The Plot Against Section 230 Is Being Run By Big Legacy Companies Who Failed To Adapt To The Internet

from the the-plot-against-the-internet dept

Last summer, we explained how it was not crazy to think that the narrative being pushed about internet companies and Section 230 was a manufactured narrative by Hollywood and other old legacy companies jealous of the success of new internet companies. Now, the NY Times has a detailed article on exactly that. It's about how a broad coalition of big, old, legacy companies are conspiring to punish Google and Facebook by convincing the media and politicians that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is bad.

The headline lists three companies: IBM, Marriott, and Disney. While that might seem like "an unusual constellation of powerful companies" -- as the article puts it -- there is a simple thing tying them together: all three failed to adapt to an open internet. And now they're trying to kill it.

Disney and its powerful trade association have fought to stop the law’s spread abroad.

Marriott has asked Congress to amend the law.

IBM has a plan to slim it down.

An unusual constellation of powerful companies and industries are fighting to weaken Big Tech by limiting the reach of one of its most sacred laws. The law, known as Section 230, makes it nearly impossible to sue platforms like Facebook or Google for the words, images and videos posted by their users.

We've discussed each of these companies and their motivations in the past. Disney, of course, is a stand-in for the MPAA and all of the big Hollywood movie studios. Indeed, while Disney led the copyright lobbying charge in the 80s and 90s, the company leading the way against the internet and Section 230 over the past decade has been Fox. But, of course, Disney recently bought Fox. Hollywood has been fighting against the open internet for years, and its lobbyists have been planting false narratives about 230 for years, and eagerly fan the flames at every opportunity. Their hope has always been to chip away at 230 to make Google and Facebook more vulnerable, and to force them to negotiate some sort of huge transfer of money.

Marriott, somewhat famously, has been screaming bloody murder about Airbnb for years, because it can't stand having competition that actually offers better service. Its hatred of 230 is because Airbnb has argued (though not always successfully), that 230 protects it from liability over user listings -- which, if successful, would block some of the laws Marriott and the wider hotel industry have been pushing to hinder Airbnb.

Finally, there's IBM. And while the article doesn't mention it, it's really IBM and Oracle teaming up here. Last summer we wrote about IBM's sad attack on 230, a law that it doesn't rely on. Once again, with IBM and Oracle, we see two giant, lumbering tech companies, that made bad bets on the internet, and rather than recognizing that they messed up, they're using lobbying and the political process to harm the competitors who built the products people actually want. Neither IBM nor Oracle rely on Section 230, since they don't run consumer facing internet services. Both bet that the enterprise market and data would be where the market was -- but it actually turned out to be in consumer facing services. In both cases, the bottom-up open internet has also enabled smaller enterprise focused offerings to chip away increasingly at the bottom of their markets.

A decade ago, we wrote about writer Andy Kessler's concept of political entrepreneurs v. market entrepreneurs. One of them builds better, more innovative products that increase consumer welfare and increase the overall size of the pie by making things people want. The other uses its enormous power and political connections to pass regulations that hinder competitors who have innovated. One becomes successful through building services that make money from happy customers. One makes money by creating a restrained market in which they can collect monopoly rents above and beyond what an open market would bear.

The latter -- the old legacy companies using lobbying to stomp out competition -- are a form of dangerous "unproductive entrepreneurship." It does not make the world a better place. It limits innovation and limits consumer welfare.

So the next time you hear about the "techlash" and the "problems" of Section 230, consider who actually stands to benefit from chipping away (or removing entirely) Section 230. It is not you or me. It is not those who rely on a wide variety of internet services to express ourselves. It is the legacy companies which have fallen behind, which have not adapted, and which are using their political will to try to suppress and destroy the open systems that the rest of us now depend on.

