And don’t forget, this was an expired copyright. It seems no one made an effort to tell the robot that the distribution rights had reverted to me. So if I hadn’t fought to keep my work published, it would have fallen off the Web forever.
For me, this little run-in with the copyright police was a brief but unsettling reminder of just how easy it is for free speech and editorial voice to be silenced by an automated system that takes content down first, and puts authors, poets, filmmakers, and performers in the uncomfortable position of having to fight to keep their work from being silenced by copyright robots.
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The problem with automation is that it makes people, who should be the sole decision maker, lazy and they allow a machine to make decisions for them. The amount of injustice and harm that does to many people because of they lazy attitude of people who depend to much on automation can be huge. Perhaps it's a good idea for our culture to get back to us humans being completely responsible for all decisions. Machines cannot exercise responsibility.
#1 Posted by Arnold Kirschner, CJR on Thu 26 Jul 2012 at 09:36 AM
This is a very important story, and I hope you will be talking about it next week in NYC.
#2 Posted by Kirsten Lambertsen, CJR on Thu 26 Jul 2012 at 03:26 PM
The irony here is delicious: a talk about curating the web to bring it back to human scale is thwarted by automation. But in all fairness, human decisions are, if anything, more boneheaded than the robots'. It's not a binary "humans good, robots bad" decision. If anything, a robot with thorough instructions will be more objective and make a more rational decision.
#3 Posted by Stephan Hokanson, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 11:51 AM
A bigger deal needs to be made about YouTube's takedown processes. YouTube is one of the only UGC clearinghouses actually creating useful tools for DMCA compliance, CC-licensing, and allowing response to takedowns on fair use grounds.
And yet....
Your example is just one of the areas where YouTube's attempts fail. As the person in charge of posting video from lectures at a major university I've had to respond to dozens of takedowns in recent years by citing fair use, only to have the copyright holders simply reject our claim. With fingerprinting and automation, the concept of fair use might as well not exist at YouTube.
#4 Posted by Dan Jones, CJR on Thu 2 Aug 2012 at 11:44 AM