That worrisome test case

The Italian courts have now seen fit to convict six apparently randomly chosen Google executives (or in one case, former executive) and hand them six-month suspended sentences because of YouTube clips showing the bullying of a teenager with Down Syndrome. No word on whether anyone has gone after the actual bullies, though one expects they wouldn't be too hard to track down.

Google is naturally outraged over this, and plenty of people are nervous. If you can be tried or sued over content that other people put up on a site you provide the infrastructure for, why would anyone want to get into the ISP/infrastructure/public web site business at all? It's particularly troublesome that the case was criminal. For civil cases you can at least buy liability insurance.

Google claims that the Italian case is the equivalent of "prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post." Fair enough. The Italian case certainly looks like overreach to me, but I'd be careful of carrying the analogy too far.

Hang on a second while I dust off my "I am not a lawyer" disclaimer. There, that's better.

Judging by the arbitrary selection of defendants and the wrist-slap sentences imposed, the whole thing smells like a test case, the idea being not to bust Google or its employees but to force the courts to consider the issue of liability for internet content. Then again, it might also be Signore Berlusconi flexing some muscle to warn off competition for his media empire.

Whatever the cause, the "we're just the post office" defense seems risky on its own. There are clearly cases where a provider definitely ought to share liability, for example when that provider has actively solicited a particular kind of material. If I put up a web site called statesecrets.com and encourage people to post classified information on it, even if I never actually post a single such page, I would not expect to get by with such a defense [not that such a thing would ever happen, of course -- D.H. May 2015].

As with so many things in the law, intent is significant. Google's explicitly stated intent is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and their actions are largely in line with that stated mission. I would certainly hope to see the Italian decision overturned. If not, everyone involved is going to have to take a deep breath and figure out how to continue doing business.

On a practical note, given the size of Google's pockets and the all-around undesirability of Google pulling out of Italy, there will be every incentive to get the thing settled. That might not lead to a very satisfying win. The worst case would be a drawn-out, highly-visible legal process and a more or less inscrutable ruling that effectively sends the message that "You'd better watch what goes on your site, unless you're Google."

The best case would be that it all blows over.

Fingerpickin', or Is YouTube the new Folkways?

For some reason the old Doc Watson song* Deep River Blues popped into my head. So I googled, and up came a clip of Doc pickin' it, every note in the right place as usual. Right there in the list of related videos next to it was Leo Kottke's take on the same song. Clearly the same song, but it's fascinating how Doc's sounds like no one but Doc and Kottke's sounds like no one but Kottke.

On the related list for that one in turn is impromptu-looking footage of Doc, Kottke and the late Chet Atkins for good measure picking I-forget-what tune along much the same lines as Deep River. Atkins is mostly comping here, but when he does take a lead, darned if it doesn't sound exactly like Chet Atkins. Note that Kottke, being the junior member, doesn't seem to merit a mention in the opening captions.

One could spend a fair bit of time (and this one did) chasing links, comparing and contrasting the styles and techniques of the greats, almost as though there were something to this whole web-as-online-educational-resource thing. If that sounds intruguing to you, I'll leave you to it. In which case if you run across bootleggy-looking versions** of Eight Miles High by Kottke, Michael Hedges and Roger McGuinn himself, say hi for me.

* He didn't write it, just made it his
** I'm going to assume here that YouTube would have taken down anything egregiously illicit, and/or that Kottke, McGuinn and the Hedges estate are not greatly offended. See the previous post on iBiblio for why McGuinn in particular might not mind.

Pop culture imitating life imitating ... oh never mind

Since you have a web connection, I'll assume you've heard the story already. In any case I don't really have much to say about it. I guess I just had to write it down and look at it to make sure I got it right.

Teen idol Miley Cyrus was until recently one of the most followed tweeters on twitter with over a million followers (a whole megacommunity, if you will). Then she woke up one day and realized "I was kind of just like over tweeting about what I was doing instead of actually doing it." and "I complained that I wanted my private life more private but I’m the one who is giving the world access to it.” So she deleted her account.

So far nothing out of the ordinary, except for the million followers part. Any number of people, myself included, have been sucked into the vortex of some net.timesink and decided that quitting cold turkey would be best for all involved.

But then she went the next step and put up a YouTube rap about it.

As of this writing there have been about 3.5 million views.

How much money is YouTube not making?

I previously mentioned that YouTube is losing money. This was based mostly on having run across Credit Suisse's estimate of $470 million in losses. John Paczkowski of the Digital Daily disputes this, saying that Credit Suisse vastly overestimated YouTube's infrastructure costs and that Google has no incentive to correct this impression since doing so would lead its partners to demand a bigger share of revenue.

