With this article, Greenhouse of Social Technologies and RosKomSvoboda open a series of publications on mapping technological challenges and possible solutions ahead of the hackathon on digital citizenship and digital rights demhack.ru, which will be held on September 12-13, 2020. problem field of digital rights in order to share concentrated knowledge with participants, future participants of the hackathon about the observed problems and possible technological solutions.
This overview will focus on the right to use, create and publish digital works. The text below, of course, does not exhaust the problem field, but gives an idea of the problems that came into the heads of the experts in the first place.
In the digital environment, everything we say to an indefinite circle of people becomes a digital work. We live in a culture of what the American lawyer and media philosopher Lawrence Lessig calls "remix culture", producing memes, quotes, using images, constantly creating in a variety of virtual spaces.
The analog world is rapidly digitizing, and the works created in it are overgrown with additional properties characteristic of digital rather than physical objects (for example, the possibility of instant and complete copying on an unlimited scale). In a digital context, it's not just people who create, but algorithms as well.
The plots we covered:
- Offline digitalization and copyright;
- Creative Commons and Public Domain Issues;
- Threats to open initiatives (open data, open access, etc.);
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1.
The simplest DIY model of a book scanner. Source: Daniel Reetz // Instructables .
In this story, experts noted a number of issues that cannot be solved technologically: outdated copyright legislation (according to experts), copyright trolls, museum law and related restrictions, the problem of freedom of panorama (people create digital works, but they cannot be used (photo monuments, photos of graves, etc., to obtain the rights of sculptors, the rights of architects) - Wikipedians, bloggers, lawyers often talk about her), however, the problem of orphan / orphan works - works whose authors could not be found , caused the greatest discussion .
For example, for repressed authors - 70 years of copyright “release” is counted from the term of their rehabilitation, and the date of rehabilitation is only in the FSB archive. The same problem with photographs from the family archive. Relatives are not copyright holders, the copyright holder is a photographer in a photo studio. If the photographer is unknown, then 70 years from the date of publication. But relatives, at the same time, formally cannot publish photographs. You cannot clear these rights. And it is already impossible to know the will of the author - the author is dead. In the same vein there are works that have been published, but they have not been commercially used for a very long time. Commercial use involves drawing up a contract. Summing up, we can say that for works that undergo analog-digital transition there is an acute problem of clearing rights.
The problem of finding the right holder (the problem of clearing the rights) - it is difficult to find who has the right to a work.
Hackathon solutions :
- Creation of a database of orphan works;
- Owner search service;
Plot 2. Creative Commons and Public Domain Issues
Creative Commons logo inspired by zullage tiles. Source: Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA)
The problem of the public but not released domain is formulated by experts as follows: there are a large number of works that have already passed into the public domain , but exist on the Web in suboptimal formats - somewhere with an ugly watermark, somewhere in obscenely poor resolution. Many are still on photo stocks, although everyone can legally use them.
Solution for the hackathon : create a bot that would parse works in the public domain and upload them, for example, to Wikimedia Commons. Or, for example, using AI would remove the watermark.
The problem of the lack of good quality public domain works . In Russia there is no portal on which public domain works in the public domain would be posted. There are websites abroad that curate and publish well-crafted public domain works - for example, Wolne Lektury (Free Reading, Poland). But in Russia, the easiest way to find Dostoevsky is at Flibust.
Hackathon solution : create a portal and process for publishing and curating public domain works.
The problem of popularizing Creative Commons is formulated as follows - despite the fact that the Civil Code of the Russian Federation contains Article 1286.1about open licenses and these licenses are used, including on state sites, authors and lawyers do not know about open licenses and Creative Commons.
There is a lack of confidence in Creative Commons licenses even in spite of their stable legal status in the Russian Federation. Many sites could use these licenses, but due to illiteracy they do not.
Hackathon solutions :
- A service where people could generate template letters “Move your site to Creative Commons” explaining the essence of the issues and send them to the relevant departments, libraries, etc.
- : «Creative Commons – . , . , – , , – . , ». : , – , Ⓐ ( – -). , – .
The problem with finding authorship - for Russian-language content there are no search engines for images, music and other works with Public Domain or Creative Commons licenses.
Hackathon solution : search engine or better way to index or identify a piece with this mode of authorship.
Problem with archiving sites . Sites die periodically. Projects like Ivan Begtin are trying to archive the Russian state web. The Wayback Machine tries to archive the entire web, but there is not much Russian-language content there.
Hackathon solutions :
- A bot that would automatically submit a site to a web archive.
