EU Directive On Copyright in the Digital Single Market: Three Not-So-Scary Possibilities

When evaluating the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, there are three general categories of outcomes: Little/no impact, Moderate-but-endurable Impact, Apocalyptic/Catastrophic. It turns out that there are pros and cons to each.

NOTE: Here I consider the DCDSM in the context of arts and entertainment, with a particular focus on user-generated content production. I note at the outset that I suspect there is a very different analysis for the impact of this directive on news media and news dissemination.

 

1. Little-To-No Impact

EU Implications

As a directive, this passing of the DCDSM does not accomplish much. The directive is only an edict that member states must pass their own laws that accomplish the general purposes of the directive. The first question the DCDSM poses, then, is how different nations will approach this directive.  Some nations might do very little, passing only milquetoast legislation and then neglecting to enforce it. Other nations may openly and pointedly refuse to comply with the directive, daring the EU to take punitive measures  against the non-compliant nation. Each country will have to decide how to balance the force of the directive (which is, itself, of debatable strength) with the risks of losing access to some major technology platforms.

Each nation is surely aware that there is a question of whether companies would rather cease operations in countries whose requirements are too onerous. Twitter or YouTube may find that the cost of meeting a nation’s copyright requirements outweighs the benefits to the company of continued operations in that nation. There is a bold example of this behavior in recent memory: When China demanded too much from Google with regard to censorship, access to user’s email and other data, Google simply decided to discontinue operations with the largest consumer base in the world. If Germany asked Twitter to pay for each link that users disseminate through their service, Twitter might prefer to avoid that tax by no longer offering Twitter to Germany.

 

US Implications

Another of the looming questions that this directive poses is whether there will be implications for non-EU jurisdictions. When the EU passed a law that increased user data protections, many companies restructured their data privacy systems across all regions. Some companies might consider a similar approach when faced with the DCDSM—it is sometimes easier to structure a business model to meet the highest requirements placed on the business. Many companies have struggled to navigate copyright claims (and data privacy, consumer protection, and advertising laws) in the wild frontier of user-generated content and digital media. They may see new, stringent laws as an opportunity to approach these problems with new tactics—though companies will have to consider whether their tactics will obliterate their business.

2. Moderate-But-Endurable Impact

In some ways, this is the worst for users and the best for large stakeholders.  This outcome keeps YouTube and Twitter afloat, imposes inconvenience and malcontent on users, but the obstacles are just minor enough to navigate. Maybe YouTube and Twitter charge a small subscription fee to cover their increased costs (not unlike Netflix or Hulu). Maybe the large, familiar platforms lose some of their functionality, but not so much functionality that the platform feels entirely transformed. Under this scenario, most of the things that most users do still mostly work, and therefore the overall satisfaction of the user base is only slightly lessened.

 

 

3. Apocalyptic, Catastrophic Annihilation of Social Media As We Know It

Histrionic

People who have the most to lose in the worst-case scenarios are beyond deeply concerned. The reaction of content creators on YouTube seems to be that this is among the worst things to ever happen for their business model. These people consistently cite existing problems with YouTube’s ContentID system and the copyright strike system as the basis for their concern (and moderating content on a social media platform is no easy task), and predict that this law will exacerbate those existing problems. Their reasoning is that YouTube has already demonstrated the challenges involved in trying to regulate copyright claims on YouTube: algorithms get things factually wrong, there is no presumption of de minimis use, journalism and parody uses are rarely recognized, etc.

The Way Forward

The worst case scenario that content creators fear is the death of the major platforms: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook (and subsidiaries like Instagram), will all lose economic viability or become so difficult to use in meaningful ways that users will abandon them, and the internet itself will die as a direct result. I see plenty of alternatives to the death of the internet (that’s something I expect the telecommunications industry to achieve before anyone else), even granting a severe impact to the operations and function of major (and minor) platforms.

A key fact about the internet is that users will always find ways to navigate the new space. The internet is a battleground for a particular kind of warfare: a fight in which new strategies are always being discovered. New platforms rise to replace old ones (no matter what the reason for the death of the last one was).  New methods and systems are born out of the effort to get around whatever obstruction frustrated the users.

Users will find ways to continue their current behavior, working around the impositions of the new laws. Not allowed to Tweet a link? Users will develop a new system for pointing people to information (humans have been creating systems for this purpose for millennia). Not allowed to stream a video game with a song it? Sing over it. Users are creative: successful content creation in the new environment makes creativity an imperative. The large copyright holders may one day (if not this time around) live to regret promulgating too draconian of an edict of creativity.

 

3A. The Backfire Scenario, Or, The Poetic Justice of Getting What You Ask For

“Success is a menace. It fools smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” – Bill Gates, as depicted in Pirates of Silicon Valley

One likely response to the DCDSM is that users will create more of their own content. If using existing content becomes prohibitively difficult, more users will create what they cannot afford. This will have a detrimental effect on the stakeholders who expect to gain the most from the new laws: the rights holders of existing popular works. These stakeholders have felt for decades that the internet was undermining their profits by allowing people to access movies and music without paying for it. As users create original content instead of incorporating these existing works, the works of the larger establishments will enjoy less dissemination and recognition by the public. The audience for these works will shrink as fewer people are exposed to their works. Large corporate stakeholders will need to invest more in advertising campaigns to acquaint the public with their products; they will try to replace what content creators were doing (for free and more effectively) for them.

