Auguste Rodin's Sculptures Are In The Public Domain; 3D Scans Of Them Should Be, Too

from the free-the-scans dept

Auguste Rodin is without doubt one of the greatest sculptors in history. Equally without doubt, his works are now in the public domain, since he died in 1917. Unfortunately, the situation in France is a little more complicated, for reasons the artist and public domain campaigner Cosmo Wenman explains:

Shortly before his death, Rodin willed his estate to the French government, which created the Musée Rodin and assigned to it droit moral (“moral rights”) in Rodin’s oeuvre. By these rights the museum is permitted under French law to manufacture and sell a limited quantity of modern, posthumous bronze casts and represent them as “original” Rodin works. Musée Rodin earns considerable income from sales of such posthumous casts, as well as unlimited, simple reproductions.

Musée Rodin’s moral rights apply only within French jurisdictions, and only in very limited circumstances. They do not impinge on the public domain status of Rodin’s works, nor on the public’s right to freely copy them, even within France.

Wenman believes that museums, art galleries and private collectors around the world should make 3D scans of important public domain works and release them freely, thereby becoming “engines of new cultural creation”. The Musée Rodin disagrees, presumably because it is concerned that its monopoly on “original” posthumous casts might be devalued. As a result, it has been fighting for some years Wenman’s efforts to obtain the museum’s 3D scans of Rodin’s works through the courts.

Wenman has tweeted an update on his lawsuit. One piece of good news is that thanks to his legal campaign, the scans carried out for the Musée Rodin’s of two famous works – “The Kiss” and “Sleep” – are now freely available. Even better news is that Wenman has discovered the Musée Rodin has scanned its entire collection at high resolution. As he says: “These documents are of world wide interest and immeasurable artistic, academic, cultural, and commercial value. I am going after all of them, for everyone.”

It’s regrettable that some museums and galleries are still resisting these attempts to liberate public domain works. When those who are supposedly the guardians of society’s cultural patrimony are fighting to stop people from having full and free access to it, it’s clear that copyright’s poison, based on ownership and exclusion, has entered deep into their souls.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally published to the Walled Culture site.

34 Comments

Analog Books Go From Strength To Strength: Helped, Not Hindered, By The Digital World

from the technology-is-not-destroying-culture dept

Many of the worst ideas in recent copyright laws have been driven by some influential companies’ fear of the transition from analog to digital. Whereas analog formats – vinyl, books, cinematic releases of films – are relatively easy to control, digital ones are not. Once a creation is in a digital form, anyone can make copies and distribute them on the Internet. Traditional copyright industries seem to think that digital versions of everything will be freely available everywhere, and that no one will ever buy analog versions. That’s not the case with vinyl records, and a recent post on Publisher’s Weekly suggests that analog books too, far from dying, are going from strength to strength:

Led by the fiction categories, unit sales of print books rose 8.9% in 2021 over 2020 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Units sold were 825.7 million last year, up from 757.9 million in 2020. BookScan captures approximately 85% of all print sales. In 2020, unit sales were up 8.2% over 2019, which saw 693.7 million print units sold.

The young adult fiction segment had the largest increase, with unit sales jumping 30.7%, while adult fiction sales rose 25.5%. Sales in the juvenile fiction category increased 9.6%.

The two years of increased sales is part of a longer-term trend, as this article from the New York Times in 2015 indicates:

the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.

Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.

Digital formats possess certain advantages over analog ones, notably convenience. Today, you can access tens of millions of tracks online with music streaming services, and carry around thousands of ebooks on your phone. But many people evidently continue to appreciate the physicality of analog books, just as they like and buy vinyl records. The Publisher’s Weekly article also shows how the digital world is driving analog sales:

Gains in the young adult category were helped by several titles that benefitted from attention drummed up by BookTok, users of the social media platform TikTok who post about their favorite books. They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera, released in December 2018, was the #1 title in the category, selling nearly 685,000 copies.

As a recent post on Walled Culture noted, if publishing companies were less paranoid about people sharing snippets of the books they love, on BookTok and elsewhere, the already significant analog sales they produce could be even higher. If the copyright industries want to derive the maximum benefit from the online world, they need to be brave, not bullying, as they so often are today.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally posted to Walled Culture.

62 Comments

Patent Applications Hint That Facebook's VR World Might Just Be Web Mutton Dressed Up As Metaverse Lamb

from the all-gussied-up,-and-nowhere-to-go dept

The unexpected rebranding of Facebook's holding company as "Meta" has prompted a good deal of head scratching. Was it because Mark Zuckerberg is now a true believer in the metaverse religion, as the rather cringe-worthy video released at the time of the name change is meant to suggest? Was it perhaps an attempt to change the conversation in the wake of the damning testimony and leaks of Frances Haugen? Or maybe it was just a desperate bid to find a way of attracting younger users now that Facebook is increasingly an old person's social network, as the New York Times pointed out recently:

The truth is that Facebook's thirst for young users is less about dominating a new market and more about staving off irrelevance. Facebook use among teenagers in the United States has been declining for years, and is expected to plummet even further soon -- internal researchers predicted that daily use would decline 45 percent by 2023. The researchers also revealed that Instagram, whose growth offset declining interest in Facebook's core app for years, is losing market share to faster-growing rivals like TikTok, and younger users aren't posting as much content as they used to.

Whatever the reason, there is no doubting the seriousness of Facebook's corporate swerve to virtual reality (VR). The company has said that it is spending at least $10 billion on its new VR division this year, and that it will create 10,000 new jobs at Facebook across the EU to "help build the metaverse". The new strategy may not be in doubt, but one thing is: how will Meta make money in this brave, new virtual world?

At the heart of Facebook's current business model and profitability are two things: surveillance and advertising. Everything that a Facebook user does on the site -- and on thousands of other major sites around the Internet -- is tracked and analyzed in the minutest detail. The personal profile that results is then sold online -- algorithmically, in real-time -- to the highest bidder, who buys the opportunity to display online advertising targeted at the person in question, as they visit a Web site.

At the moment, the surveillance takes the form of recording which pages people visit on which sites, and where they click. It's not hard to extrapolate that to a virtual world, where Facebook/Meta records everything a user looks at, talks to, touches or interacts with in any way. In addition to using eye gaze direction and pupil activity monitored within the virtual reality headsets to gauge user interest, there may be other biometric inputs -- things like heartbeat, blood pressure and skin conductivity. In-world advertising is also easy to visualize. These could be in the form of virtual ad hoardings in the metaverse, or the more subtle use of product placement.

