[Plura-list] Youtube, fair use, competition, and the death of the artist; Carbon offsets are bullshit; Outgoing Facebookers blast the company

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Youtube, fair use, competition, and the death of the artist: Meet the
new boss, same as the old boss.

* Carbon offsets are bullshit: And the "Nature" "Conservancy" is neither.

* Outgoing Facebookers blast the company: "Embarrassing to work here."

* This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

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🥱 Youtube, fair use, competition, and the death of the artist

Today we have three major record labels, the meanest, most voracious
gobblers-up of the competition, companies that clawed their way to
global dominance through absolute ruthlessness, particularly to the
musicians who did the work that brought in the money.

For example: the Beatles earned $0.01/record.

Split four ways.

But 15% of that was creamed off by the label to account for "promotional
copies" that they later admitted they sold at full price without giving
the Beatles their *one penny* of royalties.

When Napster and other digital distribution platforms appeared, many
musicians were angry about them, but many were hopeful: was this -
finally - a way to be free of the labels?

It was!

For a while.

The subsequent record industry lawsuits combined with runaway mergers
and acquisitions in *both* tech (5 giants) *and* entertainment (4
studios, 4ish publishers, 3 labels) killed the dream of a pluralistic,
fair alternative to the content oligarchy.

This was confirmed when Youtube launched its music service in the early
part of the past decade. After hammering out a deal with the Big Four
(now three) labels, YT told all the independent artists and labels that
this would be their deal too - or they could leave Youtube.

In other words, Youtube was now an honorary member of the Big Four (now
three) and every musician in the world who wanted access to the monopoly
audio-video distribution platform would have to toe the Big Four's (now
three) line...or else.

The fusion of Youtube with the big entertainment companies includes a
complete disregard for fair use - the limitations and exceptions to
copyright that are so necessary to free speech, criticism, and new
artistic expression.

It's hard to square copyright with the First Amendment ("Congress shall
make no law.. abridging the freedom of speech"). I wrote this, it
attracted a copyright at the moment of fixation, and now the US
government gives me to the power to bar you from repeating it.

How can a government that is constitutionally barred from abridging your
speech also have a law telling you what you're allowed to say?

The Supreme Court explored this in Eldred v Ashcroft, with RBG calling
fair use copyright's "safety valve."

Fair use is how you can ban people from saying stuff without abridging
their free speech: it allows for transformation, criticism, commentary,
education, parody, archiving and a host of other uses. Without fair use,
copyright is unconstitutional censorship.

In 2007, Viacom sued Youtube for $1b; the court released emails between
Viacom execs admitting that their goal was to "steal" Youtube and take
it over (the emails were *very* sweary and included vicious fights about
which exec would get to run YT)

https://www.fastcompany.com/1588353/steal-it-and-other-internal-youtube-emails-viacoms-copyright-suit

As the suit was making its way through the courts, Youtube launched
Content ID, its automated takedown system. Content ID - which cost $100m
to build and run - allowed select rightsholders to "claim" certain audio
and video elements as their copyrights.

Content ID scours uploaded videos for matches to claimed works, then
(depending on rightsholders' preferences), Content ID either removes the
matching video, takes the money it is generating, or (if it's ad-free)
puts ads all over it and gives the money to the rightsholder.

And Content ID can't figure out if a use is fair or not. No algorithm
can. How software tell if something is parody? If it's commentary? If
it's sufficiently transformative to constitute a fair use? It can't, and
so Content ID doesn't.

What do you get when you mix automated takedown, entertainment and tech
monopolies and the absolute annihilation of fair use?

The contemporary arts world.

https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-discourages-fair-use-and-dictates-what-we-see-online

In a superb white paper, my EFF colleague Katharine Trendacosta
painstakingly documents how Youtube transfers gigantic sums from working
artists to rent-collecting rightsholders in a system that incentivizes
false copyright claims and punishes those who appeal automated verdicts.

The paper starts by documenting how Content ID *really* works, and shows
how the pretty, streamlined, easy to follow flowcharts that YT publishes
to prove that it has a fair and transparent systems are a sham.

The reality is a giant, gnarly hairball of rules, threats, ultimatums
and dire punishments, where videos that pass muster one day can be taken
down the next, and where challenging the robot (or a rightsholder) can
annihilate your Youtube account - and thus your artistic career.

