I keep pointing out that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. There are always going to be mistakes. And lots of them. We've spent years highlighting the many obvious mistakes that websites trying to make moderation decisions on thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pieces of content are going to make every day. It's completely natural for those who are on the receiving end of obviously bogus suspensions to take it personally -- though there does seem to be one group of people who have built an entire grievance complex on the false belief that the internet companies are targeting them specifically.
But if you look around, you can see examples of content moderation "mistakes" on a daily basis. Here's a perfect example. Dr. Matthew Knight, a respiratory physician in the UK, last week tweeted out a fairly uncontroversial statement about making sure there was adequate ventilation in the hospitality industry in order to help restart the economy. At this point, the scientific consensus is very much that good ventilation is absolutely key in preventing COVID transmission, and that the largest vector of super spreader events are indoor gatherings with inadequate ventilation. As such this tweet should be wholly uncontroversial:
To get hospitality working safely in the U.K. a significant investment is required in ventilation systems. The standards should be set ASAP and funding made available. Covid is airborne (as are other infections) and ventilation vital part of prevention. Good air quality vital
There’s something wrong with Twitter’s censorship function. An Aerosol Scientist and a Respiratory Physician have both been blocked from accessing their accounts for “spreading misleading & potentially harmful information related to COVID-19”. How is this misleading/harmful? pic.twitter.com/wodknwKUKw
Thankfully it appears that Twitter eventually realized its mistake and gave Dr. Knight his account back. Lots of people are (understandably) asking why Twitter is so bad at this, and it's a fair enough question. But the simple fact is that the companies are all put in an impossible spot. When they weren't removing blatant mis- and disinfo about COVID-19, they were getting slammed from plenty of people (also for good reason). So they ramped up the efforts, and it still involves a large group of (usually non-experts) having to make a huge number of decisions very quickly.
There are always going to be mistakes. As Harvard's Evelyn Douek likes to note, content moderation is all about error rates. Each choice you make is going to have error rates. The biggest questions are what kinds of errors are preferable, and how many are you willing to deal with. Should the focus be on minimizing false positives? Or false negatives? Or somehow trying to balance the two? And the answers to that may vary given the circumstances and may change over time. But one thing that is clear is that no matter what choices are made, mistakes inevitably come with them, because content moderation at scale is simply impossible to do well.
As part of a recent COVID bill, the government recently announced that folks struggling economically during COVID would be getting some temporary help. Under the EBB (Emergency broadband Benefit program), U.S. consumers can nab a $50 discount off their broadband bill, or $75 if you live in tribal areas. The program ends when its $3.2 billion in federal funding expires, or six months after the government has declared an end to the pandemic.
It's a useful but temporary band aid, and doesn't really do much to address the regional monopolization and lack of competition that makes US broadband so perennially mediocre in the first place. Nor does it address the fact the Trump FCC gutted its own consumer protection authority because a bunch of telecom monopolies asked them to, using completely bogus justifications.
Under the program, the money is first given to your broadband provider, which is then in charge of ensuring you get the discount. But given these companies' track record of dodgy behavior, it obviously didn't take long for US telecoms to misbehave. Enter Verizon, which is using the program as an opportunity to upsell customers to more expensive plans. Users contacting Verizon to sign up were told the program didn't apply to their existing plans, and in order to get the discount they'd need to sign up for more expensive service. The Washington Post politely points out this is rather sleazy:
"Verizon elicited the most ire from readers. It requires customers to call a phone line to register for the EBB, rather than just signing up online. And when you do, Verizon told some customers the EBB can’t be used on “old” data plans, so they’d have to switch. That might be allowed by the letter of the law but certainly isn’t the spirit of the program."