None of these are particularly novel suggestions -- they've been around for years. But it is fascinating to see precisely these ideas mentioned in a Financial Times article (paywall alert) looking at "dozens of patents recently granted to Facebook's parent company". Among the patents reviewed by the FT there are several that concern mapping users and their movements onto avatars in the metaverse as realistically as possible:

There is a "wearable magnetic sensor system" to be placed around a torso for "body pose tracking". The patent includes sketches of a user wearing the device but appearing in virtual reality as a soldier complete with a sword and armour.

Another patent proposes an "avatar personalisation engine" that can create three dimensional avatars based on a user's photos, using tools including a so-called skin replicator.

To do that requires even closer surveillance of what users do, both online and offline, which potentially allows even more information to be sold to advertisers:

One patent explores how to present users with personalised advertising in augmented reality, based on age, gender, interest and "how the users interact with a social media platform", including their likes and comments.

Another seeks to allow third parties to "sponsor the appearance of an object" in a virtual store that mirrors the layout of a retail store, through a bidding process similar to the company's existing advertising auction process.

As the FT notes, these kind of approaches would allow Meta to offer an immersive virtual world that is even more personalized than the existing Web-based system.

It's important to note that these are just patents. Nowadays, companies apply for as many of them as they can, just in case. Most are never used. But the similarity between today's Facebook and the one that the approaches detailed in the patents might produce is striking, as is the absence of anything truly radical or innovative. And that could be a problem for Meta. If young people aren't interested in what today's Web-based Facebook has to offer, are they really going to want to spend time as an avatar moving through the same thing gussied up into a virtual world?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

11 Comments

How The Financialization Of Music Could Lead To Demands For Perpetual Copyright

from the just-another-asset-class? dept

Back in October, I noted the huge amounts of money pouring into music copyrights, largely driven by the global rise of online streaming. Since then, that trend has continued, most notably with Bruce Springsteen's sale of his recordings and songwriting catalogue to Sony, for a rumored $550 million. As I pointed out in the post, one of the problems with this "financialization" of the sector is that music copyrights become completely divorced from the original creativity that lies behind them. They become just another asset, like gold, petroleum or property. On the Open Future blog, Paul Keller has pointed out a plausible – and terrifying – consequence of this shift.

As Keller notes, the more the owners of copyrights become detached from the creative production process, the less they will care about the nominal balances within the system. In particular, the central quid pro quo of copyright – that a government monopoly is granted to creators for a limited period, after which the work enters the public domain – will be perceived simply as an obstacle to greater profits. The financialization of the music world means that an artist's ability to use the public domain as a foundation for future creativity, or to take advantage of copyright exceptions, will be of no interest to the corporations and private equity firms that are only concerned about the value of their own assets. For Keller, the end-game is clear:

From the perspective of financial investors, copyright is not much more than a bundle of rights created out of thin air that structure financial flows and it follows that there is absolutely no reason why they should not push for governments to make these rights last longer. Once the slate of recording artists that entered into these deals have passed away and will not be able to speak up anymore – or complain that they have been shafted – it will only be a question of time until financial investors start pushing for longer term durations or – more likely – perpetual copyright. Compared to this new class of cultural predators, the good old Walt Disney company will quickly start looking like an innocent schoolboy.

It has been hard enough in the past to make copyright a little fairer for members of the public. If Keller is right – and I fear he is – it will become close to impossible to continue that process in the future unless people start defending vociferously what few rights that they currently have in the world of copyright.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Republished from the Walled Culture blog.

45 Comments

Sci-Hub's Creator Thinks Academic Publishers, Not Her Site, Are The Real Threat To Science, And Says: 'Any Law Against Knowledge Is Fundamentally Unjust'

from the put-up-or-shut-up dept

A year ago, Techdirt wrote about an important lawsuit in India, brought by the academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub and the similar Libgen. A couple of factors make this particular legal action different from previous attempts to shut down these sites. First, an Indian court ruled in 2016 that photocopying textbooks for educational purposes is fair use; the parallels with SciHub, which provides free access to copies of academic papers for students and researchers who might not otherwise be able to afford the high subscription fees, are clear. Secondly, the person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, is fighting, rather than ignoring, the case, as she has done on previous occasions.

One manifestation of her new pro-active approach is a tweet she posted recently. It included a screenshot of an email she wrote to Nature magazine, which had contacted her about a forthcoming article on the Indian court case. Following standard practice, the journalist writing the article, Holly Else, asked Elbakyan to comment on some of the accusations the academic publishers had made against Sci-Hub. Her responses are fascinating, not least because they provide Elbakyan's perspective on several important issues.

For example, according to the publishers' comments as transmitted by Else, "Pirate sites like Sci-Hub threaten the integrity of the scientific record, and the safety of university and personal data". In reply, Elbakyan points out Sci-Hub is unique, and the use of the phrase "Pirate sites like Sci-Hub" is a clever attempt to lump Sci-Hub in with quite different sites, thus prejudging the legality of its activities. Elbakyan says that it's academic publishers -- not Sci-Hub -- which threaten the progress of science:

open communication is [a] fundamental property of science and it makes scientific progress possible. Paywalled access prevents this and is a great threat to science. Also the great threat is also when the whole scientific knowledge became the private property of some corporation such as Elsevier, that has full control of it. That is the threat, not Sci-Hub.

Elbakyan points out that Sci-Hub doesn't threaten the "integrity of the scientific record", since she simply disseminates copies of the academic papers without changing them in any way. But perhaps the most interesting part of her reply concerns the accusation that Sci-Hub threatens the safety of university and personal data. Techdirt has written previously about claims that Elbakyan allegedly has links to Russian intelligence, and that Sci-Hub is some kind of security risk. According to Else, the publishers assert:

Pirate sites like Sci-Hub compromise the security of libraries and higher education institutions to gain unauthorized access to scientific databases and other proprietary intellectual property, and illegally harvest journal articles and e-books.

Sci-Hub uses stolen user credentials and phishing attack to extract copyrighted articles illegally

These are serious allegations, and ones that have been made several times in the past. Elbakyan's response is probably the first time that she has addressed them directly:

Do they have any actual case when Sci-Hub somehow compromised the security of any library or a person? Any person that complained about credentials that were 'stolen' from them? Or is it again, nothing more than empty accusations. Nobody is complaining about 'compromised security' except academic publishers.