The argument seems plausible. One of Google's competitive advantages is its ability to buy bandwidth in bulk and its expertise in hosting hordes of servers cheaply. So, taking this into account, the picture changes considerably: YouTube is probably losing more like $170 million (the article says $174 million, but I'm not convinced I see three significant digits).

Now, if I had just told you that YouTube was losing $170 million, that might have sounded bad. But given that they might have been losing $470 million but it turns out it's only $170 million, surely that's not so bad, right? Kind of like getting a $470 pair of shoes for only $170. Such a deal, no?

The key question here is whether Google can afford it and if so, whether they want to. As far as I can tell, the answer to both is yes. With net income of around $4 billion, $170 million looks relatively small. $470 million would be harder to ignore.

Anyone(*) can become president ...

... but only 44 have. If that doesn't work out you can always put together a hit viral video on YouTube. Chris Wilson explores the odds on that one:

On Friday, May 22, I used Web-crawling software to capture the URLs of more than 10,000 YouTube videos as soon as they were uploaded. Over the next month, I checked in regularly to see how many views each video had gotten. After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 views—that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That's the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.

The theory behind the "long tail" is that it can be just as profitable to go after (in this case) the many videos with few hits as the few with many hits. Maybe. But the 280 with no views are unlikely to bring in much. Given that there's at least some overhead per video, it's not even clear that the 6500 or so with 50 views or fewer are worth going after. So that leaves the top 32% or so, pretty much the opposite of the long tail.

Note also that Wilson is sampling all YouTube videos, including videos from record labels, clips from commercial broadcasts and so forth, not just potential viral videos.

So how does YouTube make its money? Well, actually, it doesn't.

*I feel compelled to state the obvious: Quite apart from the hurdles of actually getting elected, or even nominated by a major party, this particular sweepstakes is only open to "natural born citizens" of the US who are 35 or older (If you were a citizen when the constitution was ratified, you're also eligible regardless of where you were born. You'd probably be also able to draw a lot of YouTube hits.).

Laptop orchestras and such on YouTube

A while ago I mentioned an article on laptop orchestras. I'd meant to check some of them out some time, and the other day I finally got around to browsing through YouTube to see what I could see. Here are a few items that turned up. I won't try to play music critic except to say that the style tends heavily toward "electronic" "modern" music -- more abstract soundscapes than beats and chord progressions.

• Here's Princeton's Plork in DC, with a flautist.
• Here's a laptop orchestra in Japan with Ko Ishikawa. It reminds me of some of the demos that came with CSound.
• Here's an edgier composition from the Moscow Laptop Orchestra, incorporating a video component
• This piece by Stanford's Slork makes interesting use of a Wii controller (I wish they'd come up with a better title, though).
• Here's the Berlin Laptop Orchestra lifting a visual from the Spinal Tap movie.

Interestingly, I didn't find anything for the Worldscape Laptop Orchestra that inspired the original post. However, I did find some performances that, while not involving laptops, were clearly in the same vein of using computers and consumer electronics to make music:

• Here is the Modified Toy Orchestra playing, well, modified toys. If you dig around, you can find how-tos and links to a whole subculture of "circuit bending".
• You may have seen the famous iBand clip featuring two iPhones and what looks to me like a DS.
• And finally, here's turntablist DJ Kentaro jamming with Kenoshita Shinichi on Tsugaru-shamisen.

Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords

My focus these days seems to be across the pond ...

The House of Lords doesn't exactly have a cutting-edge reputation, so if you see them on YouTube addressing the question of "What's it all about?", that says something about YouTube's status as a mainstream medium, not to mention something about the House of Lords.

One could take such a clip as a stuffy bunch of old geezers trying to use the web to spiff up their image and try to convince the world that they're a hip, happenin' kind of legislative body like, say, the U.S. Senate, but that would be unfair. Actually, it's a nicely put together, brief and cogent explanation of what the House of Lords actually is, what it does and why people, and Britons in particular, should care -- if they do say so themselves. I certainly learned a couple of things from it.

In other words, it's an entirely legitimate use of modern media to help people understand what their government is up to. This being the web, if you want an alternative viewpoint, such are also available. Interestingly enough, the House itself maintains a listing of recent proposals to reform or abolish it (I think I'm safe in calling "since 1900" recent in this context).

Just make sure you follow the link above, or go through the House of Lords' own web site. The "What's it all about?" video seems to have made its way up the rankings since I first looked, but if you search YouTube directly you're just as likely to end up with a band by the same name, or footage of a peer appearing to sleep through a speech ...