In the latest bizarre news concerning the Snowden leaks, Reuters is reporting that Ed Snowden was able to convince a number of NSA employees to give him their login info, which helped him access a lot of the content. Of course, this differs from earlier reports, which had suggested that, as a sys admin, he'd simply been able to login as other employees.
A handful of agency employees who gave their login details to Snowden were identified, questioned and removed from their assignments, said a source close to several U.S. government investigations into the damage caused by the leaks.
Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator, a second source said.
What fascinates me about this is the idea that if you were working for the NSA, wouldn't you know to never give out your password to anyone, ever? It just seems like basic common sense (also: if you were one of those 20 to 25 people, I'd imagine that as soon as Snowden's name came out, you were sweating bullets). You'd think that NSA employees wouldn't do that sort of thing.
And, once again, what this brings us back around to is the simple fact that NSA employees are humans and sometimes they do the wrong thing. That is why the surveillance program is so worrisome. Keith Alexander and others can insist that there were only a small number of abuses, but all the data actually showed is that the NSA only caught a small number of abuses. It's quite likely that many more have happened, and continue to happen. The fact that it's apparently not that difficult to get NSA employees to cough up their login info shows that for all the talk of careful review, audits, limits and security -- humans remain a very weak link, and there are all sorts of ways to get at information even if the NSA believes it's locked down and carefully monitored.
The NSA still has no idea what Snowden took or what leak is going to be revealed next. It also seemingly has no contingency plan for the sort of situation any forward-thinking intelligence agency should realize is a distinct possibility.
It has made some moves, all mostly involving the closing of system barn doors, including end-to-end audits and the constantly hovering threat to eliminate 90% of its sysadmin staff. But no matter what methods and safeguards it implements, it's not going to eliminate the problem. As much as the revelations to date are only the "tip of the iceberg," Snowden himself is only the leading edge of a generational shift in thinking -- one that doesn't bode well for government entities that value their secrecy.
Generation X's parents expected a job for life, but with few exceptions Gen Xers never had that — they're used to nomadic employment, hire-and-fire, right-to-work laws, the whole nine yards of organized-labour deracination. Gen Y's parents are Gen X. Gen Y has never thought of jobs as permanent things. Gen Y will stare at you blankly if you talk about loyalty to their employer; the old feudal arrangement ("we'll give you a job for life and look after you as long as you look out for the Organization") is something their grandparents maybe ranted about, but it's about as real as the divine right of kings. Employers are alien hive-mind colony intelligences who will fuck you over for the bottom line on the quarterly balance sheet. They'll give you a laptop and tell you to hot-desk or work at home so that they can save money on office floorspace and furniture. They'll dangle the offer of a permanent job over your head but keep you on a zero-hours contract for as long as is convenient. This is the world they grew up in: this is the world that defines their expectations.
Snowden was never an NSA "employee" in the any true sense of the word. He was a contractor and yet the keys to the system were handed over to someone essentially on the outside. Snowden, unlike actual government employees, had no guarantees. He said he was making good money, but it wasn't permanent. When the renewal date rolled around, he may have been left with nothing but a job reference. The government buys loyalty with pension plans and decent health care, but being "set for life" is no longer the reality, not even in an arena recognized for its lifelong employment of underachievers and middle managers.
Sure, it is possible to build a career in the classified world of government contracting, but there are no guarantees. Younger people grew up knowing this: there are no employment guarantees anywhere. They see it in their friends. They see it all around them.
Many will also believe in openness, especially the hacker types the NSA needs to recruit. They believe that information wants to be free, and that security comes from public knowledge and debate. Yes, there are important reasons why some intelligence secrets need to be secret, and the NSA culture reinforces secrecy daily. But this is a crowd that is used to radical openness. They have been writing about themselves on the internet for years. They have said very personal things on Twitter; they have had embarrassing photographs of themselves posted on Facebook. They have been dumped by a lover in public. They have overshared in the most compromising ways -- and they have got through it. It is a tougher sell convincing this crowd that government secrecy trumps the public's right to know.
