Music attorney Chris Castle will moderate a panel on “The Pledge Music Crowdfunding Debacle” at noon on May 22 at the Austin Bar Association, 816 Congress Avenue, Suite 700, Austin, Texas 78701.  Details to follow.  Read about the Pledge Music crisis in Billboard by Colin Stutz.

 

 

Miranda Mulholland is a wonderfully articulate speaker and advocate for artist rights!  We’re pleased to let readers know that she’ll be on this panel at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva and will be performing with Andrew Penner in their band Harrow Fair.  More info here.

An industry transformed: securing sustainable growth for today’s digital music industry

Friday, 5^th April 2019

1pm – 3pm

Geneva, Switzerland

The global music industry has transformed itself through investment and innovation over the past two decades. The recording industry has licensed hundreds of digital music services around the world, driving innovation and providing consumers with access to some 50 million tracks. Meanwhile, artists have gained more choice than ever before in how to reach fans with their music. At the heart of this success are the partnerships between artists and record labels.

Delegates will be presented with key global and regional data from the IFPI Global Music Report (which will be published globally during the week of the SCCR), insights into the partnerships between record companies and artists, and some key challenges to ensuring the sustainable and balanced development of digital music markets around the world.

Next, Graham Henderson will share highlights from Music Canada’s upcoming report on the discrepancy between the value of music accessed by consumers and the revenues returned to the artists and businesses who create it. The report outlines how Canada’s music community has overcome initial skepticism regarding the existence of this discrepancy, known as the Value Gap, and its causes. It examines the key arguments and evidence that have led to widespread acknowledgement of the discrepancy in Canada, and presents a road map to help build a stronger music ecosystem for artists and labels around the world.

The final speaker, Miranda Mulholland, a Canadian musician who runs her own boutique record label, will explain how weak copyright legislation has impaired her career. She will also reflect on the value of record labels in the modern music marketplace, and will demonstrate how artists can help establish a sustainable and functioning marketplace, outlining her own journey as an artist advocate.

Following the discussion, Mulholland will take the stage with Andrew Penner, her musical partner in the band Harrow Fair, to perform their unique blend of folk, country and garage rock music.

Speakers:

Larry S. Miller – Clinical Associate Professor and Director, Music Business Program, NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

Graham Henderson – President and CEO, Music Canada

Miranda Mulholland – Musician, President of Roaring Girl Records, and Music Festival Founder

Performance: Harrow Fair

Editors Note: In light of the very recent article by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on efforts by cyberturfers Create.Refresh to pay YouTubers to influence debate on the EU Copyright Directive, this analysis of influencers on Twitter is extraordinarily important.  Please note, this article was reworked from earlier version, omitting location data that proved to be unreliable).

Who tweets on EU copyright?

The debate on the reform of EU copyright law has many facets and a considerable part of the discussion takes place on Twitter.
The power of hashtags

On the one hand, hashtags are used to search for key words in discussions particularly quickly and effectively. On the other hand, it is very easy to find out which topics receive special attention on Twitter by analyzing which terms are often hashed and how often and dynamically they are shared. These terms are then displayed as so-called “trending topics” on the Twitter home page. The so-called “retweeting”, i.e. the unchanged forwarding of a tweet along with hashtags to one’s own followers, is an important factor here.

The frequency of use and distribution of hashtags is therefore often seen as an indicator of the public relevance of certain topics. If, for example, the #saveyourinternet hash tag appears regularly in the trending topics, the impression is created that more and more people are rejecting the copyright reform.

The importance of influencers

Now that the final decision on the reform is about to be taken, it makes sense to take a closer look at the Twitter campaign against the EU copyright reform using aggregated data. The data is based on data from the Talkwalker service, which we have compared with alternative services such as Keyhole. Here we use only the global data without geolocation, i.e. the worldwide number of uses of certain hashtags in a certain period of time, were examined. (the geolocation data proved to be faulty).