Granted this is the same company that tried to upsell California firefighters to more costly plans when their data allotment ran out during an historic wildfire, so this shouldn't be too surprising. In short, knowing the subsidy was temporary, Verizon nudged users to more expensive plans so they'd see a revenue boost when the plan ended. U.S. regulators at the FCC didn't do a thing. Fortunately Verizon reversed course after the Post story began circulating online:
"On Wednesday, two days after I initially published this column, Verizon reversed course and said it would accept old plans. “We heard from some customers that they prefer to stay on the legacy plans they have,” it wrote in a blog post. “Moving forward, we will offer customers on legacy Fios plans (no longer in market today) the ability to enroll in EBB."
A few other companies have taken to using misleading websites to trick users into thinking they're enrolling in the government's official program (the real website for which is here).
Needless to say the press shouldn't always be the last line of defense against Americans getting ripped off, especially considering the increasingly tenuous financial situation the press finds itself in. You also wouldn't need a COVID discount program in the first place if the U.S. hadn't spent the last twenty years coddling regional monopolies, resulting in some of the most expensive prices in the developed world for broadband.
As vaccinations and relaxed health guidelines make returning to the office a reality for more companies, there seems to be a disconnect between managers and their workers over remote work.
A good example of this is a recent op-ed written by the CEO of a Washington, D.C. magazine that suggested workers could lose benefits like health care if they insist on continuing to work remotely as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes. The staff reacted by refusing to publish for a day.
While the CEO later apologized, she isn’t alone in appearing to bungle the transition back to the office after over a year in which tens of millions of employees were forced to work from home. A recent survey of full-time corporate or government employees found that two-thirds say their employers either have not communicated a post-pandemic office strategy or have only vaguely done so.
As workforcescholars, we are interested in teasing out how workers are dealing with this situation. Our recent research found that this failure to communicate clearly is hurting morale, culture and retention.
Workers relocating
We first began investigating workers’ pandemic experiences in July 2020 as shelter-in-place orders shuttered offices and remote work was widespread. At the time, we wanted to know how workers were using their newfound freedom to potentially work virtually from anywhere.
We analyzed a dataset that a business and technology newsletter attained from surveying its 585,000 active readers. It asked them whether they planned to relocate during the next six months and to share their story about why and where from and to.
After a review, we had just under 3,000 responses, including 1,361 people who were planning to relocate or had recently done so. We systematically coded these responses to understand their motives and, based on distances moved, the degree of ongoing remote-work policy they would likely need.
We found that a segment of these employees would require a full remote-work arrangement based on the distance moved from their office, and another portion would face a longer commute. Woven throughout this was the explicit or implicit expectation of some degree of ongoing remote work among many of the workers who moved during the pandemic.
In other words, many of these workers were moving on the assumption – or promise – that they’d be able to keep working remotely at least some of the time after the pandemic ended. Or they seemed willing to quit if their employer didn’t oblige.
One of authors explains the research.
We wanted to see how these expectations were being met as the pandemic started to wind down in March 2021. So we searched online communities in Reddit to see what workers were saying. One forum proved particularly useful. A member asked, “Has your employer made remote work permanent yet or is it still in the air?” and went on to share his own experience. This post generated 101 responses with a good amount of detail on what their respective individual companies were doing.
While this qualitative data is only a small sample that is not necessarily representative of the U.S. population at large, these posts allowed us to delve into a richer understanding of how workers feel, which a simple stat can’t provide.
We found a disconnect between workers and management that starts with but goes beyond the issue of the remote-work policy itself. Broadly speaking, we found three recurring themes in these anonymous posts.
1. Broken remote-work promises
Others have also found that people are taking advantage of pandemic-related remote work to relocate to a city at a distance large enough that it would require partial or full-time remote work after people return to the office.
A recent survey by consulting firm PwC found that almost a quarter of workers were considering or planning to move more than 50 miles from one of their employer’s main offices. The survey also found 12% have already made such a move during the pandemic without getting a new job.
Our early findings suggested some workers would quit their current job rather than give up their new location if required by their employer, and we saw this actually start to occur in March.
One worker planned a move from Phoenix to Tulsa with her fiancé to get a bigger place with cheaper rent after her company went remote. She later had to leave her job for the move, even though “they told me they would allow me to work from home, then said never mind about it.”