For most of the 20^th century, large corporate rights holders had every reason to think that they were indispensable—that they were the only way that people could access arts and entertainment. The Napster case demonstrated that the internet had the power to undermine their channels of distribution. User-generated content is the current argument that the content itself can also be produced outside of the control of these large stakeholders. If the DCDSM sparks an apocalypse of the current generation of UGC platforms, the phoenix that rises from those ashes is surely the end of the 20^th century entertainment business model. In this scenario, users truly leave the large rights holders behind.

 

Conclusion: Probably Not Really That Bad For Art and Entertainment

Everyone will have to wait and see what form the Directive takes as it influences national laws. I think this is the kind of law that the internet is ready to work around. If it has devastating effects on existing platforms and services, I am quite sure that new platforms will emerge that promote entirely original content, unshackled from existing copyrighted content. The emergence of new solutions is the story of the internet.

K/DA and Holographic Performance: Computer Code or Dance Choreography?

Copyright applies when a creative expression is fixed in a tangible medium. This has presented questions and problems for certain kinds of creative works, of which my two favorite examples are fireworks and dance. Like a beautiful explosion of color in the night sky, the dancer does not leave a fixed expression in a tangible medium after leaving the dance floor. However, it is possible to fix the dancer’s choreography in a tangible medium—and maybe there is a new way to do that.

“So Keep Your Eyes On Me Now/ The Show Is About To Start”

At the 2018 League of Legends World Finals, some 90 million spectators (including some 23,000 live at Munhak Stadium) were treated to a musical performance that featured life-sized augmented reality projections of fictional pop-star characters dancing alongside physically present, corporeal, non-fictional dancers. This is not the first time a hologram has performed at a live concert: Tupac graced Cochella with his digital and photonic presence in 2012, despite the inconvenience of his death in 1996.

My idle, speculative quandary in the case of K/DA Pop/Stars is whether a dance routine performed by holograms can be registered as choreography for the copyright office. For a lot of reasons, it really doesn’t matter in this case—Riot isn’t going to litigate around this issue (though people may change their tune about copyright), and to the extent that they do need a copyright registration for this, it’s unlikely to matter whether it’s classified as choreography or as a computer program.

Still, it’s an interesting issue to explore because the finer details of technology can sometimes inform how a judge will rule (as in the case of embedded Tweets).  Can someone register copyright for a computer program that directs the lights and projection machines to present the images of the hologram in such a sequence and manner as to create the illusion of a dancing individual? It would be interesting to see how the Copyright Office or courts would parse a computer program for a dancing hologram.

 

Drawing Distinctions

Law can take controversial twists around new technology because an adjudicator struggles with the technology involved. Typically, this means someone has either embraced the extreme of refusing to recognize a substantive difference in a new technology, or someone has gone to the other extreme of imagining a difference with a new technology that isn’t supported by reason.

When faced with new technology, the easiest move is to look back at other technology and see if an analogy can be made. The obvious subject for comparison is traditional animation. In broad concepts, there are plenty of similarities between creating a hologram dancer and drawing and animating a dancer. The tools are clearly different- so how similar is a keyboard to a pencil? The uses, purpose, function, and the end results of the tools are similar enough—but there are also very clear distinctions. Copyright law has made an effort to be medium-neutral: it doesn’t matter if a novel is written on paper, caved into rock, or saved in a PDF.

It might be that augmented reality and holograms are simply a new flavor of animation, and, from a copyright perspective, there’s simply nothing new to see here. However, the combinations of new technologies are more likely to produce something substantively new. Anthropologist Thomas de Zengotita is fond of the point that a hurricane is just a lot of breeze—yet everyone treats the two as substantively different. I take it that he means that a sufficient accumulation of non-substantive changes, at some point, creates a substantively new category. This is the core distinction that adjudicators have to make: is a new technology substantively different, or just a different medium for something that is already established?

 

“So Can You Handle What We’re All About?”

Is a computer program of choreography is substantially different from a recording of a dance? The choreography is the script for the dance. A recording of a dance is how a particular dancer happened to perform the dance. Copyright distinguishes between the sheet music and a recording of the performance. In the case of a computer program that simultaneously generates a dancer and dictates the movements of that dancer, can the performance be separated from the script? The choreography only exists as it is embodied in the performance itself.

This raises a further question as to whether effects of the performance are also part of the choreography: for example, the moment in which Kai’Sa fires a firework-like lighting effect during the performance. If it is part of the code, and the code is the choreography, then this effect is part of the choreography—although it seems like something that should be a production direction, not part of the dance itself.

