Category: Intellectual Property

The end of ownership

It seems no manufacturer will be satisfied until they have turned everything they make into an ongoing revenue stream. Once, it was enough to sell widgets. Then, you needed to have a line of upgrades and add-ons for your widgets and all your sales personnel were expected to “upsell” at every opportunity. Now, you need to turn some of those upgrades and add-ons into subscription services, and throw in some ads for extra revenue. All those ad-free moments in your life? To you, this is space in which to think your own thoughts. To advertisers, these are golden opportunities that haven’t been exploitable before and should be turned to their advantage. (Years ago, I remember, for example, a speaker at a lunchtime meeting convened by the Internet Advertising Bureau saying with great excitement that viral emails could bring ads into workplaces, which had previously been inaccessible.)

The immediate provocation for this musing is the Chamberlain garage door opener that blocks third-party apps in order to display ads. To be fair, I have no skin in this specific game: I have neither garage door opener nor garage door. I don’t even have a car (any more). But I have used these items, and I therefore feel comfortable in saying that this whole idea sucks.

There are three objectionable aspects. First is the ad itself and the market change it represents. I accept that some apps on my phone show ads, but I accept that because I have so far decided not to pay for them (in part because I don’t want to give my credit card information to Google in order to do so). I also accept them because I have chosen to use the apps. Here, however, the app comes with the garage door opener, which you *have* paid for, and the company is double-dipping by trying to turn it into an ongoing revenue stream; its desire to block third-party apps is entirely to protect that revenue stream. Did you even *want* an app with your garage door opener? Does a garage door need options? My friends who have them seem perfectly happy with the two choices of open or closed, and with a gizmo clipped to their sun visor that just has a physical button to push.

Second is the reported user interface design, which forces you to scroll past the ad to get to the button to open the door. This is theft: Chamberlain is stealing a sliver of your time and patience whenever you need to open your garage door. Both are limited resources.

Third is the loss of control over – ownership of – objects you have ostensibly bought. With few exceptions, it has always been understood that once you’ve bought a physical object it’s yours to do with what you want. Even in the case of physical containers of intellectual property – books, CDs, LPs – you always had the right to resell or give away the physical item and to use it as often as you wanted to. The arrival of digital media forced a clarification: you owned the physical object but not the music, pictures, film, or text encoded on it. The part-pairing discussed here a couple of weeks ago is an early example of the extension of this principle to formerly wholly-owned objects. The more software infiltrates the physical world, the more manufacturers will seek to use that software to control how we use the devices they make.

In the case we began with, Chamberlain’s decision to shut off API access to third parties to protect its own profits mirrors a recent trend in social media such as Reddit and Twitter in response to large language models built on training data scraped from their sites. The upshot in the Chamberlain case is that the garage door openers stop working with home automation systems into which the owners want to integrate them. Chamberlain has called this integration unauthorized usage and complains that said use means a tiny proportion of its customers consumed more than half of the traffic to and from its system. Seems like someone could have designed a technical solution for this.

At Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow lists four ways companies can be stopped from exerting unreasonable post-purchase control: fear of their competition, regulation, technical feasibility, and customer DIY. All four, he writes, have so far failed in this case, not least because Chamberlain is now owned by the private equity firm Blackstone, which has already bought up its competitors. Because there are so many other examples, we can’t dismiss this as a one-off; it’s a trend! Or, in Doctorow’s words, “a vast and deadly rot”.

An early example came from Tesla in 2020; when it disabled Full Self-Drive on a used Model S on the grounds that the customer hadn’t paid for it. Over-the-air software updates give companies this level of control long after purchase.

Doctorow believes a countering movement is underway. I hope so, because writing this has led me to this little imaginary future horror: the guitar that silences itself until you type in a code to verify that you have paid royalties for the song you’re trying to play. Logically, then, all interaction with physical objects could become like waiting through the ads for other shows on DVDs until you could watch the one you paid to see. Life is *really* too short.

Illustrations: Steve (Campbell Scott) shows Linda (Kyra Sedgwick) how much he likes her by offering her a garage door opener in Cameron Crowe’s 1992 film Singles.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon

Power cuts

In the latest example of corporate destruction, the Guardian reports on the disturbing trend in which streaming services like Disney and Warner Bros Discovery are deleting finished, even popular, shows for financial reasons. It’s like Douglas Adams’ rock star Hotblack Desiato spending a year dead for tax reasons.