Using data from the Hashtagify service, the largest influencers were measured in terms of range.
This makes it easy to see who gave a hash tag the most momentum.The so-called “mentions”, i.e. the mention of a hash tag in a tweet, are decisive for the spread of a hash tag. The more mentions a hashtag experiences, the more it is perceived as relevant for a topic.

The following analysis focuses on the mentions of the hashtags, which play a major role in the campaign against the EU directive from a German perspective, because they are the framing of the anti-reform movement.

#saveyourinternet

#Artikel 13

#upload filter

#linktax

#censorshipmachines

The temporal development of mentions

Most noticeable is the increase in mentions of #saveyourinternet after Google/Youtube started its active campaign around this hashtag in autumn 2018.  The numbers doubled.

Illustration: worldwide cumulative representation of the development of the hashtag #saveyourinternet. Source: Talkwalker

The  graph illustrates very well the influence that Google has on the debate.

The timing  of the votes in the parliament created short peaks peaks in the change (or delta) in number mentions of  #saveyourinternetcampaign.  These boosts helped prolong and expand the reach of the campaign.

Illustration: Overall development of the hashtag #saveyourinternet 01.2018- 02.2019 on a weekly basis, source: Talkwalker

One can see very well in this weekly development the impact that Google had through its own Twitter channels Youtube and Youtube Creators.

The campaign with the Hashtag #saveyourinternetwas mainly determined by Google and Youtube from the end of October and was much broader in November/December than in the summer of 2018. There were, however, also peaks that could be explained by the two voting dates.

This is confirmed by the reach measured by the Hashtagify service. It is referred to there as Influence, which we refer to in the following charts and in the text as reach.

In this analysis, the top 10 influencers for different hashtags were examined, but this also means that there were of course far more influencers involved.

The top 10 influencers at Hashtag #saveyourinternettherefore had a reach of 1.5 billion

However Youtube and YoutubeCreators constitute 1,3 billion at the reach.

That corresponds to 85% of the Top 10 Influencer.

7 further of the Top 10 Influencer are Youtuber. It should be noted that Twitter accounts from Youtubers sometimes have a slightly different name than the Youtube channels. There are also Youtubers who have several Twitter accounts.

The only outlier is the Pirate Party, with a very small percentage.

The second largest reach in this study was hashtag #Artikel13.

However, it was only 9% of the range of #saveyourinternetwith 135 million reach (Top 10 Influencer number)

6 of the top 10 influencers are Youtuber. Other media also play a role here, as the shares of the Heuteshow, Extra3 and the SZ illustrate.

With a reach of 111 million for the top 10 influencers according to Hashtagify, the hashtag #Uploadfilter comes in 3rd in this review. 5 of the Top 10 are Youtuber.
Other media like Heuteshow, ZDFheute and SZ are also among the Top 10.

The Hashtag #linktaxcomes to a reach of 24 million.

So it seems to have captured less attention.
There is a somewhat different picture.
The US organizations Creative Commons and EFF apparently managed to best spread this hashtag in the debate about an EU legislation.

The Hashtag #censorshipmachinesachieved the lowest reach with 8.4 million related to the Top 10. Nevertheless it is remarkable that a US organization (Creative Commons) with almost 70% share within the top 10 dominates the debate in a European legislative process with an anti-reform hashtag.

Conclusion:

There are two inescapable lessons:
1.  fear sells
2.  YouTube and Google can effectively use their platforms to capture the attention of their users and to directly affect perceptions on matters relevant to their operations. This capacity can be used to distort debates and create an appearance of movements, or can actually create movements based on the presentation of one-sided information that distorts what is actually a far more nuanced truth.

YouTube intentionally created panic about its future that rather predictably resulted in an outpouring of expression of concern, reflected in the data presented here. A cynical campaign that itself illustrates the dangers to society presented by monopoly/monopsony platforms.

 

Authors: Stefan Herwig and Lukas Schneider. This  article originally appeared as Upload Filters: The Dystopia Has Been Canceled on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung here.  German language version here. Translated from German to English by Sarah Swift.
© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH 2001 – 2019 All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission. 