This generation will more readily identify with the "crowd," despite its inherent lack of truly personal relationships. People have actively "stuck it to The Man" for years, but now it's the default, rather than limited to a small group of gutsy outliers.
The people who live very public lives as adjuncts of The Internet aren't easily swayed by boardroom talk or mandates delivered from corner offices. They're not nearly as naive as some pundits, especially those beholden to institutions of the past, have tried to portray them. They cling to a moral code, but it's a code nearly unrecognizable to anyone who entered the job market 40 years ago. This Time poll result, as pointed out by Peter Ludlow at the New York Times, shows the gap between not only this generation and generations past, but the difference between so-called "new media" and the aging journalistic institutions.
In broad terms, commentators in the mainstream and corporate media have tended to assume that all of these actors needed to be brought to justice, while independent players on the Internet and elsewhere have been much more supportive. Tellingly, a recent Time magazine cover story has pointed out a marked generational difference in how people view these matters: 70 percent of those age 18 to 34 sampled in a poll said they believed that Snowden “did a good thing” in leaking the news of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.
This generation will be much less susceptible to the "banality of evil" that asks for nearly-blind loyalty. There are no more "company men" -- the kind that later justify malfeasance by explaining they were "just following instructions." (Ludlow excusably Godwinises his own post, quoting Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem," in which the phrase "banality of evil" was conceived to explain how the right working atmosphere can result in horrific transgressions -- all compartmentalized by ordinary people performing their roles as cogs in the machinery.)
The ideal "company man" followed the "fundamental rules of corporate life," according to Robert Jackall's book, "Moral Mazes."
(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut.
Those who break out of these confines are punished for their independent actions. Whistleblowing has always been received badly, both by the entity being exposed, and by others who still adhere to the above rules. This is also why the supposed "proper steps" whistleblowers are supposed to follow are completely useless. Systemic problems are rarely solvable by insiders, especially those higher up who have "bought in." Going outside is the only realistic choice.
The former United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, argued that Snowden “thinks he’s smarter and has a higher morality than the rest of us … that he can see clearer than other 299, 999, 999 of us, and therefore he can do what he wants. I say that is the worst form of treason.”
For the leaker and whistleblower the answer to Bolton is that there can be no expectation that the system will act morally of its own accord. Systems are optimized for their own survival and preventing the system from doing evil may well require breaking with organizational niceties, protocols or laws. It requires stepping outside of one’s assigned organizational role. The chief executive is not in a better position to recognize systemic evil than is a middle level manager or, for that matter, an IT contractor. Recognizing systemic evil does not require rank or intelligence, just honesty of vision.
Schneier says whistleblowing is the "civil disobedience of the information age." Stross is even more blunt, calling whistleblowing the natural progression of a new generation whose future has been sabotaged by generations who lived in an era when getting hired meant having a job for life and whose loyalty, right or wrong, was rewarded with pension plans and a functioning Social Security system. But those niceties have vanished and those stuck with the broken system and the bill of goods aren't happy.
[S]lighted or bruised employees who lack instinctive loyalty because the culture they come from has spent generations systematically destroying social hierarchies and undermining their sense of belonging are much more likely to start thinking the unthinkable.
So, who are these agencies going to turn to when hiring in order to prevent dozens of future Snowdens? Hiring from the human race is already problematic, given the inherent propensity of the average person to abuse granted power. The future certainly isn't promising. If nothing else, the agencies should embrace transparency simply because they realistically no longer have an option. The long run of opacity is over and no one's buying the justifications for secrecy, abuse and overreach, least of all those in search of a job.
Techdirt has published a number of posts that explore the issue of whether art organizations can stop people sharing images of works in their collections when the latter are indisputably in the public domain. Even if museums might be able to claim copyright in their "official" photographic images, the more important question is whether they ought to. The good news is that some institutions are beginning to realize that using copyright monopolies in this way contradicts their basic reason for existing -- to share the joy of art. Here, for example, is a wonderful statement of that principle from the Getty Museum entitled "Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come":
Today the Getty becomes an even more engaged digital citizen, one that shares its collections, research, and knowledge more openly than ever before. We've launched the Open Content Program to share, freely and without restriction, as many of the Getty's digital resources as possible.