Given that consumers’ budgets are stretched so thin that many are reevaluating the streaming services they’re paying for, you would think this would be the worst possible time to delete popular entertainments. Instead, the industry seems to be possessed by a death wish in which it’s making its offerings *less* attractive. Even worse, the promise they appeared to offer to showrunners was creative freedom and broad and permanent access to their work. The news that Disney+ is even canceling finished shows (Nautilus) shortly before their scheduled release in order to pay less *tax* should send a chill through every creator’s spine. No one wants to spend years of their life – for almost *any* amount of money – making things that wind up in the corporate equivalent of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It’s time, as the Masked Scheduler suggested recently on Mastodon, for the emergence of modern equivalents of creator-founded studios United Artists and Desilu.

***

Many of us were skeptical about Meta’s Oversight Board; it was easy to predict that Facebook would use it to avoid dealing with the PR fallout from controversial cases, but never relinquish control. And so it is proving.

This week, Meta overruled the Board‘s recommendation of a six-month suspension of the Facebook account belonging to former Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen. At issue was a video of one of Sen’s speeches, which everyone agreed incited violence against his opposition. Meta has kept the video up on the grounds of “newsworthiness”; Meta also declined to follow the Board’s recommendation to clarify its rules for public figures in “contexts in which citizens are under continuing threat of retaliatory violence from their governments”.

In the Platformer newsletter Casey Newton argues that the Board’s deliberative process is too slow to matter – it took eight months to decide this case, too late to save the election at stake or deter the political violence that has followed. Newton also concludes from the list of decisions that the Board is only “nibbling round the edges” of Meta’s policies.

A company with shareholders, a business model, and a king is never going to let an independent group make decisions that will profoundly shape its future. From Kate Klonick’s examination, we know the Board members are serious people prepared to think deeply about content moderation and its discontents. But they were always in a losing position. Now, even they must know that.

***

It should go without saying that anything that requires an Internet connection should be designed for connection failures, especially when the connected devices are required to operate the physical world. The downside was made clear by the 2017 incident, when lost signal meant a Tesla-owning venture capitalist couldn’t restart his car. Or the one in 2021, when a bunch of Tesla owners found their phone app couldn’t unlock their car doors. Tesla’s solution both times was to tell car owners to make sure they always had their physical car keys. Which, fine, but then why have an app at all?

Last week, Bambu 3D printers began printing unexpectedly when they got disconnected from the cloud. The software managing the queue of printer jobs lost the ability to monitor them, causing some to be restarted multiple times. Given the heat and extruded material 3D printers generate, this is dangerous for both themselves and their surroundings.

At TechRadar, Bambu’s PR acknowledges this: “It is difficult to have a cloud service 100% reliable all the time, but we should at least have designed the system more carefully to avoid such embarrassing consequences.” As TechRadar notes, if only embarrassment were the worst risk.

So, new rule: before installation test every new “smart” device by blocking its Internet connection to see how it behaves. Of course, companies should do this themselves, but as we/’ve seen, you can’t rely on that either.

***

Finally, in “be careful what you legislate for”, Canada is discovering the downside of C-18, which became law in June. and requires the biggest platforms to pay for the Canadian news content they host. Google and Meta warned all along that they would stop hosting Canadian news rather than pay for it. Experts like law professor Michael Geist predicted that the bill would merely serve to dramatically cut traffic to news sites.

On August 1, Meta began adding blocks for news links on Facebook and Instagram. A coalition of Canadian news outlets quickly asked the Competition Bureau to mount an inquiry into Meta’s actions. At TechDirt Mike Masnick notes the irony: first legacy media said Meta’s linking to news was anticompetitive; now they say not linking is anticompetitive.

However, there are worse consequences. Prime minister Justin Trudeau complains that Meta’s news block is endangering Canadians, who can’t access or share local up-to-date information about the ongoing wildfires.

In a sensible world, people wouldn’t rely on Facebook for their news, politicians would write legislation with greater understanding, and companies like Meta would wield their power responsibly. In *this* world, a we have a perfect storm.

Illustrations:XKCD’s Dependency.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Author Wendy M. GrossmanPosted on Categories Infrastructure, Intellectual Property, Law, Media, Net lifeTags , , Leave a comment on Power cuts

The data grab

It’s been a good week for those who like mocking flawed technology.