Another worker indicated the promise to work remotely was only implicit, but he still had his hopes up when leaders “gassed us up for months saying we’d likely be able to keep working from home and come in occasionally” and then changed their minds and demanded employees return to the office once vaccinated.
2. Confused remote-work policies
Another constant refrain we read in the worker comments was disappointment in their company’s remote-work policy – or lack thereof.
Whether workers said they were staying remote for now, returning to the office or still unsure, we found that nearly a quarter of the people in our sample said their leaders were not giving them meaningful explanations of what was driving the policy. Even worse, the explanations sometimes felt confusing or insulting.
One worker complained that the manager “wanted butts in seats because we couldn’t be trusted to [work from home] even though we’d been doing it since last March,” adding: “I’m giving my notice on Monday.”
Another, whose company issued a two-week timeline for all to return to the office, griped: “Our leadership felt people weren’t as productive at home. While as a company we’ve hit most of our goals for the year. … Makes no sense.”
After a long period of office shutterings, it stands to reason workers would need time to readjust to office life, a point expressed in recent survey results. Employers that quickly flip the switch in calling workers back and do so with poor clarifying rationale risk appearing tone-deaf.
And even when companies said they wouldn’t require a return to the office, workers still faulted them for their motives, which many employees described as financially motivated.
“We are going hybrid,” one worker wrote. “I personally don’t think the company is doing it for us. … I think they realized how efficient and how much money they are saving.”
Only a small minority of workers in our sample said their company asked for input on what employees actually want from a future remote work policy. Given that leaders are rightly concerned about company culture, we believe they are missing a key opportunity to engage with workers on the issue and show their policy rationales aren’t only about dollars and cents.
3. Corporate culture ‘BS’
Management gurus such as Peter Drucker and other scholars have found that corporate culture is very important to binding together workers in an organization, especially in times of stress.
But many of the forum posts we reviewed suggested that employer efforts to do that during the pandemic by orchestrating team outings and other get-togethers were actually pushing workers away, and that this type of “culture building” was not welcome.
One worker’s company “had everyone come into the office for an outdoor luncheon a week ago,” according to a post, adding: “Idiots.”
Surveys have found that what workers want most from management, on the issue of corporate culture, are more remote-work resources, updated policies on flexibility and more communication from leadership.
As another worker put it, “I can tell you, most people really don’t give 2 flips about ‘company culture’ and think it’s BS.”
Remember the absolute shit fit that Donald Trump threw after Twitter placed warning labels on some of his tweets about mail-in ballots? That resulted in the ridiculous executive order to undermine Section 230, even though all Twitter had done at the time was add more speech to Trump's tweets and pointed out that they were presenting misleading information.
To some extent, however, we should be thankful that the power of the US President is at least somewhat limited, or we might have ended up with a situation like what happened in India this week. The story begins similarly to what happened with Twitter labeling some Trump tweets. In this case, there was something of a political spat in India, where the Indian National Congress (more or less the opposition political party, not a legislative body as the name might imply), complained to Twitter that the leading BJP party was spreading "forged documents" on Twitter. They asked Twitter to suspend the accounts of some BJP leaders who were supposedly spreading those documents.
We've formally written to @Twitter seeking suspension of Twitter accounts of BJP leaders who are indulging in spreading forged documents attributing to Congress.
While an FIR has already been lodged, the independent fact-checkers too have blown the lid off BJP's propaganda. pic.twitter.com/DeVUO585l3
The "forged documents" were basically misleading claims by the BJP that Congress was using a "toolkit" to undermine the Indian government's response to the raging pandemic.
After apparently reviewing this request to suspend those accounts, Twitter instead took what should be seen as a perfectly reasonable middle ground approach, and flagged the tweets of a BJP spokesperson noting that they were "manipulated media." The "manipulated media" flag is one of the first that Twitter started using in its attempt to flag misinformation and it has been used for well over a year now in a variety of contexts.
