Scrutiny

Last week, YouTube announced on its company blog (in an entry titled “A YouTube for All of Us”) that it is tightening its restrictions on sexual content and profanity. Of course, YouTube has always had limits, mostly for pornography, spam, and gratuitous violence, handled primarily through automatic filtering that can spot X-rated scenes, and through the user community itself flagging inappropriate content for review. Now that user community is in an uproar about the recent announcement, because the restrictions will extend to sexually suggestive video and video that uses profanity. It’s not a surprise that sites like YouTube have to strike their own balance, between being an open platform for whatever users choose to post, and building a user community (not to mention a public brand) that’s acceptable to mainstream users and to the sponsors eager to sell to them. Censorship is hardly new to the Internet. What is new is the way YouTube intends to handle inappropriate videos: not only by removing some videos and placing age restrictions on others, but through “demotion.” “Videos that are considered sexually suggestive, or that contain profanity, will be algorithmically demoted on our ‘Most Viewed,’ ‘Top Favorited,’ and other browse pages.” This means that videos with too much profanity or sexually suggestive content will not be removed, but their popularity will be mathematically reduced, so they don’t show up on the lists of what’s most popular - censorship through technical invisibility. And we won’t know which videos, for what reasons. That YouTube can bury the rules, and their judgments, into the mechanisms by which users know what’s available and popular, points to the kinds of free speech dilemmas we’re likely to face in a digital future, and that we’re hardly prepared to think through.

This is fun. Cornell’s publicity office has been asking me and my department colleageus to offer pithy quotes about media industry news events, in the hopes of circulating us as experts to journalists. Hence the last post, about Tribune Company filing for bankruptcy, and this one. What a wonderful university-sanctioned opportunity to spout off about things I find interesting. I’ll keep posting them here.

Whose bedtime is it? NBC has announced that it will hand Leno the 10pm time slot five nights a week. Not so long ago, that 10pm time slot was the one chance for the TV networks to offer dramas with adult themes and concerns, because the kids had been shuffled off to bed. ER, Law & Order, The West Wing, L.A. Law, Homicide, Hill Street Blues, even Miami Vice. Now, with the kids watching The Hills and Grey’s Anatomy online and on DVD, the 8pm shows more explicit and explosive than ever before, and the real drama being provided by HBO and AMC, the networks have nothing left to do but make the economic, rather than the creative decision: to offer up five more hours of cheap talk and celebrity chatter (and, honor their costly contract with Conan). Will the day come when the parents are nodding off to Leno’s monologue at 10, while their kids stay up late downloading True Blood? Or is this shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, the very idea of a TV schedule sinking fast?

Will the information industry be next at Congress’ doorstep, looking for its own bailout? With the Tribune Company’s declaration of bankruptcy today, the recession of 2008 has again proven adept at revealing those industries whose business models were already top-heavy and unworkable. But, while many will point to a decade–long decline revenues for paper-and-ink news and blame this all on the Internet, I wonder whether the business that failed them was that the entertainment industry, so eager to lash together every entertainment property it can swallow into an advertising megaplex. Isn’t it telling, that Tribune is struggling not just because readers are canceling their newspaper subscriptions for digital feeds — after all, Tribune has an enormous web presence — but because they were unable to sell off the Chicago Cubs in time to make this year’s debt payments?

LA Times report here; CEO Sam Zell’s letter to his employees here.

This is excellent news:

President-elect Obama has championed the creation of a more open, transparent, and participatory government. To that end, Change.gov adopted a new copyright policy this weekend. In an effort to create a vibrant and open public conversation about the Obama-Biden Transition Project, all website content now falls under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

This may be one of those moments where people will think I’m obsessing over small details, and to some extent its true. But this is a very important gesture, with real consequences. The Obama team has shown some real savvy about the opportunities and implications of new media. I was very glad to see that they plan to post their weekly address online and to their YouTube channel, making online video the 21st century replacement for the radio “fireside chats” of FDR. Opting to make these videos, and the other materials they post, open for redistribution and reuse opens up a wealth of material for citizen commentary. More than that, it indicates their commitment to transparency, free speech, and participation.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that publications of the federal government, like court decisions and Senate reports, are traditionally in the public domain, i.e. with no copyright at all. The whitehouse.gov site does not have a copyright statement that I could find, so its not clear what their policy is. One might argue that, with a CC license, the Obama campaign is being slightly more restrictive than should be expected. However, by posting the CC license, they make an explicit assurance to users that they my distribute and remix as they see fit, which is by far the bigger issue. The very absence of a copyright statement on the current White House site could leave re-users in a grey area, unsure of their rights. The Obama teams commitment goes further, in that the online videos will be accompanied by a link to a high-res Quicktime version, so those interested in excerpting and remixing will not have to make do with the low-res YouTube version.

This is also a substantial vote of confidence for Creative Commons, and yet another moment in the slow move towards the widespread recognition that copyright maximalism simply cannot persist online, and a more moderate balance of rights is required.