As unlikely as it sounds, some adjudicators might look to the question of whether the computer code recognizes a difference between pixels and limbs. That is, the question might turn on whether humans can recognize the code as dance instructions. An adjudicator might reason that the computer cannot dance, and so the execution of the code is not the performance of a dance– thus, someone who can dance must be able to interpret the instructions so as to perform the dance.

If we want to make this more interesting, we can imagine this technology combined with an AI that creates new dances. Here, the AI dancer is also the author (unless the author is the rights holder of the program). We can further ramp up the question by putting this AI choreography in a robotic humanoid body and turning it loose on the dance floor, where it transcribes its own choreography as it creates it.

 

Fortnite Is Dead, And So Are The Copyright Claims (Hyperbole or Prognostication?)

If Riot (I assume Riot holds the rights for the K/DA performance) can register the work as a dance, they will probably need to register the entire dance. The Copyright Office has rejected the attempts to register the brief dances (micro-choreography?) of several plaintiffs who are bringing suit against Epic Games. As I already discussed, these plaintiffs may still have claims under some use of personal likeness laws, but it looks like their copyright claims are unlikely to get off the ground after the Copyright Office denied registration.

 

The Bigger Picture: “Wish ya luck”

Ultimately, this is exciting because this is what it looks like when technology, culture, and law meet. This is exactly what it is: Epic Games monetizes dance moves that are popular and known and publicized, and before the lawsuits can even be dismissed, Fortnite has already lost its player base to Anthem and Apex (odd twists of identity theft included for added 21st century flavor). These fringe, unimportant, idle explorations form the basis for decisions that affect the bottom line of corporations and the constraints on artistic productions. For the adjudicators of copyright law, this only gets harder: As computers become increasingly sophisticated and increasingly common tools for the production of works of art, the Copyright Office will face increasingly difficult questions.

Music Modernization Act, Artificial Intelligence, and Cryptocurrency

“Angel Pumping Gas” is not a song about copyright regulatory policy, artificial intelligence, or cryptocurrency. I’m going to use it to round up all three of those subjects in this blog post.

1. Music Modernization Act: Not Enough Of a Good Thing

“Why won’t this moment last?”

A.

“Angel Pumping Gas” is a 1999 song by the band Lindsey Pool, the second track on the album Postal. The song was circulated around various music sharing sites and services—but it was erroneously attributed to the band The Postal Service. Even now, comments sections on YouTube express surprise concerning the song’s artist. Google’s first result for lyrics attributes the song to The Postal Service. This serves as a clear, simple example of how easily information spreads online, and how difficult it can be to correct information online. If early 2000’s music sharing used a single database held the information for every published song, such an error might have never happened. A new law requires the creation of such a database, but there’s a lot still up in the air.

The biggest open question from the Music Modernization Act is: Who is going to create and maintain the required database of songs and rights holders? The law mentions that a database will be made, presumably by the Mechanical Licensing Collective that the law also creates. This is only forces everyone to ask more questions: who will be on the board of the Mechanical Licensing Collective? What methods will this organization use to create this database?

B.

Measured by content, “Angel Pumping Gas” is little more than an unnecessarily detailed recounting of purchasing gasoline. In fact, the middle two-thirds of the song is an entirely banal description of an entirely ordinary and unremarkable transaction. Only the beginning and ending of the song (and chorus) frame the experience in terms of the romance and desire that the singer feels. It’s either beautiful post-modern appreciation of the beauty in the mundane encounters of our lives, or it’s just a little bit silly.

The Music Modernization Act is either a beautiful resolution of a pressing problem in the music industry, or it’s just a little bit too narrow to be worth caring about. The Music Modernization Act was passed unanimously by the House. Sound Exchange and the RIAA have praised it. It seems like everyone loves it, so I was surprised to learn how narrowly tailored the new law is. It is almost entirely focused on problems specific to digital streaming of music. Though there were issues that required resolution in this area, there remain enormous gaps between current copyright law and the daily use of media and technology. It is unsurprising that the problem that got addressed was one that concerned the rich and powerful (record labels, digital platforms), but they did take the opportunity to include studio professionals in the legislation—a group that has historically be neglected. Music Modernization Act is not as far behind the times as I expected: it’s not a response to Napster, it’s a response to Spotify… but I would still like a more satisfying response to Napster than the DMCA.

 

2. Artificial Intelligence All Around Us– And We Don’t Know What It’s Doing

“You ask ‘What Can I do?’ I say ‘unleaded fuel.’ You open up my tank and start the pump.”

“Angel Pumping Gas” is a wistful ballad that describes a brief meeting with a filling station attendant, with whom the singer is immediately infatuated. Filling station attendants are rare in 48 of the 50 states (NJ and OR have laws against filling one’s own gas tank… as does the town of Huntington, NY).  The entire premise for the song is slightly alien to the tens of millions of Americans who have always pumped their own gasoline.

