Group items tagged

Frustrated with the Google-owned video site, Bieber instead uploaded his video using Facebook’s video app onto his Facebook page. “no one keeps my music from my fans. nobody,” he wrote on Twitter.

There’s a level of irony to the situation. Bieber got his start on YouTube, where home videos of him on his account singing covers of hip-hop songs

You would think if anyone deserved to be able to upload his own music videos to YouTube, it would be Bieber. So why couldn’t he? The answer lies in the complicated legalities behind copyright law and new media. It comes down to the question: who owns the video? In Bieber’s case, the answer depends on who you ask.

According to the YouTube website where Bieber’s upload was blocked, it appears that UMG has ownership. YouTube has a Content ID copyright protection system in place. Content ID automatically detects whether new content being uploaded to the website infringes on any copyrighted material in YouTube’s vast video database, using video and audio recognition techniques. The rights-holder can preselect what YouTube should do to the video in response: A) block it outright, B) monetize it by overlaying an ad on the video or C) do nothing, but be able to track the video’s viewership.

And why was Bieber able to upload his video to Facebook with no problems? Facebook also says it has a copyright protection scheme in place. But if it has a similar Content ID system to YouTube, it doesn’t have the same amount of video content that YouTube does, meaning a given uploaded video to the social network is less likely to automatically ring warning bells.

Creative Commons has in the past been struggling with the fact that the majority of users tends to adopt more restrictive licenses. The organization estimated that two out of three Creative Commons-licensed works can’t be reused commercially, and one out of four can’t be reincorporated into a new work at all.

CC-BY on the other hand allows commercial reuse as well. This doesn’t just open YouTube and its producers new revenue opportunities it also makes it possible to reuse these videos in a much wider variety of contexts. Wikipedia, for example, demands that any videos posted to its site can be reused commercially. Combine that with the fact that YouTube has been converting its entire catalog into the open source WebM format, and there’s little reason why tens of thousands of Creative Commons-licensed YouTube videos shouldn’t show up on Wikipedia any day now.

One of the technologies where extremism is playing out these days is in Google’s own backyard. While citizen empowerment movements have made use of YouTube to broadcast their messages, so have Terrorist and other groups. Just this week, anti-Hamas extremists kidnapped an Italian peace activist and posted their hostage video to YouTube first before eventually murdering him. YouTube has been criticized in the past for not removing violent videos quick enough. But Cohen says the conference is looking at the root causes that prompt a young person to join one of the groups in the first place. "There are a lot of different dimensions to this challenge," he says. "It’s important not to conflate everything."

For the positive responses it's mainly people who understood that rep.licants is not about giving performant bots but is more like an experiment (and also a kind of critics about how most of the users are using social networks) where users can mix themselves with a bot and see what is happening. Because even if my bots are crap they can be, sometimes, surprising.

But I was kind of surprised that so many people would really expect to have a real bot to manage their social networks account. Twitter never responded and Facebook responded by banning, three times already, my Facebook applications which is managing and running all the Facebook's bots.

some people use the bot: a. Just as an experiment, they want to see what the bot can do and if the bot can really improve their virtual social influences. Or users experimenting how long they could keep a bot on their account without their friends noticing it's runt by a bot. b. I saw few time inside my database which stores informations about the users that some of them have a twitter name like "renthouseUSA", so I guess they are using rep.licants for getting a presence on social networks without managing anything and as a commercial goal. c. This is a feedback that I had a lot of time and it is the reason why I am using rep.licants on my own twitter account: If you are precise with the keywords that you give to the bot, it will sometimes find very interesting content related to your interest. My bot made me discover a lot of interesting things, by posting them on Twitter, that I wouldn't never find without him. New informations are coming so fast and in so big quantities that it becomes really difficult to deal with that. For example just on Twitter I follow 80 persons (which is not a lot) all of those persons that I follow is because I know that they might tweet interesting stuffs related to my interests. But I have maybe 10 of those 80 followers who are tweeting quiet a lot (maybe 1-2 tweet per hour) and as I check my twitter feed only one time per day I sometimes loose more than one hour to find interesting tweets in the amount of tweets that my 80 persons posted. And this is only for Twitter ! I really think that we need more and more personal robots for filtering information for us. And this is a very positive point I found about having a bot that I could never imagine when I was beginning my project.

One surprising bugs was when the Twitter's bots began to speak to themselves. It's maybe boring for some users to see their own account speak to itself one time per day but when I discovered the bug I found it very funny. So I decided to keep that bug !

The questions that rep.licants poses are deep human and social ones – laced with uncertainties about the kinds of interactions we count as normal and the responsibilities we owe to ourselves and each other.  Seeing these bots carry out conversations with themselves and with human counterparts (much less other non-human counterparts) allows us to take tradition social and technological research into a different territory – asking not only what it means to be human – but also what it means to be non-human.

They found less hyperlinking of women’s than men’s names (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 7). Personally, I’d have really liked some detail as to how they came up with this, and what constituted ‘hyperlinking of women’s names’ precisely. It’s potentially an interesting finding, but I can’t quite get a grip on what they are saying.

They also note that the women that did appear, they were often peripheral to the main story, or ‘subject to muting’ (i.e. seen but not heard). They also noted many instances where women were pictured but remain anonymous, as if there are used to illustrate a piece – for ‘ornamental’ purposes – and give the example of the wikipedia entry on scientists, which includes a picture a women as an example, but stress she is anonymous (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12).

Echoing findings of earlier research on science in the media (e.g. the Bimbo or Boffin paper), they noted that women, when represented, tended to be associated with ‘feminine’ attributes and activities, demonstrating empathy with children and animals, etc. They also noted a clustering in specific fields. For example, in the pages they’d sampled of the Guardian, they found seven mentions of women scientists compared with twenty-eight of men, and three of the these women were in a single article, about Jane Goodall (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12-13).

The women presented were often discussed in terms of appearance, personality, sexuality and personal circumstances, again echoing previous research. They also noted that women scientists, when present, tended to be younger than the men, and there was a striking lack of ethnic diversity (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 14).

I’m going to be quite critical of this research. It’s not actively bad, it just seems to lack depth and precision. I suspect Mendick and Moreau were doing their best with low resources and an overly-broad brief. I also think that we are still feeling our way in terms of working out how to study online science media, and so can learn something from such a critique.

Problem number one: it’s a small study, and yet a ginormous topic. I’d much rather they had looked at less, but made more of it. At times I felt like I was reading a cursory glance at online science.

Problem number two: the methodological script seemed a bit stuck in the print era. I felt the study lacked a feel for the variety of routes people take through online science. It lacked a sense of online science’s communities and cliques, its cultures and sub-cultures, its history and its people. It lacked context. Most of all, it lacked a sense of what I think sits at the center of online communication: the link.

It tries to look at too much, too quickly. We’re told that of the blog entries sampled from Bad Science, three out of four of the women mentioned were associated with ‘bad science’, compared to 12 out of 27 of the men . They follow up this a note that Goldacre has appeared on television critiquing Greenfield,­ a clip of which is on his site (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 17-18). OK, but ‘bad’ needs unpacking here, as does the gendered nature of the area Goldacre takes aim at. As for Susan Greenfield, she is a very complex character when it comes to the politics of science and gender (one I’d say it is dangerous to treat representations of simplistically). Moreover, this is a very small sample, without much feel for the broader media context the Bad Science blog works within, including not only other platforms for Ben Goldacre’s voice but comment threads, forums and a whole community of other ‘bad science bloggers’ (and their relationships with each other)