Filed Under: competition, lobbying, market entrepreneurs, political entrepreneurs, section 230, techlash
Companies: disney, facebook, fox, google, ibm, marriott, oracle

History Repeats Itself: Twitter Launches Illegal SF Street Stencil Campaign Just As IBM DId Decades Ago

from the oops dept

Everything old is new again, and the population of tech workers seems to turn over especially fast in the San Francisco Bay Area. I guess I now qualify as an old timer, in that I remember quite clearly when IBM ran a big ad campaign in San Francisco and Chicago to profess its newfound love for Linux. The ad campaign involved stenciling three symbols side-by-side: a peace symbol, a heart, and Tux, the Linux penguin:

The message? Peace, Love, Linux. It didn't make much sense then either. Either way, neither city was happy with the streets being all stenciled up. San Francisco fined IBM $100,000 for graffiti, though perhaps the company figured that was cheaper than buying a bunch of billboards in the same area, and it certainly got more press attention. The story was even more fucked up in Chicago, however. There, one of the random dudes IBM's ad company had hired to paint this ad message all over sidewalks was arrested and sentenced to community service for vandalism. Not great.

So, apparently no one working at Twitter was around for that experience nearly two decades ago, because the company has just done the same thing. Just a few days ago I was at the Powell Street BART station and saw it was completely coated in giant posters of tweets, but apparently they're stenciled on sidewalks nearby as well (I seemed to have missed those)

San Francisco wasted little time in pointing out to Twitter that, uh, this is not allowed:

Apt or not, the stencils, created using a spray-paint-like chalk, are illegal, according to Rachel Gordon, spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works.

“That’s not the use of the sidewalks,” she said. “We can go and document them. If they don’t remove them immediately, we’ll send a crew to remove them and charge them.”

Gordon added, “Our sidewalks are not to be used for commercial billboards. Twitter has the resources to use appropriate venues to advertise their company.”

Twitter has apparently already apologized and said it's trying to figure out why it fucked up:

Twitter responded with the following apology: "We looked into what happened and identified breakdowns in the process for meeting the cities' requirements for our chalk stencils. We're sorry this happened."

I'm just amazed that no one involved in the process remembered the whole IBM thing, but I guess it's just a reminder of how old stories like that fade away.

Filed Under: advertisements, chalking, promotions, sf, stencils
Companies: ibm, twitter

IBM's Ridiculous Opportunism: Sells Out Section 230 To Sell More Filters

from the go-away dept

This perhaps isn't a huge surprise, but IBM is being disdainful of the wider tech ecosystem, yet again. It has an incredibly long history of this kind of activity -- mostly in the patent space, where it is the world's foremost patent bully. The company gleefully announces each and every year that it gets the most patents of any company in the US. It has done this (no joke) for 26 straight years. Of course, given how many patents it gets, if patents actually were a marker for innovation, you'd think that IBM would still be putting out all sorts of innovative new products all the time. Right? Except, of course, it is not. Instead, it uses the patents to shake down companies who actually do innovate. The most famous of these stories is the one about IBM and Sun in its early days, in which IBM showed up at Sun's offices with threats of patent infringement:

My own introduction to the realities of the patent system came in the 1980s, when my client, Sun Microsystems--then a small company--was accused by IBM of patent infringement. Threatening a massive lawsuit, IBM demanded a meeting to present its claims. Fourteen IBM lawyers and their assistants, all clad in the requisite dark blue suits, crowded into the largest conference room Sun had.

The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.

After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.

An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.

This kind of negotiation is a standard part of IBM's business practices these days. Just recently it was shaking down Groupon. And a few years ago, we wrote about the similar shakedown of Twitter, with the threat coming on the eve of Twitter's IPO -- timed perfectly to scare off investors. Left with little choice, Twitter caved, even though the patents were bogus, and paid IBM $36 million.

Back in 2013, when IBM first went after Twitter, I highlighted how it was an example of how older tech companies focus on litigation when they have no innovation left. In the comments, a few people challenged that claim, saying that IBM was innovative. "Just look at Watson," the company's big AI project, they all said. So, about that:

• How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care
• What went wrong at IBM? Its 'master plan' has failed to deliver...
• IBM pitched its Watson supercomputer as a revolution in cancer care. It’s nowhere close
• MD Anderson Cancer Center’s IBM Watson project fails, and so did the journalism related to it
• IBM’s Watson ‘is a joke,’ says Social Capital CEO Palihapitiya
• IBM’s Watson Not Living Up to Hype
• Doctors Are Losing Faith in IBM Watson’s AI Doctor
• Report: IBM Watson delivered ‘unsafe and inaccurate’ cancer recommendations

I could go on and on, but I think you get the picture. And of course, in a post-Alice world, where the Supreme Court has made it clear that most software doesn't deserve a patent, IBM is losing its ability to prop up its businesses with the patent shakedown game as well. Indeed, EFF even shamed the company into dropping one of its truly stupid patents.

