Posts tagged Defense
Legal Analysis: How the Megaupload Defense Could Proceed
Jan 26th
There will be two battles fought simultaneously in defense of Megaupload, the cyberlocker site accused by the U.S. of hosting and publicizing illicit copyrighted material. One is in the public arena, where we can expect the defendant to portray itself as Robin Hood, not so much stealing content from the rich as repurposing it for the poor, the meek, the 99 percent. It may even get some traction in that arena, but those same tactics may not play so well to a jury. That will be a separate battle whose defense strategy may not be so populist.
With the help of technology industry attorney Richard Santalesa and a team of researchers at New York City-based Information Law Group, ReadWriteWeb has examined the possible strategies a Megaupload defense may adopt, and analyzed their chances of success.
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The Robin Hood defense
The case for Megaupload acting on behalf of the everyday consumer, the average Joe, is already being assembled – in fact, defense attorneys could perhaps sit tight, relax, and watch the Web build their case for them.
Just after Megaupload first came under scrutiny by the U.S. Justice Dept., it pursued a business relationship of some sort with Universal Music Group. The subject was a prospective music download service called MegaBox. The indictment last week refers specifically to a November 2010 e-mail sent to one Megaupload proprietor from a UMG executive, listing the terms which MegaBox would have to meet in order for it to host music tracks copyrighted by UMG. For example, as the indictment quotes from the e-mail: “proactive fingerprint filtering to ensure that there is no infringing music content hosted on its service; proactive text filtering for pre-release titles that may not appear in fingerprint databases at an early stage; terminate the accounts of users that repeatedly infringe copyright; limit the number of possible downloads from each file; process right holder take down notices faster and more efficiently.”
The receipt of this e-mail could be cited as evidence that Megaupload was, at the very least, communicating with music industry executives about apparently legitimate business arrangements. Fast-forward to last month, when Megaupload announced it would launch MegaBox as a commercial site that would enable artists to distribute their music directly to listeners, while paying only a 10% distribution fee to Megaupload.
That started a wave of “question-mark” articles including this one from TechCrunch on Tuesday, plus this one from Digital Music News yesterday, and this one from Broadband DSLReports.com early this morning. Could the Justice Dept. have been serving as the stooge, the errand boy, for the music industry, stopping a competitive service from coming into being in revenge for the anti-SOPA demonstrations, question-mark? We’re just saying, we’re only the messenger. (We present both the facts and the innuendo, and let you sort them out as a public service.)
Missing amid all of the question-mark speculation was any recognition of the obvious connotation from this widely circulated screenshot, which features not some generally unknown, independent music artist seeking 90¢ from every dollar, but an album by The Black Eyed Peas – artists whose music is signed by, and who are promoted by, UMG. Regular RWW readers will recall UMG had successfully, if temporarily, used a DMCA petition to have YouTube take down a Megaupload promotional video featuring musical contributions by well-known artists, some of whom were UMG stars. A DMCA petition is normally used for claiming copyright violation, although the tracks these artists contributed – singing the Megaupload catch-phrase and theme tune – was not under UMG copyright.
So one potential Megaupload defense, which could be beta-tested in the public arena before generally released to a jury, is that principal representatives of the music industry were leveraging the power of the justice system for anti-competitive purposes. For a judge to uphold any jury verdict in Megaupload’s favor arising from that defense, however, some type of direct conspiracy between the music industry and the government would need to be established beyond just sticking a question mark at the end of speculation. Here is where the bubble of question-mark would would need to be pierced, and speculation would have to give way to reality.
The existence of the one e-mail cited in the Justice Dept. indictment indicates that investigators would have plenty of other Megaupload e-mails which may speak to the true intent of MegaBox, and the legitimacy – or lack thereof – of their intended business model, and their relationship with music publishers.
(Information Law Group, not unlike many smart vendors, declined comment on speculation.)
Next page: “Obviously infringing content”
Eric Schmidt, Patents, and the ‘Sword of Damocles’ Defense
Nov 7th
Populism is a tool that only works in one’s defense when one does not appear big or strong enough to wield it by himself. In its rise to fame, Google has been a champion of populist causes, most notably the association of freedom of ideas with freedom in licensing. Up until recently, the company has been adept in utilizing populism to its advantage, including distinguishing itself against Microsoft, and encouraging others to rally around its relative degree of openness with respect to Android, video codecs such as VP8, and HTML5.
But there’s a reason the phrase “populist giant” does not appear much in politics, or in technology which has in many ways become the successor to politics in the public mind. Last month, the U.S. Senate had an opportunity to remove the populist veil from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, for whom it clearly no longer fits.
