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Note: This is Part II in a series; Part I is here, Part III is here.
Last week, I began the story of the Broadcast Flag, a law that would make it illegal to build a general-purpose computer unless it conformed to a set of privately negotiated restrictions. The law had been promised by Billy Tauzin, then a lavishly corrupt Congressman, and its contours were being hammered out in an inter-industry body called the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), convened by the MPAA and attended by movie studios, TV studios, broadcasters, consumer electronics companies, and PC companies.
Note: This is Part I in a series; Part II is here, Part III is here
âA polite marketplace.â
Thatâs what the movie studio executive said he wanted to create.
It was my first day at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One of our supporters had been at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas the week before; coming back through the Convention Center late at night, he stumbled on an âopen meetingâ being held by the Motion Picture Association of Americaâs Copy Protection Technical Working Group. It was an âopen meetingâ in the sense that anyone who knew about it was welcome to attend, but they didnât actually tell anyone it was happening, and they held it in the dead of night.
On the spur of the moment, that supporter decided to attend. What he heard was genuinely bizarre, and would have been absurd if it wasnât so alarming.
That dead-of-night NAB meetingâs purpose was to announce the formation of a new interindustry consortium: the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), which would hold its inaugural âopen meetingâ the following week, at an LAX airport hotel that would be convenient for tech reps who flew in from Silicon Valley and for studio and TV reps based in LA.
BPDGâs purpose? To steal the future.
The U.S. Copyright Office has issued a Notice of Inquiry, seeking comment on whether online services should be legally required to filter all their usersâ communications to block copyright infringement, as part of a âStay Downâ system.
The idea is that once a copyright holder notifies a service provider that a certain work canât be legally posted, the service must filter all their user communications thereafter to ensure that this notice is honored.
I think that creators and creatorsâ groups should oppose this. Hereâs why.
The âstandard measuresâ being discussed are not standard. Indeed, theyâre largely found in just two companies: Google (through its Content ID system for YouTube) and Meta/Facebook. Thereâs a reason only two companies have these filters: They are incredibly expensive. Content ID has cost $100,000,000 and counting (and it only does a tiny fraction of what is contemplated in the proposed rule).
That effectively cements Googbook as the permanent rulers of the internet, since they are the only two social media companies that can afford this stuff.
A nearly identical proposal to this one â Article 13 of the Copyright Directive, since renumbered to Article 17 â went through the EU Parliament in 2019, and both Facebook and YouTube came out in favor of it. They understand that this is a small price to pay for permanently excluding all competitors from the internet.
(Itâs worth noting that actually implementing Article 17 with automated filters is likely a violation of both the e-Commerce Directive and the GDPR, both of which ban automated judgements of user communications without explicit opt-in and consent, and thereâs every chance that Article 17 will not survive a constitutional challenge in the European Court of Justice.)
Now, some people may be thinking, why should I care if Googbook get to take over the internet, so long as theyâre forced to police my copyrights?
I think those people are going to be very disappointed, for three reasons:
The unexpected death of the anthropologist David Graeber in September 2020 ripped a hole in the hearts of millions of us whose lives had been altered by his books (Debt, The Utopia of Rules, Bullshit Jobs), his work as an anarchist organizer (he is credited with coining âWe are the 99%â), his teaching, and his friendship. Itâs hard to overstate the mark Graeber left on this world during his too-brief tenure here.
For those of us who counted him as an inspiration, 2021 brought a small consolation: the posthumous publication of The Dawn of Everything, a mammoth book he co-wrote with the archaeologist David Wengrow in a collaborative process that took most of a decade to come to fruition.
Itâs spectrums all the way down.
Thereâs an old nerd joke that goes, âThere are 10 kinds of people in this world âthose who understand binary and those who donât.â The joke is that in binary math (that is, base two), you count using only one and zero, so 1 is 1, 10 is two, 11 is three, 100 is four, 101 is five, and so on.
Thereâs a slightly newer nerd joke that goes, âThere are ten kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary, those who donâtâââand those who understand ternary.â Ternary is base three, which counts like this: 1 is 1, 2 is two, 10 is three, 11 is four, 12 is five, 20 is six, and so on.
You could continue this joke ad infinitum, simply by referring to a handy list of numeral prefixes: âThose who understand binary, those who understand ternary, those who donât, and those who understand quaternaryâ (base four) or âquinaryâ (base five) or senary (base six), etc etc etc.
The thing I like about this joke is that it challenges your assumptions about categorization, reminding you that thereâs no way to really know how many buckets things might be sorted into.