So what's a giant tech company that hasn't been innovative in years, and can't rely on shaking down actually innovative companies with bogus patents, to do? Well, how about using some other methods of gaming the regulatory system? Last year, IBM made it quite clear that it wanted to fuck up the internet, when it came out in favor of FOSTA (and at the same time, against inserting intermediary liability protections, like Section 230 of the CDA, into trade agreements).

Now, incredibly, just at the time when there are bipartisan attacks on Section 230, IBM has decided to support gutting Section 230 with a truly malicious and ill-informed statement arguing that 230 protections should be "earned" based on an impossible "reasonable" standard.

In the United States, precision regulation means taking a fresh look at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230). As currently written, CDA 230 grants an expansive liability shield to any provider of an “interactive computer service” for the actions that occur on their platform, regardless of whether the platform turns a blind eye to illegal activity. Courts have found companies that knowingly host illegal content to be exempt from legal liability based on the broad protection that CDA 230 provides. But a measure designed nearly a quarter-century ago to foster an infant internet needs to keep pace with the enormous social, economic, and even political power that the online world today commands.

Instead of holding all online platforms exempt from liability by default, IBM believes that the exemption should be conditioned on companies applying a standard of “reasonable care” and taking actions and preventative measures to curb unlawful uses of their service.

We just recently discussed how this is a completely unworkable standard. First of all, a reasonable care standard would mean widespread censorship, because what internet company wants to risk going to court over all of this? If "conservatives" think they're getting banned too frequently from social media today, just wait until those platforms face real liability for leaving content up too much.

Second, "reasonable care" will have to be proven in court -- meaning that the procedural benefits of Section 230 get tossed out the window (rather than being able to get a case tossed at an early stage on 230 grounds, companies will have to go through the expensive and time-consuming process of "proving" to a court that they've taken "reasonable care").

Of course, IBM doesn't give a shit about the open internet. To them, killing Section 230 opens up all sorts of neat possibilities. First off, IBM doesn't host any significant online services that rely on Section 230 protections, so it doesn't increase its own liability. Second, it handicaps the companies who actually have been innovating in AI technology, like Google and Microsoft. Third -- and this is the key -- you can bet that one way that many companies will try to prove "reasonable care" would be to purchase an expensive filtering technology. Perhaps one based on... Watson? IBM gets to salvage its junk technology and have the government create a market for it. Bonus.

The rest of IBM's post is incredibly disingenuous:

The “reasonable care” standard would provide strong incentives for companies to limit illegal and illicit behavior online, while also being flexible enough to promote continued online innovation and fairly easy adaptation to different online business models.

The companies already have plenty of incentives to "limit illegal and illicit behavior online" -- because when they don't, they get a ton of shit for it in the press and from politicians. Establishing a new bullshit level of liability will only lead to much greater censorship, including of perfectly legal content. This is something IBM doesn't even acknowledge.

In fact, IBM tries to rewrite what happened with FOSTA:

Around the same time, IBM played a key role in promoting passage of U.S. legislation to crackdown on the spread of online content with a truly horrific purpose: trafficking children for sexual exploitation. We saw this legislation, known as SESTA/FOSTA, as an important step in a broader global effort to stop criminals from using digital platforms for clearly illegal behavior.

And what has happened since then? FOSTA has failed in every measure. More women and children have been put at risk thanks to FOSTA. For IBM to be taking a victory lap on that is truly fucked up.

Then IBM pushes out this complete nonsense:

Reasonable care does not mean eliminating entirely the intermediary liability protections of CDA 230, or comparable laws in Europe and elsewhere. Nor are we calling for amending the “Good Samaritan” provision of CDA 230, which limits the liability of companies that take voluntary actions to stop bad actors. We simply believe companies should also be held legally responsible to use reasonable, common-sense care when it comes to moderating online content. This means, for example, quickly identifying and deleting content focused on child pornography, violence on child-oriented sites, or online content promoting acts of mass violence, suicide, or the sale of illegal drugs. A reasonable care standard in CDA 230 would add a measure of legal responsibility to what many platforms are already doing voluntarily.