It's a system where creators producing major video essays can upload
them in five minute chunks to YT to check for copyright claims, find
none, piece the whole feature together and upload it - only to get five
copyright claims.

It's a system where a ten-hour video of white noise attracts *six*
copyright claims - one for an "infringement" that allegedly lasted for
less than *one second*.

Trendacosta's paper revolves around deep interviews with three very
different Youtubers.

The first is Hbomberguy, a long-form video essayist with 600k
subscribers, who spends weeks playing blind man's bluff with Content ID,
slicing more and more sections out of his video to get rid of copyright
claims (and doing it over again when the algorithm changes).

The second is Todd Nathanson, a musicologist who produces videos that
dive deep into one-hit wonders and other musical oddities. He has given
up on getting any of the money his wildly popular videos generate
through YT ads; it's impossible to fend off the Content ID robots.

Instead, Nathanson relies on Patreon subscribers to pay his bills, and
allows the rightholders who lay claim to the money from his legal,
canonical-fair-use musical excerpts to simply steal the money he is
entitled to.

Finally, there's Lindsay Ellis, a bestselling novelist with 1m
subscribers who has been shunted from one service to the next as all of
Youtube's competitors were driven out of business, landing on Youtube
after she ran out of alternatives.

Ellis's high profile means she can sometimes actually reach a human
being at Youtube to discuss copyright claims against her work, but they
are monumentally unhelpful. Ellis knows an awful lot about copyright,
but that's actually a detriment when it comes to Content ID.

That's because defending yourself to the Content ID system means that
rightsholders can deny your defense and generate "copystrikes" against
your account. Rack up three strikes and your account gets suspended or
even deleted.

Ellis wonders "why I bothered playing by the rules all these years
because fair use doesn’t matter. Content ID is all that matters."

Youtube's Content ID statistics are opaque and out of date, but
Trendacosta estimates that the system rendered automated judgements in
122,500,000 copyright claims in 2017, a number that has surely climbed
since.

Once, creators dreamed of the internet as an escape hatch from the
airtight cell that the Big Four (now three) labels had crammed all the
world's music into. Today, most creators have been corralled into a
single online platform.

That platform colludes with the Big Three to misappropriate the incomes
of artists who never signed their one-sided record deals, and the ripoff
continues with a long tail of penny-ante grifters who claim copyrights
over silence, white noise and birdsong.

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🥱 Carbon offsets are bullshit

The third stage of grief is bargaining. When the climate emergency hove
into sight, we started with denial (Exxon's criminal suppression of its
own research on the looming crisis #ExxonKnew).

From there, it was onto anger: slurs like "treehugger" and performative
Drill-Baby-Drill-style incursions into protected lands.

But now we're into bargaining: can't we please keep the rapacious,
immoral system that jeopardized our planet and species?

In other words: carbon offsets.

Rather than punishing firms and executives who sacrificed our planet and
species for their short-term gains, we'll just give them a path to
realizing even handsomer rewards for not murdering us all.

We decide how much carbon each country can emit, and then we let them
trade those allotments between one another. If you forgo your carbon
allowance - by not chopping down a forest, say - you get a credit that
you can sell to a planet-destroying cruise-ship operator.

This is supposed to provide the incentives needed to get the market to
reduce its own carbon footprint, by putting a price on carbon and then
turning capitalism loose to reduce its obligation to pay that price with
all the ingenuity that the human mind can muster.

"Incentives matter" is the rallying cry of the right. They're correct.
And the incentive here is to reduce the amount paid for carbon by any
means necessary, which is exactly what the market did.

To understand what happened next, consider a labor law that causes
companies to pay fines for hurting their workers. Depending on how the
fines are structured, they might incentivize employers to make their
workplaces safer.

But there are other ways to respond. If the fine is low enough, it might
be cheaper to maim workers than to upgrade your physical plant ("a fine
is a price"). It might be cheaper to buy off the regulators and get the
fines reduced.

It might be cheaper to hire Pinkertons to spy on maimed workers and find
ways to discredit and smear them so the fines are nullified. Regulation
works best in the presence of personal liability for corporate execs,
steep fines, and weakened corporate power.