The initial focus of the Open Content Program is to make available all images of public domain artworks in the Getty's collections. Today we've taken a first step toward this goal by making roughly 4,600 high-resolution images of the Museum's collection free to use, modify, and publish for any purpose.
These are high-resolution, reproduction-quality images with embedded metadata, some over 100 megabytes in size. You can browse all available images here, or look for individual "download" links on the Getty Museum's collection pages. As part of the download, we'll ask for a very brief description of how you're planning to use the image. We hope to learn that the images will serve a broad range of needs and projects.
As that makes clear, the scheme is not strictly "freely and without restriction" since you are asked for a description of what you plan to do with the image; there's also a request that attribution be given. However, these are minor restrictions. And the Getty certainly gets why collections should be doing this:
Why open content? Why now? The Getty was founded on the conviction that understanding art makes the world a better place, and sharing our digital resources is the natural extension of that belief. This move is also an educational imperative. Artists, students, teachers, writers, and countless others rely on artwork images to learn, tell stories, exchange ideas, and feed their own creativity. In its discussion of open content, the most recent Horizon Report, Museum Edition stated that "it is now the mark -- and social responsibility -- of world-class institutions to develop and share free cultural and educational resources."
That is the key point: art galleries and museums have a moral duty to share the expressions of creativity entrusted to them, so that others can "feed their own creativity" and contribute back to the commons of art for others to draw on. The Getty is to be congratulated not only for making this move, but articulating so clearly the reasons for doing so. Let's hope other art organizations around the world now follow suit.
Prefixing concepts with the epithet "open" has become something of a fashion over the last decade. Beginning with open source, we've had open content, open access, open data, open science, and open government to name but a few. Indeed, things have got to the point where "openwashing" -- the abuse of the term in order to jump on the openness bandwagon -- is a real problem. But a great post by David Eaves points out that the spectrum of openness actually extends well beyond the variants typically encountered in the West:
While sharing and copying technologies are disrupting some of the ways we understanding "content," when you visit a non-Western country like India, the spectrum of choices become broader. There is less timidity wrestling with questions like: should poor farmers pay inflated prices for patented genetically-engineered seeds? How long should patents be given for life-saving medicines that cost more than many make in a year? Should Indian universities spend millions on academic journals and articles? In the United States or other rich countries we may weigh both sides of these questions -- the rights of the owner vs. the moral rights of the user -- but there's no question people elsewhere, such as in India, weigh them different given the questions of life and death or of poverty and development.
Consequently, conversations about open knowledge outside the supposedly settled lands of the "rich" often stretch beyond permission-based "fair use" and "creative commons" approaches. There is a desire to explore potential moral rights to use "content" in addition to just property rights that may be granted under statutes.
He then goes on to write about the ideas of Sunil Abraham, founder and executive director of the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) in India. Abraham has created an interesting representation showing the extended gamut of openness, which reaches from proprietary to counterfeiting and false attribution:
Eaves's post examines some of the details of Abraham's map:
Particularly interesting is Sunil's decision to include non-legal "permissions" such as ignoring the property holders rights in his spectrum of openness. He sees this as the position of the Pirate Party, which he suggests advocates that people should have the right to do what they want with intellectual property even if they don't have permission, with the exception, interestingly, of ignoring attribution.
This is something that several Techdirt posts have touched on before. One of the most telling facts about unauthorized sharing online is that people preserve attribution -- there's no attempt to hide who made the song or film. That's probably why survey after survey shows that sharing materials online increases their sales -- something that would be unlikely if attribution were stripped from files. Eaves notes that this aspect ties into a particularly hot topic at the moment -- surveillance:
To Sunil, the big dividing line is less about legal vs. illegal but around this issue of attribution. "This is the most exciting area because this (the non-attribution area) is where you escape surveillance," he declares.
