« BACK  |  PRINT

RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Tech at Night: The DMCA balance is delicate. Deflating the Fed attack hype. No, Google’s ad service isn’t racist.

Tech at Night

The anti-copyright crusaders are going to try to use this latest DMCA horror story as a reason to eliminate DMCA. I disagree. Of all the DMCA uses that go on in this country, most of them fly under the radar. How many are correct? Probably most. Will mistakes happen? Yup. Are copyright holders overzealous? Yup. Is this reason not to strengthen the system? Yup. But it’s not reason to repeal it. It’s a tradeoff and a compromise.

Of course, the real motive of the typical Slashdot left-anarchist DMCA critics is to open the Internet to mass copyright infringement on free services like WordPress.com, Youtube, and others. These are the same people who think abusers should be able to go onto MIT’s network and abuse MIT’s JSTOR access to commit mass, premeditated copyright infringement, and then blame MIT, JSTOR, and the government for the crime.

Details come out about the Federal Reserve/Anonymous story: a Federal Reserve website was hit, but the Anontards want you to think some shadowy, vital Fed server was attacked.

Of course, that said, until the government gets its own house in order, government is not fit to regulate the way Obama wants on Cybersecurity matters. We need to give private industry the tools to work with government though, and that’s why CISPA was a good idea, and is coming back this Congress.

It’s too bad Greg Walden has to propose a bill on Internet freedom, because the administration is such a laggard on the topic. But if he and Republicans don’t step up on the issue, who will?

Should FCC Commissioners be able to meet off the record? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

I have my suspicions about this story screaming about Google racism, and they center on this point: It’s really unlikely that anyone at Google sat down and decided to make ‘racial profiles’ on this stuff. Either individual advertisers chose to buy certain keywords, or automated algorithms chose these names based on data. Either way, blaming people at Google is kind of silly.

But if (and I really mean if, for all I know the above Huffington Post link is all made up) data mining really did, all on its own, come up with trends that make people uncomfortable, screaming racism isn’t the way to fix that. Remember: those are the tools that re-elected the President.

COMMENTS

  • jarober

    The DMCA is not in balance with anything – it’s a “guilty until proven innocent” system. I’ve had tutorial videos flagged on YouTube by trolls with pattern matching software – and no, there was no musical background. The system should not be set up so that any troll who can put together a takedown notice can force content offline.

  • bgmacaw

    The Google advertising is almost entirely algorithm driven. The ads that are displayed based on tracking and matching an individual’s previous searches and tracked website visits as well as aggregate user data for the same or similar search keyword requests.

    Advertisers bid on keywords and the price can be very high, $50+, or low, just pennies. Smart advertisers will bid on lower cost keywords, say “Latonya”, rather than a higher cost one like “arrest records”. I guess you could make the case that the advertisers, not Google, are “racist” in their keyword selection and purchase but they’re just trying to advertise effectively to a target audience.

    I haven’t completely checked this out, but based on some tests I’ve run, I suspect Google may have made a manual intervention here by not selling or displaying ads for a lot of name keywords.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    You guess you could make the case? On what grounds?

    That’s ludicrous.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Oh, just checked. You’re a Kim Dotcom fanboi.

    What other crimes do you endorse, even as you casually call people racist without evidence?

  • http://www.facebook.com/jarober James Robertson

    This is not a “single issue troll” thing. The way copyright law has been evolving threatens first amendment rights, and further pushes (the failed SOPA bill) would have made linking to anything from your own site highly dangerous. But congratulations on your effort to hand wave objections away.