Wikipedia leverages user-generated content for its own politics

Posted on January 20, 2012 by John Bickerton

Information wants to be free… (so the Web gospel reads)

Wikipedia apparently has entered the political arena, closing the site for one day to protest the SOPA bill.

What’s interesting to me is the notion that the knowledge collected by Wikipedia, freely given by volunteers spending untold hours contributing to the site, can be leveraged by the site’s owners to support their own politics.

I don’t know that that meets the approval of the many, varied, unpaid writers that contribute freely to Wikipedia or so-called crowdsource or “open source” platforms.

In an article titled The importance of Wikipedia published Nov 30, 2011 on opensource.com, Susan Hewitt, a 63-year old contributor to Wikipedia says

“Wikipedia is self-organizing and self-correcting,”. “There is no boss and police force, yet at this point in its development it’s perfectly clear that it works really well.” Wikipedia calls to the better angels of people’s nature, and those angels respond.

No police force, but apparently a higher power.

It’s the downside of the concept of a free web. The truth is there are powers behind the free web and they can use their power when it suits them. Now it’s free, now it’s not. Who decides? Well, we saw this week who decides.

Interestingly, a paid product, Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, could not be so leveraged. Once you purchase it, it is yours. It can’t be removed from your home by the publishers because they don’t agree with your politics. Is that what we pay for? Ownership? Control? Privacy? Autonomy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris

Information Piracy and the Bottom Line

Posted on February 8, 2011 by John Bickerton

Internet piracy is a hot issue these days. As the amount of non-text media online grows, so does the amount of pirated media. But, just how much piracy is going on has largely remained a topic of speculation.

Until now.

Putting Hard Numbers to Online Piracy

A new study conducted by the British firm Envisional has shed new light on just how widespread the piracy problem is.

According to the study, in the United States alone, 17% of the content streaming, downloading, or otherwise being viewed via the internet is pirated material. That’s nearly one-fifth of all the content viewed by Americans.

To be clear, the study measured bandwidth usage. So, Envisional is not saying that 17% of the population in the United States is pirating copyrighted materials. However, it does show that a massive amount of piracy traffic is cutting into the bottom line of many companies in several industries.

The Magnitude of the Problem

If you own your own business, you can readily understand how devastating these numbers are. Imagine if, after paying for your employees’ benefits, covering workman’s comp insurance, paying business taxes, and shelling out for all the operating costs of your business, someone took 17% of your profits and walked out the door.

In fact, you don’t even have to own a business to understand how frustrating this situation is. If you’re a U.S. employee, you’re used to getting a pay check that’s missing a large chunk of the money you’ve worked hard to earn. As the old saying goes, “Who’s FICA and why is he getting all my money.”

Take another 17% off that and imagine how happy you would be.

The Good News

There is a bright side to the Envisional study. It shows a growing online market for a variety of new media. The interest is there, if we can find a way to control widespread piracy, it will open new doors for legitimate businesses to not only make money but provide additional jobs, which, in this economy, would be a welcome sight.

You can read the full Envisional report here.

New Weapons for the War Against Piracy

Posted on January 25, 2011 by John Bickerton

The war against online piracy is entering a new era and there are several new weapons that could make an explosive impact in 2011.

COICA

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) in November 2010. This bill would give the US Justice Department the power to shut down websites that are declared as being “dedicated to illegal file sharing”. Opposition to the bill centers around first amendment rights of free speech.

The bill was initially shelved in September but was taken up again by the committee in November. If it passes the House and Senate, and that is in no way a sure thing, it could mean a wave of pirate sites get taken down in 2011. (In late November 2010 the Department of Homeland Security conducted its largest raid of file-sharing sites seizing over 80 domains).

If COICA passes, it’s likely many pirate sites will simply move their operations off American soil and out of the jurisdiction governed by COICA. The US is already encouraging other nations to adopt legislation similar to COICA in their own countries (some nations, like Ecuador, already have something similar to COICA in place).

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UPDATE: 3/3/2011
For more please read Chris Castle’s very informed new article Defending Property Rights, Hollywood Style
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Google Policy Changes

Following the takedown of several domains late last year, Google made strides to tighten up it’s policy and make it more difficult for pirate sites to gain visibility in the search giant. At the same time they implemented strategies to give more prominence to sites that are legally hosting copyrighted materials.