"All the modern day regulation over IP is trying to pin an individual against their actions and then trying to attach responsibility so as to prosecute them," Sunil says. "All that is circumvented when you play with the attribution layer."
This matters a great deal for individuals and organizations trying to create counter power -- particularly against the state or large corporate interests. In this regard Sunil is actually linking the tools (or permissions) along the open spectrum to civil disobedience.
It's a fascinating piece that brings some fresh ideas to an area that has been steadily gaining in importance for some time. I hope that Abraham builds on these thoughts, and publishes some more extended and worked-out explorations of them -- ultimately, perhaps, as a book.
"Why is it that people are willing to expose large quantities of information to private parties but don't want the Government to have the same information?"
It's a valid question, but not when asked by the overseer of government intelligence agencies. Daniel Stuckey at Motherboard points out that there's a big difference between voluntary and involuntary "exposure."
Now, I'd hate to answer Litt's question so simply by saying that consumers are extorted by their love of what they consume, but it's part of it. And trust in companies that give us free things, that advance self-expression is an inalienable consumer right. If the government, theoretically, already knows everything there is to know—when we didn't directly volunteer our information—it then provides momentum for a rally cry. The shame and disgust when Edward Snowden pulled back the curtain reverberates that government by virtue is supposed to be more clear, more holistic, and an idealized reflection of ourselves.
It's a false equivalent. Thousands of people expose tons of information every day using social media platforms, but they do so with the implicit understanding that the free service is deriving some sort of benefit from their interactions. When the government scoops up the same data, there's no perceived benefit, not even the supposed "targeting" of terrorists.
Furthermore, as Stuckey states, we want to believe our government is above snooping on our "private" interactions. (Private in the sense that they're between individuals, no matter how many others can view or interact with the conversations.) If we initiate the exchange, we don't feel victimized by the lack of privacy.
Beyond that, every social media service has some sort of privacy settings built in that limit what others can see. Most of these have only limited effectiveness, but the fact is that users have the option to exclude others. The underlying platform is the facilitator and therefore, has "earned" the "right" to mine data and can never truly be excluded, and we (for the most part) accept this. There is no "exclude government" option, other than Litt's implicit suggestion: if you don't want the government to see it, don't post it in public arenas.
But the most troubling part of Litt's question is this.
It's great that the U.S. government behaves better than corporations on privacy—too bad it trusts/subcontracts corporations to deal with that privacy—but it's an uncomfortable thing to even be in a position of having to compare the two. This is the point Litt misses, and it's not a fine one.
This is the crux of the issue. When someone asks why we don't value our privacy more, in terms of social networking, they have a point. When someone asks why we're willing to give Facebook plenty of data but resent the government doing the same thing, the point is no longer valid. Handing data to advertisers is a lot easier to stomach than the impression that the government is reading over your shoulder.
Ultimately, though, we should never have gotten to the point where the government's thirst for data on American citizens exceeds the demands of corporations. We expect corporations to act in self-interest. We expect our government to be a lot more selfless and its intelligence agencies more willing to sacrifice some effectiveness in order to protect the rights of American citizens.
If Litt honestly feels people don't have privacy expectations in regards to data shared with a third party, he should put some manpower into launching Facebook.gov (or whatever) and see how many people are willing to sign up. Facebook vs. government isn't a fair comparison and Litt knows it. He's just using the question to prop up the third party exception that enables the NSA to acquire vast amounts of data. What he's doing is making a convenient presumption that these users are aware of the protections they lose by sharing information with a third party -- and, consequently, the government. Part of the "expectation of privacy" is the "expectation," something the Supreme Court has noted, and it's safe to say that many Facebook/Google/Twitter users don't expect the government to be accessing their data.
Finally, there's also the utilitarian aspect. As the New Jersey Supreme Court pointed out earlier, no one uses a cell phone simply to provide location data for law enforcement and investigative agencies. And no one utilizes social media in order to provide the government with a treasure trove of personal information.