The “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace“ published in 1996 by John Perry Barlow begins with the words “Governments of the Industrial World I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.” One reading of this text entirely rejects the possibility that processes of making and enforcing collectively binding decisions – political processes – apply on the Internet. Another possible reading sees the Internet as a public space governed by rules that must be established through democratic process while also holding that certain sub-spaces belong to the private rather than the public sphere. The distinction between public and private affairs, res publicae und res privata, is essential for the functioning of social spaces. The concept of the “res publicae” as “space concerning us all”  led – and not only etymologically – to the idea of the republic as a form of statehood and, later, as a legitimate space for democratic policymaking.

On the Internet, this essential separation of private and public space has been utterly undermined, and the dividing lines between public and private spaces are becoming ever more blurred. We now have public spaces lacking in enforcement mechanisms and transparency and private spaces inadequately protected from surveillance and the misuse of data. Data protection is one obvious field this conflict is playing out on, and copyright is another.

The new EU Directive on Copyright seeks to establish democratic rules governing the public dissemination of works. Its detractors have not only been vociferous – they have also resorted to misleading forms of framing. The concepts of upload filters, censorship machines and link taxes have been injected into the discussion. They are based on false premises.

Upload filters as cogs in a censorship machine

What campaigners against copyright reform term “upload filters” are not invariably filters with a blocking function; they can be simple identification systems. Content can be scanned at the time of uploading to compare it to patterns from other known content. Such a system could, for example, recognize Aloe Blacc’s retro-soul hit “I need a Dollar.” Such software systems can be compared to dictation software capable of identifying the spoken words in audio files. At this point in time, systems that can identify music tracks on the basis of moderately noisy audio signals can be programed as coursework projects by fourth-semester students drawing on open-source code libraries. Stylizing such systems as prohibitively expensive or as a kind of “alien technology” underestimates both the dystopian potential of advanced pattern recognition systems (in common parlance: artificial intelligence) in surveillance software and similar use cases while also underestimating the feasibility of programming legitimate and helpful systems. The music discovery app “Shazam,” to take a specific example, was created by a startup with only a handful of developers and a modest budget and is now available on millions of smartphones and tablets – for free. The myth that only tech giants can afford such systems is false, as the example of Shazam or of enterprises like Audible Magic shows. Identifying works is a basic prerequisite for a reformed copyright regime, and large platforms will not be able to avoid doing so. Without an identification process in place, the use of licensed works cannot be matched to license holders. Such systems are, however, not filters.

How do upload filters work?

The principal argument of critics intent on frustrating digital copyright reforms that had already appeared to be on the home stretch is their charge that the disproportionate blocking of uploads would represent a wholesale assault on freedom of speech or, indeed, a form of censorship. Here, too, it is necessary to look more closely at the feasibility and potential of available options for monitoring uploads – and especially to consider the degree of efficiency that can be achieved by linking human and automated monitoring. In a first step, identification systems could automatically block secure matches or allow them to pass by comparing them against data supplied by collecting societies. Licensed content could readily be uploaded and its use would be electronically registered. Collecting societies would distribute license revenue raised to originators and artists. Non-licensed uses could automatically be blocked. In a second step, errors could be caught through a complaints handling system making decisions on whether complaints are justified on the basis of human analysis – this would represent a clear improvement on the current procedures used by YouTube and Facebook. What automated pattern recognition systems cannot do is determine the meaning of content items at the semantic level. This means that they cannot identify legitimate uses of protected works – in the context of parodies or mash-ups, say, or when an image is reproduced online in a piece of art criticism. In such cases, the identification system would report a “fuzzy”  match, stating for example that 40% of a given upload corresponded to a copyrighted file known from the database. To achieve a legally watertight result here, human judgment would be required. Humans can recognize parodies or incidental uses such as purely decorative uses of works in ways that that do not constitute breaches of copyright.

