#Intellectual property violation

[miochimochi]

Made 2 new lino cuts. The fabric here isn't the best for stamping it seems but it's enough to show off.

[spocksjuul]

one of my spirk prints got deactivated on Etsy for intellectual property violation… on their anniversary no less…….the blatant homophobia

[yeehawetc]

this ao3 AI stuff is genuinely so stupid. ch*tgpt is profoundly bad/dangerous/stupid/etc but it training on bad fanfiction is like 0% the problem

[dykehimejoshi]

ever since i was a little girl i knew i always wanted to violate intellectual property and copyright law

[mariaalexander]

You Can't "Opt Out" of Meta's Generative AI

Many people are just discovering that Mark Zuckerberg has declared war on the intellectual property of all Meta users. The new terms of service for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads declares the following: A highly misleading blog post by a well-meaning author recently went viral. It supposedly tells people how to opt out of Meta using our post and photos to train generative AI. The problem is…

[chromegnomes]

the most frustrating thing about AI Art from a Discourse perspective is that the actual violation involved is pretty nebulous

like, the guys "laundering" specific artists' styles through AI models to mimic them for profit know exactly what they're doing, and it's extremely gross

but we cannot establish "my work was scraped from the public internet and used as part of a dataset for teaching a program what a painting of a tree looks like, without anyone asking or paying me" as, legally, Theft with a capital T. not only is this DMCA Logic which would be a nightmare for 99% of artists if enforced to its conclusion, it's not the right word for what's happening

the actual Violation here is that previously, "I can post my artwork to share with others for free, with minimal risk" was a safe assumption, which created a pretty generous culture of sharing artwork online. most (noteworthy) potential abuses of this digital commons were straightforwardly plagiarism in a way anyone could understand

but the way that generative AI uses its training data is significantly more complicated - there is a clear violation of trust involved, and often malicious intent, but most of the common arguments used to describe this fall short and end up in worse territory

by which I mean, it's hard to put forward an actual moral/legal solution unless you're willing to argue:

Potential sales "lost" count as Theft (so you should in fact stop sharing your Netflix password)

No amount of alteration makes it acceptable to use someone else's art in the production of other art without permission and/or compensation (this would kill entire artistic mediums and benefit nobody but Disney)

Art Styles should be considered Intellectual Property in an enforceable way (impossibly bad, are you kidding me)

it's extremely annoying to talk about, because you'll see people straight up gloating about their Intent To Plagiarize, but it's hard to stick them with any specific crime beyond Generally Scummy Behavior unless you want to create some truly horrible precedents and usher in The Thousand Year Reign of Intellectual Property Law

[sayruq]

A Girl Scout troop leader in Missouri was threatened with legal action by the organization after her troop tried to sell bracelets to raise money for Gaza, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Nawal Abuhamdeh said that it had been the children’s idea to sell bracelets to raise money for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. She said that the members of her troop, including her own 10 year-old daughter, had been deeply emotionally impacted by Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 29,000 people, and at least 10,000 children. “I’m grieving. We are all grieving. We literally couldn’t muster the energy to sell cookies,” Abuhamdeh said. Soon after making a post about the fundraiser, Abuhamdeh said she received an email from the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri organization, alerting her that her troop could not support “partisan politics,” and needed to “stay neutral.” The email said that the fundraiser had violated the organization’s governing documents, and that if the troop went forward with their plan, the organization would engage legal counsel to “protect the intellectual property and other rights of the organization.”

[probablyasocialecologist]

Fifty per cent of web users are running ad blockers. Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony. (Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”.) So when someone in a boardroom says, “Let’s make our ads 20 per cent more obnoxious and get a 2 per cent revenue increase,” no one objects that this might prompt users to google, “How do I block ads?” After all, the answer is, you can’t. Indeed, it’s more likely that someone in that boardroom will say, “Let’s make our ads 100 per cent more obnoxious and get a 10 per cent revenue increase.” (This is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website.) There’s no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn’t install a counter-app that co-ordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold. No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete or, in other words, “IP law”. IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for “a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers”. And “app” is just a euphemism for “a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user”.

[mothman-etd]

I have talked a few times about Psychological Operations or psyops on here, but I would like to point out a real world example of a PO Operation that was found out recently by the Department of Justice.

Before that though, If you would like to read more about the actual position of a PO soldier, you can look no further then the PO benefits page on the US Army special operations recruitment website (https://www.goarmysof.army.mil/PO/).