Zeus... assigned Prometheus the task of forming man from water and earth, which Prometheus did, but in the process, became fonder of men than Zeus had anticipated. Zeus didn't share Prometheus' feelings and wanted to prevent men from having power, especially over fire. Prometheus cared more for man than for the wrath of the increasingly powerful and autocratic king of the gods, so he stole fire from Zeus' lightning, concealed it in a hollow stalk of fennel, and brought it to man.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Bloomberg came out with quite a bombshell last night, discussing how lots of tech companies apparently work with the NSA and other government agencies, not to pass data on users over to the government, but to share exploit information, sometimes before it's public or patched -- in some cases so it can be useful for the US government to use proactively. Last month, we had written about how the feds were certainly collecting hacks and vulnerabilities for offensive purposes, but it wasn't clear at the time that some of these exploits were coming directly from the companies themselves.
The report names one major participant: Microsoft:
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), the world’s largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes.
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft (MSFT) and other software or Internet security companies have been aware that this type of early alert allowed the U.S. to exploit vulnerabilities in software sold to foreign governments, according to two U.S. officials. Microsoft doesn’t ask and can’t be told how the government uses such tip-offs, said the officials, who asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential.
That's fairly incredible. You'd expect Microsoft and other tech companies to be focused on fixing the bugs first, not letting the NSA exploit the vulnerabilities on foreign computers.
The same report, once again, implicates the big telcos for their cushy relationship with the intelligence community -- in which the telcos willingly and voluntarily hand over massive amounts of user data. There's no oversight here, because the telcos apparently have no problem dismantling the privacy of their users.
Some U.S. telecommunications companies willingly provide intelligence agencies with access to facilities and data offshore that would require a judge’s order if it were done in the U.S., one of the four people said.
In these cases, no oversight is necessary under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and companies are providing the information voluntarily.
The article later notes that the big telcos -- AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Level3 and CenturyLink -- have all agreed to participate in a program called Einstein 3, which analyzes metadata on emails, but that all of the companies asked for and received assurances that participating wouldn't make them liable for violating wiretapping laws.
Before they agreed to install the system on their networks, some of the five major Internet companies -- AT&T Inc. (T), Verizon Communications Inc (VZ)., Sprint Nextel Corp. (S), Level 3 Communications Inc (LVLT). and CenturyLink Inc (CTL). -- asked for guarantees that they wouldn’t be held liable under U.S. wiretap laws. Those companies that asked received a letter signed by the U.S. attorney general indicating such exposure didn’t meet the legal definition of a wiretap and granting them immunity from civil lawsuits, the person said.
Suddenly the "blanket immunity" clauses in CISPA make a lot of sense. The whole point of CISPA, it appears, is to further protect these companies when this kind of information comes out.
Museums and copyright have historically had a somewhat strained relationship. Overly complicated copyright laws and overly long copyright terms have only made this more problematic, resulting in museum policy oddities like prohibiting photography and sketching, as the Art Institute of Chicago recently did. (Flash photography is prohibited almost universally, but more for preservation of artwork than for copyright reasons.)
In recent years, though, more and more museums are opening up and allowing the public to access their collections remotely. Many have also taken steps to digitize their collections and make these archives available for download. While many have moved in a more realistic direction, few have taken it as far as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Many museums post their collections online, but the Rijksmuseum here has taken the unusual step of offering downloads of high-resolution images at no cost, encouraging the public to copy and transform its artworks into stationery, T-shirts, tattoos, plates or even toilet paper.
The staff’s goal is to add 40,000 images a year until the entire collection of one million artworks spanning eight centuries is available, said Taco Dibbits, the director of collections at the Rijksmuseum.
This collection may seem miniscule next to that of the Smithsonian, which has digitized over 14 million items from its collection. But the Smithsonian's images are deliberately low-res, a choice it made to deter commercial use. The Rijksmuseum has no such qualms about its catalog being "exploited," stemming from its very realistic take on the realities of the digital era.