For most young Americans in the 90s, gas station attendants were a historical curiosity—something referenced in films in the 50s and 60s. However, for residents of NJ and OR, having someone else fuel your car was a commonplace occurrence. Today’s emerging technologies have the same impact: a device or service is either a commonplace part of your life, or it’s a foreign concept. Twitter, Facebook, Alexa, Smartphone GPS navigation, Netflix, Twitch, YouTube, AmazonPrime- all of these things are, for most Americans, either so commonplace as to be unremarkable, or are simply not part of your life. As technology becomes more integrated in our lives, the difference between so-called “haves” and “have-nots” becomes more pronounced. The very premise of the song creates a divide in the audience: there those who have encountered a filling station attendant, and those who have not.

Our relationship with technology is already creating visible divides in our population. We aren’t always sure who is a bot, though some of us are willing to pay a lot for their art. Even as AI becomes an essential tool for the largest companies that manage important aspects of our lives, the law has no idea how it will handle the legal aspects of a tool that is on a complicated trajectory. Artificial intelligence is steadily becoming more and more commonplace- but the majority of us can’t see how or where AI is being used, much less which systems use what kind of data. Like a teen in the 90’s listening to a song about a filling station attendant, most people who hear about bots and AI have to turn to movies and pop culture references to draw up a mental picture, rather than rely on our own experiences.

 

3. Cryptocurrency’s Perpetual Hype

“You walk over my way, I didn’t know what to say… I think that I love you, or maybe it’s just the fumes.”

The song details the singer’s desire and longing, wallowing in the idea of feeling a romantic desire for someone he doesn’t know. The song juxtaposes the intensity of the singer’s amorous emotions with the brevity and shallowness of the interaction. Our popular culture mirrors this adolescent infatuation in our reactions to new technologies: sudden, intense waves of excited fervor for a world-changing device or platform that either never arrives or seems to evaporate into the past shortly after it appears. (I have written before about the hype surrounding the Internet of Things… )

Cryptocurrency prices are down, but it doesn’t feel like the hype has suffered at all. The estate of one of the Wu-Tang Clan is starting a cryptocurrency, to be named after the deceased: Dirty Coin. The strangest part of this is that I haven’t seen blockchain applied in the kinds of contexts I expected it to find more success: online games, a new kind of customer loyalty program, or other gimmicky, comparatively low-stakes settings. Perhaps the hype is fueled by risk-taking and gambling, and such settings aren’t thrilling enough. This is unfortunate, because turning down the hype would allow the technology to actually move forward in much more appropriate, smaller steps, rather than trying to change the world all at once.

Is the gas station attendant in the song the destined One True Love of the singer? It’s not impossible. Are there are a lot of fumes around gas stations? In my experience, yes- always, in fact. Will cryptocurrencies bring about a Utopian future? It’s not impossible. Do crowds tend to favor exciting hype over careful, substantive analysis? In my experience, yes- always, in fact.

Conclusion

“We share our precious moment in a glance…  and as I drive away, her memory’s here to stay—her deep blue eyes have left me in a trance.”

The singer bemoans that he needs to leave, as the road calls him away. His lack of control is an unstated axiom of the logic that he must follow. The singer is a passive pawn of forces around him: fate, the road, filling station attendant (her authority to invoke payment and her beauty), the transaction, his emotions. He begins the song by attributing the encounter to fate and concludes with the resigned acceptance that the separation is, perhaps, better for all involved. This is not a song about a person taking decisive actions; this is a song about a consumer making his way through a brief and common transaction in the life of a middle-American.

Society seems to display about as much mindfulness and self-possession in approaching technology. We owe it to ourselves to take more effort and more thought regarding our laws and our technology than an adolescent’s unapproached crush.

The Scare of Abandonware

It’s nice to have law in a society to bring a sense of predictability. Clear and organized laws allow us to understand the consequences of our actions. Knowing the law lets us make choices based on the expected outcomes. However, there are a few areas of law where outcomes are not so obvious. Abandonware is an interesting case of 21^st century law. Copyright law simply doesn’t outline what to do when a company publishes a game and then closes its doors. It’s scary for cautious lawyers to discuss because of that uncertainty. As always, this blog post is NOT legal advice– in fact, it’s mostly about why giving legal advice about abandonware is difficult.

How Games Get Abandoned

Abandonware isn’t entirely limited to software, but the differences in technology and industry norms and structure make it a far larger problem for software than any other media. It’s no surprise that book, radio, television, film, or music industries ever needed a statute on abandoned works.

When game studios close, they are often bought by other, larger studios- or at least their IP assets are. However, sometimes the IP of a studio doesn’t get purchased – it just gets abandoned. Copyrights in the US last at least 70 years. Although courts have ruled that not every work has a recognized owner at the time of creation, courts have not definitively addressed the issue of abandoned works. (It is possible to officially declare a work abandoned and part of the public domain, but this is not automatic for IP that is simply left behind by a defunct company.)

Who Would Have The Right To Sue?