Google also made it clear that they will be improving response time for takedown requests and improve efforts to remove AdSense ads from sites that pirate copyrighted materials.

The number of pirate sites that rank in Google (or even exist in their index) will taper off in 2011, and it’s no surprise. It behooves Google to be as cooperative on the piracy issue as possible in light of the concern many people have that COICA might even bring YouTube to its knees.

Hitting Pirates Where It Hurts…Their Bank Account

Likely the most effective strategy will come from corporations themselves. The whole reason pirate sites exist is to make money. Most of their revenue comes from online advertisements. These ads come from some pretty big players including major brands like KFC and even Netflix. Often these corporations don’t know where their ads are ending up.

Now that Disney and Warner Brothers have won their lawsuit against Triton Media, there should be a big reduction in advertising dollars sent to pirate sites. (Triton Media, is alleged to have provided advertising consulting and referrals for nine websites identified as “one-stop-shops” for infringing works).

One of the outcomes of that lawsuit is that advertisers can now get a list of sites known to pirate content and can then avoid placing ads on those sites. Companies like Disney and Warner Brothers will now have a list available so they can easily see if the companies managing their advertising campaigns are keeping company dollars out of the pockets of pirates.

Laser Accurate Pirate Tracking

New technology allows movie studios to create a unique tracking code for each movie they create. This tracking code will allow officials to pinpoint the exact moment piracy is committed and tag the person in the distribution chain that is responsible for leaking copyrighted material.

While the movie industry has had a lot of personal experience with pirates themselves, they’ve also been able to learn a great deal from the mistakes of the music industry. As piracy issues are analyzed, trends are appearing. These trends can be leveraged to deal some serious blows to piracy. It’s kind of like cutting off an army’s supply lines, and anti-piracy initiatives will be using these trends to their advantage in 2011.

Remembering the album as its own art form

Posted on January 22, 2011 by John Bickerton

Don Was co-founded the eclectic ’80s band Was (not Was) (hit single – Spy in the House of Love) before becoming a highly regarded record producer having produced Bonnie Raitt and the Rolling Stones. He is currently writing a blog for MetroTimes in Detroit.

I am originally from Windsor, Ontario (Canada) just across the river from Detroit. It was a cool place to live. That area of the country gets a lot of bad press even from its own local media but it has a great history and, to me, is one of the hidden gems in North America (the Detroit River!) – but that’s another story.

Was’s post celebrates records, that is, vinyl LPs. Not only the fidelity of LPs but also their artwork and the space they allowed for the artist to credit those involved in the making of the record. He uses Frank Zappa’s 1966 release of the Freak Out! LP as an example.

It was a double album with an amazing gatefold jacket that retailed for $4.99. Inside there were extensive liner notes written by Frank Zappa that changed my life. In a subsequent interview, Frank said that the Freak Out! album package was designed to be “as accessible as possible to the people who wanted to take the time to make it accessible. That list of names in there, if anybody were to research it, would probably help them a great deal.” He was right: The first time I heard of Charles Ives, Willie Dixon, Captain Beefheart, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Eric Dolphy was when I read that list of 150 random notables.

The article underlines what recording used to be at its best – what records used to be at their best. How an album could be its own art form, not just a loss leader or a promo to get you to go to the live show and buy t-shirts. The album – the music, the artwork/design and packaging – could be it’s own artistic experience.

Was celebrates how albums of the past listed all the people that worked to create the project. Much like a movie that lists its credits at the story’s end, the LP had the room to print not only song lyrics but also the recording studio and engineer, the mastering studio engineer. I can remember reading the names, Hit Factory, Record Plant, Power Station, as a kid. They seemed like far-away temples to me.

The digitization of audio was originally lauded and welcomed by musicians and audio engineers alike. It seemed to make the work of recording so much easier. But today, 25 years into digital audio, there is a different perspective amongst many musicians and audio engineers. There is an on-going argument about the fidelity of digital recording and the use or over-use of digital audio techniques (i.e. brickwall mastering). Most devastating to the actual commerce of the recording industry, digitization has allowed exact copies of recordings to be freely copied and the Internet has made those copies available to millions.

