[Reader-list] Fwd: [PR] Fwd: [New post] YouTube, Geoblocks and Proxies

Sat Mar 6 03:46:39 IST 2010

From: Claude Almansi <claude.almansi at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 12:27 PM

Hi All,

Below, the automatic notification and text of a post I wrote for
<http://etcjournal.wordpress.com>. The idea came from a) the block of
the "Zardari saying Shut Up" videos in Pakistan in February; b) folks
in CH and other countries getting irritated at being getting
geoblocked from YT videos "with content from EMI" and other majors.

Best

Claude

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Educational Technology and Change Journal <no-reply at wordpress.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 12:39 AM
Subject: [New post] YouTube, Geoblocks and Proxies
To: claude.almansi at gmail.com

YouTube, Geoblocks and Proxies

Claude Almansi | March 4, 2010 at 1:15 pm | Tags: Black Eyed Peas,
censorship, copyright, EMI, geoblock, geoblocking, Pakistan, proxy,
vevo, Video, YouTube, Zardari | Categories: Multimedia, law |

URL:  <http://etcjournal.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/youtube_geoblocks_proxies/
>
or <http://wp.me/pu4Ig-Wj>

Geoblocking as censoreship measure

<http://etcjournal.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/zardari_shutup_blocked.jpg>

Screenshot of blocked YouTube video of PK President Zardari saying
"Shut up!" during a rally - by Huma Imitaz. The message reads: "This
Site is Restricted."

The above screenshot shows the page people in Pakistan got redirected
to early on February 7, 2010, when they were trying to view a YouTube
video of Pres. Asif Zardari saying "Shut up" to someone during a
rally. In the rest of the world, the video could be seen normally:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzuHD5x1fEU>

So Pakistani advocates of freedom of information immediately started
blogging, twittering and writing to mailing lists about the block,
some of them advising how to by-pass it by using proxies such as can
be found by looking up "YouTube" and "proxy" in a search engine.

Geoblocking as copyright measure

<
http://etcjournal.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/geoblocking_okgo_ttsp.jpg?w=n300&h=124<http://etcjournal.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/geoblocking_okgo_ttsp.jpg?w=300&h=124>
>
Screenshot of OK Go's YouTube channel when trying to view their "This
Too Shall Come to Pass" video from Switzerland.

In the case of President Zardari's "Shut up" video, the block was
apparently enforced by the Pakistan Telecom Agency at the request of
the government. However, for quite a while now, YouTube has been
offering its partners automated audio and video content
identification, which allows them to find uses by third parties of
content under their copyright. And on September 28, 2009, YouTube
announced that it was integrating this offer with YouTube Insight,
which also gives complete statistics on the use of a given video.

This allowed right holders to fine-tune the management of their rights
on  their content when they found it on YouTube: getting their share
of the ad revenue, completely blocking or geoblocking uploads by third
parties. And as Liz Gannes wrote in her article about her interview
with David King, Senior Product Manager of YT Content ID (From Monitor
to Monetize: The Evolution of YouTube Content ID. Newteevee. Sept 28
09):

...Content is increasingly geoblocked, said King, so for instance,
something that was uploaded in France could potentially be unavailable
there because of local rights issues, but viewable in the rest of
world. ...

Proxies cannot tell the difference

Proxy servers enable you to surf the web as if you were in the country
where they are. Therefore they cannot tell the difference between web
pages that are geoblocked for censorship and those that are blocked
for copyright management. Actually, they are not even aware of
geoblocks.

But what is the legal situation when geoblocking is enforced as a
copyright management mesure? In countries that have ratified the 1996
WIPO Copyright Treaty,  it is illegal to circumvent such measures,
except for personal use, and it is illegal to publicize the existence
of circumvention tools. So:

When people surf with a proxy to bypass censorship, do they violate
copyright law if they happen to view a video they would otherwise be
geoblocked from for copyright motives?
When human rights activists give info about using proxies to access
geoblocked-for-censorship content, do they violate copyright law
because the same proxies can be used to view geoblocked-for-copyright
content?