The process of analysis could be simplified further by uploaders stating the context of use at the time works are uploaded. Notes such as “This video contains a parody and/or uses a copyrighted work for decorative purposes” could be helpful to analysts. The Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) in Germany provides a good example of how automatic recognition and human analysis can work in tandem to analyze vast volumes of information. A few hundred people in Germany are currently tasked with deciding whether statements made on Facebook constitute incitement to hatred and violence against certain groups or are otherwise in breach of community rules. These judgments are significantly more complex than detecting impermissible uses of copyrighted works.

Being obliged to implement human monitoring will, of course, impose certain demands on platforms. But those most affected will be the platforms with the largest number of uploads. These major platforms will have the highest personnel requirements because they can host content of almost every kind: music, texts, video etc. Protecting sites like a small photo forum will be much simpler. If only a modest number of uploads is involved, the forum operator can easily check them personally at the end of the working day. In that case, uploaders will simply have to wait for a brief period for their content to appear online. Or operators can opt to engage a service center like Acamar instead of adding these checks to their own workloads. Efficient monitoring is possible.

An additional misinterpretation propagated by campaigners against copyright reform is that platforms will have to take out licenses for all the content in the world from a near-infinite number of licensing partners. This, too, is inaccurate, since the transfer of liability to platforms only arises in cases in which rightsholders have specifically prohibited the unlicensed use of their works and had the works in question added to a database made available to platform operators through collecting societies. Visions of upload filters leading to dystopian censorship are, it follows, unfounded. This should be clear to anybody who has read the text of the directive and has even a basic working knowledge of informatics.

For a free Internet, we need copyright reform

The reform provides a basis for ensuring artists are fairly remunerated for their work and forces rightsholders to assist in the identification of works by registering their content in databases. Both effects are highly advantageous for users. Under the proposed regime, somebody who wants to use the Rage Against The Machines track “Killing In The Name Of”  on the soundtrack of a protest video will no longer have to worry about copyright and can simply upload the video to a platform. Works used will be identified, and the relevant collecting societies will distribute the licensing revenue they receive from the platform. If Rage Against The Machine has objections to the transformative use of their work, they can communicate them to the database. Once the directive has been transposed into national law, this procedure will become standard practice.

It will become possible to publish more content and easier to comply with the law. All of this will contribute to more freedom on the Internet – the kind of freedom that stems from having democratic rules rather than allowing tech giants with their community rules and automated decision-making processes to determine what content is permitted on their platforms and what they are prepared to pay for it.

Barlow overlooked what the author William Gibson had already recognized – that enterprises, when they make the rules, can become more powerful than states. The rejection of state-guaranteed democratic rules creates the power vacuum required for this to happen. This is the wider context that explains why copyright reform is but one battlefield in the struggle for political power on the Internet. YouTube should not be allowed to become the Internet for videos just as Google has practically already become the only filter for web searches. Amazon should not be allowed to evolve from a vendor in the market to the provider of the market and to dictate the earnings of parcel couriers. Rules in digital space must be created and weighed against each other by democratic means and not in an arbitrary fashion dependent solely on who wields the most market power. Artists and net activists should fight this battle together, because the Internet is not some abstract parallel dimension: its data flows determine our creditworthiness just as they supply us with holiday pictures and pervade every aspect of modern life. If we relinquish democratic control over this public space, we will become subject to the despotic rule of neoliberal tech giants, and not merely on the Internet.

Barlow’s manifesto ends with the words: “We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” Copyright reform will take our society one step closer to this aim. The quasi-governments that must now be opposed are called Google, facebook und Amazon. Those who take the side of these giants in this controversy are opposed to the free Internet in the true meaning of the word.

Translation from German by Sarah Swift.

Authors

Stefan Herwig and Lukas Schneider jointly run a think tank, Mindbase, that tackles questions of Internet policy with academic rigor. Stefan Herwig works in the music industry and advises politicians and enterprises on digital policy issues. Lukas Schneider is an information science expert and a musician and is active in Germany’s Green party (Alliance ’90/The Greens).

Translated from German.  Original here.