- There is no software that would allow you to conveniently and transparently generate .WARC (web archive) files - experts believe that the existing methods are very difficult for a simple user. The hackathon could create tools that would simplify this process.
- All-Russian initiative for web archiving.
Bad CC problem . People can mistakenly or maliciously indicate the CC license, but do not have the rights to do so.
Hackathon Solution : Creative Commons License Checker Service "Check Your License": check, for example, using a reverse image search to see if anything is copyrighted.
Plot 3. Threats to open-initiatives (open data, open access, etc.)
“And they couldn't put this table in a machine-readable format? They all have paws? WTF? " - free interpretation of the next stock photography. Photo: jeshoots.com // Unsplash (CC-BY-SA)
As part of this story, experts noted that often in a conflict between copyright holders, etc. "Pirates" often forget about the third party - the movement for free and open legal access. In addition, experts noted a problem related to the right to access information in that many sites in litigation with copyright holders are simply blocked.
However, even within an exclusively legal approach to free data, there is a so-called. The "paywall problem", i.e. when academic articles are available in both paid and free access, but are (including through DOI links) primarily portals that offer paid access. Abroad, a similar problem is solved by the Kopernio browser plugin, however, as experts say, there is nothing for Russian content. Hackathon
solution : create a Russian-language analogue of Kopernio or connect Russian-language content to Kopernio (for example, from Cyberleninka).
Plot 4. Artificial Intelligence Products and Copyright
Screenshot of the website of the musical AI system Av3ry
Formally, copyright arises on the basis of human creativity. There is legal uncertainty about what a non-human produces (external surveillance cameras, X-rays, etc.)? Nowadays artificial intelligence is creating good works, but there is no legal certainty who should be considered the author: is the copyright held by the programmer of the algorithm or in the public domain?
This question is still in the gray zone. There are no high-profile cases, the question is still in the technical and legal plane. Showbiz already sees AI as a threat because there are precedentswhen artificial intelligence first generates melodies, and then massively sends them into the public domain, which could potentially lead to a drop in musicians' income.
Hackathon solutions : algorithms that "liberate" melodies, pictures, patterns, etc. - i.e. which are generated by AI and immediately released into the public domain.
Plot 5. "Behavioral surplus" - the property of users or the property of the platform
How Solid works. Source: Private Internet Access Blog (CC-BY-SA)
Behavioral surplus is a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff for derivatives of user behavioral data used to sell targeted advertising and similar services.
As for Plot 5, the experts agreed that the issue of “behavioral surplus” is still at a very early stage of development and is of a legal and political (balance of interests of companies and society) nature.
In this story, it should be noted decisions related to hardware management of own data and the issue of decision-making rights(decision rights) in the field of personal data. Those. the main question is whether the user is aware of what data is collected, how it is processed, to whom it is sold, and at what stage the user can withdraw or take any other decision regarding his data or derivatives based on it.
Hackathon Solutions : In the context of a hackathon, experiments with the following technologies are interesting directions:
- working with the Solid project by Tim Berners-Lee;
- DoNotTrack technology (and in addition to it a governance framework) , which is proposed to be adopted by site owners and browser creators to respect the decision-making rights of users regarding the collection of their data;
- , , . Mozilla Firefox , Facebook’a. : Alphabet, MRG, Yandex.
6. VS
Collage. Photo: Mika @mikafinland // Unsplash (CC-BY-SA)
There is no fair use in the Russian system of law , free use is regulated by Article 1274 . In this sense, the participants of the roundtable believe, Russians are freer than citizens of jurisdictions where fair use is unambiguously defined using four criteria : 1) the purpose of the work citing the material, 2) the essence of the cited material, 3) the volume of the quotation, 4) the impact of the use of quotation To the market.
Another point of view on Article 1274 is that fair use itself is wider than Russian “free use”, it allows us to adapt actual digital content like Google Books to it, to resolve the issue of the possibility of using content freely through file sharing services, etc. The use of content under Article 1274 is limited to purposes (informational, polemical, critical, scientific, disclosure of the author's creative intention). The goals themselves are not specified, which makes the practice unpredictable, and journalists are not always asserted these goals.
Solutions for the hackathon : perhaps, from the very beginning, it should be in some way, perhaps in a hardware way, to separate the purpose of the created works into commercial and non-commercial.
The greenhouse of social technologies and RosKomSvoboda would like to thank Vladimir Kharitonov, executive director of the Association of Internet Publishers , Alena Denisova, lecturer in law at the HSE Media Department, as well as all the experts who took part in the round table. You can register for the digital citizenship and digital rights hackathon at demhack.ru until September 8, 2020.