In other words, it is time for Elbakyan's accusers to put up or shut up. She concludes by stating that "Any law against knowledge is fundamentally unjust", and hopes that "Nature will have enough honesty to publish my comments in full.

It didn't, of course.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

39 Comments

The Copyright Industry Wants Everything Filtered As It Is Uploaded; Here's Why That Will Be A Disaster

from the i'm-sorry,-we-can't-let-you-post-that,-dave dept

The history of copyright can be seen as one of increasing control by companies over what ordinary people can do with material created by others. For the online world, the endgame is where copyright holders get to check and approve every single file that is uploaded, with the power to block anything they regard as infringing. That digital dystopia moved much closer two years ago, with the passage of the EU Copyright Directive. At the heart of the Directive lies precisely these kind of upload filters – even though the legislation's supporters insisted that they would not be needed. When the law was safely passed – despite voting issues – only then did they admit that upload filters would indeed be required.

The parts of the EU Copyright Directive dealing with upload filters are so badly crafted that most of the EU’s Member States are struggling to implement them in their national laws in any coherent way. This means the full impact of the legislation's upload filters won't be known for some time.

Until then, we can look at the real-life effects of a similar approach, as used by YouTube. Content ID is a digital fingerprinting system developed by Google at great cost – around $100 million by 2018 – which is designed to spot and block allegedly infringing material on YouTube. Content ID’s flaws are well known, particularly in terms of overblocking perfectly legal uploads. This is the fundamental problem with all upload filters: there is no way that an automated, algorithmic system can encompass the complexities of global copyright laws, which even trained lawyers struggle with. The problem of overblocking is widely known on an anecdotal basis, but we have not had reliable data about the scale of the problem. That has finally changed with the release of YouTube’s first Copyright Transparency Report. The Kluwer Copyright Blog has a good analysis and summary of the report by Paul Keller, Director of Policy at openfuture.eu:

The overall take-away is that automated content removal is a big numbers game. In total YouTube processed 729.3 million copyright actions in the first half of 2021 of which the vast majority (99%) were processed via Content ID (as opposed to other tools, such as Copyright Match Tool and the Webform). And while YouTube claims that ContentID is much more accurate and less prone to abuse than its other systems ContentID has still received 3.7 million disputes from uploaders claiming that the actions (these can be blocks/removals but also demonetisation actions) taken against them are unjustified. 60% of these disputes have ultimately been decided in favour of the uploaders, which means that in the first half of 2021 Content ID has generated at least a 2.2 million unjustified copyright actions against its users on behalf of rightholders. In other words, over-enforcement (both unjustified blocking and unjustified demonetisation) is a very real issue that affects the rights of a substantial number of uploaders on a regular basis.

As Keller rightly notes in his post, the real number of unjustified copyright actions is likely to be larger than 2.2 million. When blocked by the Content ID system, many people will just give up, rather than instituting a formal dispute of the block. Unlike copyright companies’ well-paid lawyers, ordinary people do not have the time, money or expertise to engage in this kind of legal battle.

The figure for YouTube overblocking is bad enough. The situation once the EU Copyright Directive’s upload filters come into operation across the continent will be far worse, for a number of reasons that were widely explored by experts before the law was passed, but almost completely ignored by the EU politicians. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the imminent upload filters is that they must apply to every kind of copyright material. YouTube only deals with music and video, and even then has enough problems with overblocking, as the new report indicates. The upload filters required by the new EU law will apply to text, images, photos, maps, music scores, ballet scores, software and 3D models amongst other things. There are currently no systems comparable to Content ID for these domains, nor are there likely to be for a long time, if ever, given the huge cost involved in developing them.

Despite this glaring omission, EU Member States are required to bring in new copyright laws, which will inevitably come with upload filter rules. This seems like a huge disaster waiting to happen – all thanks to the selfish desire of copyright companies to control down to the last byte what ordinary people do online.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.

45 Comments

Another Example Of How The Playing Field Is Tilted In Favor Of Copyright Owners

from the copyright-abuse dept

It's widely known that artists of all kinds often get a raw deal from the contracts they sign. But this kind of legal unfairness is not the only danger they face: copyright can also be turned against creators in other, illegal ways. For example, according to a report on MarketWatch:

Two men have been charged with allegedly running a years-long music royalty scam, in which they collected more than $20 million in payments from YouTube, by falsely claiming to hold the rights to 50,000 Spanish-language songs. 

Things began back in 2017, when the two men allegedly:

approached a third-party royalty management firm identified in court papers only by the initials A.R., falsely claiming to control the royalty rights to the songs. In some cases, Teran and Batista used forged notes from artists claiming they had the rights to manage the music, prosecutors said.

The men allegedly signed a contract with the management firm. Working with an established player seems to have given the accused credibility with YouTube, which then paid them royalties – an astonishing $20 million over the next few years according to the prosecutors. According to court documents, it seems that none of this was passed on to the artists concerned. In addition, YouTubers are alleged to have lost out when their uploads were falsely marked as infringing, and then used to generate income for the accused.

Assuming the details of this case are confirmed during the trial, they show how the digital copyright system takes on trust claims to ownership, if made in the right way – in this case, through an established royalty management firm. That trust contrasts strongly with a widespread reluctance by companies to recognize that people may be able to draw on copyright exceptions when they make copies, and a readiness to assume that it must be an infringement. It's another example of how the playing field is tilted strongly in favor of copyright owners, and against ordinary citizens.

Originally published to the Walled Culture blog.

11 Comments

How China Uses Western Influencers As Pawns In Its Propaganda War

from the chaos-and-suspicion dept

China's efforts to subdue the turkic-speaking Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region will be familiar to Techdirt readers. International awareness is increasing, too, not least thanks to the diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics that the US and other countries have announced. That presents an interesting challenge to the Chinese authorities: how to counter the growing evidence of pervasive surveillance and large-scale arrests of the Uyghurs. Using official outlets like China's Global Times is one way, but its articles are easily dismissed as crude propaganda. Much more interesting is the approach described by the New York Times, which looks at how China is helping Western YouTubers to report on the country:

The videos have a casual, homespun feel. But on the other side of the camera often stands a large apparatus of government organizers, state-controlled news media and other official amplifiers -- all part of the Chinese government's widening attempts to spread pro-Beijing messages around the planet.