There are a few fundamentals that have to be in place for a case to even get seriously looked at by a judge. There must be an allegation of a violation of a law, for one thing. Additionally, the plaintiff must have “standing.” This means the plaintiff was harmed by the breaking of the law. A case must also be “ripe” (the allegation cannot be speculated or predicted to occur sometime later), and the case cannot be “moot” (resolving the case must make an actual difference to the injured party).

In the case of abandonware, could these fundamentals be met? Sometimes revenue is still given to developers whose companies have closed shop, but it’s unclear how often this is the case.  In most cases, it seems that no one can claim to be damaged by the unauthorized distribution of the software, because no one can claim they lost money as a result. Further, any case would be moot because ceasing the distribution would not make any difference to a non-existent competitor.

Despite the unlikely odds of an abandonware suit even getting to trial, distributing abandonware still feels a little risky for two reasons. First, unlike trademarks, copyrights are not contingent on use in commerce, and unlike abandoned property there is no law describing how to treat abandoned works. Second, it’s an unexplored area of law, which means that there isn’t precedent either to argue in court or to consider when advising a client.

Who Gets the Loot of the IP License When a Company Dies in the Dungeons?

Despite the murkiness, some abandonware cases seem clearer than others. Some games from the 80s and 90s seem well and truly abandoned. However, if a copyright is assigned to a corporation and that corporation then goes defunct or is bought, it’s sometimes unclear who owns the copyright.  Other games may carry a sort of tangential active ownership that could complicate a case. For an example of both of these complications, let’s consider a game from 1991 that featured a licensed IP to a game developer and a publisher (who are now both defunct): Eye of the Beholder.

Dungeons and Dragons was owned by TSR, Inc until that company went out of business and sold most of its D&D intellectual property assets to Wizards of the Coast (a company owned by the toy company Hasbro, Inc). Eye of the Beholder was a game made by Westwood Associates (bought by Electronic Arts and defunct since 2003), though the title screen clearly identifies it as an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. The game was published by Strategic Simulations, Inc (bought by Mindscape and defunct since at least 2011), who worked with TSR on dozens of licensed D&D games.

With Westwood and SSI now out of the picture, can Wizards of the Coast claim ownership in the use of their D&D mark in 30 year old games?  Wizards of the Coast would probably not prevail on a claim of direct ownership of these games. As far as I can tell, courts have not addressed a case in which a party bases a claim on IP that is inside another product. The closest cases involve the use of a person’s likeness in a game, but the plaintiffs don’t try to claim ownership over the entire product. It may be that the original license agreement puts the “D&D” IP out of the reach of claims by TSR, and therefore out of the reach of WotC.

Ideally, the licensing contract between TSR, Inc and Westwood Associates has a paragraph for just this kind of question (this is why it pays to draft contracts with the worst possibilities in mind- like your company going out of business). If a court faced the claim that WotC has a claim on the distribution and sales of games featuring D&D settings and characters, I suspect* it would rather dismiss the claim on the basis of laches rather than address the tangled mess of IP licensing claims.

Conclusion: We Can Know The Risks, If Not the Outcomes

Abandonware seems to be technically illegal, but it also seems to be nearly unenforceable. That’s an uncomfortable place to be. It’s a strange state, and there are hardly any appropriate analogies that would help explain it. The best analogy might be a comparison to an old game that, despite being technically functional, won’t run on a current operating system. Abandonware’s legal challenge might be best described by its technical challenge.

 

*There is always a small risk of a surprise in court: A court could create the principle that when a party does not exist to protect a licensed IP, the licensor may step in and act as owner of that IP for some limited purpose. Some would call that “legislating from the bench.” The judge would call it “meeting the demands of justice in the face of technological development.”

Tooth And Tail: Lessons in Planning With Realistic Expectations

Tooth and Tail is simple. It has to be simple because the game designers had a very challenging goal: Make a Real Time Strategy game that is reasonably playable on a console. Real-Time Strategy games are notorious for needing high-speed and complex inputs (professional Starcraft players’ fingers perform over 400 actions per minute) that are simply not possible with the constraints of a console controller (even with all of the buttons they’ve added after Nintendo produced the perfect game controller in 1990). But the designers were smart, and they looked realistically at the constraints of the system, and they crafted the game to fit those constraints. The result is a playable, enjoyable game about a Soviet-revolution inspired rodent uprising on a farm. The designers of in-house corporate programs and databases need to learn to be realistic about the actual uses of their programs.

I. Lesson in Project Design: Accept the Probabilities of Disaster so you can Plan for Prevention; Don’t Plan for Immortality and Invulnerability. (#dontbeateen)

In the digital age, there is an increased focus on preventing and eliminating problems/errors. The promised outcomes of flawless perfection are enticing, but the realities of inevitable problems require more effort be put into managing problems and recovering from disasters.

Computers amplify the speed and scale of what people can do. This makes it easier for people to do more, and to do more, faster. This includes making mistakes bigger. Years after a British woman got 15 minutes of fame for accidentally ordering 500kg of chicken wings, Samsung accidentally made a $105 billion ghost.