Note the many, many contradictions in just this paragraph alone. The "Good Samaritan" provision of Section 230 is what encourages companies to take down that content already. Adding legal liability absolutely does remove the very mechanism that the Good Samaritan provision provides. Second, if (as the paragraph notes) the internet platforms are already doing this voluntarily, why do we need to add legal liability to hold them responsible? And that's not even mentioning the fact that the post conflates a bunch of different content -- ignoring how difficult some of it is to recognize (compared to others that are easy to recognize). There is not a single serious internet company that is allowing child pornography on its platform. They all ban it. They all remove it as soon as they're aware of it. They all tap into the giant NCMEC database of hashes. And they do that because they don't face liability.

IBM has long been a black hole for actual innovation. Now it wants to suck down the open internet with it. Don't let it.

Filed Under: cda 230, filters, liability, patents, reasonable care, section 230, watson
Companies: ibm

Stupid Patent Of The Month: IBM's Software Patent On Texting And Driving

from the distracted-patent-approvals dept

In the smartphone era, "distracted driving" is a serious, and well-known, problem. Official warnings about poor driving habits are as old as the automobile itself. The New York Times published a Pulitzer-winning series on distracted driving back in 2009.

Increasingly, technological assists are available for those seeking to manage their smartphone's distractions while in the car. Apple integrated a "do not disturb while driving" mode into iOS 11, and Google has long had similar functionality in its Android Auto app. Multitudes of third-party smartphone apps exists to address the issue. Finally, more than 50 companies are working on what may be the ultimate solution to distracted driving: autonomous vehicles.

Unfortunately, the U.S. patent system creates warped incentives for emerging software fields like road-safety features. Rather than competing in a challenging space, some players are seeking broadly-worded patents, then hope to sit back and extract profits later.

That may be the strategy of the International Business Machine Corp., which has acquired more U.S. patents than any other company for decades now. This week, IBM was awarded U.S. Patent No. 10,191,462, describing a "Vehicle electronic receptionist."

IBM likely has the resources to make technology to manage communications while driving. But the '462 patent describes nothing of the sort. Instead, IBM's patent simply describes a computerized decision-making process.

The patent's Claim 1 describes a computer system that determines the "driving context" of a vehicle; analyzes an incoming communication; and then determines an "electronic action" in response, considering various weights and risk factors. The electronic action could be "taking a message, providing a silent or audible notification… [or] providing an automated response."

Other claims add more layers to the analysis, like considering road conditions, doing voice analysis on a voicemail, or considering whether a passenger is sleeping before deciding to put a call through.

Essentially, IBM has described a futuristic car computer system that will analyze the driving conditions and the context of an incoming text or call, then use some unspecified type of AI to decide what to do about the communication. The specification is filled with empty platitudes typical of software patents, like "[t]he computer system may be described in the general context of computer system executable instructions, such as program modules, being executed by a computer system." Aside from hand-waving like this, the patent has essentially no information about how one would actually create the claimed system.

IBM: Ignore the "Troll Scare"

Some of the claims describe good ideas that could be useful parts of automotive software in the future. But the patent is just that—a list of ideas, not instructions for executing the ideas or creating anything. IBM's patent offers no code, no algorithms, not even a vague description of how the rules might work.

We've seen this problem before, in which the Patent Office awards a patent not to the first proven inventor, but to the first applicant who describes a task using technological and legal jargon that patent professionals respect. The Patent Office and the Federal Circuit have been far too willing to approve patents that merely state the idea of applying rules without even specifying what those rules are. The public gains nothing from companies getting patents on the mere idea of using an algorithm to solve a particular problem. Patents like the '462 patent leave all of the hard work—actually writing, debugging, and deploying software that solves the problem under real-world conditions—as an exercise for the reader. And they allow IBM to exclude the public from making or creating any of the wide range of algorithms that these broad patent claims could ensnare.

In our view, IBM's new patent should fail under the Supreme Court's Alice v. CLS Bank decision, which holds that you can't patent basic decision-making processes by adding references to generic computer hardware and software. Given that, it may come as no surprise that IBM is lobbying to throw out the Alice precedent. In a recent interview, top IP executives from IBM explained their plans to demolish Alice by getting Congress to re-work Section 101 of the patent laws, which bars abstract patents. "Every time we try to enforce a patent, we get a 101 defense that comes back at us," said IBM Chief Patent Counsel Manny Schecter. IBM VP Mark Ringes said he's hearing "positive messages from Congress" about changing Section 101 to better suit big patent owners.