State-run news outlets and local governments have organized and funded pro-Beijing influencers' travel, according to government documents and the creators themselves. They have paid or offered to pay the creators. They have generated lucrative traffic for the influencers by sharing videos with millions of followers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Typically, the Chinese government support comes in the form of free organized trips around China, particularly in Xinjiang. By showing the influencers a carefully sanitized image of life in the country, the authorities don't need to worry about negative stories. They simply make it easy for the YouTubers to present images of jolly peasants and happy city-dwellers, because that's all they are allowed to see.

One of the authors of the New York Times piece, Paul Mozur, noted on Twitter another important way that the authorities are able to help their influencer guests. Once produced, the China-friendly videos are boosted massively by state media and diplomatic Facebook and Twitter accounts:

One video by Israeli influencer Raz Gal-Or portraying Xinjiang as "totally normal" was shared by 35 government connected accounts with a total of 400 million followers. Many were Chinese embassy Facebook accounts, which posted about the video in numerous languages.

A new report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, "Borrowing mouths to speak on Xinjiang", has some more statistics on this practice:

Our data collection has found that, between January 2020 and August 2021, 156 Chinese state-controlled accounts on US-based social media platforms have published at least 546 Facebook posts, Twitter posts and shared articles from [China Global Television Network], Global Times, Xinhua or China Daily websites that have amplified Xinjiang-related social media content from 13 influencer accounts. More than 50% of that activity occurred on Facebook.

Mozur says that the use of Western influencers in this way also allows employees of Beijing-controlled media, like the journalist Li Jingjing, to present themselves as independent YouTubers. On Twitter, however, she is labeled as "China state-affiliated media". The Australian Strategic Policy Institute sees this as part of a larger problem (pdf):

labelling schemes adopted by some video-sharing and social media platforms to identify state-affiliated accounts are inconsistently applied to media outlets and journalists working for those outlets. In addition, few platforms appear to have clear policies on content from online influencers or vloggers whose content may be facilitated by state-affiliated media, through sponsored trips, for example.

According to Mozur, China's state broadcaster is actively looking for more influencers, offering bonuses and publicity for those who sign up. In the US, China's consulate general is paying $300,000 to a firm to recruit influencers for the Winter Olympics, ranging from Celebrity Influencers with millions of Instagram or TikTok followers, to Nano Influencers, with merely a few thousand. The ultimate goal of deploying these alternative voices is not to disprove negative stories appearing in Western media, but something arguably worse, as the New York Times report explains:

"China is the new super-abuser that has arrived in global social media," said Eric Liu, a former content moderator for Chinese social media. "The goal is not to win, but to cause chaos and suspicion until there is no real truth."

As if we needed any more of that…

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

30 Comments

An Unplanned, Ad-Hoc Collaboration Reveals The On-The-Ground Truth About China's Internment Camps For Uyghurs

from the name-that-surveillance-camera dept

The US, UK and Australia have all announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The reason given for the move is because of human rights abuses in China, particularly in the turkic-speaking region of Xinjiang. Techdirt has been writing about the Chinese authorities' use of technology to censor and carry out surveillance on the local Uyghur population, among others, for some years. One of the most controversial aspects of China's policy in the region is the use of huge detention camps. According to the authorities there, these camps are for educational and vocational training. Human rights organizations call them internment camps; some governments speak of "genocide" against the Uyghurs.

Given the highly sensitive nature of the topic, it is naturally hard to ascertain what is really happening in these camps. One solution is to use satellite imagery to peek inside China's tightly-controlled borders. Perhaps the best-researched investigation using this technique appeared on BuzzFeed News last year. The main article, and the four follow-ups, revealed the hitherto unknown scale of the internment camps, but were necessarily limited by their use of an extreme physical viewpoint -- the view from space.

A Chinese travel blogger going by the name of Guanguan decided to investigate on the ground some of the camps located by BuzzFeed News, by driving to them. The remarkable 20-minute video summary of his travels provides unique views of the camps, which complement the satellite imagery used by BuzzFeed News. Specifically, they show in some detail side-views of the camps. This allows Guanguan to make reasonable guesses about which camps are indeed for education and training of some kind, and which ones are likely to be high-security internment camps.

The video is well-worth watching in its entirely, since it provides probably our best glimpse yet of the reality of China's internment camps for Uyghurs and others (wisely, Guanguan seems to be out of China now). In fact, the quality of the video images is such that IPVM, which specializes in covering the world of video surveillance, was able to recognize several of the security cameras used at the internment camps. There are a few cameras from the Chinese company Dahua Technology, but the majority identified come from Hikvision. This, Techdirt readers will recall, is the company whose director of cybersecurity and privacy said that IoT devices with backdoors "can't be used to spy on companies, individuals, or nations." IPVM reported that Hikvision "declined to comment" on these latest findings. Its article noted that the visual evidence of Hikvision cameras being used in multiple internment camps, the result of an interesting unplanned, ad-hoc collaboration between Western journalists and a Chinese video blogger, is likely to make things even worse for a company already blacklisted by the US government.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

14 Comments

BookTok Shows How Fans Can Power Sales; Imagine What Could Be Done Without Copyright Anxiety

from the let-your-fans-market-for-you dept

A little while back, the Guardian covered the rising literary power of BookTok – short videos on TikTok devoted to the pleasures and pains of reading. As well as plenty of background information about the BookTok phenomenon, it has the following perceptive comment from Kat McKenna, a marketing and brand consultant specializing in children's and young adult books:

“These ‘snapshot’ visual trailers are making books cinematic in a way that publishers have been trying to do with marketing book trailers for a really long time. But the way TikTok users are creating imagery inspired by what they are reading is so simple, and so clever. It’s that thing of bringing the pages to life, showing what you get from a book beyond words.”

Attracting new – and especially new young – readers is something that publishers have long been striving for. And now, free of charge, BookTok creators are doing this for them, driving huge sales in many cases, as the Guardian explained:

Adam Silvera’s 2017 novel They Both Die at the End is one of the books to have benefited from the BookTok effect. Users recently started filming themselves before and after reading the book, sobbing as they reached the finish line. In March, it shot to the top of the teen fiction charts, selling more than 4,000 copies a week. The book has sold more than 200,000 copies in the UK, with well over half of those coming belatedly in 2021, after thousands of posts about it (#adamsilvera has been viewed 10.8m times).

BookTok is a wonderful demonstration of the power of user-generated content. Because it is made by ordinary people for ordinary people, it speaks directly in a way that no slick marketing campaign can hope to match. But inevitably, hanging over all such exciting experiments with the digital medium there will be “copyright anxiety” – a fear that during your explorations you might cross some invisible line that means you are breaking the law.

