple censorship requests. Sozeri also has more bad news: Turkey's ISPs are commonly blocking domains at the DNS level, providing for more complete censorship while bypassing the targeted entity's participation in government censorship.

This incident also serves as an example of why targeted censorship so often fails. In most cases, those asking for content to be blocked are largely unconcerned about collateral damage -- whether it's rights holders trying to "protect" their intellectual property or governments seeking to control the content accessible to their citizens. And because they don't care who else is harmed, they'll push for the most "effective" form of censorship: deploying a nuclear weapon to kill a single person, to mix metaphors. And because the only good censorship target is a dead censorship target, they're not above using everything from overly-broad blocking orders to man-in-the-middle attacks to achieve their aims.

Filed Under: censorship, free speech, site blocking, turkey, wordpress.com
Companies: automattic

Wordpress Wins Case Against DMCA Abuser... Who Ignored The Proceedings

from the it's-a-start dept

Back in the summer of 2013, we wrote about yet another case of someone abusing the DMCA to censor content, rather than for any legitimate copyright purpose. The story was quite ridiculous, involving a group in the UK, called "Straight Pride UK." The group did an interview with a student named Oliver Hotham, who had emailed the group, noting he was a journalist with a list of questions. The guy behind "Straight Pride UK," Nick Steiner, responded to the questions with a document, which the group labeled as a "press release." Hotham posted his article, which, quite reasonably, made Straight Pride UK look ridiculous. In response, the group issued a DMCA takedown notice to Automattic, the company behind Wordpress.com, and the host of the article.

A couple months later, the legal team at Automattic decided it had had enough of these kinds of bogus takedowns and filed two lawsuits concerning bogus takedowns, including Nick Steiner's. As we've noted for years, the DMCA does have section 512(f) which allows for some punishment for bogus DMCA takedowns, but in practice, 512(f) has been almost entirely neutered by the courts. Yet here were cases of clear abuse.

So it's good to see that the court in the Hotham/Automattic/Steiner case has now ruled for Wordpress and awarded $25,084.00. Unfortunately, Steiner has more or less ignored the entire case, so it is really a default judgment. And, assuming Steiner never comes to the US, it may not ever truly impact him, and it's doubtful that he'll pay up. Still, at the very least, it's nice to see some sort of victory against bogus DMCA takedowns, given that it is so rare.

Filed Under: 512(f), 512f, censorship, copyright, dmca, nick steiner, oliver hotham, wordpress
Companies: automattic, wordpress