PayPal Blocks Purchases Of Tardigrade Merchandise For Potentially Violating US Sanctions Laws

from the water-bears-are-the-new-WMDs dept

Moderation at scale is impossible. And yet, you'd still hope we'd get better moderation than this, despite all the problems inherent in policing millions of transactions.

Archie McPhee -- seller of all things weird and wonderful -- recently tried promoting its "tardigrade" line of goods only to find out PayPal users couldn't purchase them. Tardigrades are the official name for microscopic creatures known colloquially as "water bears." Harmless enough, except PayPal blocked the transaction and sent this unhelpful response:

If you can't read/see the tweet and the screenshot, here's what it says:

Just an FYI that @PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word "tardigrade" in the product name or description. We've contacted them and they told us we should just stop using the word tardigrade.

And PayPal's response:

Every transaction that goes through our system, is reviewed by our internal security team. Certain words can trigger our security system. Unfortunately, this cannot be overridden. I would advise you to change the wording on your website to prevent this from happening.

PayPal's size demands the use of automated moderation. But this outcome seems inexplicable. It says the "internal security team" manually reviewed the block… and decided to keep it in place anyway. What's the point of having a "security team" if they can't override the algorithm's decision?

Then there's the question as to why "tardigrade" is blocked in the first place. It's the official name for a particularly hardy micro-animal found all over the world. Early speculation centered on the Scunthorpe Problem, suggesting PayPal blocks transactions involving forms of the word "retarded."

But it appears to be even more ridiculous than that. Tim Ellis at GeekWire received this explanation from PayPal:

A PayPal representative put the blame on the US government’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions, which contain an entry for an industrial supply company called “Tardigrade Limited” located in the country of Cyprus. According to PayPal, the word “tardigrade” triggered a manual review process because their system determined that the payments “may potentially violate US sanction laws."

Customers have a Balkan arms dealer to blame for their inability to purchase tardigrade goods.

Slobodan Tesic (Tesic) was identified in the annex of E.O. 13818 on December 21, 2017. At the time of his designation, Tesic was among the biggest dealers of arms and munitions in the Balkans, spending nearly a decade on the United Nations (UN) Travel Ban List for violating UN sanctions against arms exports to Liberia.

[...]

Tesic also utilized Cyprus-based Tardigrade Limited (Tardigrade) to conduct business in third-party countries, particularly Arab and African countries. Tesic has also used his Serbian companies to sign contracts with Tardigrade before selling the goods to a final buyer.

So, "tardigrade" is flagged by the system as indicative of sanctions violations. But there's that term again: "manual review." Is it impossible for reviewers to distinguish between arms sales through third parties and these?

Now, it could be the manual review team didn't want to end up on the wrong side of sanctions and felt safer blocking transactions than possibly allowing an arms dealer to launder money through the sale of adorable water bear products. Or it could be the manual "review" consists of scrolling through a list of flagged items as quickly as possible and hitting the "approve all" button. Whatever it is, it ain't working. And Archie McPhee isn't the first retailer to run into this problem. Two months ago, Two Photon Art noted it had to rename its Tardigrade pin to "Water Bear Enamel Pin" to allow PayPal users to purchase it.

Erring on the side of caution seems like the smart thing to do. But when the term "manual review" accompanies "automated process," you'd think manual reviewers would see these errors for what they are, rather than allow the blocking to continue. It appears PayPal is doing a little more manual review for tardigrade-related purchases now that it's gone a bit viral, with customers experiencing delays rather than being hit with warnings their purchases have violated PayPal policies.

The upshot is stuff like this will only become more common as time goes on. The more pressure that's placed on tech companies to aggressively police content, the greater the chance harmless content will be rendered inaccessible. It's not that companies shouldn't make efforts to keep their sites free of illegal content and whatever the companies would rather not see on their sites, but automated moderation will always create issues like these. And there just aren't enough manual reviewers available to clean up algorithmic mistakes.

Filed Under: content moderation, payments, sanctions, tardigrade
Companies: paypal

On Appeal, 'Star Trek Discovery' Still Doesn't Infringe On Video Game's Copyright

from the making-the-tardigrade dept

As one of the most beloved science fiction series in history, it's no surprise that the Star Trek franchise has seen its share of intellectual property flare ups. With Viacom manning the IP enforcement guns, it only makes sense that the series has been the subject of the company's failed attempt to pretend Fair Use doesn't exist, the company's failed attempts at copyright enforcement taking down an authorized Star Trek panel, and the company's failed attempt to actually be good humans to the series' adoring fans.

But this is not a story of Viacom failing at yet another thing. Instead, Viacom/CBS, along with Netflix, won in court, defeating an appeal by a video game maker that tried to claim that one episode of Star Trek Discovery infringed on the copyrights for a video game.