Samsung Securities Co (a financial services company owned by conglomerate Samsung Group) tried to pay a dividend to their employees, but accidentally gave the employees shares instead. The 1,000 WON dividend became a 1,000 SHARE distribution- creating over $100 billion in new shares.  Then some employees immediately sold those shares. There were a lot of safety measures that failed in this story. The program should have been able to calculate that this order totaled over 1 trillion WON, more than 30 times the entire company value. A second human should have checked over the work for simple, obvious errors when there is a potential for this level of damage (anything at a company-wide level for a publicly-traded international corporation would certainly qualify). Several departments should have reviewed the work (compliance, risk, accounting, finance, legal—almost anyone!). Samsung’s own internal compliance should have also prevented the sale of the ghost shares.

II. A Lesson in Categorical (Or Macro) Errors: Some Mistakes are Annoying, Others Are Fatal. Design to Catch and Prevent, Not Headline and Damage Control. (#dontbeaceleb)

Mistakes happen a lot when computers are involved. Sometimes it’s the user, sometimes it’s a problem in the code. But when a user catches a problem, they can assess the problem in a broader context, and determine just how bad a mistake is. A bigger mistake is just more obvious to a human than a computer.

Many years ago, a friend of mine got on a flight and found someone else sitting in his designated seat. Not wanting to cause trouble, he simply took the empty seat next to his designated one and prepared for the flight.  As the crew prepared for taxi and takeoff, a flight attendant welcomed passengers to their non-stop service to their destination city. Upon hearing this announcement, the woman next to my friend hurriedly gathered her belongings and fled the plane.

She wasn’t in the wrong seat. She was on the wrong plane.

Computer programs don’t intuitively differentiate between the severity of errors:  the wrong plane and the wrong seat are just two errors if you’ve never flown and don’t know have a broad concept of travel or the context of moving around a world. To a computer, being in the right seat is still pretty good, just like executing a financial order with the correct number is pretty good – even if the number is in the wrong field or tied to the wrong variable. What humans easily grasp, computers are often unlikely to infer. The right detail at a micro-level cannot remedy a catastrophic error at a macro-level.

User errors are inevitable. Programming errors are likely. The more we rely on computers, programs, and apps for the things that allow our lives to function, the more likely it is that our lives will be disrupted by programmer or user errors.

III. The Solution: Make The Programs Flexible, and Make Problems Fixable.

Tooth and Tail’s success is rooted in the realism of its game designers, who sacrificed dreams of a more complex game (that would have been unplayable) for the right game that fit the actual constraints and experience of the player. Designing with the actual user’s experience in mind—with special consideration for what can go wrong—is more important for project designers and programmers every day.

There is an increasing drive to try to use computers to prevent any errors, mistakes, or problems. However, these solutions only make problems worse because they decrease flexibility in and around the program. The solutions is to move in the opposite direction: programs need to play less of a role in trying to self-regulate and self-repair, while users and programmers take a larger role in guiding and overseeing the programs.

But wouldn’t this much red-tape bureaucracy be time-consuming? Wouldn’t it be inefficient to invest so much effort in a simple dividend payment? It would take time and resources, yes—but efficiency measurement is relative to scope (among other factors): it certainly appears inefficient if 6 people spend 10 minutes each to look at the same work and find no error. Here, we would conclude that a full hour of productivity was wasted. However, if 6 people took 10 minutes each and found a problem that would have cost 1,000 hours of productivity had it not been discovered, we conclude that we have a net gain of 999 hours of productivity.

Although problems like these cannot be entirely prevented or eliminated, they can be contained and managed. If a person is on the wrong plane, they can quickly determine the outcome of their choice and work on a solution. People will still get in the wrong city from time to time, but they don’t have to end up in the wrong city as a result. Similarly, employees will make occasional typos or errors in their accounting and payroll from time to time, but that doesn’t mean that financial markets have to be rocked as a result.

Regulating The Internet? Not the Tubes Themselves…

If Net Neutrality is an argument about economics (and federal administrative law), Content Regulation is an argument about ethics and culture.

Net Neutrality is becoming an old hobby horse for a lot of people. It gets a lot more attention than most telecommunications policy issues. Even though questions about copper wire lines vs fiber optic cables actually affects more people, the internet is generally united by the fact of its own existence.  This is about regulation at the highest level, determining the equality and/or equity of access to content. No one online is indifferent to the internet—the only debate about net neutrality is which policies are best for the consumer and the telecommunications marketplace (or, in the United States, “telecommunications marketplace”).

But there is another layer of regulation that is quickly gaining attention. If Net Neutrality is about the form of the internet (its structure and broad organization), there is a growing need to consider questions about the regulation of the content of the internet. Over the years, the internet has been a vector for some amazingly good and amazingly bad actions by humans. The differences in the kind of regulatory concept at play are hard to understate. Rather than comparing it to different video games, I would compare it to the difference between a video game and a tabletop game.