Now matter how you look at it, this is a "more speech" approach to dealing with potential misinformation. Twitter is adding its own speech to the tweets, noting that what they show appears to be manipulated. This hardly seems like a reason for law enforcement to get involved -- but get involved they did. Police first sent a notice to Twitter demanding an explanation over why it placed the "manipulated media" tag on that tweet, and then followed it up by raiding two separate Twitter offices in order to conduct a "search" for such information.
Of course, Twitter has all of its employees working from home these days (especially in India where there is still a massive COVID outbreak), so that wasn't particularly effective. But this is also against the backdrop of the Indian government just recently threatening to throw Twitter employees in jail if they didn't remove various criticisms of the Indian government, including over both protests and its handling of the pandemic.
This is all kind of terrifying when you look at it. It seems like a blatant intimidation technique from the ruling government trying to stifle not only criticism, but to suppress attempts to fact check some of its own disinformation.
Few things illustrate the broken state of our global intellectual property system better than the fact that, well over a year into this devastating pandemic and in the face of a strong IP waiver push by some of the hardest hit countries, patents are still holding back the production of life-saving vaccines. And of all the countries opposing a waiver at the WTO (or withholding support for it, which is functionally the same thing), Canada might be the most frustrating.
Canada is the biggest hoarder of vaccine pre-orders, having secured enough to vaccinate the population five times over. Despite this, it has constantly run into supply problems and lagged behind comparable countries when it comes to administering the vaccines on a per capita basis. In response to criticism of its hoarding, the government continues to focus on its plans to donate all surplus doses to the COVAX vaccine sharing program — but these promises were somewhat more convincing before Canada became the only G7 country to withdraw doses from COVAX. Despite all this, and despite pressure from experts who explain how vaccine hoarding will prolong the pandemic for everyone, the country has continually refused to voice its support for a TRIPS patent waiver at the WTO.
Last week, the US finally said that it would support a waiver. This position has issues — there's no commitment to a specific proposal, just to negotiating a new one, so the devil is very much in the details — but the top-line promise of support for the general concept is meaningful and welcome. Some suspected that Canada might finally follow suit with, at least, a similarly open-to-interpretation promise — but apparently the government can't even go that far, and has stated that it's still "weighing support":
Following a meeting with his G7 counterparts, Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau said discussion on whether to lift patents, as was done in the AIDS crisis, was “very active” but said Canada is still weighing the options.
“Canada’s position is that we need to obtain more vaccines, we need to all put more money into the COVAX program, and by the way Canada is the fourth largest contributor to the COVAX program, and we need to discuss with manufactures whether they’re prepared to make licensing arrangements to allow greater production of the vaccine,” he said in an interview on CTV News Channel’s Power Play.
This position is baffling and infuriating. Canada has already missed its chance to be a leader in the call for a truly cooperative global vaccine production strategy, and now it's missing its opportunity to at least be an early supporter among high-income countries. Meanwhile, the country's struggling rollout has convinced many citizens that its procurement has been too slow despite being the world's biggest hoarder of orders. As other countries like India face devastation, the ruling Canadian Liberal party's opposition (especially Conservative provincial premiers, who are among the most responsible for the failed rollout) are taking the opportunity to shift blame and bring dangerous isolationist dog whistles into the mainstream by claiming the country's only real problem is poor border controls. Canada is also struggling to fund development of a homegrown vaccine, and build out domestic manufacturing capacity that was sorely lacking when the pandemic hit. All of this is ample reason for Canada to support an IP waiver that would increase global supply, stem the spread of COVID around the world and especially in hard-hit places like India that traditionally have lots of people traveling to the country, and maybe even accelerate domestic vaccine production. Instead, Canada is hedging its bets and letting its struggling pandemic response become a partisan football in a political debate laced with misinformation and toxic nationalism while millions of Canadians — and billions around the world — still wait for their chance to get vaccinated.
Summary: An app that allowed users to moderate content residing on their own phones was given the boot by Google after it was determined to be in violation of Play Store rules.