Numerous outlets have reported, for example, that “AI is getting dumber at math”. The source is a study conducted by researchers at Stanford and the University of California Berkeley comparing GPT-3.5’s and GPT-4’s output in March and June 2023. The researchers found that, among other things, GPT-4’s success rate at identifying prime numbers dropped from 84% to 51%. In other words, in June 2023 ChatGPT-4 did little better than chance at identifying prime numbers. That’s psychic level.

The researchers blame “drift”, the problem that improving one part of a model may have unhelpful knock-on effects in other parts of the model. At Ars Technica, Benj Edwards is less sure, citing qualified critics who question the study’s methodology. It’s equally possible, he suggests, that as the novelty fades, people’s attempts to do real work surface problems that were there all along. With no access to the algorithm itself and limited knowledge of the training data, we can only conduct such studies by controlling inputs and observing the outputs, much like diagnosing allergies by giving a child a series of foods in turn and waiting to see which ones make them sick. Edwards advocates greater openness on the part of the companies, especially as software developers begin building products on top of their generative engines.

Unrelated, the New Zealand discount supermarket chain Pak’nSave offered an “AI” meal planner that, set loose, promptly began turning out recipes for “poison bread sandwiches”, “Oreo vegetable stir-fry”, and “aromatic water mix” – which turned out to be a recipe for highly dangerous chlorine gas.

The reason is human-computer interaction: humans, told to provide a list of available ingredients, predictably became creative. As for the computer…anyone who’s read Janelle Shane’s 2019 book, You Look LIke a Thing and I Love You, or her Twitter reports on AI-generated recipes could predict this outcome. Computers have no real world experience against which to judge their output!

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, Waymo and Cruise driverless taxis are making trouble at an accelerating rate. The cars have gotten stuck in low-hanging wires after thunderstorms, driven through caution tape, blocked emergency vehicles and emergency responders, and behaved erratically enough to endanger cyclists, pedestrians, and other vehicles. If they were driven by humans they’d have lost their licenses by now.

In an interesting side note that reminds of the cars’ potential as a surveillance network, Axios reports that in a ten-day study in May Waymo’s driverless cars found that human drivers in San Francisco speed 33% of the time. A similar exercise in Phoenix, Arizona observed human drivers speeding 47% of the time on roads with a 35mph speed limit. These statistics of course bolster the company’s main argument for adoption: improving road safety.

The study should – but probably won’t – be taken as a warning of the potential for the cars’ data collection to become embedded in both law enforcement and their owners’ business models. The frenzy surrounding ChatGPT-* is fueling an industry-wide data grab as everyone tries to beef up their products with “AI” (see also previous such exercises with “meta”, “nano”, and “e”), consequences to be determined.

Among the newly-discovered data grabbers is Intel, whose graphics processing unit (GPU) drivers are collecting telemetry data, including how you use your computer, the kinds of websites you visit, and other data points. You can opt out, assuming you a) realize what’s happening and b) are paying attention at the right moment during installation.

Google announced recently that it would scrape everything people post online to use as training data. Again, an opt-out can be had if you have the knowledge and access to follow the 30-year-old robots.txt protocol. In practical terms, I can configure my own site, pelicancrossing.net, to block Google’s data grabber, but I can’t stop it from scraping comments I leave on other people’s blogs or anything I post on social media sites or that’s professionally published (though those sites may block Google themselves). This data repurposing feels like it ought to be illegal under data protection and copyright law.

In Australia, Gizmodo reports that the company has asked the Australian government to relax copyright laws to facilitate AI training.

Soon after Google’s announcement the law firm Clarkson filed a class action lawsuit against Google to join its action against OpenAI. The suit accuses Google of “stealing” copyrighted works and personal data,

“Google does not own the Internet,” Clarkson wrote in its press release. Will you tell it, or shall I?

Whatever has been going on until now with data slurping in the interests of bombarding us with microtargeted ads is small stuff compared to the accelerating acquisition for the purpose of feeding AI models. Arguably, AI could be a public good in the long term as it improves, and therefore allowing these companies to access all available data for training is in the public interest. But if that’s true, then the *public* should own the models, not the companies. Why should we consent to the use of our data so they can sell it back to us and keep the proceeds for their shareholders?

It’s all yet another example of why we should pay attention to the harms that are clear and present, not the theoretical harm that someday AI will be general enough to pose an existential threat.

Illustrations: IBM Watson, Jeopardy champion.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award and contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Mastodon.