1) I’ve always been fascinated by the dawn of the computer age. My childhood was the tail-end of a world in which homes did not have internet access. By the start of law school, everyone looked up famous cases and Latin phrases on Wikipedia during class (except for the people who did the reading the night before- they looked it up before class). I’ve often compared the early days of the internet to a kind of Wild West setting: a lawless frontier where fundamental questions about the mold of civilization were not yet settled. I thought most of those questions would be settled by 2015. We are not close to a consensus on rules. Indeed, we are still testing what types of rules are feasible or desirable.

Video games are literally made of rules: the computer code that constitutes the game itself. Tabletop games are made of… usually cardboard, or some kind of paper. (Occasionally, they have some plastic – or even metal if you got the collector’s edition.) This may sound like a silly or vacuous distinction, but it has important ramifications for the kinds of problems that can happen in a game, and the kinds of solutions that will (or won’t) be effective.

2) Lawlessness can lead to problems. This was probably not known until 2 decades of unfettered internet, but now we know. Free to do anything, people have tried very hard to do everything. Every app, platform, hosting site, game, or program online that gets big enough eventually starts to experience just about every problem type that humans can present. From intellectual property disputes to death threats, from fraud to manslaughter, the internet has been a way for people to discover criminal behaviors that past generations could never have the opportunity to access. The unethical choices of both multi-national companies and village simpletons are available for repeated viewing.

In a video game, the code can sometimes glitch and create problems for players. The code can also execute perfectly, but there may be complaints about the design of the game itself (a level being too difficult or some power or tactic being of an unsuitable level of power). With some difficulty, players can cheat by actually breaking the code, but more games can detect this (and especially so in professional e-sports settings). In a tabletop game, anyone can cheat, the rules may be wrongly applied (or not applied at all), and all manner of chaos can ensue. DDoSing an opponent during a game might be a little bit akin to literally flipping a table during a game of Monopoly or checkers,

3)  YouTube’s takedown system is already an example of an effort to regulate content, and it already shows some of the challenges with instituting a content regulation system: people will find ways to game that system. Any system of regulation will have two negative outcomes: it will penalize the innocent, and it will be dodged by the guilty. The most you can hope for is that it will protect most of the innocent and it will penalize most of the guilty. The US justice system, even when working as intended, will sometimes produce undesirable results: a guilty person will go free, and an innocent person will go to prison. The hope is that this happens very infrequently.

The most common reaction to bad behavior online has been for authoritative parties to do nothing. The most common reaction by authoritative parties to actually do something has been to ban the bad actor. The most common reaction to this ban is to come back with a different username or account.

In video games, cheaters are often banned (if they are making the game worse for other players). But in table top games, people who ruin the game are just not invited back. No one will play with them anymore. People might hang out with someone less if they behaved in a wildly unacceptable way during a casual weekend game of Risk or Werewolf. In a video game, bad behavior has very limited consequences. In a tabletop game, bad behavior can have lots of meaningful implications.

 

4) What would it look like to regular content? Getting it wrong is easy — which is the primary reason that’s what’s going to continue to happen. Whether trying to penalize criminals or regulate behavior online, creating a fair and ethical system that consistently produces more good results than bad ones is difficult. One problem is that incentives are at odds: most platforms want to turn a profit, and if bad behavior yields a net gain, the platform needs a solution that will actually make more money than the current bad behavior (plus the cost of implementing the remedy). Another problem is that platforms tend to think of regulating their content the way that most Americans think about regulations: an appointed governing authority (or combination of authorities).

 

Conclusion

You can’t make people be good, but you can keep deleting all of their manifestations of their behavior on the internet: You can suspend or ban accounts, and eventually IP addresses. You can automatically censor strings of characters, and continually update the list of banned strings. These will continue to be the solutions offered, and they will continue to mostly fail while they almost half-succeed.

Over a decade ago, Lawerence Lessig asserted that laws are of four types: market, cultural, legal, and architectural. It turns out that enforcing the legal type of law in a digital space is very difficult. But cultural norms practically enforce themselves. And architectural laws are always already enforced. Market rules can be fickle, but persuasive. A lot of efforts to regulate content will fail because they will hinge on the concepts of legal enforcement.

The lack of rules and regulations is what made the internet a place where amazing things could happen. Without rules to stop imagination and creativity, people created art, solved problems, built positive communities, and enriched themselves and each other. In that same landscape: without rules to stop hate and anger, people created harassment and bullying, invaded privacy, ruined lives, occasionally killed people, and destroyed a lot of good in the world. Lawless frontiers are the best opportunity for the most beautiful, important, and inspiring expressions of humanity. They are also the best opportunities for the most despicable, dangerous, and damaging expressions of humanity. What the internet becomes will be decided—has always been decided—by what people bring to it.

Horizon: The Dawn of Zero Privacy?