Think how many more sales of books, music, art, and films could be driven by new kinds of BookTok, appearing on multiple platforms, if only copyright allowed this kind of material to be used without the risk of legal threats, or of accounts being blocked. Ironically, it turns out that companies demanding stringent enforcement of copyright's unreasonable rules are ultimately harming themselves.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.

10 Comments

Hikvision's Director Of Cybersecurity And Privacy Says IoT Devices With Backdoors 'Can't Be Used To Spy On Companies, Individuals Or Nations'

from the O-RLY? dept

Hikvision describes itself as "an IoT solution provider with video as its core competency". It hasn't cropped up much here on Techdirt: it was mentioned earlier this year as one of two surveillance camera manufacturers that had been blacklisted by the US government because they were accused of being "implicated in human rights violations and abuses" in Xinjiang. Although little-known in the West, Hikvision is big: it has "more than 42,000 employees, over 20,000 of which are R&D engineers." Given the many engineers Hikvision employs, the following comment by Fred Streefland, Director of Cybersecurity and Privacy at Hikvision EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), reported by IPVM, is rather remarkable:

even devices with backdoors can't be used to spy on companies, individuals, or nations. The security features built into devices, networks, and data centres, combined with end-users data-protection responsibilities, make espionage and other misuses of backdoors impossible.

Streefland expanded on why data protection laws make espionage "impossible":

the end-users who buy these cameras are responsible for the data/video footage they generate. In other words, they're the data custodians who process the data and control the video footage, which is legally required to be kept private. Secret access to video footage on these devices is impossible without the consent of the end-user.

An interesting theory, but not one that security guru Bruce Schneier has much time for. IPVM asked him to comment on Streefland's statements:

I would say that only someone who doesn't understand cybersecurity at all would say something like that. But he's a CSO [Chief Security Officer], so he's probably deliberately saying something that stupid in order to sell you something.

That's a polite way to put it. As many stories on Techdirt attest, IoT products in general, and video cameras in particular, have huge security problems, often caused by backdoors, that have led to all kinds of spying at every level.

It seems that someone at Hikvision has realized just how ludicrous Streefland's comments were. The original source for the IPVM story is an interview with Streefland published by Benchmark Magazine. That interview is taken almost verbatim from a post on Hikvision's own blog, called "Debunking myths in the security industry." By an amazing coincidence, both the original interview and the blog post now lead to "404 not found" messages. Happily, the Internet Archive's indispensable Wayback Machine still has copies of both the interview and the blog post, where Streefland's words of wisdom quoted above can be found, along with some other choice thoughts on security.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

14 Comments

Is Protecting Copyright More Important Than Saving Lives During The COVID-19 Pandemic?

from the to-hollywood-it-is dept

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked terrible suffering across the world, we are fortunate that we already have several vaccines that have been shown to be highly effective in reducing the number of deaths and hospitalization rates. Discovering vaccines proved easier than expected, but ensuring that everyone – including people in developing countries – has access to them has proved much harder. The main reason for that is an intellectual monopoly: patents. Even though at least two of the main vaccines were developed almost entirely using public funds, which ought by rights to mean that the results are in the public domain, companies have obtained exclusionary patents on them. This has led to calls for a patent waiver of some kind to allow countries to produce their own supplies of medicines, without needing to pay licensing fees.

The proposal from India and South Africa to the World Trade Organization (WTO) does not mention patents at all, but lists instead what the waiver seeks to achieve: "the prevention, containment and treatment of COVID-19". A paper from Sean Flynn, Erica Nkrumah and Luca Schirru points out that works covered by copyright also need a waiver if we are to combat COVID-19 effectively. For example:

Researchers cannot contribute to COVID-19 responses if they cannot access the scientific literature they need to conduct their work. A global survey recently found that about 20% of researchers globally, and over 30% of researchers in South America (where copyright exceptions are the most limited), report that COVID has “completely” altered or halted their work.

Although some publishers did make publications relevant to COVID-19 freely available initially, the number of articles available is diminishing. Similarly, researchers need free access to material covered by copyright in order to carry out text and data mining, which uses computational analysis of large collections of material in order to reveal new insights. In fact:

The [Covid-19] outbreak was discovered by a Canadian text and datamining company, BlueDot, which tracks emerging health threats by analyzing “a variety of information sources, including chomping through 100,000 news reports in 65 languages a day.”

A less obvious problem caused by copyright concerns the labels and inserts that convey vital information about vaccines and drugs:

Even if a competing vaccine or treatment is lawfully produced with respect to patent law, there are opportunities for companies to use copyrights to halt or delay generic marketing. The issue arises because labels and package inserts – which convey information often required by regulators – may be considered protected by copyright in some countries. There is a history of pharmaceutical companies making such claims (ultimately ineffectively) in the U.S. A recent report by WTO and WIPO [World Intellectual Property Organization] explained that the practice of using copyrights to block generic production continues in other countries.

In each of these instances copyright is acting as an obstacle to the wider availability and use of vital medical interventions to people around the world. Hindering the ability to offer vaccines and treatments will inevitably lead to avoidable deaths from Covid-19. As well as granting waivers for patents, it's long overdue for the authorities concerned to grant them for key material covered by copyright too. If they don't, people in parts of the world without ready access to vaccines and treatments will have to conclude that saving their lives is regarded as less important than protecting intellectual monopolies.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.

20 Comments

Does Copyright Give Companies The Right To Search Your Home And Computer?

from the it-shouldn't dept

One reason why copyright has become so important in the digital age is that it applies to the software that many of us use routinely on our smartphones, tablets and computers. In order to run those programs, you must have a license of some kind (unless the software is in the public domain, which rarely applies to modern code). The need for a license is why we must agree to terms and conditions when we install new software. On Twitter, Alvar C.H. Freude noticed something interesting in the software licence agreement for Capture One: "world-class tools for editing, organizing and working with photos" according to the Danish company that makes it (found via Wolfie Christl). The license begins by warning:

if you do not agree to the terms of this license, you may not install or use the software but should promptly return the software to the place where you obtained it for a refund.

That's normal enough, and merely reflects the power of copyright holders to impose "take it or leave it" conditions on users. Less common is the following:

Capture One or a third-party designated by Capture One in its sole discretion has the right to verify your compliance with this License at any time upon request including without limitation to request information regarding your installation and/or use of the Software and/or to perform on-site investigations of your installation and use of the Software.