Ringes went so far to claim that the "troll scare is largely just noise now." That assertion flies in the face of the patent litigation landscape. By one estimate, about 90 percent of patent lawsuits filed last year in the tech sector were filed by non-practicing entities. IBM appears to be downplaying the damage done by patent trolls because its business interests have become aligned with them. IBM collected more than 9,000 patents in 2017 alone. It uses that massive storehouse of IP to fuel a licensing business that earns more than $1 billion per year

In some cases, that means IBM can let other companies battle for dominance in a particular sector, then step in and demand licensing payments when it's clear who can pay. There's less need for IBM to build new social media apps, when the company can use a patent threat to collect $36 million from Twitter right before its IPO. There's less need to build an e-commerce business, when IBM can sue Amazon over an "electronic catalog" patent that dates back to 1994.

Make no mistake: IBM has an incentive to pile up overly broad patents like this one because these patents might allow it to extract revenues from other companies' future products. A broken patent system encourages companies to use patents, rather than products, to assure dominance in key sectors like driving communications and autonomous driving. Getting rid of Alice would only make the system worse and lead to another flood of do-it-on-a-computer patents. We hope Congress agrees.

Reposted from the EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month series.

Filed Under: software patents, stupid patent of the month
Companies: ibm

Red Hat Hysteria: Aren't We Past The Point Of Being Surprised That 'Free' Is A Part Of The Business Model?

from the seriuosly? dept

As you have likely heard by now, a few days ago, IBM announced that it was purchasing Red Hat for $34 billion. I've seen a fair bit of hand-wringing over this buyout, but don't really feel that strongly one way or the other about it. It was nice having a giant company like Red Hat to point to in explaining how of course open source software could be a big business, but... that still exists within the confines of IBM.

There could be some concerns on the patent side, as Red Hat at least has long positioned itself as a fighter against patent trolls, though in practice the company has sometimes been a bit wishy washy on that, and some have accused the company of selling out its vision on patents in the past. Of course, since Red Hat is a founding member of the License On Transfer (LOT) network, that at least should prevent any of its existing patents from getting out to patent trolling entities. Still, IBM has, for decades, had the reputation of being a very aggressive patent litigator, and has at least some history of trolling and bad practices. But, IBM has long embraced open source, and its announcement pledges to uphold Red Hat's various other commitments towards open source and against patent trolling: "IBM and Red Hat will remain committed to the continued freedom of open source, via such efforts as Patent Promise, GPL Cooperation Commitment, the Open Invention Network and the LOT Network."

However, what struck me most about the deal was't so much the deal itself, but some of the coverage of it. I'll use Wired as the unfortunate example of the kind of coverage I find bizarre (especially for a publication like Wired). Here's how it opens:

IBM JUST SPENT $34 billion to buy a software company that gives away its primary product for free.

IBM Sunday said it would acquire Red Hat, best known for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Red Hat is an open source software company that gives away the source code for its core products. That means anyone can download them for free. And many do. Oracle even uses Red Hat’s source code for its own Oracle Linux product.

Spending billions to acquire an open source software company might seem strange.

Come on, Wired. It's 2018. Are we really still in an age where the idea that companies use "free" as part of their business model is somehow shocking or confusing to people? At this point, the idea that you can use free software to sell all sorts of other things, such as services, is pretty damn well established, and it's insulting to act like it's a huge shock that a business could possibly exist while giving away free software.

Just the fact that Red Hat has been so successful for so many years should have put the idea that "free" can't be a part of the business model to rest. Hell, IBM itself is another example of that, as it has invested heavily in open source software and made money by selling services as well. Perhaps Wired thinks very little of its readership, but to frame it as somehow surprising or confusing that a company that has open source software could somehow be worth so many billions of dollars is odd. Even more bizarre is to frame it as shocking that some other company needs to buy it out to validate that price. After all, Red Hat's market cap as a publicly traded company has been in the billions for years, and was approaching a similar valuation to IBM's buyout price around May and June before taking a hit on recent earnings.