CBS and Netflix re-affirmed an earlier win in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit over a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against both companies due to a plotline in the first season of Star Trek: Discovery that a video game creator alleged infringed upon the plot of his unreleased game. The video game was about a giant tardigrade who traveled through outer space and a similar creature played a key role in Star Trek Discover Season 1.

After the Second Circuit lower court had already dismissed the claims, the Court of Appeals agreed in upholding the lower court ruling that both the video game and the TV show were relying on uncopyrightable scientific facts about tardigrades and their ability to survive in outer space.

While it's a wonder the lawsuit was ever filed in the first place, why in the world Anas Osama Ibrahim Abdin went on to appeal that initial ruling is a complete mystery. The issue at hand was a story arch in the first season of Discovery which dealt with a giant tardigrade. Tardigrades are real life, tiny creatures that typically survive within water droplets. The most interesting aspect of tardigrades is that they have been shown to have been able to survive in the vacuum of outer space. Abdin's video game also dealt with tardigrades that survived the outer reaches of space. On essentially this basis alone, Abdin filed both his original suit and the appeal.

This is yet another instance where the idea/expression dichotomy of copyright law comes into play. This dichotomy dictates that copyright can be afforded to specific expression, but not to a general idea. And certainly not to an idea comprised essentially of real life scientific discovery. So, if Discovery told the same story about the same tardigrade creature, merely having a tardigrade in its plot is not somehow infringement just because both works are set in space.

While "[t]he distinction between an idea and its expression is an elusive one," Crichton, 84 F.3d at 587-88, Abdin's space-traveling tardigrade is an unprotectible idea because it is a generalized expression of a scientific fact -namely, the known ability of a tardigrade to survive in space.

While the court's opinion is 40 pages long, that one paragraph does all of its work in affirming the lower court's ruling.

Filed Under: anas osama ibrahim abdin, copyright, discovery, star trek, tardigrade, video game
Companies: cbs, netflix

DailyDirt: Nature Doesn't Play By Our Rules...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Biology does whatever it can do, and it's usually pretty messy about it. Just when people think they've figured out a nice hierarchical system for classifying plants and animals and microscopic organisms, we find out that there's more going on and some things aren't as clear cut as we thought. We could divide up life into several kingdoms and/or three domains, but taxonomy isn't getting simpler with time. Life is a continuous spectrum that can't be separated easily, and classifications could become even more complicated in the future. If you thought a platypus was weird, check out a few of these creatures.

• The tardigrade (aka water bear) is a strange eight-legged critter that is so resilient that it can survive in space -- and it can inherit genes from its environment. Horizontal gene transfer from bacteria, fungi and Archaea has contributed to about 17.5% of the tardigrade's genome, making it the record holder for an animal. For reference, the human genome has 5-8% of its DNA from foreign sources like retroviruses. [url]
• Solar-powered sacoclossans are herbivorous sea slugs that can absorb chloroplasts from their food and use these disembodied algae parts as both a form of camouflage (from the green color of the chloroplasts) and as a source of energy. These chloroplasts don't get passed down to offspring, but young sacoclossans eat algae and obtain chloroplasts just like their parents did. [url]
• A new species of 'coywolf' is emerging in eastern North America from interspecies breeding, resulting in an animal with wolf, coyote and dog DNA. Millions of these animals populate a vast geographic area including rural and urban environments. These adapted coywolves can eat a variety of things -- from discarded human foods to rodents and small mammals like cats -- and hopefully these animals aren't related to Michael Corvin. [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: algae, biology, chloroplast, coywolf, dna, evolution, genome, life, nature, sacoclossan, tardigrade, taxonomy

DailyDirt: What Is This Thing Called Life?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Finding life elsewhere in the universe would be a remarkable event. But obviously, we haven't had much luck so far. Still, there are plenty of folks trying to look at the universe as half-full (instead of mostly empty?). Here are just a few quick links that support the optimistic view that we're not alone.

• Astrophysicists have run some simulations that indicate that Earth-like planets without a moon might still harbor conditions suitable for life as we know it. Previously, astrobiologists assumed that ETs would need to live on a planet that had a moon like ours... but what do astrobiologists know, eh? [url]
• Other computer models suggest that life might exist on moons of gas giant planets. Simulations like these should probably include an enormous grain of salt, though... [url]
• The tardigrade, aka the water bear, is an interesting little creature and one of the few animals proven to be able to survive exposure to the vacuum of space. Tardigrades are called the "hardiest animal on earth" because they can exist for months in an anhydrobiotic state. [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: astrobiologists, biology, extraterrestrial life, physicists, tardigrade