“We’re a public institution, and so the art and objects we have are, in a way, everyone’s property,” Mr. Dibbits said in an interview. “‘With the Internet, it’s so difficult to control your copyright or use of images that we decided we’d rather people use a very good high-resolution image of the ‘Milkmaid’ from the Rijksmuseum rather than using a very bad reproduction,” he said, referring to that Vermeer painting from around 1660.
Not only are the images hi-res, but the museum's archive site, Rijksstudio, provides online image manipulation tools for downloaders to utilize. The site asks that users refrain from commercial use (it sells even higher resolution images for that purpose), but also tacitly acknowledges that people are going to use these works however they see fit.
“If they want to have a Vermeer on their toilet paper, I’d rather have a very high-quality image of Vermeer on toilet paper than a very bad reproduction,” he said.
Even the act of making Vermeer toilet paper is considered part of the Rijksmuseum experience.
Mr. Dibbits of the Rijksmuseum maintains that letting the public take control of the images is crucial to encouraging people to commune with the collection. “The action of actually working with an image, clipping it out and paying attention to the very small details makes you remember it,” he said.
Many have argued that allowing photography (or access to downloadable archives) takes money out museums' pockets. After all, if you've seen the painting via a cell phone, why bother seeing the original? But that argument ignores why people go to museums. It's not because the picture is remarkably different in person than when viewed as a high-res photo. It's the whole experience. At worst, photography displaces a gift shop postcard sale. And anyone receiving a postcard from a museum knows it's no substitute for being there.
The Rijksmuseum has gone a step or two further than most, not only by providing high-res downloads (because if it doesn't, someone else will) but by encouraging interaction with the uploaded works with its set of digital tools. Art isn't static. But some museums continue to pretend it is by offering low-res archives wrapped in restrictive usage limitations. Which approach to museum archives is more likely to inspire creation of new works?
For those of you who have managed to avoid the viral sensation of February, known as "The Harlem Shake," consider yourselves lucky. People still seem at a total loss how this became "a thing," but it involves the opening 30 seconds of a song released nearly a year ago, called The Harlem Shake, by Baauer, with the first half involving someone in a wacky costume (often involving a helmet) dancing while others around them ignore it, followed by a bass drop and suddenly everyone around is dancing crazily, often involving costumes, stuffed animals (or real animals), people in sleeping bags and much much more. It's gone quite insane (and, yes, we know it's not "the real Harlem Shake" but so what?) with way, way, way, way too many people, companies and organizations all doing their own versions. There were reports of 4,000 Harlem Shake videos being uploaded to YouTube every single day, and over 60,000 being on YouTube already. If you want (and I warn you to be careful), you can spend hours going through video after video. The KnowYourMeme link up top has collected some of the most popular ones. I cannot vouch for how many such videos it takes before you are driven insane, so be forewarned.
Over the weekend Baauer's song hit number one on the charts and it appears to be doing fairly well around the globe. Also, the song has resulted in a sold out show in NY for Baauer and what is likely to be a fair bit of money. That's because, rather than freak out about others using "his" song (which includes a bunch of samples), Baauer and his label Mad Decent have a deal with INDmusic, which helps indie labels/musicians claim YouTube videos via ContentID and place ads on them. So, combine a top selling song on iTunes, plus allowing the free use of it on YouTube (and monetizing it via ads) and it seems like a tidy profit is being made.
