Brief 6 - Copyright and Fair Use

Youtube.com is one of the largest distributors of digital content, but they don't exactly respect the idea of fair use. According to Arstechnica.com, video content can be taken down due to alleged "copyright usage violations" that should be legally left alone, including NASA public domain videos. In the past, Youtube took down a political satire video of Obama, then put it back up without explanation. When asked why they took it down in the first place, they refused to comment on why it was taken down, who requested the takedown, and how it was requested.
Many copyright holders choose to instead profit off of the videos by placing ads on them. A quick search for Michael Jackson's "Thriller" will show 'lyric videos,' parodies, fan-videos, and of course, minecraft videos. And if we take a look at this song's Music Policy on youtube we see that whoever now holds the rights to this song is choosing to put ads on these videos and profit off of them. But not everyone is content to simply profit off of videos made under Fair Use.

One company overseas is taking advantage of youtube's apparent weakness to lawsuit: Nintendo. A common video genre on Youtube is a "Let's Play." A fan of a video game plays while recording the playthrough, while offering humorous and usually explicit commentary. This is defended under fair use through the commentary clause, which Fair Use protects. However, fair use is an America-specific law, and Japan has no such law. So when Nintendo noticed gamers on Youtube were making these videos, they decided to take action.

"A prolific LPer named Zack Scott took to Facebook yesterday to complain that several LPers had experienced takedowns of the videos including Nintendo games. A company fan like himself wasn't the right target for automated takedowns, Scott complained, and he said he'd stop playing Nintendo games until the situation was straightened out. "It jeopardizes my channel's copyright standing and the livelihood of all LPers," he wrote."

According to the EFF, youtube only allows three "Copyright strikes" on your account before it takes down your account and removes all your videos completely.

"As part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), Congress granted online service providers (like YouTube) certain protections from copyright infringement liability, so long as they meet certain requirements. One requirement of this "DMCA safe harbor" is that online service providers must implement a "notice-and-takedown" system. Another requirement is that YouTube must cancel the accounts of "repeat infringers."
     That's why, when YouTube receives a formal DMCA takedown notice from a rightsholder, it removes the video. It also puts a "strike" on your account, and requires you to complete a mandatory session in its online "Copyright School." Once you accumulate 3 "strikes" on your account, YouTube will cancel all of your YouTube accounts, taking down all of your videos and refusing to allow you back as a YouTube account holder."
--Eff.org

The DMCA itself does not seem to conflict with Fair Use in the first place. According to Fair Use, people are free to make intellectual property using other people's ip material as long as they're using it for some sort of commentary, parody, or education. Naturally the exact legal boundaries are disputed, but this is legal content that is being created in the cases of Lets Plays and covers of Thriller. So the rights-holders of Michael Jackson's songs and Nintendo should have no legal standing to take down or profit off of this content, but they do.

So where does the DMCA come in? Well, basically, if Nintendo is correct in their claim that some guy playing video games in front of a camera is violating their rights, then youtube itself can be liable. And if youtube does go to court over the sanctity of their users' rights, and prove that Nintendo "knowingly materially misrepresents" their claim, the DMCA makes provisions for their legal fees to be paid. However, if they are wrong, they are liable for the video's violation. (Source: sfwa.org)

So youtube, in an effort to avoid costly lawsuits, seems to be taking down videos that get DMCA-requested. Nintendo may not be legally right, but if it costs too much to prove the Nintendos, Michael Jacksons, and every other company with a chip on their shoulder wrong, then creators that utilize fair use will be under fire even though they didn't do anything wrong.

Brief 5 - Reporter's Privilege

Journalists have a responsibility to tell the truth to society. And in this responsibility are certain protections: Shield Laws are laws that protect a Journalist from revealing their sources when ordered by a court. America values free speech so much that it has protections for those who want the truth to get out without being accountable to a judge. Most states have Shield Laws in order to protect their journalists. Now in 2015, the house of representatives passed legislation blocking federal prosecutors from forcing journalists to testify. However, usnews.com writes that it could have negative effects.

How could shielding anonymous sources be bad? Well, one of the main issues lawmakers have is that it doesn't give any process to defining who is a journalist and who is not. It could be argued that whoever identifies themselves as a journalist can give themselves immunity from testifying. Certainly, nowadays we do see a more decentralized form of journalism, with the advent of cell phone cameras and glorified bloggers, it's hard to tell who is a "real" journalist.