Cloudflare: The bad, the worse and the criminal

In the US, a large technology company is about to go public. Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based company, wants to collect nearly $3.5 billion on the stock exchange in the first half of the year with the support of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. But there are dark shadows over Cloudflare. The spectrum of its customers ranges from credit card fraudsters and spammers, to sites that engage in copyright infringement as a business model, to terrorist sites. Even US embargos are undermined.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers a content delivery network.

In simple terms, it provides a kind of turbo drive for web pages, allowing them to be delivered world-wide quickly and securely. Cloudflare places itself between, on one hand, the web page and/or servers of its customers and, on the other, the site visitor and/or user of the service. By enabling it to selectively control and distribute site traffic, it can offer increased speed and protection against network overload attacks (DDoS).

However, Cloudflare also offers another feature: anonymizing its customers.

By placing a virtual screen over the original web page and/or their server, Cloudflare makes the operator practically untraceable. Upon inquiry, Cloudflare will only provide its own data, hiding client information such as hosting service and IP address, making it impossible to take legal action against illicit sites and services.

Civil law inquiries are futile, because Cloudflare only provides the naming of the hosting services, which is worthless without the respective IP address. This is roughly equivalent to seeking info on an unmarked apartment with just the address of a high-rise building housing thousands of residents.

The Cloudflare problem is well known

This anonymizing feature from Cloudflare attracts a number of unsavory customers including, again and again, copyright infringers.  But it doesn’t stop there.
Since December 2018, the EU Commission has included Cloudflare on a watch list for counterfeiting and piracy. Most recently, the service received the dubious prize as the worst enemy of the creative community from the US blog TheTrichordist.

The listing of infringing market participants has a long history in the US.
The music association RIAA submits an annual list of the worst offenders to the US Department of Commerce. In 2017, 9 out of 20 violators could not be identified by the RIAA because Cloudflare effectively camouflaged them.
The US film association MPAA is also aware of the problems with Cloudflare obfuscation and names the company in its annual list of interferers.

In the relatively new piracy segment IPTV – the streaming of non-licensed TV signals – the company is also on the move. A study from Fall 2018 shows the role of Cloudflare both in camouflaging the sites that sell IPTV subscriptions and in concealing the origin of the streams.

In a survey of data centers comprising file and streaming hosts in 2016, 40% of the Top 10 and 47% of the Top 30 used Cloudflare.
The ECO, a German association, which obviously doesn’t care about anything

 

Cloudflare is a member of the German industry association ECO. The purpose of this membership is probably to get a discount for traffic at the Frankfurt (DE-CIX) internet node, which ECO operates through a subsidiary.
ECO has never seemed to care that providers who are very heavily involved in piracy, including Cloudflare, are members of the association. In any case, there was no reaction to corresponding reports that ECO members, including Cloudflare, are responsible for over 50% of piracy traffic in the film sector in 2014, with 45.2% of this activity accounted for by Cloudflare and around 6% by a further five members.

Screenshot: Extract from the ECO member list, February 2018,

www.eco.de/ueber-eco/mitglieder/#C

Cloudflare in court

The reports of legal proceedings against Cloudflare are long and concern more than just virtual goods. For example, two manufacturers of bridal fashions filed suit for trademark and copyright infringements by plagiarizers who were made anonymous by Cloudflare. And, while a claim brought by adult entertainment provider ALS-Scan ultimately ended in settlement, the judge found that Cloudflare’s activities could significantly support copyright infringement by hosting cached copies of files (though the settlement precluded a final judgment on Cloudflare’s actions and liability).

Supporting Illegal Activity: Calculated or Coincidence?

In Fall 2018, Cloudflare made news by ending its business relationship with pirate hosts like Rapidvideo due to violating its terms of use. Such action begs the question: is the service being cleaned up in anticipation of the IPO or are these just insignificant and cynical platitudes? After all, before this,  Cloudflare had only voluntarily terminated its business relationship with US Nazi site the Daily Stormer in 2017.