Either way, there are potentially many interesting things to discuss concerning IBM purchasing Red Hat, from questions about the future of its products, to questions about cloud computing, open source, software services, patents and more. But... one thing that really isn't that interesting at this point in time is the fact that Red Hat built a business based on free software that it gave away. As we've said for over a decade, free never is the business model, but it absolutely can be part of any business model.

Filed Under: cloud computing, free, linux, mergers, open source, patents
Companies: ibm, red hat

Documents Show IBM Pitched The NYPD Facial Recognition Software With Built-In Racial Profiling Options

from the facial-profiling-amirite dept

Documents obtained by The Intercept show the NYPD and IBM engaged in a long-running facial recognition tech partnership from 2008 to 2016. While some of this deployment was discussed publicly, details about the extent of the program -- as well as it's more problematic elements -- haven't been.

As the article's title informs the reader, camera footage could be scanned for face matches using skin tone as a search constraint. Considering this was pushed by IBM as a tool to prevent the next 9/11, it's easy to see why the NYPD -- given its history of surveilling Muslim New Yorkers -- might be willing to utilize a tool like this to pare down lists of suspects to just the people it suspected all along (Muslims).

There are a number of surprises contained in the long, detailed article, but the first thing that jumps out is IBM's efforts and statements, rather than the NYPD's. We all know the government capitalizes on tragedies to expand its power, but here we see a private corporation appealing to this base nature to make a sale.

In New York, the terrorist threat “was an easy selling point,” recalled Jonathan Connell, an IBM researcher who worked on the initial NYPD video analytics installation. “You say, ‘Look what the terrorists did before, they could come back, so you give us some money and we’ll put a camera there.”

From this pitch sprung an 8-year program -- deployed in secrecy by the NYPD to gather as much footage as possible of New Yorkers for dual purposes: its own law enforcement needs and to serve as a testing ground for IBM's new facial recognition tech. Needless to say, New Yorkers were never made aware of their lab rat status in IBM's software development process.

Even though the software could search by skin tone (as well as by "head color," age, gender, and facial hair), the NYPD claims it never used that feature in a live environment, despite IBM's urging.

According to the NYPD, counterterrorism personnel accessed IBM’s bodily search feature capabilities only for evaluation purposes, and they were accessible only to a handful of counterterrorism personnel. “While tools that featured either racial or skin tone search capabilities were offered to the NYPD, they were explicitly declined by the NYPD,” Donald, the NYPD spokesperson, said. “Where such tools came with a test version of the product, the testers were instructed only to test other features (clothing, eyeglasses, etc.), but not to test or use the skin tone feature. That is not because there would have been anything illegal or even improper about testing or using these tools to search in the area of a crime for an image of a suspect that matched a description given by a victim or a witness. It was specifically to avoid even the suggestion or appearance of any kind of technological racial profiling.”

It's easy to disbelieve this statement by the NYPD, given its long history of racial profiling, but it may be those handling the secret program deployment actually understood no program remains secret forever and sought to head off complaints and lawsuits by discouraging use of a controversial search feature. It also may be the NYPD was super-sensitive to these concerns following the partial dismantling of its stop-and-frisk program and the outing of its full-fledged, unconstitutional surveillance of local Muslims.

The thing is IBM is still selling this tech it beta tested live from New York. The same features the NYPD rejected are used to sell other law enforcement agencies on the power of its biometric profiling software.

In 2017, IBM released Intelligent Video Analytics 2.0, a product with a body camera surveillance capability that allows users to detect people captured on camera by “ethnicity” tags, such as “Asian,” “Black,” and “White.”

And there's a counter-narrative that seems to dispute the NYPD's assertions about controversial image tagging features. The IBM researcher who helped develop the skin tone recognition feature is on record stating the company doesn't develop features unless there's a market for them. In his estimation, the NYPD approached IBM to ask for this feature while the 8-year pilot program was still underway. The NYPD may have opted out after the feature went live, but it may have only done so to steer clear of future controversy. An ulterior motive doesn't make it the wrong move, but it also shouldn't be assumed the NYPD has morphed into heroic defenders of civil liberties and personal privacy.