The self-explanatory "Remove China Apps" app was developed by Indian engineers residing in Jaipur, India in collaboration with One Touch App Labs. The app was created in response to growing backlash against China during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, after early reports showed visitors to a seafood market in Wuhan, China had contributed to the spread of the virus.
India's proximity to China intensified this backlash. How removing apps developed in China was supposed to stop the spread of the virus is best left to the possibly literally-fevered imaginations of the app developers and the millions of Indian users who downloaded the app.
However questionable the motivation for the development and deployment of the app, it did allow Android users to easily identify apps developed by Chinese developers and remove them from their phones. However, this secondhand act of personal content moderation was soon hampered by Google, which dumped the app from its Play store, citing violations of its policies. Specifically, Google pointed to its "deceptive behavior" policy. App developers are forbidden from uploading apps that "encourage or incentivize users to remove or disable third-party apps."
Decisions to be made by Google:
Should Google control how Android phone purchasers choose to use their phones?
Should Google be more concerned with possible exploitation of permissions to compromise phone users, rather than the ability of users to more closely moderate the content of their devices?
Is an app that openly states it will remove other apps actually "deceptive?"
Questions and policy implications to consider:
Could apps like these serve a useful purpose, like giving Google a heads up on questionable apps/developers?
Does maintaining a blocklist for devs/users achieve the same objective without harming developers who rely on crowdfunding?
Does pushing Android users towards sideloading apps do less to protect users than removing questionable apps that run afoul of rules rarely broken by app developers?
Resolution: Google has refused to reinstate the app. Android users are still able to sideload the app if they wish. The popularity of the app went further than India and the county's kneejerk reaction to developments in Wuhan, China.
But Google still has a battle ahead of it. With it commanding nearly 95% of the Indian market, the demand for apps that (correctly or incorrectly) "punish" Chinese app developers remains a growth market.
Earlier this week we wrote about the absolutely ridiculous coalition of folks who were lobbying against the US supporting a TRIPS intellectual property waiver to support fighting COVID. As we noted, it was totally expected that Big Pharma would object to it, but the surprising thing was seeing Hollywood and the legacy entertainment industry -- an industry that needs COVID to go away to get back to normal -- coming out strongly against the waiver as well. They claimed they had to do so since the waiver would apply to copyright as well, but that's nonsense. The waiver (1) explicitly excluded entertainment products and (2) is expressly limited to "prevention, containment or treatment of COVID-19."
On top of that, the waiver process was built into the TRIPS agreement, and if a full on global pandemic that has already killed over 3 million people (and counting) isn't the time to use the waiver, then the waiver is effectively meaningless.
Thankfully, the US has now announced that it will be supporting a waiver. USTR Katherine Tai made the announcement:
These extraordinary times and circumstances of call for extraordinary measures.
The US supports the waiver of IP protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help end the pandemic and we’ll actively participate in @WTO negotiations to make that happen. pic.twitter.com/96ERlboZS8
— Ambassador Katherine Tai (@AmbassadorTai) May 5, 2021
Her quote:
“This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines. We will actively participate in text-based negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) needed to make that happen. Those negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved.
“The Administration’s aim is to get as many safe and effective vaccines to as many people as fast as possible. As our vaccine supply for the American people is secured, the Administration will continue to ramp up its efforts – working with the private sector and all possible partners – to expand vaccine manufacturing and distribution. It will also work to increase the raw materials needed to produce those vaccines.”
Of course, the details here matter. Tai says the US will support a waiver for vaccines... but did not definitively say if it will support the waiver currently applied for from South Africa and India. It would be just like the US to say it supports the waiver to get everyone who supports the effort to cheer... and then go into negotiations and push for a much, much narrower (and potentially effectively meaningless) waiver. Hopefully that's not the case.
Still, just getting the USTR to support any waiver was a big step. This was far from the most likely outcome. The pharma industry is incredibly powerful at the lobbying game, and when you add Hollywood's muscle to it as well, many people felt that the US would refuse to support the waiver. Hell, earlier this week they even got Dr. Fauci to come out leaning against it, saying he was agnostic on the actual waiver, but thought there were better ways to fight COVID (Fauci may be an expert in infectious diseases, but his expertise in intellectual property is... that he holds a few patents of his own). And, of course, Biden has always had a close relationship with Hollywood and has long been a copyright maximalist.