So, for a bit, this was looking like yet another story of how letting people build something on your music was enabling a nice way for one artist to make money, without flipping out about "copyright infringement." But... then we learned that it wasn't quite that simple. As highlighted by The Verge, while Mad Decent and Baauer have mostly let people do what they want with the song, they did send a takedown to Soundcloud over Azelia Banks posting her lyrics over the entire Baauer track, and also posting a video:
That quickly turned into a bit of a Twitter fight, with Banks calling out Baauer:
And, from there we get the following exchange:
Of course, it seemed like there absolutely had to be more to this, as it was unlikely that Banks put together that song and video so quickly after the meme took off (especially since the video doesn't reference the meme at all). Indeed, in an interview with the Daily Beast Baauer (real name: Harry Rodrigues) explains:
“I’m not happy about it,” says Baauer. “She had a version that we were going to release because I’m a big fan of hers. We knew she likes to beef with producers. So she laid something on ‘Harlem Shake’ and it was so/so. Didn’t love it. And that was a little while ago, and since all this video stuff happened, our plans all changed. Because of that, we decided to just release the song on it’s own with no vocal version. So we told her, ‘Please don’t release your version.’ And she said, ‘Well, I’m going to put it online anyway.’ And we said, ‘Please don’t. We’d really like it if you didn’t.’ And she did.”
Still, while lots of folks are defending Baauer here (in part because Banks does have a reputation for getting into arguments with people, and in part because she also went on a homophobic rant), she did have a point when she tweeted this:
Art is supposed to be inspiring, and you should be happy when someone is inspired by your art. In fact, one might argue that Baauer's statement to Banks that "its not ur song" could potentially come back to bite him as well. In that same Daily Beast interview, he talks about how he created the song:
“I just had the idea of taking a Dutch house squeaky-high synth and putting it over a hip-hop track,” he says. “And then I tried to just make it the most stand-out, flashy track that would get anyone’s attention, so put as many sounds and weird shit in there as I could. The dude in the beginning I got somewhere off the Internet, I don’t even know where, and the lion roar just makes no sense.” He laughs. “There’s the sound of flames in there, too, it’s just really low.”
He doesn't know where the "dude in the beginning" comes from -- though, the folks at Reddit have figured it out (because Reddit knows everything). You have to imagine that wasn't licensed, though, if he didn't know where it was from. Who knows about all of the other samples. Personally, I think it's great that he created something by building on the works of others, and was inspired to create something that has become such a huge hit. But you'd think that someone who made the song by pulling bits and pieces from others wouldn't be so fast to sling claims of "ownership" back at someone else who built off of his work. Yes, there's more to it than that and, for the most part, Baauer seems reasonably giddy with all the insanity (and he definitely seemed to do a nice job with his Reddit AMA thanks in particular to this exchange).
It would just be nice if artists who really build on the works of others didn't jump to claiming ownership when others build on their works as well.
In the recently released Copy Culture In The US & Germany survey report from the American Assembly (for which we provided the design & layout work), one small but especially interesting component is the list of reasons given for downloading TV shows and movies. The American responses were pretty evenly distributed among the various key reasons, and serve as a laundry list of things that piracy does just slightly better, or slightly more permissively, than most legitimate sources:
Why I Download TV/Movies For Free (US, Based On Americans Who Do)
While price was one of the top three reasons, this hardly paints a picture of penny-pinching freeloaders—rather, it shows emerging trends in media consumption that distributors and rightsholders simply can't keep ignoring. Absolutely none of these responses are surprising, because they are exactly the way people have been interacting with the majority of content online for years now. They share, they use multiple devices, they expect comprehensive access and a choice of sources, they want access as soon as possible, and they are put off by obtrusive advertising.
Of course, that last item is a bit of an oddity. The knee-jerk reaction among most people is that all advertising is bad, but that seems to underestimate the amount of stuff that advertising pays for or subsidizes, and that most of us happily enjoy on a daily basis. Advertising is one of those things that only ever gets badmouthed, because you only focus on it when it's bad — when it's good it doesn't register as advertising because it doesn't register as intrusive. The perennial buzz around Superbowl commercials and the 44-million views on Old Spice's famous viral ad support this notion pretty strongly.
In the world of online television, I think there's room for both subscription models and advertising-funded models — and even some combinations of both if balanced correctly. But until content providers start tackling the overall problem by catching up to pirate sources in the many areas where their services fall short, no model is going to succeed in defeating piracy.
