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unjapanologistApparently Summit Entertainment had a picture by artist Kelly Howlett yanked from Zazzle because they believed - wrongly - that she was selling Twilight fan art.
Now, I seriously question the wisdom of Summit Entertainment spending time and resources to track down Twilight fan artists who may be trying to make a buck from their work. Except that they don't have to spend time or resources on this sort of thing anymore: the identification of this picture as unauthorized Twilight art being sold in violation of Summit's intellectual property rights happened via an automated process.
Using automated processes to identify and "prosecute" (term used loosely here, since these are private companies who've been given the power to police and sentence) infringing art on the internet is a practice that's very error-prone and has considerable collateral damage. People can get their livelihood yanked off the internet or even get kicked offline entirely for no good reason and without due process. And when individual creators want to protest bogus infringement claims, they don't have an automated process to do the work for them or the confidence of having lawyers in their pockets that they can shake at big companies: it takes a great deal of time and effort before they get permission to upload a work again. Some people say that such "annoyances" for individual creators are unfortunate but necessary, because rightsholders need automated systems to track infringement of their works on the whole wide internet, and they just can't afford to actually look at every single online work that gets flagged. I think that claim shows a complete failure to understand what makes works valuable on the internet, for their creators and in the eyes of others.
When a work is taken down after a bogus infringement claim, it can often be uploaded again, but that new copy will have been stripped of its the work's whole history. A "work" isn't just the text or the picture that you can make a backup copy of; it's the work, and the comments, and the views, and the kudos/favs/stars/bookmarks/ other thingies by which sites let people show appreciation and communicate. You could even argue that the "work" also includes bookmarks outside of the posting location - bookmarks that get broken if the work has to be reposted to a different URL. A bogus takedown notice can destroy all of that in a second.
I recently deleted one of my fics from the AO3 by accident, and losing that one easily replaceable online copy of that work was nothing compared to losing the whole history of comments etc. associated with that particular copy. If this snafu had happened because of some random claim by an automated process rather than through my own inattention, I'd have expired from sheer fury on the spot, because someone would have taken three quarters of what made that fic valuable for me simply because their algorithm had a hiccup. Whoops.
There's lots of reasons to dislike automated processes, but deep down, what offends me the most is that a bunch of media companies apparently feel totally okay with imposing their view of where the value of "culture" lies on everybody else. In their framework, the financial value of any given movie or other commercial property they own trumps the different value of works created outside of their circuit, in any and all circumstances. In the minds of these companies (because companies are apparently persons), if it's to protect the need of a handful of people to make all financial value derived from a movie flow into their pockets and nobody else's, it's completely acceptable to use automated processes to randomly shoot down online art and potentially destroy the value it holds for its creators. Not just "acceptable": it's the natural order of things.
It's unbelievable that the new RIAA policing scheme actually has some people going "Bwahaha, that will teach those pirates". Media companies who only want to protect their current business model get the power to decide what "legitimate" culture is for everybody else? Via use of automated processes? What could go wrong.
Now, I seriously question the wisdom of Summit Entertainment spending time and resources to track down Twilight fan artists who may be trying to make a buck from their work. Except that they don't have to spend time or resources on this sort of thing anymore: the identification of this picture as unauthorized Twilight art being sold in violation of Summit's intellectual property rights happened via an automated process.
Howlett is not actually convinced that anyone at Summit even saw her sketch, that this was done by an automated process that found a (vaguely) familiar tag. But if that is what’s considered the intellectual property of anyone, then is there any stopping big companies like Summit from going after even the most minor of references, let alone the entre fan art community? And how are regular people who make fan art supposed to stand up to high-power corporate lawyers? (Answer: They can’t.)
Using automated processes to identify and "prosecute" (term used loosely here, since these are private companies who've been given the power to police and sentence) infringing art on the internet is a practice that's very error-prone and has considerable collateral damage. People can get their livelihood yanked off the internet or even get kicked offline entirely for no good reason and without due process. And when individual creators want to protest bogus infringement claims, they don't have an automated process to do the work for them or the confidence of having lawyers in their pockets that they can shake at big companies: it takes a great deal of time and effort before they get permission to upload a work again. Some people say that such "annoyances" for individual creators are unfortunate but necessary, because rightsholders need automated systems to track infringement of their works on the whole wide internet, and they just can't afford to actually look at every single online work that gets flagged. I think that claim shows a complete failure to understand what makes works valuable on the internet, for their creators and in the eyes of others.
When a work is taken down after a bogus infringement claim, it can often be uploaded again, but that new copy will have been stripped of its the work's whole history. A "work" isn't just the text or the picture that you can make a backup copy of; it's the work, and the comments, and the views, and the kudos/favs/stars/bookmarks/ other thingies by which sites let people show appreciation and communicate. You could even argue that the "work" also includes bookmarks outside of the posting location - bookmarks that get broken if the work has to be reposted to a different URL. A bogus takedown notice can destroy all of that in a second.
I recently deleted one of my fics from the AO3 by accident, and losing that one easily replaceable online copy of that work was nothing compared to losing the whole history of comments etc. associated with that particular copy. If this snafu had happened because of some random claim by an automated process rather than through my own inattention, I'd have expired from sheer fury on the spot, because someone would have taken three quarters of what made that fic valuable for me simply because their algorithm had a hiccup. Whoops.
There's lots of reasons to dislike automated processes, but deep down, what offends me the most is that a bunch of media companies apparently feel totally okay with imposing their view of where the value of "culture" lies on everybody else. In their framework, the financial value of any given movie or other commercial property they own trumps the different value of works created outside of their circuit, in any and all circumstances. In the minds of these companies (because companies are apparently persons), if it's to protect the need of a handful of people to make all financial value derived from a movie flow into their pockets and nobody else's, it's completely acceptable to use automated processes to randomly shoot down online art and potentially destroy the value it holds for its creators. Not just "acceptable": it's the natural order of things.
It's unbelievable that the new RIAA policing scheme actually has some people going "Bwahaha, that will teach those pirates". Media companies who only want to protect their current business model get the power to decide what "legitimate" culture is for everybody else? Via use of automated processes? What could go wrong.
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