Carbon offsets have none of the above. What happened next is exactly
what was predicted to happen: polluters were incentivized to find the
cheapest possible carbon offsets, which turn out to be the most
meaningless ones.

To do so, they only had to perform the relatively straightforward chore
of corrupting the largest environmental charity in America: The Nature
Conservancy, a 69-year-old nonprofit that buys up endangered lands and
prevents them from being logged or despoiled.

Buying and preserving endangered lands generates carbon credits, and
those carbon credits can be sold onto the world's worst polluters, which
generates more capital to put into buying and protecting endangered
lands. Sounds good, right?

https://bloomberg.com/features/2020-nature-conservancy-carbon-offsets-trees/

But you can generate even more carbon credit profits by cheating: taking
land that's *not* endangered and falsely claiming carbon credits for it,
then flogging them to the oil, travel, and finance industry as imaginary
offsets for very real planet-destroying carbon emissions.

Last year, the Nature Conservancy generated $932m in revenues. As Ben
Elgin writes for Bloomberg, that's more than the next three largest US
environmental charities combined.

The Conservancy insists that the credits it generates come from real
preservation efforts.

But that's not supported by the data. Take the half-million tons' ($2m)
worth of carbon offsets the Conservancy generated and sold to JP Morgan
and others for not logging 2380 acres of Pennsylvania forest.

That forest is already a conservancy protected by the Hawk Mountain
Sanctuary Association, which does not permit logging. The Association
was misled into believing that its share of the credits would come from
planting saplings.

The credits came from the absurd assumption that the land would be
logged The American Carbon Registry - which oversees the credits - says
that you can't tell if the Association mightn't have changed its mind
and logged the lands it's protected for 90 years.

The Conservancy has a long history of cozying up to large polluters and
allowing them to buy their way to respectability ("The only problem with
tainted money is there tain't enough of it" -Patrick Noonan, Conservancy
President, 1973-80).

But procuring and selling phony carbon offsets doesn't just change how
people feel about Conservancy partners like Exxon and Dow - it changes
how they perceive the climate impact of their everyday activities.

Maybe you've heard that cruise ships are destroying the planet, but if
Disney Cruises promises you that the offsets it bought from the
Conservancy more than make up for it, the cruise starts to look pretty good.

Disney and the Conservancy know the offsets are bogus, but you don't.
Market trufans call this "information asymmetry" and understand that
over time, it leads to a "market for lemons"  in which only defective
goods are bought and sold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

It's not a new idea. Gresham's Law (1860) says that "bad money drives
out good" - the credits generated by "preserving" land that no one was
going to log anyway are cheap to produce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law

Meanwhile, good credits - like those that Stripe gets from Climeworks AG
for carbon sequestration at $775/ton - cost more than fake ones for not
logging a forest that no one was ever going to log.

Incentives matter. Gresham's Law produces a market for lemons.

All of this is firmly within market orthodoxy. That's the core of the
bargaining stage, after all: "Can't we just keep doing exactly what
we've always done and hope for a better outcome?"

Nope.

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🥱 Outgoing Facebookers blast the company

There's two reasons that Facebook is such a cesspit of disinformation,
unproductive flamewars and trolling:

First, it's too fucking big. That is, not only is Zuck monumentally
unqualified to control the social lives of 2.6b people - *no one is*.

Second, they don't really want to shut down the bad stuff. Paid
disinformation is revenue, after all. That's why FB (which insists it
should gobble up its competitors because scale is "efficient")
outsources the bulk of its "user safety" function.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#curse-of-bigness

Those outsource subcontractors don't work for Facebook because they
believe in its mission - they take the jobs because they don't have any
leverage, which is why they're paid low wages and denied the benefits
that FB lavishes on its in-house tech employees.

But high wages and free kombucha in the campus mini-kitchen only go so
far. Those high-paid workers are running up against the limits of their
ability to rationalize their role in one of the world's most toxic
enterprises.

The ones that joined to fix Facebook from the inside have overwhelming
evidence that Facebook doesn't actually want to fix its problems,
particularly disinformation.

Reality has a leftist bias, so any crackdown on disinformation will
disproportionately affect conservatives.

