Copyright callouts and the promise of creator-driven platform governance (2024)

It is now commonly claimed that new online platforms have made news more participatory, more of a ‘conversation’ than a ‘lecture’. Mainstream news outlets, though in principle keen to capitalise on new opportunities for engagement with audiences, are often tentative in the steps they take in this direction. Various commercial risks, as well as opportunities, are associated with linking branded content to the frequently rancorous and hostile arenas of online conversation. This paper looks at the example of YouTube, a notoriously unruly and uncivil conversational domain, and explores some of the textures and facets of conversational participation by audiences now being staged within the official branded channels of established mainstream news outlets. Combining analysis of comment threads with theoretical reflections on the nature and function of online conversation spaces such as that provided by YouTube, this paper considers the value of such spaces for the outlet, for audiences and for the public sphere at large.Keywords: YouTube, news, public sphere.

International Journal of Cultural Policy

This study is the embodiment of an intellectual evolution over a decade in the making. As an electronic and hip hop music DJ when I began my graduate studies in 2000, I became fascinated with remix culture, questions about creativity, and—with a nudge from Brian Ott—the socially constructed nature of authorship.

American University of International Law Review, 2017

Around the world, the focus of copyright policy reform debates is shifting from the protection of copyright owners’ rights towards defining their appropriate limits. There is, however, a great deal of confusion about the legal ontology of copyright “limits,” “exceptions,” “exemptions,” “defenses,” and “user rights.” While the choice of terminology may seem to be a matter of mere semantics, how we describe and conceptualize lawful uses within our copyright system has a direct bearing on how we delimit and define the scope of the owner’s control. Taking seriously the role of rhetoric in shaping law and policy, this Paper critically examines the recent embrace of the language of “users’ rights” to frame fair use, fair dealing, and other non-infringing acts. This terminology has been adopted to varying degrees by courts in Canada, Israel, and the United States and is increasingly employed by public interest advocates and policy-makers at the domestic and international level. In this Pap...

Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2013

Society Media + Society, 2019

The rise of contemporary platforms—from GAFAM in the West to the “three kingdoms” of the Chinese Internet—isreconfiguring the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content in staggering and complex ways. Given thenature and extent of these transformations, how can we systematically examine the platformization of cultural production?In this introduction, we propose that a comprehensive understanding of this process is as much institutional (markets,governance, and infrastructures), as it is rooted in everyday cultural practices. It is in this vein that we present fourteenoriginal articles that reveal how platformization involves key shifts in practices of labor, creativity, and citizenship. Diverse intheir methodological approaches and topical foci, these contributions allow us to see how platformization is unfolding acrosscultural, geographic, and sectoral-industrial contexts. Despite their breadth and scope, these articles can be mapped alongfour thematic clusters: continuity and change; diversity and creativity; labor in an age of algorithmic systems; and power,autonomy, and citizenship.

Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation, 2020

In the last decade, YouTube has established itself as the largest video sharing platform worldwide. Content creators on YouTube work to act, film and post-produce their content, and usually engage with their audience through multiple channels. Their success, and thus revenue, is dependent on their visibility on the platform. Visibility on YouTube is tied to the platform’s recommendation engine, an algorithmic architecture that chooses what users see as recommendations on their screens when they use YouTube. Griev-ances among content creators raised, however, when YouTube enforced a strict regime of mostly automated content moderation on the platform. Income-generating content creators are a globally dispersed workforce, however, facing a fragmented work environment. This makes the mutual association of those platform workers seem highly difficult. Also, collective action on YouTube could not build on conventional forms of labour organising such as work stoppages. Nevertheless, in March 2018, grassroots, self-organising by a group of YouTubers has resulted in the creation of the YouTubers Union consisting of professional content creators, aspiring professionals, viewers and supporters. The YouTubers Union sent introductory letters to You-Tube headquarters, conducted internal membership surveys and launched a collective »warning strike«. YouTube proved open to talking with some large creators individually. Yet, the company refused to communicate with the YouTubers Union, and rejected any institutionalised form of review and feedback. As talks with YouTube proved unable to produce lasting agreements, the YouTubers Union entered into a cooperative venture with the German trade union IG Metall – the largest union in Europe. This coalition with a traditional union resulted in the joint FairTube campaign launched in July 2019. The campaign attracted a high level of attention to the situation of content creators but was initially able to sit out the pressure. Nevertheless, the campaign made their cause more visible to the public while also diversifying the membership of the YouTubers Union, while IG Metall was able to promote itself in organising a campaign of platform workers.

