How should Big Tech deal with fake news, hacked elections, propaganda and hate speech? This is one of the biggest issues in tech policy for the moment. The general assumption is that a service created for, let’s say, checking out girls, can be abused to promote genocide. Or maybe you want to share party videos online and end up amplifying white supremacists. The issue then is what Big Tech should do about it, how to mitigate these unintended effects. Accidents brought about by maybe naïvety or rush to innovate. This is a debate of great importance, in fact one of the biggest challenges for the democratic system. But behind that hides a deeper problem: what about when Big Tech intentionally uses it platforms to push its own agenda? Fake news by design…

Case in point: EU copyright reform. Wikipedia blacked out in Poland and Italy in protest. Silicon Valley carried out the greatest astroturfing campaign known to man. And now this: Youtube mobilises its viewers against the proposal. Keep in mind: this is not about climate change, world hunger, the rise of authoritarianism or the refugee crisis. It’s about a change in copyright law. Yes, the world has lost its sense of proportion.

The playbook is familiar. Big Tech used it to stop ACTA in the EU. SOPA/PIPA in the US. It almost succeeded with the copyright vote in European Parliament this summer. Use the services to mobilise the users, provide them with easy tools to reach out to policy-makers. Not all of it is astro-turfing, many of the e-mails and calls are from real people. Except most of them only hear one side of the argument. The other side does not control niche monopolies allowing them to send their message unfiltered to Billions of users. And those media organisations who come anywhere close would not use their channel to promote their own agenda because of press ethics (or rather; thanks to press ethics). If you are not afraid of information monopolies yet, think about what the public sphere will be like if Big Tech continues to starve out competing media and further increases its dominance over our attention. If this is what it looks like for copyright, imagine what it would be if some policy-maker dared do something that could really change things. Such as anti-trust, privacy or data ownership. Who said something about joining the resistance?

Does Youtube have a point? Not really, the concerns about memes, parody, mash-ups etc have been addressed in the political negotiations. The Youtube “creators” need not worry, they own the content they create and are free to do what they like with it. There is no need for Youtube to take down all user generated content, it only needs to get licenses or use better methods to stop users from spreading other people’s content (oh, they can if they want to, easily – ever ask yourself why there is no porn on Youtube?). Make no mistake, this is not about memes or streamers: this is about commercial-scale distribution of music and movies without the consent of those who made it.

Youtube claims to support the goals of Article 13. But does it really? The policy aims to close the “value gap” which means licensed music services – like Spotify – pay maybe ten times more than Youtube for the same content delivered to the same audience. The difference is with Youtube it’s uploaded by the users rather than the service itself. Does Youtube really support that goal? Does it really want to pay fair compensation for the content it monetizes? You tell me.

Youtube proudly claims to have paid 5 Billion Euro to the music industry “over the years” (Youtube started in 2005). Except that’s only about one third of the turn-over in a single year for recorded music. Youtube is the second most popular website in the world (Google.com is #1). 5 Billion in 13 years? Peanuts.

The Copyright reform won’t hurt the internet. It might however hurt Youtube’s business. Maybe Youtube’s business model cannot support paying fair dues for content. Tough luck. Time to change the business model. There is no shame in that. Startups do it all the time. It’s called a pivot.

After the drama around the copyright reform votes in Parliament, the policy is now in trilogue negotiations. The tone has changed but nevertheless the debate continues. Last week, arch-techno-apologist Cory Doctorow wrote a letter on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (actual grass-roots, Silicon Valley-funded). As usual, Netopia disagrees with Doctorow on most points:

Articles 11 and 13 are ill-considered and should not be EU law

The many pains of the current internet regime come from the lack of responsibility on the part of the intermediaries. These articles are one way to make them more accountable. It’s not all great, but something needs to be done. If not this, then what? If we are to believe Doctorow, there is no problem.

Rightsholders systematically overclaim copyrights that they do not own

The letter gives some examples of abuse of copyright protection systems. But the far greater problem is the abuse of copyright online. Doctorow focuses on a small problem to take attention away from the big problem. Intellectual property crime cost up to US$461 Billion world-wide in 2013 according to a report from the EU Intellectual Property Office. By all means, let’s have good methods to deal with abuse of the systems put in place. Surely, that can be done without ignoring the big problem. No one argues that home delivery of pizza should be banned because pranksters sometimes order pizza for somebody who doesn’t want it.

Articles 11 and 13 are bad ideas that have no place in the Directive

Sure, so what’s your idea mr Doctorow? The problem doesn’t go away just because you don’t like the proposed solution. Your argument is a text book case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, sir.