If you use Capture One, you must provide "without limitation access to your premises, IT systems on which the Software is installed", and "Capture One or an Auditor may decide in their sole discretion to apply software search tools in accordance with audits."

That is, thanks to copyright, a company is perfectly able to demand the right to access a user's premises, the computer systems they use, and to run search tools on that system as part of an audit. Although this applies to business premises, there's no reason a software license could not demand the same right to access somebody's home. In fact, there are really no limits on what may be required. You're not obliged to agree to such terms, but most people do, often without even checking the details.

The fact that such requirements are possible shows how far copyright has strayed from the claimed purpose of protecting creators and promoting creativity. Copyright has mutated into a monster because it was never designed to regulate activities, as it does with software, just static objects like books and drawings.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally published on the Walled Culture blog.

81 Comments

It's Time To End The Anti-Circumvention Exemption Circus

from the pleading-for-your-rights dept

Copyright as we know it goes back to the Statute of Anne of 1710. A law that old is clearly going to struggle to cope with the enormous changes in technology that have taken place since then – notably the Internet. But even relatively recent copyright laws were framed in ways that have become unworkable for the digital world we live in.

For example, arguably one of the most important pieces of recent legislation in this area is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the US, and its sibling, the EU's Copyright Directive (EUCD). Both are wide-ranging, affecting many aspects of copyright, and a particularly problematic aspect of both concerns anti-circumvention. The DMCA and EUCD prohibit the bypassing of any "technical protection measure" (TPM) used to protect works under copyright. That typically means the much-hated Digital Rights Management (DRM), which aims to control who can do what with copyright material, and thus often gets in the way of people enjoying material that they have paid for.

The DMCA and EUCD introduced severe penalties for circumventing any such TPM, no matter how weak it is, and no matter how reasonable the need to do so may be. As a tiny recognition of this lack of proportion, the DMCA includes Section 1201, which provides a mechanism for giving people permission to circumvent protection:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), codified in part in Title 17, section 1201, of the United States Code, generally makes it unlawful to circumvent technological measures used to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works, including copyrighted books, movies, videos, video games, and computer software. Section 1201, however, also directs the Librarian of Congress, upon the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights following a rulemaking proceeding, to determine whether the prohibition on circumvention is having, or is likely to have, an adverse effect on users' ability to make noninfringing uses of particular classes of copyrighted works. Upon such a determination, the Librarian may adopt limited temporary exemptions waiving the general prohibition against circumvention for such users for the ensuing three-year period.

The new temporary exemptions have just been announced. One of them is to allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented so that the visually impaired can use technology to help them access the texts. Wired reports:

The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility – by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example – that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice.

Another exemption concerns text and data mining (TDM) – using automated techniques to analyze typically large quantities of text and data in order to find patterns and trends there. This kind of work allows existing facts to generate new ones, but often requires circumventing publishers' TPMs. The Authors Alliance reported on a new exemption to section 1201 of the DMCA that would permit TDM by researchers affiliated with academic institutions. But even here, there were restrictions that made it less useful than it could have been:

In the recommendation, Register Perlmutter also recommended adding a limitation that "circumvention be permitted only on copies of the copyrighted works that were lawfully acquired and that the institution owns or for which it has a non-time-limited license," and should not be permitted on works the institution had "rented or borrowed." This limitation has the potential to complicate the usability of the exemption with regards to TDM research on e-books: because e-books are generally licensed rather than owned, whether the exemption will permit TDM research on a certain e-book will depend on the terms of the license for that e-book.

Finally, there is an example of how outdated copyright laws are seriously hampering what is manifestly a legal activity: repairing digital equipment. Because software is involved, and that code is often protected, it has hitherto been illegal in the US to repair many digital devices. The new exemption will now allow circumvention for the purpose of repair, but with a major restriction, as explained by the iFixit site. The new exemption does not allow you to distribute repair tools that circumvent manufacturers' TPMs:

Without access to shared tools, the exemptions are largely academic. Right now, if you want to use this new exemption to repair your Xbox, you're going to have to whittle your own optical drive unlocking app or device from scratch. That just doesn't scale – most gamers are not security engineers.

It should not be necessary to beg every three years for limited and flawed exemptions, like the ones above, to overly-strong copyright laws; instead, people should have a right to carry out these perfectly reasonable activities. The DMCA and EUCD need to be amended, and their logic inverted, so that circumventing a TPM is always permitted, except when it is for an illegal purpose.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally published to the Walled Culture blog.

24 Comments

Chinese Internet Companies Are Censoring People Who Write Or Speak Tibetan Or Uyghur, Lending A Hand To China's Cultural Genocides

from the remembering-Jack-Ma dept

Techdirt has reported on the oppression of Tibetans by the Chinese authorities for 15 years now. More recently, the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs in Xinjiang have come in for the same treatment, with the apparent aim of breaking their spirit and imposing total obedience. But alongside the hundreds of prisons and physical repression -- sometimes leading to deaths -- the Chinese authorities have been making it increasingly hard for Tibetans and Uyghurs to preserve their distinctive, non-Han cultures. Now Chinese Internet companies are lending a hand to these cultural genocides, reported here by Protocol:

First it was Talkmate, a language-learning app that partners with UNESCO, that posted via its official Weibo account that it had "temporarily" taken down Tibetan and Uyghur language classes "due to government policies." There is no set date for them to return.

On some services, even people who already speak those languages aren't allowed to write them. The popular Chinese streaming service Bilibili has banned comments posted in Tibetan and Uyghur:

Screen recordings shared by Fergus Ryan, a senior analyst with ASPI's International Cyber Policy Centre, showed that when he tried to type comments in Uyghur and Tibetan, he received error messages that read: "Comment contains sensitive information."

Similarly, on Douyin, the original Chinese version of TikTok, whenever live-streamers speak an ethnic minority language or a dialect, they will receive a warning to switch to Standard Chinese. And if they don't, Douyin's moderators will just cut off the stream, regardless of the content.