Unchartered ground

<http://etcjournal.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/wesch_lionsmajo.jpg>
Screenshot from Michael Wesch's "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us"
YouTube video and lion from William Wallace Denslow's illustrations
for L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (source: Wikimedia)

When I asked Ben Edelman the above questions about online geoblocks
and proxies, he answered:

(...) I don't think any courts, in an country, have had occasion to
consider this question (...) there's lots of ground to cover --
including what "circumvent" and "effectively constrains access" mean
when a DRM system grants access to entire countries without charge or
other restriction.  Certainly this is quite different from the core
DRM (e.g. DVD players) that began notions [of] circumvention.

Indeed, and the meaning of  these words are also problematic in other
countries where copyright law was adapted towards the ratification of
the 1996 WIPO copyright treaty and WIPO Performances and Phonograms
Treaty.

This is even true in Switzerland, where the revised version  of the
copyright law (French text) only came into force on July 1, 2008.
However,  its new articles on digital works and digital protection
measures remained identical to their version in the 2004 draft, in
spite of the radical changes in content distribution and sharing
brought in the meantime by Web 2.0.

This creates headaches both for content users and for content
producers. Geoblocks of multimedia works made some sense from the
producers' - if not from the consumers' - viewpoint when such works
were only available on material supports (DVDs, CDs): for a producer
in country X to  have a chance to sell the rights on a given work to a
producer in country Y, the work produced in country X had to be
unavailable and unusable in country Y.  But attempting to apply this
geoblocking policy to online multimedia just does not work, as the
block can be bypassed by using a proxy. And as Grant Buckler wrote in
Internet Geoblocking: How It Works And Why It's Done (MPIII.com. Feb
17th, 2009):

(...) There are ways around geoblocking by disguising your computer's
IP address.

One of the most common ways is to use a service that relays your
internet connection through a server in another country — most often
the U.S. — so that you appear to be in that country. Content providers
haven't found a way to prevent this, and so far are simply tolerating
it. (...)

(my emphasis).

Appeal

As online geoblocking  does not work any better than plugging the
bunghole of an old wooden cask that leaks through all stave joints,
would music majors kindly leave it to tech-and-otherwise-benighted
autocrats, please?

Proxy servers are - often literally - vital to people who live in
dictatorial countries or in countries like Pakistan,  which has a more
or less democratically elected government that nonetheless promulgated
the ferociously repressive  Prevention of E-Crime Ordinance (PECO)
last year. So these proxy servers must not get swamped by requests
from fans who want to see their favorite band's videos they are
theoretically geoblocked from.

Bonus track

Of course, Pakistani civic rights militants also made many mirrors of
the  "Zardari saying shut up" video shown at the beginning of this
post. Someone even made a remix version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvyX1yD3jfI>
Interestingly, the song used in the remix is "Shut Up" by Black Eyed
Peas, available on YouTube without geoblock as a VEVO video:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRzMtlZjXpU>

even though, as the description says, it is a "Music video by Black
Eyed Peas performing Shut Up. (C) 2003 Interscope Geffen (A&M) Records
A Division of UMG Recordings Inc." and even though its main VEVO.com
site is geoblocked outside US. However, from the Wikipedia VEVO entry,
VEVO might be a promising new business model:

Vevo is a music video and entertainment website. It is owned by Sony
Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media
Company. The service was launched officially on 8 December 2009. The
video hosting for Vevo is provided by YouTube, with Google and Vevo
sharing the advertising revenue. Vevo offers music videos from three
of the four major record labels, Universal Music Group, Sony Music
Entertainment and EMI. (...).

Links

The sites/pages mentioned in this post, and a few others, are gathered
in http://www.diigo.com/user/calmansi/geoblock"

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