Personally I feel like many people still believe psyops to be some kind of conspiracy theory instead of a fairly standard military division in almost all modern militaries, anyways onto the example.

The US Department of Justice is going after (indicting) two RT (Russian state media) employees for committing fraud and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Basically they created a front "media" company in Tennessee, translated russian propaganda videos into english, then paid right-wing influencers to promote (reblog/retweet/talk about on streams) said videos.

Three of the named influencers that I could find were Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson.

I honestly have no idea who these three are, but supposedly their platforms have millions of followers. Also, some of these influencers were paid up too $100,000 a week to promote their videos and messaging.

So to summarize, Russia setup a fake company to pay American influencers to repeat their lies so that their followers would interpret those lies as legitimate since their were coming from a source they trust.

When people talk about election interference this is what we are talking about.

$100K a week is insane money for most, I am sure many people would be hard pressed to not sell their soul for that much money. Many of the videos from this media company were lies about the Ukraine war, and looking into Tim Pool it seems he also has a very anti-Ukraine stance (Audio from one of this podcasts https://v.redd.it/41xgvuri0vmd1/DASH_AUDIO_128.mp4)

I generally do not talk about my job on here, but corporations used to pay me to run seminars to help train their employees on spotting these types of attacks--mainly targeted psyops attacks from nation states to hack into their company via end user interaction.

Or in layman's terms, to help companies protect themselves from Russian Ransomware Thieves and Chinese Intellectual Property/Information collectors. Both of these being extensions of the Psychological Operations military divisions of each country.

I am really not sure how to end this post other than I am just trying to show people how real it is that the militaries of the world are spending obscene amounts of money in trying to influence your opinions and day to day life via your internet consumption.

Surf responsibility, be very wary of anyone telling you not to vote and don't believe everything you see/hear on TikTok/youtube/twitter/Insta etc etc

[deception-united]

Worldbuilding: Questions to Consider

Government & authority:

Types of government: What type of government exists (monarchy, democracy, theocracy, etc.)? Is it centralised or decentralised?

Leadership: Who holds power and how is it acquired (inheritance, election, divine right, conquest)?

Law enforcement: Who enforces the laws (military, police, magical entities)?

Legal system: How are laws made, interpreted, and enforced? Are there courts, judges, or councils?

Laws:

Criminal laws: What constitutes a crime? What are the punishments?

Civil laws: How are disputes between individuals resolved?

Cultural norms: How do customs and traditions influence the laws?

Magic/supernatural: Are there laws governing the use of magic or interaction with supernatural beings?

Social structure:

Class/status: How is society divided (nobility, commoners, slaves)? Are there caste systems or social mobility?

Rights & freedoms: What rights do individuals have (speech, religion, property)?

Discrimination: Are there laws that protect or discriminate against certain groups (race, gender, species, culture)?

Economy & trade:

Currency: What is used as currency? Is it standardised?

Trade laws: Are there regulations on trade, tariffs, or embargoes?

Property laws: How is ownership determined and transferred? Are there inheritance laws?

Religion/belief systems:

Religious authority: What role does religion play in governance? Are religious leaders also political leaders?

Freedom of religion: Are citizens free to practice different religions? If not, which are taboo?

Holy laws: Are there laws based on religious texts or teachings?

Military & defense:

Standing army: Is there a professional military or a militia? Who serves, and how are they recruited?

War & peace: What are the laws regarding war, peace treaties, and diplomacy?

Weapons: Are there restrictions or laws regarding weapons for civilians? What is used as a weapon? Who has access to them?

Technology & magic:

Technological advancements: How advanced is the technology (medieval, steampunk, futuristic, etc.)?

Magical laws: Are there regulations on the use of magic, magical creatures, or artifacts?

Innovation & research: How are inventors and researchers treated? Are there laws protecting intellectual property?

Environmental/resource management:

Natural resources: How are resources like water, minerals, and forests managed and protected, if at all?

Environmental laws: Are there protections for the environment? How are they enforced? Are there consequences for violations?

Cultural & ethical considerations:

Cultural diversity: How does the law accommodate or suppress cultural diversity?

Ethics: What are the ethical foundations of the laws? Are there philosophical or moral principles that underpin them?

Traditions vs. change: Does the society balance tradition with progress? How?

Happy writing ❤

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[thecolacorporation]

Last week I received a cease and desist letter, claiming that my F*CK THE LAPD design was in violation of LAPD intellectual property. A few days later my lawyer sent this letter, seen here in its entirety.