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a problem because I don’t know which game I have to slide out of my top 5 in order to fit it into that list. (It might be have to replace “Child of Light,” which pains me, but replacing any would pain me… maybe “Outlaws” will move to #6 …) It’s an incredible game in its own right, with beautiful artwork, well-written characters, and genuinely fun gameplay. I find its story especially fascinating—and particularly relevant as we grapple with a framework for governing and living in an age of digital information and interconnected devices. Though its central technological focus is on Artificial Intelligence and the future of humanity, it touches a multitude of topics- including data privacy.

Although Judge Richard Posner famously decried privacy as a way for bad people get away with bad things, privacy is important for personal development and free association. Privacy is essential to our culture, and it is only valuable inasmuch as it is protected and reliable. Our expectations of privacy follow us into our digital extensions. However, one of the best methods of securing privacy is impractical in the face of consumer demands for interconnection and convenience.

I. Can We Have Privacy by Design When We Demand Designs that Compromise our Privacy?

The Federal Trade Commission’s favored method for protecting Privacy is “Privacy By Design.” In simple terms, this often means designing a product to rely as little on privacy as possible. After all, if no data is collected, there is no data to steal. However, there are serious questions about the feasibility of this approach in the face of consumer expectations for interconnected devices.

Privacy by Design is a much better idea than the sophomoric idea of increasing security measures. Designing a house not to be broken into is better than trying to just put a good lock on the front door. To put it another way: Think of it as building a dam without holes rather than trying to plug all of the holes after you finish building.

I’ve heard tech entrepreneurs talk about “The Internet of Things” at conferences for many years, now. They talk about it like it’s a product currently in development and there’s an upcoming product launch date that we should be excited about- like we can line up for outside of a retail store hours before the doors open so we can be the first to get some new tech device. This is not how our beloved internet was created. Massive networks are created piece by piece- one node at a time, one connection at a time. The Internet of Things isn’t a tech product that will abruptly launch in Q3 of 2019. It’s a web of FitBits, geolocated social media posts, hashtags, metadata, smart houses, Alexas and Siris, searches, click-throughs, check-ins, etc. The “Internet of Things” is really just the result of increasingly tech-savvy consumers living their lives while making use of connected devices.

That’s not to diminish its significance or the challenges it poses. Rather, this highlights that this “Coming Soon” feature is really already here, growing organically. Given that our society is already growing this vast network of data, Privacy by Design seems like an impossible and futile task. The products and functions that consumers demand all require some collection, storage, or use of data: location, history, log-in information- all for a quick, convenient, personalized experience. One solution is for consumers to choose between optimizing convenience and optimizing privacy.

II. A Focus on Connected Devices

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a story deliberately situated at the boundary of the natural world (plants, water, rocks, trees, flesh and blood) and the artificial world (processed metals, digital information, robotics, cybernetics). As a child, Aloy falls into a cavern and finds a piece of ancient (21st century) technology. A small triangle that clips over the ear, this “Focus” is essentially a smart phone with Augmented Reality projection (sort of… JawBone meets GoogleGlass and Microsoft Hololens). This device helps to advance the plot, often by connecting with ancient records that establish the history of Aloy’s world (it even helps with combat and stealth!).

It’s also a privacy nightmare. The primary antagonist first sees Aloy -without her knowledge- through another character’s Focus. Aloy’s own Focus is hacked several times during the game. A key ally even reveals that he hacked Aloy’s Focus when she was a child and watched her life unfold as she grew up. (This ultimately serves the story as a way for the Sage archetype to have a sort of omniscience about the protagonist.) For a girl who grew up as an outcast from her tribe, living a near-solitary life in a cabin on a mountain, with the only electronic device in a hundred miles, she manages to run into a lot of privacy breaches. I can’t imagine if she tried to take an Uber from one village to the next.

Our interconnected devices accumulate deeply astonishing volumes of data- sometimes, very personalized data gets captured. In a case heard by the Supreme Court this month, a man in Ohio has his location determined by his cell phone provider. The police obtained this information and used it as part of his arrest and subsequent prosecution. The Supreme Court recently heard a case about the use of warrants for law enforcement to access cell phone data. (This is different from the famous stalemate between the FBI and Apple after the San Bernadino shooting, when Apple refused an order to unlock the iPhone of a deceased criminal.)  As connected devices become omnipresent, questions about data privacy and information security permeate very nearly every side of every facet of our daily lives. We don’t face questions about data the way that one “faces” a wall; we face these questions the way that a fish “faces” water.

From cell phone manufacturers to social media platforms, the government confronts technology and business in a debate about the security mechanisms that should be required (or prohibited) to protect consumers from criminals in myriad contexts and scenarios. In this debate, the right answer to one scenario is often the wrong answer for the next scenario.

Conclusion: Maybe We Don’t Understand Privacy In a New Way, Yet

The current cycle of consumer demand for risky designs followed by data breaches is not sustainable. Something will have to shift for Privacy in the 21st century. Maybe we will rethink some part of the concept privacy. Maybe we will sacrifice some of the convenience of the digital era to retain privacy. Maybe we will try to rely more heavily on security measures after a breakthrough in computing and/or cryptography. Maybe we will find ways to integrate the ancient privacy methods of the 20th century into our future.