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After having failed spectacularly, the Senate Antitrust Committee sent Schmidt a huge questionnaire comprised of things it thinks it should have asked when it had the opportunity, disguised as requests for clarification. One of those clarifications concerned an e-mail from Android contributing engineer Dan Morrill, which was quoted in a one-paragraph “story” on the New York Magazine Web site: “We are using compatibility as a club to make them [cell phone manufacturers do things we want,” Morrill wrote. (Online columnist John Gruber’s response was priceless: “See, but it’s an open club.”)
Eric Schmidt’s written response starts with the obvious tack: that it’s one sentence out of thousands that was (quite probably) taken out of context: “Mr. Morrill’s remarks reviewed in their full context express his belief that Google’s efforts to maintain compatibility across different devices could be misperceived as a way for Google to improperly influence manufacturers. Google does not in fact use compatibility in this way. Mobile operating system competition is fierce — Apple, RIM (BlackBerry), and Microsoft are very significant competitors — and carriers and handset manufacturers have many options other than Android.”
Schmidt then goes on to take another tack we’ve seen before. As an open source platform, he goes on, Android enables manufacturers to make any number of adaptations to Android on their own terms (“There are more than 500 models of Android devices on the market”), and that the result is a broad platform of supporting manufacturers, a sort of nation of Android (my term, not his) which demands a special sort of responsibility on Google’s part.
Google has often pictured itself as a caretaker of a rather nebulous concept called “openness,” which can best be explained in the context of Google as the full and unobstructed freedom for any developer to understand, in the light of day, just what it is Google is doing and to whom it is being done. It’s a slick way of responding to the notion, put forth by both American and European legislators, that a company with dominant power in a market has special responsibilities to that market; Google accepts that nomination as though it were a knighthood.
And it is from that lofty perch that here, for one brief, shining moment, Eric Schmidt may have reached too far. In the fourth paragraph of his response to this same question, he reaches for an image born from the most tense period of the Cold War. It’s a faint, though genuine, allusion to the notion of Mutually Assured Destruction, and the reason great superpowers arm themselves.
One of the most significant benefits of Android is that it is free. This has significantly reduced Android device costs and has helped drive down handset prices across the wireless industry. But Android and our partners have recently come under significant fire by firms attempting to use patent infringement suits to drive up the cost of Android phones and jeopardize the Android platform. Google’s intent in acquiring Motorola Mobility is to provide a defense against these suits. Google hopes that Motorola Mobility’s patent portfolio will deter other companies from suing to limit the distribution of Android or from attempting to burden it with unreasonable licensing fees.
Schmidt went for it; he reached for the Kennedy perch.
“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness,” Pres. John F. Kennedy told the United Nations in September 1961. “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”
Ever since that moment, in the history of more important things than software patents, the mental images of MAD have been intertwined: the tripwire of mutual annihilation, and the sharp swords dangling by gossamer threads over the heads of anyone who dared accept the responsibility to trip it. Substitute nuclear warheads with software patents, place Google and the Coalition Contrary to Google Principles (CCGP, whose comrades include Apple, Microsoft, RIM, and Sony) in place of Kennedy and Khrushchev, respectively, and just perhaps the dramatic moment will help Google ascend, in the minds of Congress, to an heroic and courageous level worthy of a medal of honor.
It was one metaphor too many, for in adopting it, Schmidt may have given away the keys to the kingdom. “Google’s intent in acquiring Motorola Mobility,” he most clearly wrote, “is to provide a defense against these suits.” Not to build a phone, not to maintain a strong competitor amid other phone makers, not to make Motorola greater. But to make Google more defensible. An anti-missile shield of sorts. Weapons of mass production are oh, so terrible. But you have to use them, or else the other guy will use you.
For at least a moment there, the emperor has no clothes. But that moment is recorded on paper, and can be replayed again and again. If the U.S. Government ends up blocking Google’s move for Motorola, this may be the final reason.
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In Defense of Qwiki – The Machine That Reads to You
Jan 24th
Video artist Ze Frank used to say that it would take him all day long to produce each of his five to ten minute long pieces. That’s not unusual: creation of multi-media content is incredibly time and resource expensive, especially compared to the creation of text content. That’s why I have a lot of interest in today’s public launch of Qwiki – a service that combines speech-to-text and assembled multi-media to create little slideshows based on Wikipedia entries.
Geeks are engaged in heated debate, some arguing that the technology is lightweight, that the product is limited and that the funding of the company to the tune of $8 by Facebook’s exiled co-founder Edward Saverin is a sign that Silicon Valley has lost its mind like it did in the original days of the dot com bubble. You know what, though? Mainstream audiences are really excited about Qwiki. I am too.