Downloading music has also affected the album as an artistic entity. Here’s Dan Was again..

If Zappa released that same music today, we’d browse the 30-second samples on the iTunes store without the benefit of reading those mind-blowing liner notes. There’d be no context or depth to the whole experience. It’s no wonder that kids don’t wanna pay for music anymore – downloading a file of zeroes and ones for 99 cents has the same cultural allure as ordering a Ronco Veg-O-Matic from an 800 number.

It’s tough to find out who produced and engineered the music and you can forget about finding out who did the cover art (that cover art having now been reduced to 2 inches square at a resolution of 72 dpi)

The transformation to digital audio and electronic delivery has transformed how we consume music. There are benefits. Ease of storage is one. But we have traded a lot for that. Sound fidelity has been cheapened along with the whole experience of what an album is.

I had a talk with a young man recently and he was telling me about the 1000s of songs and albums he had downloaded mostly through file-sharing sites. These included several modern classical albums like performances of Steve Reich’s “Music for Eighteen Musicians” and some Philip Glass instrumental works. I thought to myself, yes, but how well do you know this music. How many times have you listened to it.

In fact it takes time to really listen to music. Especially challenging music. Like reading Tolstoy. It’s an investment of time. Really digesting 1000 recordings should take years. We seem to have become very good aggregators of music but we have forgotten or we simply don’t have the time to be good listeners. For me, it’s more important that someone really know 10 pieces of music than to sport a library of thousands of recordings.

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“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” – Hebert Simon
Recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and the A.M. Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”

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(I took a cognitive psychology class with Prof. Simon while at Carnegie Mellon in 1978)

Independent Filmmaker fights online piracy

Posted on December 20, 2010 by John Bickerton

I have noticed recently that, when one reads the comments from folks who participate in online piracy, their language is often filled with a kind of virtuous, take-from-the-rich Robin Hood-ism, where piracy is actually seen as the moral high-ground. Pirates are merely taking from overly rich global corporations that, in the case of music at least, are exploiting their artists anyway. The premise seems to be that piracy is good because it is fighting the good fight against fat, capitalist, power-brokers who are out there bilking the consumer.

Though this position is, I’m sure, both convenient and beneficial, it is also incorrect, as the following account of an independent filmmaker’s piracy travails will show.

Filmmaker Ellen Seidler and her partner poured $250,000 into their independent film, And Then Came Lola. The movie saw a good deal of success early on. Unfortunately, much of that success was achieved by content thieves.

Within 24 hours of the release of the DVD of “And Then Came Lola,” digital pirates had ripped the DVD and uploaded it to an internet distribution site where it was distributed for free download. Supported largely by AdSense ads, the site immediately began earning money off the movie.

Despite the fact that Google has a very strict policy against copyright infringement, they also apparently have an unwritten see no evil, hear no evil policy as Google’s AdSense ads are a recurring theme on sites that are pirating music and movies. Google claims that they cannot possibly root out every site that’s pirating copyrighted material and shut down their AdSense ads. Still, the frequency with which AdSense appears on sites completely dedicated to piracy, indicates that Google gives a cursory initial glance at a site before authorizing the site for AdSense and then never looks back.

And, Google isn’t the only advertiser that turns a blind eye to piracy issues. A number of major corporations (Walmart) continue to allow their ads to run on pirate sites.

So, Ellen decided to take matters into her own hands. She started filing take-down notices with every site she could find that was illegally distributing “And Then Came Lola.” Unfortunately, the task quickly became an overwhelming one.

Thousands of cyber lockers already offered her film for free download. Many of the sites have simply ignored her take-down requests. Several have complied with the take-down requests as they are afraid of having their entire site shut down (see End of 2010 sees crackdown on copyright infringement and online piracy), but many just don’t seem to care.

Add to this the fact that for every download link Ellen has disabled several more pop up. So, it seems that most of Ellen’s requests simply sail across the bow of pirate sites and fall harmlessly into the water.