This week, Youtube boss Susan Wojcicki called for help against the proposed copyright legislation in EU. The message is old, copyright gets in the way of creativity. And of Youtube’s freedom to monetise other people’s content without asking permission nor sharing revenue. It’s possible to have objections against the copyright reform proposal, but the principle is solid: you make it, you own it, you decide who gets it. Freedom of expression is the right to express one’s own opinion, not the right to distribute material against the will of its creators. Wojcicki says if the rules are enforced it threatens to block content that is already up. So what? If Youtube is in violation, time to start dealing with that problem. If I tap into my neighbor’s electric cabinet for free power, that doesn’t make it right regardless of how many years it’s been going on before I get caught.

Youtube is right to be concerned about the value gap-debate. If licensed competitors such as Spotify pay 5-10 times more per play of a song and Youtube can no longer play the safe harbor-card, it will very likely find it difficult to pay for the content with its current monetization model. They’re simply not making enough money (weird thing to say about Google, but what can you do?). No, you can’t say copyright owners demand too much. That is how markets work: the seller decides the price, the buyer decides whether to take it or not. Sometimes you can haggle. Youtube has been able to bypass the normal market function since inception, but reality (or is that Adam Smith?) is catching up fast. It’s not like Wojcicki can say rent, salaries, insurance, hardware costs or power is too expensive because Youtube has such a new and innovative business model. Content is no different.

It’s about time for Youtube to stop whining and start working on a better business model.

I had a conversation with a tech entrepreneur the other day. He told me he wants to make apps on-demand. Why do you have to download apps? Why do users have to wait? All other forms of content are on demand, instantly available. This is the norm. The expectation. Once an achievement, now the standard. Except for apps, you still have to download them and wait. If this entrepreneur is successful, this last frontier may have been conquered too. Onwards and upwards, new problems to fix, new opportunities to take. The future is bright. Except there is a villain in this story.

On-demand is the model of the future. As the entrepreneur I met observed, digital services of all sorts move in this direction, whether it’s banking, education or entertainment. Manufacturing industries did this decades before the internet with just-in-time delivery. The benefits are obvious: no time lost waiting, almost zero cost of warehousing, higher productivity. Yes, it needs to run on a sophisticated system, but as the saying goes: rocketry is engineering, not science. It makes no sense to try and stop this development, instead policy-makers should help it. But here is the catch.

A little known and very technical detail of the EU:s digital single market policy may stand in the way of the future of on-demand services. It could be a barrier to realizing the digital single market, limit the options for European consumers and put EU businesses at a disadvantage in the global competition. Please bear with me as I go through the intricacies.

One of the many rules that govern digital markets in the European Union is the Information Society Directive from 2001. Among other things, it regulates the use of so-called technological protection measures (copy protection). These used to be blunt devices, creating difficulties for users and there was a debate where some said paying users were punished. Over time, however, the technology has evolved and is now invisible to most users. The authors of the 2001 directive were foresighted and included specific rules to make on-demand possible. Yes, they must have had a really good crystal ball back then, so we should thank them. One of the more intricate points is how to balance the exceptions to copyright (say for educational purposes) and the use of technological protection measures. Enter Article 6.4.4 of the Information Society Directive, which says that in the case of on-demand, the ability to protect the content trumps the exceptions. If it were written in any other way, on-demand services would not be an option for content. Train reservations, sure, they may need no such protection, but unless digital content can be protected, it can travel anywhere (via internet, not by train!). The best business model the internet has brought would not be any use for creative content. Bad news for creators and their business partners, terrible news for the audience who not only couldn’t get their content delivered in the way they prefer, but very likely also would have less to choose from overall. And if you care about European culture, it would be at a disadvantage compared to other parts of the world where such rules existed.

“Ok, great, whatever, I get it”, you may say to yourself, dear reader. “Why is he talking about this hypothetical stuff, that 6.4.4 thing is there so who cares?”. Good point. Except this is where the villain enters the story. In the Digital Single Market directive in its current form, 6.4.4 is history.

 “Article 5(5) and the first, third and fifth subparagraphs of Article 6(4) of Directive 2001/29/EC shall apply to the exceptions and the limitation provided for under this Title.”

– Article 6: Common Provisions

That’s right: 6.4.1, two, three and five are all in there, but not 6.4.4! The missing link. The nail that keeps the digital content market in place. Why on earth take that out? Who would do something like that? Do they know what they are doing? Why else skip one of the articles and keep the other four? As the Swedish saying goes: there is a dog buried here. Netopia will work tirelessly to find the answers to these questions. Thoughts, leads and clues are welcome, either in the comment box below or e-mail stromback@netopia.eu. Watch this space.