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CNN and PC World gave Qwiki rave reviews today. PC World’s Sara Yin called it “Flipboard meets Wikipedia.” (Links to those sites not included, of course, because mainstream media knows that links to other sites can make you catch cooties.) CNN’s Dan Simon went to the company’s headquarters for an interview and called it a “site that could compete with Google.” (Well, duh, what general search engine doesn’t? Translate that attempt to speak to mainstream audiences though and you’ll see that Simon means Qwiki could be a viable search competitor, presumably because of its wow factor and smarts.) ABC News went with the dorky headline “Get Ready for a Qwiki” and said “this interactive, talking search engine may be the next big Internet sensation.”
Forty thousand people “Liked” Qwiki on Facebook before it even launched, and not just based on the visibility it got from winning a TechCrunch award. People like it a lot.
Is Qwiki a sign that Silicon Valley venture capitalists have gone insane? For what it’s worth, we searched through the archives of 150 venture capital blogs and found just one mention of Qwiki across any of them, ever. “I was excited to see what Qwiki is all about, but there isn’t much to see,” wrote Nic Brisbourne in October. Otherwise? Nothing. So chill.
Yes, Qwiki is simple: it reads the first few sentences of a Wikipedia entry and then slaps up associated images with a Ken Burns effect. A few standard forms of data, like city populations, get turned into slick looking graphs.
Simplicity can be a virtue, though. Watching these awkward little video vignettes may be slower than reading the text, but it’s also more entertaining. I’ve watched probably 50 “Qwikis” now and the quality of the delivery is just good enough to keep me clicking for more. For the bread and circus crowd, Wikipedia read-aloud in a voice just short of the uncanny valley, with images dancing on the screen, is the difference between Wikipedia content consumed and ignored.
Qwiki’s biggest problem as far as I can tell? That the pieces are too short. I’d love to hear the whole Wikipedia entries read out loud by robots. I’d like to create a playlist of Wikipedia entries for it to read and just let it fly while I’m walking my dogs or riding the city bus.
The web is filled with high-quality written content. Wikipedia, a collection of documents that scores of people have edited on top of each other for years, is a great place for Qwiki to start. That’s not where the company will stop, though. It’s building a service.
Qwiki hopes its technology will be used by all kinds of publishers. “Whether you’re planning a vacation on the web, evaluating restaurants on your phone, or helping with homework in front of the family Google TV, Qwiki is working to deliver information in a format that’s quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search.” The company lists examples that include real estate listings (good idea) through dating sites (bad idea, sounds like the Tim Ferris dating-for-creeps method, like outsourcing human introductions under false pretense).
The point is, Qwiki wants to let a robot make beautiful movies for you to passively learn about any topic, any text, that you choose. The web is an interactive place, but sometimes it’s good to sit back and enjoy the fruits of that interactivity in a way that asks less of you as a user.
Traditional multi-media content is too expensive to scale to serve the long-tail of would-be consumers. The days of broadcast, mass-media as “the only game in town” are gone. If we’re all going to get multi-media satisfaction, for all our obscure interests, a lot of it is going to need to be created by robots. Not all of it, but a lot of it. There’s no shame in liking that.
Qwiki says it will release an iPad app soon and that could be a big win. Do you want a robot to read well to you, and serve up fancy looking slideshows while it does? I do. I’m not alone, either. Far from it.
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Citizens mourn, bereaved families confront defense officials over loss of two … – Yonhap News
Nov 24th
 Yonhap News |
Citizens mourn, bereaved families confront defense officials over loss of two …
Yonhap News Staff Sergeant Seo Jeong-woo, 22, and Lance Corporal Mun Gwang-wook, 20, who were posthumously promoted one rank in honor of their sacrifices, … |
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Hot On Sphinn: In Defense Of Links, Sphinn Drops Voting, Image SEO & More – Search Engine Land (blog)
Sep 7th
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Hot On Sphinn: In Defense Of Links, Sphinn Drops Voting, Image SEO & More
Search Engine Land (blog) Along with that, articles more specific to link building were also popular, as was an article on image SEO. But the hottest discussion topic of the week was … |
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Hot On Sphinn: In Defense Of Links, Sphinn Drops Voting, Image SEO & More
Sep 7th
A three-part series about linking — and more specifically, how search marketers may view links differently from other Internet users — all went hot on Sphinn last week. Along with that, articles more specific to link building were also popular, as was an article on image SEO. But the hottest discussion topic of the week [...]
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