The companies are probably not doing this with the explicit intent to stifle Tibetan and Uyghur cultures. It is more likely that they are frightened they will be punished if they let any content that the Chinese government might deem to be "instigating" terrorism or separatism slip through. The dramatic fall from grace of China's outspoken tech billionaire, Jack Ma, stands as a chilling warning to all Internet companies, big or small. Safer just to block everything in these sensitive languages, it seems. And so the rich living cultures of Tibet and the Uyghurs move another step closer to extinction.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

6 Comments

Google News Returning To Spain, As Awful 'Inalienable' Snippets Tax Is Replaced With Marginally Less Awful EU Copyright Directive

from the what's-the-point? dept

Back in 2014, Spain brought in a Google tax. It was even worse than Germany's, which was so unworkable that it was never applied fully. Spain's law was worse because it created a right for publishers to be paid by "news aggregators" that was "inalienable". That is, publishers could not waive that right -- they had to charge. That negated the point of Creative Commons licenses, which are designed to allow people to use material without paying. Subsequent research showed that Spain's snippet tax was a disaster for publishers, especially the smaller ones.

Unsurprisingly, in response Google went for the nuclear option, and shut down Google News in Spain at the end of 2014. Seven years later -- a lifetime on the Internet -- Google News is returning to Spain:

In 2014, we closed Google News in Spain due to local legislation. Today, we're announcing that Google News will soon be available once again in Spain. We made this decision as a result of a new Royal Decree implementing the European Copyright Directive, introduced today by the Spanish government.

Google News is coming back because the EU's Copyright Directive has now been implemented by national legislation in Spain, superseding the older snippet tax. Crucially, the inalienable right to charge for snippets has gone:

the new copyright law allows Spanish media outlets -- big and small -- to make their own decisions about how their content can be discovered and how they want to make money with that content. Over the coming months, we will be working with publishers to reach agreements which cover their rights under the new law.

As Techdirt has emphasized for years, the relevant section of the EU Copyright Directive, originally called Article 11, but now renumbered as Article 15, is dreadful, because it gives publishers the ability to demand payment from Google and others for sending them traffic. But at least under the EU law that is optional, not compulsory. Google says it has no problem with paying money to publishers in a variety of ways:

we will work towards bringing Google News Showcase to Spain, a licensing program and new product experience which pays publishers to curate content for story panels across Google News and Discover.

That's a reminder that whatever form the ridiculous snippet tax takes, for Google it's just a tiny bump in the road. At most, it requires the company to spend a little small change it found down the back of the sofa.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

4 Comments

Publishers Want To Make Ebooks More Expensive And Harder To Lend For Libraries; Ron Wyden And Anna Eshoo Have Questions

from the end-of-ownership dept

Techdirt has noted in the past that if public libraries didn't exist, the copyright industry would never allow them to be created. Publishers can't go back in time to change history (fortunately). But the COVID pandemic, which largely stopped people borrowing physical books, presented publishers with a huge opportunity to make the lending of newly-popular ebooks by libraries as hard as possible.

A UK campaign to fight that development in the world of academic publishing, called #ebookSOS, spells out the problems. Ebooks are frequently unavailable to institutions to license as ebooks. When they are on offer, they can be ten or more times the cost of the same paper book. The #ebookSOS campaign has put together a spreadsheet listing dozens of named examples. One title cost £29.99 as a physical book, and £1,306.32 for a single-user ebook license. As if those prices weren't high enough, it's common for publishers to raise the cost with no warning, and to withdraw ebook licenses already purchased. One of the worst aspects is the following:

Publishers are increasingly offering titles via an etextbook model, via third party companies, licensing content for use by specific, very restricted, cohorts of students on an annual basis. Quotes for these are usually hundreds, or sometimes thousands, times more than a print title, and this must be paid each year for new cohorts of students to gain access. This is exclusionary, restricts interdisciplinary research, and is unsustainable.

Although #ebookSOS is a UK campaign, the problem is global, as publishers try to change the nature of ebook lending everywhere. Ron Wyden and Anna Eshoo have noticed that it's happening in the US, and seem unimpressed by the publishing industry's moves, as a letter to the CEO of Penguin Random House (pdf) makes clear:

Many libraries face financial and practical challenges in making e-books available to their patrons, which jeopardizes their ability to fulfill their mission. It is our understanding that these difficulties arise because e-books are typically offered under more expensive and limited licensing agreements, unlike print books that libraries can typically purchase, own, and lend on their own terms. These licensing agreements, with terms set by individual publishers, often include restrictions on lending, transfer, and reproduction, which may conflict with libraries' ability to loan books, as well as with copyright exceptions and limitations. Under these arrangements, libraries are forced to rent books through very restrictive agreements that look like leases.

The letter asks for answers to nine detailed questions about any restrictions imposed on ebook use, the pricing of both physical and digital books, as well as information about any legal actions that have been taken in response to things like multiple checkouts of digital texts, interlibrary loans, controlled digital lending, and institutions making digital copies of physical books they own.

This is a hugely important battle, since it's clear the publishing world sees it as a unique chance to redefine what libraries can do with ebooks. It's part of the much larger, very troubling trend to turn everyone into renters, and to bring about the end of ownership.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

30 Comments

Copyright Law Discriminating Against The Blind Finally Struck Down By Court In South Africa

from the about-time dept

Most people would agree that those who are blind or visually impaired deserve all the help they can get. For example, the conversion of printed materials to accessible formats like Braille, large print, or Digitally Accessible Information System (DAISY) formats, ought to be easy. Who could possibly object? For years, many publishers did; and the reason – of course – is copyright. For example, publishers refused to allow Braille and other accessible editions to be shared between different countries:

while the ONCE library in Spain has more than 100,000 titles in accessible formats and Argentina has over 50,000, these titles cannot be shared with the 19 Spanish-speaking countries across Latin America. Similarly, some years ago, charities working in five English-speaking countries, including the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the UK and Vision Australia, were obliged to produce five identical Braille master files for the same Harry Potter book, costing them valuable time and money.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) described the situation back in 2012:

Copyright protections create barriers for people with disabilities, yet big publishers continue to block efforts to create exceptions to remedy the problem even as hundreds of millions of people would stand to benefit worldwide. In the US alone, those with print disabilities represent 30 million people. According to an estimate by the World Health Organization, there are about 285 million visually impaired people in the world, and 90% of those are in the developing world.

Later that same year (2012), negotiations finally began on a treaty laying down copyright exceptions and limitations that would allow those with visual impairments to convert works, and share them internationally. The World Blind Union had some modest aims for the new treaty:

Make it legal for print disabled individuals and specialist organizations to make accessible copies of published works in all countries which sign the treaty;

Make it legal for accessible books to be sent internationally without permission from publishers;

Prevent contracts with publishers from undermining copyright exceptions for print disabled people (currently they sometimes do).