What's available to other law enforcement agencies not similarly concerned about future PR black eyes is "mass racial profiling" at their fingertips. IBM has built a product that appeals to law enforcement's innate desire to automate police work, replacing officers on the street with cameras and software. Sure, there will be some cameras on patrol officers as well, but those are just for show. The real work of policing is done at desks using third-party software that explicitly allows -- if not encourages -- officers to narrow down suspect lists based on race. In a country so overly concerned about terrorism, this is going to lead to a lot of people being approached by law enforcement simply because of their ethnicity.

An additional problem with IBM's software -- and with those produced by competitors -- is a lot of markers used to identify potential suspects can easily net a long list of probables who share nothing but similar body sizes or clothing preferences. Understandably, more work is done by investigators manning these systems before cops start rounding people up, but the potential for inadvertent misuse (never mind actual misuse) is still incredibly high.

The secrecy of these programs is also an issue. Restrictive NDAs go hand-in-hand with private sector partnerships and these are often translated by police officials to mean information must be withheld from judges, criminal defendants, and department oversight. When that happens, due process violations gather atop the privacy violation wreckage until the whole thing collapses under its own audacity. Nothing stays secret forever, but entities like the NYPD and IBM could do themselves a bunch of favors by engaging in a little proactive transparency.

Filed Under: facial recognition, new york, nypd, racial profiling
Companies: ibm

IBM Shamed Into Giving Away Awful Patent On Email Out-Of-Office Messages

from the so-why-get-it-in-the-first-place? dept

IBM basically tries to patent everything, no matter how stupid. The company has (no, really) been at the top of the patent recipient list in the United States for an astounding 24 straight years. Really. And, yes, sure, the company has done some innovative things and yes, Watson's pretty cool, but does anyone actually think IBM is the most innovative company around for the past two and a half decades? It gets tons of patents because IBM has an army of lawyers who just try to patent anything. Earlier this week, the EFF put out its regular Stupid Patent of the Month post, and it was about an incredibly stupid patent from IBM. The patent (US Patent 9,547,842) is for an out-of-office email messaging system.

You know, when you email someone and you get back a bounce that says the person is out of the office, and that they won't be reading emails (even though they probably are reading them anyway and probably will respond anyway, because, really, who goes off email these days?). Anyway, the application for this patent was filed in 2010, way, way, way after OOO messages were quite common. The one thing that might be considered different in this patent was that you could set it to tell people a few days earlier that you would be on vacation in a few days. But, as EFF pointed out, that's not particularly inventive or difficult for anyone to figure out and it certainly doesn't deserve a patent. As the EFF notes, going over the history of this patent demonstrates why the US Patent Office is so bad at this stuff. Rather than figuring what's actually obvious or in the prior art, it just looks at patents:

You might think that a patent examiner faced with a patent application on an out-of-office email system might look at some real out-of-office email solutions. But the examiner considered only patents and patent applications. The Patent Office spent years going back-and-forth on whether IBM’s claims where new compared to a particular 2006 patent application. But it never considered any of the many, many, existing real-world systems that pre-dated IBM’s application.

To take just one example, the Patent Office never considered this detailed specification from 1998 (PDF) from IBM describing the out-of-office agent in Notes. Nor did it consider other well-known email features like scheduling and signatures. If the Patent Office had taken a peek at the real world, and applied a modicum of common-sense, it would have quickly rejected IBM’s claims.

EFF also notes that the patent should have easily failed under the Alice standard, but IBM tap danced around it:

In Alice, the Supreme Court ruled that an abstract idea does not become eligible for a patent simply because it is implemented on a generic computer. That decision came down in June 2014, so the Patent Office had plenty of time to apply it to the application that led to this patent. If it had, it likely would have rejected the claims. The ’842 Patent goes out of its way to make clear that its method can be implemented on a generic computer. The final three columns of the patent recite at length how its claims can be implemented in any programming language on essentially any kind of hardware.

At one point, the examiner did reject some of the application’s claims under Section 101 of the Patent Act (which is the statute the Alice decision applies). But IBM overcame the rejection simply by arguing that the patent’s method was implemented in computer hardware. In January 2013, IBM noted that “it was agreed [between IBM and the patent examiner] that the rejection ... under 35 U.S.C. § 101 could be overcome by reciting that a hardware storage device stores computer readable instructions or program code.” Even if that was a reasonable response in 2013, it certainly was not after Alice. Yet the Patent Office never revisited the issue. We have submitted multiple rounds of comments (1, 2, 3, and 4) to the Patent Office urging it to be more diligent in applying Alice.