And, while Fauci may be correct that this may not be the most important thing for fighting COVID, no one is saying this is the only thing. This is just one of a long list of things, and it will undoubtedly help deal with restrictions in some areas that are costing people lives.
In the end, this came down to a simple question: is the best way to protect the global economy to protect the monopoly interests of a few giant companies, or to use knowledge, information, and expertise to help spread better treatments and vaccines faster. The US chose the latter, and it was the only moral choice.
So we've noted for a long time how efforts to monopolize repair have resulted in a growing, bipartisan interest in right to repair legislation in more than a dozen states. Whether it's Sony and Microsoft's efforts to monopolize game console repair, Apple's tendency to monopolize phone repair (and bully independent repair shops), or John Deere making its tractors a costly nightmare to fix, a sustained backlash has been growing against draconian DRM, rampant abuse of copyright, and other behaviors that make repairing products you own as annoying and expensive as possible.
Granted this anger has extended into the medical arena, where the problem isn't just a costly hassle, it's a matter of life and death. This was particularly true during COVID, given many hardware manufacturers made getting access to repair manuals and parts cumbersome and expensive, if not impossible. As such, several states (including Texas) have been pushing both right to repair legislation that generally protects consumers, as well as legislation that takes aim at device manufacturers that make it an expensive headache for hospitals to repair their own equipment in a timely fashion.
Granted as more and more states push such legislation, more and more companies have taken to pushing misleading claims about what this legislation does. Whether it's Apple's attempt to claim that such legislation will turn states into "meccas for hackers" (which sounds kind of cool, honestly), or the auto industry's false claim that such laws will help sexual predators, there's been no shortage of sleazy efforts to undermine such laws using specious reasoning and unethical claims. And given that legislative efforts keep getting blocked, it has proven pretty effective.
Enter the Wall Street Journal, which this week joined the fun with a nonsensical editorial claiming that medical device right to repair legislation being pushed in Texas is somehow harmful to human health. The piece basically just consists of several paragraphs of author Tom Giovanetti lauding the miraculous innovation of copyright, while claiming the bipartisan right to repair movement is some kind of "leftist" plot. Why would the activist and reform groups operating on a shoestring budget do this? They hate innovation, apparently:
"American innovation is dependent on the protection of intellectual property. It encourages innovation by discouraging theft. But there are those who are philosophically opposed to intellectual property protection. Left-leaning public interest law firms and activist groups led by U.S. PIRG, an association of public-interest law firms, have been trying for years to undermine intellectual-property protection through “right to repair” campaigns in state legislatures. During this legislative session they are pushing their anti-innovation agenda in the guise of a “right to repair” advanced medical devices."
For one thing, USPIRG is neither "left-leaning" nor a law firm (but no matter I guess, huh?). But it's also amazing how the author just cheerfully floats over the fact that manufacturers enjoy a monopoly on tools, documentation, and replacement parts, and that those monopolies have been putting human lives at risk before, during, and likely after COVID. These restrictions often drive repair technicians to dangerous third-party fixes and firmware because they literally can't get the help, tools, parts, or documentation they need; so often it's the repair monopolies and DRM that are putting lives at risk, not the efforts to fix the problem.
Industry pretty consistently tries to claim that opening up access to essential repair tools and documentation somehow always poses some diabolical threat to security, privacy, and safety, when that's never really been true. That doesn't really stop Giovanetti, who also trots out the China bogeyman for good measure:
"Forcing disclosure of these advanced medical technologies and opening them up to uncertified technicians may also represent a cybersecurity threat. You may be troubled by the idea that voting machines can be hacked, but what about opening up MRI machines and PET scanners? Patients could be endangered by sabotaged medical devices, but they might also suffer from malfunctions that cause inaccurate test results and thus unidentified medical problems. Such concerns also include direct theft of American innovation by bad actors seeking advanced U.S. technology, such as China."