Let’s make sure on-demand survives in the digital single market.

Did Whatsapp cause the brutal lynching of an innocent man in the state Karnataka in Southern India? A mob of 2000 attacked four men in a car on rumours that they were out to abduct local children. (In fact, they were IT-professionals from Hyderabad searching for good natural honey.) The four were brutally beaten and one died. It is not the first time lynch mobs like this kill people in India on various rumours. Of course those involved are responsible for their deeds. The police should have stopped it. Harsh sentences should be the consequence for the murderers, hopefully as warning to others. The Indian parliament allegedly considers an anti-lynching law. Other policies may work too. You guessed it, there is a but. But the lynch mob formed via Whatsapp. It was on this particular app the rumour spread. If I was Whatsapp, I would take a long hard look in the mirror and ask if there was anything I could have done to avoid it.

Is Whatsapp a messaging service, similar to phones, mail or text messaging? Or something else? The app makes possible instant messaging to groups of thousands of people. Pretty hard to do with mail or phone calls, or even SMS. And it can be great, but at what point does it become less like private conversation and more like public communication? It would be much harder to reach critical mass for a lynch mob if communication was slower or limited to fewer people. Perhaps the tragic story from Karnataka hints at a breaking point, where communication is less private and more public. It could very well be a gradual transition more than a threshold effect, but the question remains. If it is public communication, very different questions of responsibility arise. A newspaper cannot write anything it wants, it is committed to press ethics. There are mechanisms in place to make sure such standards are respected. Broadcast television and radio is subject to many kinds of legislation. Advertisers follow codes. And so on. Free speech goes hand in hand with responsibilities. This is for good reason and comes from hard earned experience. Bad speech can sometimes be remedied with more speech. But the reality is that the public sphere requires accountability. History shows that the consequences can be deadly, Karnataka is only the most recent example. What conclusions will Whatsapp draw? Please don’t come back and say that communication technology brings people together, or that the power of information will set us free, or that social media does more good than bad on the whole. You can do better than that.

There is a pattern in the copyright debate, which I think is different from most other fields of policy. Whatever the proposal, quickly the most extreme and absurd interpretation emerges and takes center stage. Example: Sports events create lots of revenue for bookmakers and online betting providers, money that would not come were it not for the game. In a fair world, they would share some profits with those who make their business possible. But in this world, instead online betting services provide live streams of games, competing for the viewers with those television broadcasters and video services who pay license fees for the same games. Same for other types of pirate streaming services. It would be normal to demand that the same rules apply, wouldn’t you think? This is what the European Parliament thinks, because the copyright reform vote this week gives sports events organisers this right. So far all is well. But what has been the focus of the debate? That fans should not be allowed to take selfies at games! Yes, that is what the critics have brought forward. No matter that such rules exist already in France and other member states and lots of sports fans take selfies at Ligue 1-games. Common sense and real-life evidence takes a back seat when it comes to copyright debates. It is the most unlikely and outlandish scenario that must be debated.

What if this was the case in some other field of policy? Monetary policy: “No, we can’t lower the interest rate, what if it goes down to -1000%? All the money in the world would disappear!” Defense: “Increase defense? What, put a gun in every house? There would be bloodbath in an instant!” Climate: “Reduce emissions? So we should live in caves and eat rocks for lunch?” (okay, I’ve actually heard that one) Labour market: “Fair wages? Why work at all?” Health care: “More doctors? Why not train everybody to be a doctor?” Granted, sometimes someone says things such as these, but that is the exception. It doesn’t set the standard for the debate. In copyright it does.

You think it’s only loudmouth tweeters? No, the absurdity goes all the way into the quality press. The Times used this headline to report on the copyright vote:

EU online copyright ruling ‘favours terrorists’

Sure, it’s a headline, it’s supposed to be eye-catching. But the article continues:

New European Union copyright legislation will create a “perverse incentive” forcing big internet companies, such as Google or Facebook, to take down copyrighted content before removing terrorist videos or child pornography.

Really? I thought the problem was that they screen out perfectly normal material such as mothers breast-feeding their babies or family photos from the beach. It’s not like the tech companies don’t have the resources to take out the content they don’t want. The problem is the lack of transparency and influence of how its applied. Anyone who thinks Big Tech will work harder to take away pirate movies, music or sports games than terrorist videos or child pornography (or breast-feeding mothers), please stand up.

Good news, perhaps with the press publisher’s right, The Times could afford to do their homework and call bluffs like these. Fingers crossed.