So, normally, we just repost the EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month posts here on Techdirt, and we even had this one lined up... but a funny thing happened on the way to the posting. Over at Ars Technica, Joe Mullin reached out to IBM to ask them the reporter's equivalent of "WTF?" and got back this response:

Asked today about EFF's criticisms of the patent, an IBM spokesperson said that "IBM has decided to dedicate the patent to the public."

Got that? So IBM spent tons of money not just applying for this patent, but arguing back and forth with the PTO for years over why it truly deserved this silly patent... and then it got it at the beginning of this year. And less than two months after receiving the patent, when the EFF publicly shames IBM over the patent, the company then says "oh, hey, we dedicate it to the public." That makes sense.

Filed Under: email, out of office, patents, stupid patent of the month
Companies: eff, ibm

IBM Wants To Patent A Printer That Won't Let You Output Unauthorized Copies

from the I'm-sorry-Dave,--I'm-afraid-I-can't-print-that dept

Stories about copying turn up a lot on Techdirt. That's largely as a consequence of two factors. First, because the Internet is a copying machine -- it works by repeatedly copying bits as they move around the globe -- and the more it permeates today's world, the more it places copying at the heart of modern life. Secondly, it's because the copyright industries hate unauthorized copies of material -- which explains why they have come to hate the Internet. It also explains why they spend so much of their time lobbying for ever-more punitive laws to stop that copying. And even though they have been successful in bringing in highly-damaging laws -- of which the DMCA is probably the most pernicious -- they have failed to stop the unauthorized copies.

But if you can't stop people copying files, how about stopping them from doing anything useful with them? That seems to be the idea behind an IBM patent application spotted by TorrentFreak, which it summarizes as follows:

Simply titled "Copyright Infringement Prevention," the patent's main goal is to 'restrict' the functionality of printers, so they only process jobs when the person who’s printing them has permission to do so.

It works as follows. When a printer receives a print job, it parses the content for potential copyrighted material. If there is a match, it won't copy or print anything unless the person in question has authorization.

As with so many patents, the idea is simple to the point of triviality: only a company more concerned about the quantity of its patents, rather than their quality, would have bothered to file an application. Nonetheless, it's a troubling move, because it helps legitimize the idea that everything we do -- even printing a document -- has to be checked for possible infringements before it can be authorized and executed.

But why stop with printers? We've already seen Microsoft's Protected Media Path for video, a "feature" that was introduced with Windows Vista; it's easy to imagine something a little more active that matches the material you want to view or listen to against a database of permissions before displaying or playing it. And how about a keyboard that checks text as you type it for possible copyright infringements and for URLs that have been blocked by copyright holders?

There is a popular belief that the computer in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" was named "HAL" after IBM, by replacing each letter in the company name with its predecessor. That's apocryphal, but with this latest patent application IBM is certainly moving squarely into HAL territory.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: copyright, filter, patents, photocopying, printer
Companies: ibm

DailyDirt: Thinking Machines

from the urls-we-dug-up dept

It's a source of wonder and excitement for some, panic and concern for others, and a whole lot of cutting edge work for the people actually making it happen: artificial intelligence, the end-game for computing (and, as some would have you believe, humanity). But when you set aside the sci-fi predictions, doomsday warnings and hypothetical extremes, AI is a real thing happening all around us right now — and achieving some pretty impressive feats:

• AlphaGo has already conquered the game many thought a computer never could, but can it master the more "human" game of poker? The statistics it can handle, but what about the behavioural cues? [url]
• Can machines be as creative as humans? Or moreso? There's plenty of reason to believe they are already well on the way. [url]
• This cluster of IBM chips mimics 16-million neurons and 4-billion synapses to provide an insanely fast platform for neural network applications. The Lawrence Livermore National Lab is seeing if it can replace more traditional supercomputers. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: ai, algorithms, alphago, artificial intelligence, creativity, game algorithms, games, lawrence livermore national lab, machine learning, neural network, poker, supercomputers
Companies: google, ibm