In the end, Ellen (and all independent filmmakers) will need someone with some economic muscle to gather their navy and set sail against the digital pirates of the world. It doesn’t appear that will happen soon (read more on NPR or hear the story directly from Ellen), but independent filmmakers like Ellen Seidler have little choice other than to remain hopeful.

Posted on December 8, 2010 by John Bickerton

Here are 4 events that show what looks like a growing trend towards taking serious action against copyright infringement on the Internet.

1. LimeWire, the company that issued the popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software program is closing it’s doors
. LimeWire tried to retool as a legal music site similar to iTunes after the demise of its P2P service, but the company is now abandoning that effort and closing its doors for good on December 31, 2011. Last October a court-ordered injunction forced LimWire to disable ‘the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality; of it’s P2P file-sharing software,” the company said at the time.

2. In Sweden, the convictions of Pirate Bay founders are upheld on appeal
According to the Los Angeles Times, The Pirate Bay is “one of the world’s largest facilitators of illegal downloading“, and “the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright or pro-piracy movement”. The Pirate Bay website still exists. It has over 4.5 million registered users and is approximately the 89th most popular site on the Internet worldwide. In 2009, it’s founders were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement. The ruling was appealed. In November 2010 the convictions were upheld by a Swedish appeals court. They decreased the original prison terms but increased the fine to 46 million SEK (about 6.6 million dollars).

3. US Seizes 80+ Torrent and P2P web sites
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (a division of Homeland Security) has seized the web addresses of torrent-finder.com and about 80 other websites for copyright violation. The sites have been sharing copyrighted material for free download. The New York Times reported “By Friday morning, visiting the addresses of a handful of sites that either hosted unauthorized copies of films and music or allowed users to search for them elsewhere on the Internet produced a notice that said, in part: “This domain name has been seized by ICE — Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court.”

4. Google Upgrades it’s Copyright Infringement policy
A week after the US government’s torrent crackdown, Google issued its own policy changes regarding copyright infringement.

As the web has grown, we have seen a growing number of issues relating to infringing content. We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time. But as the web grows, and the number of requests grows with it, we are working to develop new ways to better address the underlying problem.

There are four key changes that will have some impact on how they handle copyright-questionable submissions.
1. Google will be trying to take action on takedown request within 24 hours of submission
2. They will prevent terms associated with piracy from showing up in the autocomplete feature of searches
3. They plan to improve AdSense anti-piracy efforts
4. They’ll look for ways to make authorized content more likely to show up in searches

Goodbye Virgin Megastore – Music Industry in Crisis

Posted on April 28, 2009 by John Bickerton

Walking through the giant Virgin Mega-store on 14th St and Broadway in Manhattan today, I couldn’t help but feel sad about the rapid demise of the record industry. Unlike Walmart, which sells music essentially as a loss-leader and stocks only a very limited “hot” list, the Virgin Mega-stores, much like now-defunct Tower Records before them, stocked deep catalog with thousands of titles available in the store..

But now Virgin is closing this store as well as their flagship store in Times Square. Everything is on sale at 20% off yet I couldn’t buy anything. I don’t know if I just couldn’t get interested in music in the climate of the store or if I just became distracted. For me a trip to the record store was an experience akin to how some people experience going to church. I feel bad for music-loving kids that won’t know the experience of browsing a record store.

There is a lot of debate about what happened to the music industry. It seems pretty clear to me that file-sharing, which essentially devalued the recording into a “free” giveaway, killed the industry.

I know some would say good riddance – that labels are now justly paying for their gouging of consumers with over-priced CDs. Though I think there is some truth in this, I think the reaction, file-sharing on p2p networks, which essentially allows one to steal the product, is just as bad.

When I read posts by folks who favor or partake in file-sharing, their language often has a revolutionary tone - ”down with the oppressive corporations” – being the main rallying cry. It’s a convenient rationalization that covers the truth of what file-sharing really is.

Chris Purifoy of restoringmusic.com has posted a great article titled Defining the Music Industry Crisis that seeks to outline the problems facing the music industry and suggests some possible paths to restoring an equillibrium between the consumer’s rightful need for fair pricing and artists/labels need to work in a viable, healthy and yes, profit-making industry. Music will be better for it.

More on this subject? Read Chris Castle’s great blog Music, Technology, Policy.