Law, Innovation and Technology, 2022

Concentration of power in terms of user traffic and copyright content is most evident in content platforms in China. Such concentration has generated an unexpected impact on the way we understand and appreciate creativity, on copyright enforcement and determination of liability on content platforms, and on the regulation of the cultural market by the government. Specifically, the concentration of power in content platforms has not only curbed direct online piracies to a large extent but has also accelerated the fragmentation of copyright enforcement and spawned the need for algorithmic recommendation and filtering systems, which in turn has reinforced the cultural censorship system of China. This paper argues that the employment of algorithms by platforms must be treated with prudence: the algorithmic decision-making systems employed by platforms must be transparent as much as possible, and remedies must be provided for concerned users. The algorithms employed by content platforms must be adjusted to reflect not just the interests of the platforms but also the public interest in accessing and delivering information and local policy considerations. This paper suggests that our regulatory framework should reflect the algorithmic turn of content platforms in its legal and non-legal instruments and alleviate their negative impact on society.

This article considers challenges to policy and regulation presented by the dominant digital platforms. A radical democratic framing of the deliberative process is developed to acknowledge the full complexity of power relations that are at play in policy and regulatory debates, and this view is contrasted with a traditional liberal democratic perspective. We show how these different framings have informed historical and contemporary approaches to the challenges presented by conflicting interests in economic value and a range of public values in the context of media content, communication infrastructure, and digital platform policy and regulation. We argue for an agonistic approach to digital platform policy and regulatory debate so as to encourage a denaturalization of the prevailing logics of commercial datafication. We offer some suggestions about how such a generative discourse might be encouraged in such a way that it starts to yield a new common sense about the further development of digital platforms, one that might favor a digital ecology better attuned to consumer and citizen interests in democratic societies.

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law Vol. 16, n. 4 (2014)

The paper examines how Internet content governance is posing regulatory issues directly related to the growing importance ofan equitable access to digital information. In particular, it looksat conflicts arising within the systems of rights and obligationsattached to communication (and especially content provision) over the Internet. It seeks to identify emerging tensions and to draw out the implications for the nature and definitions of rights (e.g. ofcommunication and access, but also of IP ownership) and forregulations and actions taken to protect, promote or qualify thoserights. These points are illustrated by a series of recent examples.

The Digital Rights Movement is an effort by activists and advocacy organizations to expand consumer rights in media content use. A central argument for legitimating those rights pivots on a view of culture as a participatory endeavour. This article focuses on the Movement’s use of the discourse of culture and digital technology describing (1) how the Movement positions culture as necessarily participatory; (2) the role of mediating technologies in achieving a culture that is participatory; and (3) the connection of those visions to a discourse of free speech in the form of what is termed here, remix speech. The article suggests that adopting this view of culture and media consumption can result in a politics of participatory culture, where the political economic arrangements of the cultural industries and consumersare realigned.

Commercial content moderation (CCM) is the practice of screening of user-generated content (UGC) posted to Internet sites, social media platforms and other online outlets that encourage and rely upon such material to generate visits to and participation from users. Despite being essential to the media production cycle for these commercial websites and social media platforms as a major source of brand protection, gatekeeping and tastemaking, commercial content moderation is largely unknown outside its own industry and those that rely on it. This research endeavors to unveil the practice of commercial content moderation and to further contextualize it alongside contemporary trends of globalization, outsourcing and other economic and geospatial reconfigurations facilitated by the increasingly networked nature of the world. CCM tasks vacillate from the mind-numbingly repetitive and mundane to exposure to images and material that can be violent, disturbing and, at worst, psychologically ...

Media, Culture and Society, 2019

Over the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and other cognate disciplines has focused our attention on the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having 'disrupted' many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and inter-sectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures.