This Sunday was “action day,” when a million Europeans were supposed to stand up against the “censorship and control” of the proposed copyright reform. Except almost nobody turned up.

Clicktivism Turns Slacktivist

I went to check out the rally in Stockholm. But at the announced location, I couldn’t find it. A look at the Facebook event comments guided me to a nearby park where something that looked more like a picknick than a political protest took place next to Stockholmers walking dogs and reading newspapers on benches and in general doing things people do in parks undisturbed by the protest rally. I listened briefly as former Pirate MEP Christian Engström gave a speech suggesting it was time for a new “ACTA moment” (the trade agreement that was discarded by the EU Parliament in 2012 following a similar internet protest as the copyright reform this year). Such an uprising felt very distant at that moment in Berzelii Park in Stockholm. I counted 18 participants. In the very birthplace of the Pirate movement, the country that gave the Pirate Party 7.3% support in the 2009 EP election.

Across Europe, estimates point to around 450 attendees at the protests, an average of 30 per rally. As one writer calls it, Astroturf instead of grass roots, when clicktivism meets hard reality.

Media Questions Authenticity of Emails

Many have pointed out that the mass spamming of MEPs in the copyright vote earlier this summer was orchestrated by Silicon Valley rather than upset citizens.

The Times revealed how Google funded a website that was used to bombard MEPs with emails and calls backing its policies.

Music Tech Policy looked at how Google’s contributions to academics in Germany generated favourable scientific papers.

Billboard pointed to the difference in turnout for protests offline compared to online.

Thanks to research made by German cybersecurity firm File Defence, Netopia has been able to publish this chart of how the campaign was orchestrated.

Even the coordinator of the campaign conceded that it was “partly” funded by Big Tech.

Will MEPs call the bluff on September 12?

The big surprise here is that Big Tech launched an astroturfing campaign. The big surprise is also not that the pirates seemed to actually believe the crowds would turn out in masses. No, the big surprise is that so many MEPs voted against the proposal. The friendly conclusion is that they needed to know whether it was an actual protest by real voters or bots run by Silicon Valley front groups.

Protest rally in Stockholm

This was Netopia’s newsletter on August 30th, 2018

Some debates are evergreens. They go on forever, never end, regardless of fact or sense. The material for student debate clubs. The issue of whether piracy hurts legal sales is a good candidate for such evergreen status. As in many such cases, the departure point is absurd: who would pay for anything they already have? That has not stopped researches to spend years and years on figuring out an answer (or many). One could almost say the research on whether piracy hurts legal sales is an economy unto itself. Or at least the attempts to prove the impossible is in high demand.

You will recall the crazy story from last year with the supposedly “buried” Commission-commissioned report that “proved” that piracy not only does not hurt legal sales but even helps in some cases. It was full of holes of course, and my guess is the reason it was “buried” was inferior quality rather than inconvenient truth. It had huge method problems (such as starting the data collection AFTER the main changes had happened) and misquoted sources (all three game organisations that had made submissions disagreed with the interpretations). The real question – which was never asked – is why the report authors would do something like that. Either they were clueless (in which case they should probably not do formal research) or they were intentionally misleading (in which case… well you get it). What’s the word again? Fake news.

Now the same research firm, Ecorys, is back at it with a new study. The conclusion? Surprise! Legal sales are not hurt by piracy. According to the study, piracy is on the decline in Europe. Except it doesn’t look at Youtube and other established platforms where illegal content distribution is on the rise. So it’s probably not a decline in piracy as much as a move from pirate downloads and streaming to semi-legal sharing platforms. It also repeats the pirates’ favorite theory that those who are big consumers of illegal content are also big consumers of legal content (which nobody has debated) so therefore piracy leads to legal consumption – obviously a completely absurd conclusion, on par with the correlation of Nicholas Cage movie releases and swimming pool drownings. Basic causality theory: A may cause B. B may cause A. A and B may be caused by C. More factors may be involved. Patterns may also be random. If I’m a movie fan, I may watch movies both on legal and illegal services. If I’m only into horseback riding or daytrading on the stock market or outdoors cooking or whatever, I may not watch movies online regardless of source. Correlation is not causation. (Figure out Nicholas Cage and the swimming pools for yourself.) It is weird I even have to write this (for the umpteenth time!), a three-year-old gets it: cake and presents are connected by birthdays. You cannot make birthdays happen by baking cake.