Ex libris

So as previously discussed here three years ago and two years ago, on March 24 the US District Court for the Southern District of New York found that the Internet Archive’s controlled digital lending fails copyright law. Half of my social media feed on this subject filled immediately with people warning that publishers want to kill libraries and this judgment is a dangerous step limiting access to information; the other half is going “They’re stealing from authors. Copyright!” Both of these things can be true. And incomplete.

To recap: in 2006 the Internet Archive set up the Open Library to offer access to digitized books under “controlled digital lending”. The system allows each book to be “out” on “loan” to only one person at a time, with waiting lists for popular titles. In a white paper, lawyers David R. Hansen and Kyle K. Courtney call this “format shifting” and say that because the system replicates library lending it is fair use. Also germane: the Archive points to a 2007 California decision that it is in fact a library. Other countries may beg to differ.

When public libraries closed at the beginning of the covid19 pandemic, the Internet Archive announced the National Emergency Library, which suspended the one-copy-at-a-time rule and scrubbed the waiting lists so anyone could borrow any book at any time. The resulting publicity was the first time many people had heard of the Open Library, although authors had already complained. Hachette Book Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley filed suit. Shortly afterwards, the Archive shut down the National Emergency Library. The Open Library continues, and the Archive will appeal the judge’s ruling.

On the they’re-killing-the-libraries side: Mike Masnick and Fight for the Future. At Walled Culture, Glyn Moody argues that sharing ebooks helps sell paid copies. Many authors agree with the publishers that their living is at risk; a group of exceptions including Neil Gaiman, Naomi Klein, and Cory Doctorow, have published an open letter defending the Archive.

At Vice, Claire Woodstock lays out some of the economics of library ebook licenses, which eat up budgets but leave libraries vulnerable and empty-shelved when a service is withdrawn. She also notes that the Internet Archive digitizes physical copies it buys or receives as donations, and does not pay for ebook licenses.

Brief digression back to 1996, when Pamela Samuelson warned of the coming copyright battles in Wired. Many of its key points have since either been enshrined into law, such as circumventing copy protection; others, such as requiring Internet Service Providers to prevent users from uploading copyrighted material, remain in play today. Number three on her copyright maximalists’ wish listeliminating first-sale rights for digitally transmitted documents. This is the doctrine that enables libraries to lend books.

It is therefore entirely believable that commercial publishers believe that every library loan is a missed sale. Outside the US, many countries have a public lending right that pays royalties on loans for that sort of reason. The Internet Archive doesn’t pay those, either.

It surely isn’t facing the headwinds public libraries are. In the UK, years of austerity have shrunk library budgets and therefore their numbers and opening hours. In the US, libraries are fighting against book bans; in Missouri, the Republican-controlled legislature voted to defund the state’s libraries entirely, apparently in retaliation.

At her blog, librarian and consultant Karen Coyle, who has thought for decades about the future of libraries, takes three postings to consider the case. First, she offers a backgrounder, agreeing that the Archive’s losing on appeal could bring consequences for other libraries’ digital lending. In the second, she teases out the differences between academic/research libraries and public libraries and between research and reading. While journals and research materials are generally available in electronic format, centuries of books are not, and scanned books (like those the Archive offers) are a poor reading experience compared to modern publisher-created ebooks. These distinctions are crucial to her third posting, which traces the origins of controlled digital lending.

As initially conceived by Michelle M. Wu in a 2011 paper for Law Library Journal, controlled digital lending was a suggestion that law libraries could, either singly or in groups, buy a hard copy for their holdings and then circulate a digitized copy, similar to an Inter-Library Loan. Law libraries serve limited communities, and their comparatively modest holdings have a known but limited market.

By contrast, the Archive gives global access to millions of books it has scanned. In court, it argued that the availability of popular commercial books on its site has not harmed publishers’ revenues. The judge disagreed: the “alleged benefits” of access could not outweigh the market harm to the four publishers who brought the suit. This view entirely devalues the societal role libraries play, and Coyle, like many others, is dismayed that the judge saw the case purely in terms of its effect on the commercial market.

The question I’m left with is this: is the Open Library a library or a disruptor? If these were businesses, it would obviously be the latter: it avoids many of the costs of local competitors, and asks forgiveness not permission. As things are, it seems to be both: it’s a library for users, but a disruptor to some publishers, some authors, and potentially the world’s libraries. The judge’s ruling captures none of this nuance.