Those who work in the industry and realize that draconian DRM, idiotic applications of copyright, and ham-fisted repair monopolies actively harm public health weren't particularly impressed with the Journal's latest hot take:
In particular, many of the editorial's claims about how the FDA works weren't even remotely close to being true:
Among other things: The FDA STILL DOESN'T REGULATE SERVICE AND REPAIR *UNLESS* IT'S DONE BY A MANUFACTURER. Absent stuff that can nuke you (requires NRC licensing) anyone can service most medical devices.
As is the Wall Street Journal's habit on many subjects, the author tries to dress up greed as some kind of elaborate ethos, and efforts to actually implement reform as some kind of dangerous, diabolical partisan plot. But the "right to repair" movement is growing at an amazing rate because it enjoys broad bipartisan support, from John Deere owners who don't want to drive a thousand miles and pay a small fortune just to fix the tractors they own, to medical professionals who don't want patients to die while they navigate some company's obnoxious repair monopoly bureaucracy just to get a ventilator to work again.
Throughout the COVID pandemic, it's been truly shameful to watch how patent maximalists have tried to insist that we just need more patents to deal with COVID -- even though the incredible breakthroughs that brought such quick development of vaccines were not due to patents, but rather the free and open flow of information from a bunch of researchers and scientists who didn't care about whether or not information was locked up for profit, but did care about saving millions of lives.
And now that we've got vaccines, we're dealing with significant problems in rolling them out around the world -- and patents are often in the way, holding that rollout back. And we actually have a way of dealing with that: what's known as a TRIPS waiver. TRIPS is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, which set up a variety of standards among member nations and the WTO regarding intellectual property. I have many problems with TRIPS (and the WTO), but TRIPS does include a process to grant waivers on intellectual property rights. This was in response to (very legitimate!) concerns by less well off nations that rich nations would use the patent system to block access to important life saving medicines.
So, to ease such concerns, the TRIPS agreement includes a process by which the WTO can grant a compulsory licensing regime that will allow others to make patented drugs, and thus increase availability. A key point of this so-called waiver is that it allows for better allocations of certain drugs during medical emergencies. Given that, issuing such a waiver right now seems like a no-brainer. But... it has not been.
India and South Africa put forth a a fairly straightforward waiver request for dealing with COVID-19. The key part of the request is that intellectual property requirements under TRIPS solely in relation to the "prevention, containment or treatment of COVID-19" should be waived during the course of the pandemic. It seems pretty straightforward. Even reliable patent maximalist sites like IP Watchdog are now publishing articles saying that the TRIPS waiver "is a necessary first step towards facilitating increased, rapid production of vaccines" and noting that it won't undermine the value of innovation in any way.
This is... misleading at best. It is true that the waiver would cover copyrights, but only in an extremely limited fashion. As the part I quoted above notes, it only applies to intellectual property protections that are blocking the prevention, containment, and treatment of COVID-19. And, that can include a very limited set of copyrights. For example, there still remain shortages of ventilators in many parts of the world, and early on in the pandemic, people were working on 3D printing replacement parts to help deal with this extreme shortage. However, with some companies issuing threats over these 3D printed parts, there are legitimate concerns that copyright could be used to shut down such operations. Another area where a copyright waiver is likely to help is in allowing researchers easier access to important scientific journals and research that may help them develop more and better solutions.
As if to make Hollywood calm down, South Africa and India included an explicit statement in the waiver request to say that the waiver cannot be used for entertainment products: "The waiver in paragraph 1 shall not apply to the protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms (Sound Recordings) and Broadcasting Organizations under Article 14 of the TRIPS Agreement." That's literally the 2nd paragraph in a four paragraph waiver request. Already, it's kind of insulting that officials crafting this waiver request in an attempt to save lives had to waste time making sure that Hollywood wouldn't get angry at them.
And even then it didn't work.