[maowives]

person who writes fanfiction on a semi-professional basis through a quirk of economic conditions which briefly allows them to fly under the radar of copyright law because they're not a big enough fish to fry: uhhh actually this violates the sanctity of the sacred institution of intellectual property, I am very smart and not a seething reactionary, OC DONUT STEEL.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

UK publishers suing Google for $17.4b over rigged ad markets

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's good that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's good that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.

It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" – we call it "secrets."

And yet, the most popular – and widely deployed – anti-Big Tech tactic promulgated by the news industry and supported by many of my fellow trustbusters is premised on making Big Tech pay to index the news and/or provide a forum to discuss news articles. These "news bargaining codes" (or, less charitably, "link taxes") have been mooted or introduced in the EU, France, Spain, Australia, and Canada. There are proposals to introduce these in the US (through the JCPA) and in California (the CJPA).

These US bills are probably dead on arrival, for reasons that can be easily understood by the Canadian experience with them. After Canada introduced Bill C-18 – its own news bargaining code – Meta did exactly what it had done in many other places where this had been tried: blocked all news from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Meta properties.

This has been a disaster for the news industry and a disaster for Canadians' ability to discuss the news. Oh, it makes Meta look like assholes, too, but Meta is the poster child for "too big to care" and is palpably indifferent to the PR costs of this boycott.

Frustrated lawmakers are now trying to figure out what to do next. The most common proposal is to order Meta to carry the news. Canadians should be worried about this, because the next government will almost certainly be helmed by the far-right conspiratorialist culture warrior Pierre Poilievre, who will doubtless use this power to order Facebook to platform "news sites" to give prominence to Canada's rotten bushel of crypto-fascist (and openly fascist) "news" sites.

Americans should worry about this too. A Donald Trump 2028 presidency combined with a must-carry rule for news would see Trump's cabinet appointees deciding what is (and is not) news, and ordering large social media platforms to cram the Daily Caller (or, you know, the Daily Stormer) into our eyeballs.

But there's another, more fundamental reason that must-carry is incompatible with the American system: the First Amendment. The government simply can't issue a blanket legal order to platforms requiring them to carry certain speech. They can strongly encourage it. A court can order limited compelled speech (say, a retraction following a finding of libel). Under emergency conditions, the government might be able to compel the transmission of urgent messages. But there's just no way the First Amendment can be squared with a blanket, ongoing order issued by the government to communications platforms requiring them to reproduce, and make available, everything published by some collection of their favorite news outlets.

This might also be illegal in Canada, but it's harder to be definitive. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enshrined in 1982, and Canada's Supreme Court is still figuring out what it means. Section Two of the Charter enshrines a free expression right, but it's worded in less absolute terms than the First Amendment, and that's deliberate. During the debate over the wording of the Charter, Canadian scholars and policymakers specifically invoked problems with First Amendment absolutism and tried to chart a middle course between strong protections for free expression and problems with the First Amendment's brook-no-exceptions language.

So maybe Canada's Supreme Court would find a must-carry order to Meta to be a violation of the Charter, but it's hard to say for sure. The Charter is both young and ambiguous, so it's harder to be definitive about what it would say about this hypothetical. But when it comes to the US and the First Amendment, that's categorically untrue. The US Constitution is centuries older than the Canadian Charter, and the First Amendment is extremely definitive, and there are reams of precedent interpreting it. The JPCA and CJPA are totally incompatible with the US Constitution. Passing them isn't as silly as passing a law declaring that Pi equals three or that water isn't wet, but it's in the neighborhood.

But all that isn't to say that the news industry shouldn't be attacking Big Tech. Far from it. Big Tech compulsively steals from the news!

But what Big Tech steals from the news isn't content.

It's money.

Big Tech steals money from the news. Take social media: when a news outlet invests in building a subscriber base on a social media platform, they're giving that platform a stick to beat them with. The more subscribers you have on social media, the more you'll be willing to pay to reach those subscribers, and the more incentive there is for the platform to suppress the reach of your articles unless you pay to "boost" your content.