When that happens, Ted Cruz gets angry at Zuck and drags him into the
Senate. Plus, Zuck really enjoys the company of far right assholes, and
his version of "listening to both sides" boils down to "I meet with
Stormfront *and* the RNC."

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/25/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-dinners/

There's a tradition for departing Facebookers: a "badge post" - a
farewell note to the company summarizing the lessons they've learned in
their tenure. These days, badge posts are apt to be full-throated
denunciations of the company:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-rules-hate-speech-employees-leaving

These employees want their colleagues to know that Facebook's toxic stew
isn't just down to the enormity of its task: there are plenty of
instances in which Facebook CAN stop harmful (even lethal) disinfo, and
chooses not to.

The company has disbanded its civic integrity team (mission: "protect
the democratic process...stopthe spread of viral misinformation and fake
accounts") after spiking the team's plan to block provable
disinformation posted by Trump's account.

The company failed to act on its team's warnings about armed right-wing
militias that were planning murder-sprees, including the plans that led
to the murders of protesters in Kenosha, WI.

It ignores the data generated by its own researchers that attribute the
bulk of disinformation to powerful, politically connected far-right
outlets and figures like Breitbart, Fox, the Daily Caller, Ben Shapiro
and Donald Trump.

That blind eye doesn't just mean that these accounts' disinformation
spreads - it also generates income for them by helping them solicit
donations and payments.

Facebook's internal research consistently shows that fighting
disinformation would have the largest impact on right-wing causes, and
the departing scientists and techies say that the fear of political
retaliation prevents FB from acting on its own data.

The departing employees' badge posts say that working for Facebook is
"embarrassing" and call the company's vision "a dystopia." They dismiss
claims that automation will solve FB's problems as self-serving delusions.

One described FB as "a net negative effect on the quality of political
discourse."

All of this reminds me of Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist
and manager who led the Manhattan Project and created the first atom
bomb, an act he regretted instantly and forever.

Oppenheimer turned away from that first test blast and quoted the
Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." He
spent the rest of his career trying to end nuclear proliferation.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#oppenheimers

Imagine if Oppenheimer had yielded to his moral sensibilities *before*
he helped usher in the atomic age.

Moral reckonings are definitely in season in 2020. People are taking
stock of the trade-offs they made to get by - or get rich - and
wondering if they were worth it.

Our ability to rationalize our way into terrible situations - and the
difficulty we face in reasoning our way out of them - is the theme of my
novel ATTACK SURFACE, the third Little Brother novel, which just came out.

https://attacksurface.com

It's an urgent question: what does it take to get people to confront
their rationalizations...and what do we expect them to do then?

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🥱 This day in history

#15yrsago Homeland Security: Mini-golf courses are terrorist targets
https://www.ashford.zone/2005/12/bin_laden_hates

#5yrsago Britons will need copyright licenses to post photos of their
own furniture
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/you-may-soon-need-a-licence-to-take-photos-of-that-classic-designer-chair-you-bought/

#1yrago Facebook promised to provide academics data to study
disinformation, but their foot-dragging has endangered the whole project
https://socialscience.one/blog/public-statement-european-advisory-committee-social-science-one

#1yrago Family puts Ring camera in children’s room, discovers that
hacker is watching their kids 24/7, taunting them through the speaker
https://www.vice.com/en/article/3a88k5/how-hackers-are-breaking-into-ring-cameras

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🥱 Colophon

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Friday's progress: 536 words (93097 total).

Currently reading: The City We Became, NK Jemisin

Latest podcast: Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2020 Edition
https://craphound.com/news/2020/12/11/daddy-daughter-podcast-2020-edition/

Upcoming appearances:

* Colloquium on Information Security, Dec 14
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-31st-hphpe-virtual-colloquium-on-information-security-tickets-128859336745

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Recent appearances:

* Worldshapers
https://theworldshapers.com/2020/12/06/episode-72-cory-doctorow/

* A More Competitive Web (Techdirt Podcast):
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201201/10183045801/techdirt-podcast-episode-264-more-competitive-web-with-cory-doctorow-daphne-keller.shtml

* Big Tech Podcast:
https://www.cigionline.org/big-tech/cory-doctorow-true-dangers-surveillance-capitalism

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
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basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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