Pretty reasonable, most people would say. But the EFF reported at the time that negotiators were “unable to reach a consensus on many of its most contentious issues, such as allowing exports of adapted works across borders and circumventing technological protection measures to enable accessibility”. In addition, people with hearing disabilities were “written out of the draft“, and US negotiators blocked exceptions and limitations for audiovisual works at the behest of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

It took another four years before what came to be known as the Marrakesh Treaty was agreed on and entered into force. Since then, countries around the world have been ratifying the treaty, with greater or lesser degrees of haste. One nation that has still not yet ratified the Marrakesh Treaty is South Africa. The reason given was that the country’s main Copyright Act, from 1978, prevented the government from doing so. Happily, that obstacle has finally been removed, reported here by the Oxford Human Rights Hub:

After hearing arguments from the amici on important issues of the rights of all people to freely impart and receive information and the interpretation of South Africa’s existing obligations under international human rights law and copyright law, the Pretoria High Court held that the Copyright Act is unconstitutional to the extent that it unfairly discriminates against people living with visual and print disabilities as it effectively prevents them from accessing materials under copyright.

It’s simply scandalous that in 2021 the visually impaired still need to fight in this way for their basic rights to “freely impart and receive information”. Once again, it is outdated copyright law that is to blame – together with the selfishness of publishers who view their rights to exclude people from knowledge as more important than those of the blind to access it.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Story originally posted to the excellent new Walled Culture website.

7 Comments

University Of Hong Kong Wants To Remove A Sculpture Commemorating Tiananmen; To Preserve It, People Have Crowdsourced A Digital 3D Replica

from the pillar-of-shame dept

As Techdirt has chronicled, the political situation in Hong Kong becomes worse by the day, as the big panda in Beijing embraces a region whose particular freedoms were supposed to be guaranteed for another 25 years at least. One manifestation of the increasing authoritarianism in Hong Kong is growing censorship. The latest battle is over a sculpture commemorating pro-democracy protesters killed during China's 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and on display in the University of Hong Kong. South China Morning Post reports:

The eight-metre-high Pillar of Shame by Jens Galschiøt was first erected at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in Pok Fu Lam in 1997, and according to the sculptor was on permanent loan to the group that organised the annual candlelight vigil commemorating the pro-democracy activists killed by the military in Beijing on June 4, 1989.

But after the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China decided to disband in August amid a national security investigation, HKU management informed the group it had until Wednesday 5pm [on 13 October] to remove the 2 tonne artwork or else it would be deemed abandoned. The university said the move was based on its assessment of legal risks in light of the alliance’s dissolution.

The formal letter ordering the sculpture to be removed warned that:

If you fail to remove the Sculpture before 5:00 pm on 13 October 2021, the Sculpture will be deemed abandoned and the University will not consider any future request from you in respect of the Sculpture, and the University will deal with the Sculpture in such time and in such manner as it thinks fit without further notice.

That seems a clear threat to remove or even destroy the Pillar of Shame directly. The sculptor, who says the work still belongs to him, points out that moving it is hardly easy, and has threatened legal action if it is damaged:

"It will take a long time to move the sculpture," he warned. "It is an extremely valuable piece of art, which after 24 years probably is a bit frail. Therefore there is a great possibility that the work of art will suffer irreparable damage if handled by any others than experts in handling art.

"If, contrary to expectations, damage to the sculpture should occur, the university risks incurring a claim of compensation for that damage."

Galschiøt has also asked Danish politicians to help him get the sculpture out of Hong Kong, and has formally requested the University of Hong Kong to review its decision. These latest developments seem to have caused HKU to pause its plans: according to the South China Morning Post, it has said that it will take no action for the moment, and that it needed more time to consider its next move. However, some have decided to act now to ensure that the Pillar of Shame continues to exist in some form, whatever happens. Sophie Mak, whose Twitter bio describes her as "monitoring human rights abuses in Hong Kong and elsewhere": tweeted:

Dear Hong Kong friends, help us preserve the Pillar of Shame by sending over any pictures you've taken of it to PillarOfShamePics@protonmail.com! We need pictures taken from as many different angles as possible to make our digital 3D replica model.

That was on October 12. The next day, a tweet from Nathan Ruser wrote of the digital 3D replica: "Thanks to some really helpful submissions this is starting to look a heck of a lot better!" The replica is already good enough to ensure that the Chinese government would be annoyed if copies started appearing outside their embassies around the world. It offers a useful example of how others can respond when the authorities want to make inconvenient objects disappear from public view.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

13 Comments

If You Want To Know Why Section 230 Matters, Just Ask Wikimedia: Without It, There'd Be No Wikipedia

from the also-just-grow-up,-china dept

It sometimes seems that Techdirt spends half its time debunking bad ideas for reforming or even repealing Section 230. In fact, so many people seem to get the law wrong that Mike was moved to write a detailed post on the subject with the self-explanatory title "Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act". It may be necessary (and tiresome) work rebutting all this wrongness, but it's nice for a change to be able to demonstrate precisely why Section 230 is so important. A recent court ruling provides just such an example:

On September 15th, in a victory for the Wikimedia movement and for all user-driven projects online, a Florida judge dismissed claims of defamation, invasion of privacy, and infliction of emotional distress against the Wikimedia Foundation. The judge found that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes the Wikimedia Foundation from liability for third-party content republished on Wikipedia. In other words, Section 230 helps Wikimedia safely host the work of Wikipedia's contributors and enables the effective volunteer-led moderation of content on the projects.

As the Wikimedia blog post notes, this was an absolutely crucial result. If collaborative projects that are created, maintained, and curated by volunteers could be held liable every time a user contributed something that was inaccurate or offensive, none of them would last very long -- not least because they generally lack the resources to fight expensive court cases. Back in 2017, Wikimedia wrote a detailed post on Section 230, and why it made Wikipedia and other sites possible

The court's ruling is a big win for Wikimedia. On the other hand, in something of a (minor) defeat, China has yet again blocked the Wikimedia Foundation's application for observer status at WIPO -- the only country to object. This is the second time it has done so, and for the same reason:

As in 2020, China's statement falsely suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation was spreading disinformation via the independent, volunteer-led Wikimedia Taiwan chapter. The United States and the group of industrialized countries at WIPO -- which also includes many European Union member states, Australia, Canada, the Holy See, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom -- expressed their support for the Foundation's application. Since WIPO is generally run by consensus, any one country may veto accreditation requests by non-governmental organizations.

China's blocking of a small, apolitical organization that aims to promote knowledge around the world just looks incredibly petty, and is hardly befitting for a world power.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

12 Comments