Screenshot Youtube Video with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on Fox Business Network

Big Data brings it to light

The current Google Transparency Report offers a look at the actual extent of Cloudflare’s involvement in piracy.
In the report, Google lists all requests from rights holders for deletions from the Google search index that concern rights violations.

In order to understand the importance of Cloudflare to the market, the 5,000 domains that are inactive sites parked with companies such as Team Internet, Sedo or GoDaddy but still protected by Cloudflare have to be subtracted from the 5,000 domains.

This leaves 3,645 domains. Of these 3,645 right-infringing sites, 41.9 % run via Cloudflare. For their part, they are responsible for 44.7 % of the copyright infringements reported to Google.

If one were to extrapolate this proportion to the total number of domains listed in the Google Report for copyright infringements, one would come up with almost 670,000 domains protected by Cloudflare – a significant portion of the 2.2 million domains with requests for delisting from Google’s search engine.

 

Among Cloudflare’s customers are:

Torrentz.eu, Gosong.net, Share-online.biz, Catshare.net, Bitnoop.com, Deepwarez.org, Turbobit.net, Myfreemp3.eu, and Nitroflare.com.

Each of these websites received at least 3 million deletion requests from the Google search index.

Not only pirates love Cloudflare – also credit card fraudsters, phishing sites, extortionists, and terrorists

The Watchwebsite Crimeflare is a real treasure trove of information about Cloudflare, liisting650 credit card fraud sides alone, to which Cloudflare offers shelter.

 

Cloudflare also proudly deals in SSL certificates, providing sites like Phishingseiten the manufactured consumer security and confidence-building necessary to be successful. According to the German magazine Heise, hundreds of such certificates for cheats were issued by Cloudflare.

Of course, as Spamhaus reports, the spreading of Malware often takes place over Cloudflare.

With Cloudflare, extortion is also par for the course, which conveniently generates additional services. By providing anonymity and untraceability to sites threatening, for example, to bring a web page to a standstill through DDoS, Cloudflare can then sell the attacked site its protection services.
A truly special form of customer acquisition.

Cloudflare has also found good business in terror.

As far back as 2012, the news agency Reuters confronted Cloudflare with the fact that it maintained the websites of Hamas and Al-Quds, designated by the US as terrorist groups.
In 2015, a petition against Cloudflare in the US highlighted that the service offered shelter to about 50 websites attributed to ISIS.
And in 2018, terrorist organizations were still being supported, with Dutch security researcher Bert Hubert identifying at least 7 different terrorist organization websites that use Cloudflare.

The Huffingtonpost had these findings evaluated by Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution:

“This is not a content-based issue. Cloudflare] can be as pure-free-speech people as they want – they have an arguable position that it’s not their job to decide what speech is worthy and what speech is not – but there is a law, a criminal statute, that says that you are not allowed to give services to designated foreign terrorist organizations. Full stop.”

As icing on the cake, the company even has customers who are on the official embargo list of the US (SDN list). For example, CENTRAL REPUBLIC BANK from the Donetsk region uses Cloudflare’s services.

Screenshot: Collage of information from theUS Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/SDN-List/Pages/default.aspx

Screenshot: Whois record of crb.dnr.ru at February 18^th2019

Do investors actually know what they are investing in?

Against the background of all these facts, two things are worth considering:

1) How has Cloudflare been able to obtain financing rounds from various investment companies in the past, including Google’s parent Alphabet?

2) Does Goldman Sachs actually know anything about the extent of its involvement in rights violations and its support of dubious “ventures,” even to the point of undermining US embargoes?

Risk management is one of the central parameters of investment banks when evaluating investments. Risks must be known and assessable in advance. Cloudflare’s considerable participation in dubious transactions is rare in an IPO and a huge risk. Particularly if, as in the ALS-Scan case, the company is faced with its own liability, or if criminal law is violated through the service’s business with terrorist organizations.

Goldman Sachs and current investors either lack moral standards, are naïve, or consider the risk of failure to be very low, which only shows how urgently we need government regulation of intermediaries on the Internet.