This definition between which journalists are "real" and which are "fake" is a growing topic. There has been a recent hubbub about "fake news." Now, depending on who you ask, fake news can be anything from breitbart, to fox news, to cnn. Everyone with a political opinion is calling opposition-leaning news sites fake, with President Trump actually calling a CNN reporter "Fake news" to his face, live on tv (later, the President redacted this statement, later calling CNN "Very Fake News.") So the question is, does a reporter accused of being "fake news" have the same reporter's privilege?

To answer this question, we only need to look at Wikileaks. When the term "Fake News" blew up shortly after the election, Wikileaks was one of the news sites accused of being "Fake News" in that they allegedly echoed Russian propaganda. The Washington Post writes 

"The tactics [of "fake news" acting as Russian Propoganda] included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign."

While Julian Assange, editor in chief of Wikileaks, does not have to reveal his source when it comes to the leaked emails between Hillary and her campaign manager, John Podesta. In his case, I doubt it matters whether or not he is ordered to, as he is currently awaiting extradition to Sweden and the U.S. for other matters. But he did specifically say that it was not Russia that leaked the emails to Wikileaks.

But reporter's privilege is not just Wikileaks' shield in the fight for legitimacy. It is used by organizations that are attacking Wikileaks. Propornot.com lists Wikileaks on their "list" of publications that echo Russian propganda. Propornot was used as a primary source for other news sites accusin

g President Trump of benefiting from Russian Propaganda, and indeed they use Reporter's Privilege to protect themselves.

"We are anonymous for now, because we are civilian Davids taking on a state-backed adversary Goliath, and we take things like the international Russian intimidation of journalists, “Pizzagate”-style mob harassment, and the assassination of Jo Cox very seriously, but we can in some cases provide background information about ourselves on a confidential basis to professional journalists. We do not publicly describe all of our sources and methods, although we describe most of them, and again, we can in some cases provide much more detail to journalists and other researchers in order to contextualize their reporting."

No matter how dirty the journalistic mudslinging gets, in the war for public opinion, reporters will continue to use Shield Laws and online anonymity to protect themselves.

Brief 4 - Plagiarism and Fabrication

Fabrication and Plagarism are dangerous subjects for a publication. Your stories are not worth anything if nobody believes them. Not to mention they can open your entire company up for lawsuits if you don't pursue this action. So when The Guardian found one of their reporters had fabricated sources and interviews, they took immediate action.

"After sources quoted in several stories denied speaking with a freelance reporter, Joseph Mayton, the Guardian has fact-checked all of his stories. We are taking down 13 and removing quotes and information that could not be verified"

This was a preemptive move to show the readers that they take fabrication very seriously. They hired an independent fact-checker to double check all of his sources and claims. And in case you're worried that Mayton was not given a fair chance, the Guardian writes...

"Our editors met with Mayton twice in person and emailed him dozens of times, giving him more than a month from the time the first allegations were presented to him to provide notes, phone records, contact information and other evidence. All evidence he provided has been taken into account, but he was unable or unwilling to provide information on most sources. "

And to put a nice bow on the whole ordeal, The Guardian came up with ways it could have prevented this mess. They wrote that they would commit to being more diligent in their background checks of who works for them. They also pledged to look into incidents where anonymous sources are used in stories where it is not necessary.

The main point the Guardian wanted to drive home in their article was that they were taking responsibility. A liar will lie to his bosses as well as the people who buy their paper, so one might assume that it is not fair to blame the bosses in question. But in the world of business, and especially in the realm of journalism, publications take responsibility for ethical breaches like these, even when it was against their knowledge. This way, the few people who blamed the Guardian for not being psychic have their concerns addressed, and the rest of the people see that The Guardian is committed to going above and beyond what is reasonable to ensure quality, truthful stories.

And when it comes to fabrication, some crooked reporters go even further to cover their tracks. Juan Thompson, an ex-reporter for The Intercept, allegedly created fake emails and impersonated false sources in order to deceive editors. Among his fake stories was an interview with the cousin of Dylan Roof, the Charleston shooter.