Illustrations: 19th century rendering of the Great Library of Alexandria (via Wikimedia).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Twitter.

Memex 2.0

As language models get cheaper, it’s dawned on me what kind of “AI” I’d like to have: a fully personalized chat bot that has been trained on my 30-plus years of output plus all the material I’ve read, watched, listened to, and taken notes on all these years. A clone of my brain, basically, with more complete and accurate memory updated alongside my own. Then I could discuss with it: what’s interesting to write about for this week’s net.wars?

I was thinking of what’s happened with voice synthesis. In 2011, it took the Scottish company Cereproc months to build a text-to-speech synthesizer from recordings of Roger Ebert’s voice. Today, voice synthesizers are all over the place – not personalized like Ebert’s, but able to read a set text plausibly enough to scare voice actors.

I was also thinking of the Stochastic Parrots paper, whose first anniversary was celebrated last week by authors Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. An important part of the paper advocates for smaller, better-curated language models: more is not always better. I can’t find a stream for the event, but here’s the reading list collected during the proceedings. There’s lots I’d rather eliminate from my personal assistant. Eliminating unwanted options upfront has long been a widspread Internet failure, from shopping sites (“never show me pet items”) to news sites (“never show me fashion trends”). But that sort of selective display is more difficult and expensive than including everything and offering only inclusion filters.

A computational linguistics expert tells me that we’re an unknown amount of time away from my dream of the wg-bot. Probably, if such a thing becomes possible it will be based on someone’s large language model and fine-tuned with my stuff. Not sure I entirely like this idea; it means the model will be trained on stuff I haven’t chosen or vetted and whose source material is unknown, unless we get a grip on forcing disclosure or the proposed BLOOM academic open source language model takes over the world.

I want to say that one advantage to training a chatbot on your own output is you don’t have to worry so much about copyright. However, the reality is that most working writers have sold all rights to most of their work to large publishers, which means that such a system is a new version of digital cholera. In my own case, by the time I’d been in this business for 15 years, more than half of the publications I’d written for were defunct. I was lucky enough to retain at least non-exclusive rights to my most interesting work, but after so many closures and sales I couldn’t begin to guess – or even know how to find out – who owns the rights to the rest of it. The question is moot in any case: unless I choose to put those group reviews of Lotus 1-2-3 books back online, probably no one else will, and if I do no one will care.

On Mastodon, the specter of the upcoming new! improved! version of the copyright wars launched by the arrival of the Internet: “The real generative AI copyright wars aren’t going to be these tiny skirmishes over artists and Stability AI. Its going to be a war that puts filesharing 2.0 and the link tax rolled into one in the shade.” Edwards is referring to this case, in which artists are demanding billions from the company behind the Stable Diffusion engine.

Edwards went on to cite a Wall Street Journal piece that discusses publishers’ alarmed response to what they perceive as new threats to their business. First: that the large piles of data used to train generative “AI” models are appropriated without compensation. This is the steroid-fueled analogue to the link tax, under which search engines in Australia pay newspapers (primarily the Murdoch press) for including them in news search results. A similar proposal is pending in Canada.

The second is that users, satisfied with the answers they receive from these souped-up search services will no longer bother to visit the sources – especially since few, most notably Google, seem inclined to offer citations to back up any of the things they say.

The third is outright plagiarism without credit by the chatbot’s output, which is already happening.

The fourth point of contention is whether the results of generative AI should be themselves subject to copyright. So far, the consensus appears to be no, when it comes to artwork. But some publishers who have begun using generative chatbots to create “content” no doubt claim copyright in the results. It might make more sense to copyright the *prompt*. (And some bright corporate non-soul may yet try.)

At Walled Culture, Glyn Moody discovers that the EU has unexpectedly done something right by requiring positive opt-in to copyright protection against text and data mining. I’d like to see this as a ray of hope for avoiding the worst copyright conflicts, but given the transatlantic rhetoric around privacy laws and data flows, it seems much more likely to incite another trade conflict.

It now dawns on me that the system I outlined in the first paragraph is in fact Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Not the web, which was never sufficiently curated, but this, primed full of personal intellectual history. The “AI” represents those thousands of curating secretaries he thought the future would hold. As if.

Illustrations: Stable Diffusion rendering of “stochastic parrots”, as prompted by Jon Crowcroft.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Twitter.