Another finding in the study is that piracy correlates to low purchasing power and thus suggests lower prices for content. Except content is already priced according to purchasing power (this is the debate on territorial licensing, remember?) and consumers pay plenty for hardware and broadband subscriptions, so it’s probably not only the pricetag. Also, Denmark has about 10% pirate users in the adult population. Sweden has about 25%. Are the Danes really that much richer than us Swedes? I know they eat deep-fried pork rind for snacks and drink plenty of beer (we get potato crisps and apple juice, not so bad), but really? Perhaps the Danes are too busy snacking to pirate.

The study makes the point that legal services are a good antidote against piracy. Anyone against that? I thought the problem was that the legal services have a hard time competing with the illegal competition and the platforms, but perhaps legal services will magically arrive if we just stop thinking that piracy hurts sales?

Please, can we move this conversation to the student debate clubs already? There are some real issues to discuss: How do we make sure creators rights are respected online? How do we make the best services for the consumers? How do we make sure online platforms respect the law? How do we fight propaganda and fraud online? Make a study about that, Ecorys.

(I don’t think I have to tell you who commissioned the study.)

We used to think that information wanted to be free. This was the idea that informed the vision in the early days of the internet. It’s a figure of speech of course, information does not want anything. It means that information is difficult to contain. Especially if you design information technology as if information wants to be free. But time has shown that information rather wants to be precious. The quote “data is the new oil” is to be taken literally, personal data is the world’s most precious commodity. It turns out some people understood this faster than most. Take a look at Google’s famous mission statement “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It appears to be in line with the concept that information wants to be free. If information is not only free but also organized, accessible and useful, then that’s even better than free, right? But there is another idea hiding behind the first: if you’re the one who organizes all that information and it turns out that information is precious, doesn’t that mean that you have a huge edge on the competition? On everybody who uses information, at least digital information? Right? If information is precious, the one who organizes it must be the most powerful in the world.

The world is catching up to the fact that information is precious. A couple of months ago, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation came into force. It can be seen as a recognition that at least personal data wants to be precious. Let’s be honest, information is precious depending on the circumstances. If you run a power plant, the data about megawatts, volt and operating temperatures from the generators, spools and cables (and whatever other things they have in power plants) is precious for you, perhaps your suppliers and maybe your competitors, but outside that context the information is probably pretty useless for anyone else. Not all information is precious all the time. But if we think our personal information is of no value, maybe we freely give it up to somebody who thinks it’s precious. If we give it up in exchange of free services of something else we want, that may work fine on the individual level. But on the aggregate level, we create a monster.

Personal data (and power plants and what not) is not the only form of information that wants to be precious. Content can be precious, the more in demand it is, the more precious. The demand can be individual of course, an Ingmar Bergman-fan may be prepared a lot to watch a restored copy of Wild Strawberries while others would not even take the time to see it. It is probably fair to say that demand and compensation have never really been in balance. Over the years a lot of different methods have been applied to help find the balance: creators have organized to protect their interests. Copyright law has been refined as technology has developed. International treaties have been put in place. It is probably also fair to say that the imbalance between demand and compensation has been accelerated with digital distribution. In part due to technology, the ties between delivery and payment have been cut in many ways. But also in part due to ideology: the reason given was that attempts to strike the balance would stop “innovation” (and give a disadvantage in global competition). The result: run-away imbalance putting more money into the pockets of those who control the technology. Early days it was the telecoms making piles of money from piracy, but these days the internet platforms making even bigger piles and hide behind their users. That and cheap mail order knock-offs of famous designs. The pattern is the same: the power of technology and the direction of ideology multiply the imbalance.

The good news is that the European lawmakers are also interested in this aspect of information wants to be precious. Yes, the pushback from pirates and internet giants is overwhelming, but there is actually policy brought forward to address the imbalance of demand and compensation, as in the so-called Article 13 of the Copyright reform currently debated in European parliament. And the other day, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that users who publish content online should get consent from the creator (in the so-called Cordoba-case). The world is turning from information wants to be free to information wants to be precious. Good steps, but they won’t be enough. In personal data, it’s not enough to give users tools to control their personal data. We tick consent boxes and click banners that stand in the way of the service we want to use. To properly protect personal data, we need institutions that look after our interests plus transparency and accountability from those who use it. The same is true for creative content: individual users cannot get consent from creators, those who provide the tools for publishing must provide some way to help users with that. And the creators cannot be expected to patrol the internet for unauthorized use of their content. Those who provide the services should.

Institutions. Transparency. Accountability. Do it!

Notes:

The original “Information wants to be free”-quote was made by Stewart Brand. I have written about it here: www.netopia.eu/digital-myths-1-information-wants-to-be-free/

The double meanings of free is material for many good jokes. I have written about one of them here: https://www.netopia.eu/netopia-speaks-in-house-of-commons/