"Scott Roof, who identified himself as Dylann Roof’s cousin, told me over the telephone that “Dylann was normal until he started listening to that white power music stuff.” He also claimed that “he kind of went over the edge when a girl he liked starting dating a black guy two years back”...
“Dylann liked her,” Scott Roof said. “The black guy got her. He changed. I don’t know if we would be here if not …” Roof then abruptly hung up the phone"

It would certainly seem to contextualize all his actions into a neat box, which is a big clue that it's too good to be true. When asked about a cousin named Scott Roof, the Roof family denied his existence, along with any story of an ex-girlfriend leaving Dylan Roof for a black man.

The Intercept made a point to let their readers know how far Thompson went to deceive them, in order to keep the public's trust. Other fabrications by Thompson include lying about previous job experience. He now claims to have testicular cancer. And while I don't want to doubt a cancer survivor's suffering, I questions whether or not he's telling the truth here.

Brief 3 - Advertising Ethics

During presidential campaigns, television advertisements have been a mainstay of politics as long as television itself. Recently in the 2016 presidential race, both candidates ran ads attacking each other, or "Smear campaigns." Let's take a look at one.

What he believes | Hillary Clinton

This video plays the ethics component relatively safe. At the start, it's just quotes from Donald Trump, devoid of context. Then it gets into more vague attacks with the caption "And [Trump] did this:" before showing news footage of sexual assault charges brought against Trump.

Now was the Clinton campaign suggesting that Donald Trump was indeed guilty of the claims brought against him? They certainly seemed to be implying it by juxtaposing the words "did this" with footage of accusations that would later be proven false. But there is wiggle room here: it could be that what Trump "did" was provoke accusations against him. Maybe these accusations were provoked by something that Trump did, like running for president against a corrupt regime. Naturally this wiggle room is enough for plausible deniability on part of the video creators.

The most important part in clarifying ethics in this video is the caption "Approved by Hillary Clinton, paid for by 

Hillary for America," followed by the This idea of being transparent in political advertising is important.

Now let's look at a video that Trump ran.

Do you really need to ask?

This video shows Hillary Clinton asking a question out of context: "Why aren't I fifty points ahead?" The ad goes on to say that Director James Comey of the FBI said she lied about her emails. They then play a clip of Comey saying "There was classified material in the emails." In my opinion, this is a risky move by the video's creators. The exact quote of what Comey said was not that she lied, but that there was classified material in the emails that was on her unsecured server. The idea that she lied comes from context between what Comey said and what she said in her hearing, not directly from what Comey stated, as shown in the video itself.

The rest of the ad is implications of Hillary's foreign relations policies to allow ISIS to spread, along with a quote pointing out how she called roughly half of Trump's supporters "A basket of Deplorables." Not the most upstanding campaign, but not an ethical breach either. My favorite part is the snarky line at the end of the video: They show the clip where Clinton says "Why aren't I fifty points ahead you might ask." with the narrator chiming in: "Do you really need to ask?" This video also closes with a statement of transparency. A caption reads "Paid for by Trump for President INC, approved by Donald J. Trump" along with Trump saying "I'm Donald Trump and I approve this message."

When it comes to the third parties, they tend to not be as vicious in their personal attacks. Let's look at some ads from the alternative candidates from the race and see what they had to say.

Jill Stein - The Greater Good

Stein opens up with criticizing Trump and Hillary in vague, appropriate terms. But even though her campaign has less smear than the top two contenders, her claims get a bit shaky when it comes to ethics. She claims her new green program will "Create 20 million new jobs. halt climate change, and make wars for oil obsolete." Which is quite an impressive claim if it has any truth to it.

Sadly, most third party candidates have no chance of winning a presidential race. So the ad campaigns they run during the election are more designed to give themselves a career boost rather than be strictly competitive. So Stein can afford to pretend to take the high ground without dirtying herself in the political mudslinging. She can also afford to make dramatic claims that will never be tested. Maybe we really missed out on the 20 million new jobs and an end to all the wars in the middle-east, but I doubt it. As a final note, even though Jill Stein appears in her own video, explaining her message to the people, she still has a transparency disclaimer at the end of her video. After all, even if she said the words, it doesn't mean she approves of the context the video used them in. Trump's words were used in Hillary's ads, and Hillary's words were used in Trumps ads. So even though she is speaking directly into the camera, she still has the caption "Paid for by the Jill Stein for President Campaign" with the words "I'm Dr. Jill Stein and I approve this message."