Convergence, 2021

This article interrogates political brokerage on YouTube by examining the platform’s role in the construction of political discourses and in configuring the action of a new genre of political actors advancing a political agenda through historical revisionism. Using assemblage theory and drawing from technography (Bucher, 2018), we propose the concept of ‘networked political brokerage’ to characterize the mutually affirming relationship of YouTube’s governance mechanisms and alternative political influencers’ microcelebrity practices in building, complementing, and magnifying historical revisionist narratives through and within a network of algorithmically-sanctioned videos. We illustrate how this interplay of platform logics and cultures of use (Rieder et al., 2018) privileges and legitimizes political content into knowledge without accountability. We argue for the importance of examining YouTube as a socio-technical driver of this political brokerage process in curating political information in this contemporary political scene.

This paper discusses the nature of copyright exceptions to the limited monopoly rights of copyright holders as well as why a grasp of copyright exceptions is central to the evolution of participatory and online video environments. It also explains the historical underpinnings of unbalanced copyright policy, and how challenging attempts to rebalance it have been. In that light, the success of practice-related rebalancing efforts has been remarkable. These rebalancing efforts are of particular interest to participatory and online video creators and users, who can both make use of their successes and translate their techniques into the copyright regimes of their own national environments. Finally it argues that such participation in rebalancing copyright will be critical to the evolution of participatory and online video culture.

Journal of Contemporary European Research, 2013

23(2) Richmond Journal of Law & Technology 4 (2017)

This article discusses the resistance to the Digital Revolution and the emergence of a social movement " resisting the resistance. " Mass empowerment has political implications that may provoke reactionary counteractions. Ultimately—as I have discussed elsewhere—resistance to the Digital Revolution can be seen as a response to Baudrillard's call to a return to prodigality beyond the structural scarcity of the capitalistic market economy. In Baudrillard's terms, by increasingly commodifying knowledge and expanding copyright protection, we are taming limitless power with artificial scarcity to keep in place a dialectic of penury and unlimited need. In this paper, I will focus on certain global movements that do resist copyright expansion, such as creative commons, the open access movement, the Pirate Party, the A2K movement and cultural environmentalism. A nuanced discussion of these campaigns must account for the irrelevance of copyright in the public mind, the emergence of new economics of digital content distribution in the Internet, the idea of the death of copyright, and the demise of traditional gatekeepers. Scholarly and market alternatives to traditional copyright merit consideration here, as *

protection and a free and open Internet – has been criticized as being inconsistent at best and hypocritical at worst. Placing US copyright and Internet policy in an historical context and using Susan Strange’s concepts of structural power and knowledge structures, we argue that seeming inconsistencies can be rationalized by examining economic foundations of each policy that promote US business interests. All knowledge regulation policies involve balancing access and restriction, with the specific balance the outcome of path-dependent political and economic forces and subject to political contestation. Our analysis suggests that the current US policy of Internet freedom and strong copyright protection represents a particular, historically situated strategy designed to exert structural power in the global information economy: free flow of information creates markets by exposure to intellectual properties while copyright secures economic benefit from the flow. We argue that a full and honest debate over issues of information access should be discussed in terms of contemporary values drawn from all cultures, with the realization that different societies and interests will privilege access and dissemination differently. Recognizing as legitimate and incorporating these different perspectives into the global governance structures of the Internet is the key challenge facing those who favour truly democratic global Internet governance.

**This is a working version of a paper subsequently revised and published in Journal of Cyber Policy 3(2) https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2018.1519030 **Like all markets, online platforms need rules. Their rules are both explicit, in the form of community standards, moderator guidelines, terms of use, commercial contracts and policies, and implicit, in the code that shapes their interfaces and the algorithms that bring market participants together. When platforms govern the exchange of news, content and speech, their rules raise profound issues of human rights and public welfare. Online platforms are not publishers, but neither are they neutral conduits; their role in governing online content markets has inevitable ethical connotations.This paper argues that making intermediaries liable for content they host is not an appropriate solution to the harms arising from the free flow of information online. Policymakers must use new techniques to evaluate and engage with intermediaries’ rule-making activities. Since the nature and effects of intermediaries’ rules are often hard to assess, policymakers increasingly seek their ‘procedural accountability’.