The Motion Picture Association, which represents major movie and television studios, deployed five lobbyists to influence Congress and the White House over the waiver. The Association of American Publishers as well as Universal Music have similarly revealed that they are actively lobbying against it.
Neil Turkewitz, a former Recording Industry Association of America official, blasted the proposal on Twitter, claiming it will harm musicians, performers, and other cultural workers who are already struggling.
“As COVID has undermined the livelihoods of creators around the [globe emoji], you want to further expand their precarity—in the name of justice?” Turkewitz wrote.
The Turkewitz quote is particularly disgusting. There is nothing in the waiver that will harm the livelihood of creators. Indeed, getting the world vaccinated is how we bring things back to normal to help open up the world to help those musicians, performers, and other cultural workers survive. For him to even suggest that this waiver somehow harms them is not just disinformation, it's disinformation that will kill people. It's disgusting.
And the lobbying by Hollywood goes beyond just what was reported in the above linked Intercept article. ITIF, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, which may sound like a think tank that is focused on the tech industry, but which has long had close ties to Hollywood (and, indeed, an ITIF paper was the basis for the terrible SOPA/PIPA laws a decade ago), recently came out with a laughably ridiculous attack on the waiver, claiming that there's no possible way copyrights should be included in it:
This latest affront to IP rights is, to say the least, ill-placed, if not misinformed. There is simply no compelling reason to focus on the suspension of copyright in this case.
Oh come on. People are fucking dying and this is the fight you want to have? It's not "suspension of copyright" that people are asking for. They're asking for a narrowly tailored, specific exemption to excessively restrictive copyright solely in cases where that exception is needed to help fight COVID. The idea that it is "ill-placed" or "misinformed" is pure propaganda.
Yet, waiving intellectual property rights abroad would not hasten the end of COVID-19. It would harm our domestic IP industries, hand India and China valuable government-supported research free of charge and weaken the global IP system for decades to come. Just last week, in remarks before the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) Spring Summit Daren Tang, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), stated that a strong intellectual property ecosystem was primarily responsible for allowing COVID-19 vaccines to “be brought to people in the fastest time in history.” I wholeheartedly agree...
First off, it wouldn't "harm" any domestic industry. That's nonsense. And if the research is for saving lives and (as Tillis states) was "government-supported" then it should be freely available to anyone. Government supported research means that the public paid for it and it should be widely available to anyone.
Second, just because a long time advocate of patent and copyright maximalism says something, doesn't automatically make it true. There is no evidence whatsoever that "strong intellectual property... was primarily responsible for allowing COVID-19 vaccines" to come about. Indeed, the stories about how the vaccines were developed show the opposite. They show how the free flow of information and ideas among researchers and scientists around the globe, and them agreeing to work together, rather than trying to lock up ideas, is what helped make it possible.
I can understand pharma companies fighting against it, even if that alone is disappointing given the situation. That Hollywood and its friends are flat out lying about it and creating a moral panic, claiming this will somehow hurt the creative industries, is dangerous disinformation.
Back in February, we wrote about how the Indian government was threatening to jail Twitter employees if the company wouldn't block various tweets that were critical of the government's handling of farmer protests in that country. While Twitter pushed back, eventually it did block a bunch of content, though it appears it did so reluctantly, and only because it had no other choice.
As first spotted by Medianama, Twitter agreed to block access to 52 tweets for users in India. People elsewhere can still see them, so we can see what kinds of tweets the Modi government doesn't want people to see. Tweets like this:
India will never forgive PM @narendramodi for underplaying the corona situation in the country and letting so many people die due to mismanagement. At a time when India is going through a health crisis,PM chose to export millions of vaccine to other nations #ModiHataoDeshBachaopic.twitter.com/5sQRfT7kpB
— Indian American Muslim Council (@IAMCouncil) April 13, 2021
In other words, it appears that rather than deal with the fact that the government totally failed to deal with the COVID situation, its main focus right now is making sure that people in India can't talk about how badly the government handled all of this.