This is plainly fraudulent. When I sign up to follow a news outlet on a social media site, I'm telling the platform to show me the things the news outlet publishes. When the platform uses that subscription as the basis for a blackmail plot, holding my desire to read the news to ransom, they are breaking their implied promise to me to show me the things I asked to see:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

This is stealing money from the news. It's the definition of an "unfair method of competition." Article 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to step in and ban this practice, and they should:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Big Tech also steals money from the news via the App Tax: the 30% rake that the mobile OS duopoly (Apple/Google) requires for every in-app purchase (Apple/Google also have policies that punish app vendors who take you to the web to make payments without paying the App Tax). 30% out of every subscriber dollar sent via an app is highway robbery! By contrast, the hyperconcentrated, price-gouging payment processing cartel charges 2-5% – about a tenth of the Big Tech tax. This is Big Tech stealing money from the news:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Finally, Big Tech steals money by monopolizing the ad market. The Google-Meta ad duopoly takes 51% out of every ad-dollar spent. The historic share going to advertising "intermediaries" is 10-15%. In other words, Google/Meta cornered the market on ads and then tripled the bite they were taking out of publishers' advertising revenue. They even have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig this market, codenamed "Jedi Blue":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

There's two ways to unrig the ad market, and we should do both of them.

First, we should trustbust both Google and Meta and force them to sell off parts of their advertising businesses. Currently, both Google and Meta operate a "full stack" of ad services. They have an arm that represents advertisers buying space for ads. Another arm represents publishers selling space to advertisers. A third arm operates the marketplace where these sales take place. All three arms collect fees. On top of that: Google/Meta are both publishers and advertisers, competing with their own customers!

This is as if you were in court for a divorce and you discovered that the same lawyer representing your soon-to-be ex was also representing you…while serving as the judge…and trying to match with you both on Tinder. It shouldn't surprise you if at the end of that divorce, the court ruled that the family home should go to the lawyer.

So yeah, we should break up ad-tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Also: we should ban surveillance advertising. Surveillance advertising gives ad-tech companies a permanent advantage over publishers. Ad-tech will always know more about readers' behavior than publishers do, because Big Tech engages in continuous, highly invasive surveillance of every internet user in the world. Surveillance ads perform a little better than "content-based ads" (ads sold based on the content of a web-page, not the behavior of the person looking at the page), but publishers will always know more about their content than ad-tech does. That means that even if content-based ads command a slightly lower price than surveillance ads, a much larger share of that payment will go to publishers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Banning surveillance advertising isn't just good business, it's good politics. The potential coalition for banning surveillance ads is everyone who is harmed by commercial surveillance. That's a coalition that's orders of magnitude larger than the pool of people who merely care about fairness in the ad/news industries. It's everyone who's worried about their grandparents being brainwashed on Facebook, or their teens becoming anorexic because of Instagram. It includes people angry about deepfake porn, and people angry about Black Lives Matter protesters' identities being handed to the cops by Google (see also: Jan 6 insurrectionists).

It also includes everyone who discovers that they're paying higher prices because a vendor is using surveillance data to determine how much they'll pay – like when McDonald's raises the price of your "meal deal" on your payday, based on the assumption that you will spend more when your bank account is at its highest monthly level:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Attacking Big Tech for stealing money is much smarter than pretending that the problem is Big Tech stealing content. We want Big Tech to make the news easy to find and discuss. We just want them to stop pocketing 30 cents out of every subscriber dollar and 51 cents out of ever ad dollar, and ransoming subscribers' social media subscriptions to extort publishers.

And there's amazing news on this front: a consortium of UK web-publishers called Ad Tech Collective Action has just triumphed in a high-stakes proceeding, and can now go ahead with a suit against Google, seeking damages of GBP13.6b ($17.4b) for the rigged ad-tech market:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/17-bln-uk-adtech-lawsuit-against-google-can-go-ahead-tribunal-rules-2024-06-05/

The ruling, from the Competition Appeal Tribunal, paves the way for a frontal assault on the thing Big Tech actually steals from publishers: money, not content.

This is exactly what publishing should be doing. Targeting the method by which tech steals from the news is a benefit to all kinds of news organizations, including the independent, journalist-owned publishers that are doing the best news work today. These independents do not have the same interests as corporate news, which is dominated by hedge funds and private equity raiders, who have spent decades buying up and hollowing out news outlets, and blaming the resulting decline in readership and profits on Craiglist.

You can read more about Big Finance's raid on the news in Margot Susca's Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy:

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087561

You can also watch/listen to Adam Conover's excellent interview with Susca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA

Frankly, the looters and billionaires who bought and gutted our great papers are no more interested in the health of the news industry or democracy than Big Tech is. We should care about the news and the workers who produce the news, not the profits of the hedge-funds that own the news. An assault on Big Tech's monetary theft levels the playing field, making it easier for news workers and indies to compete directly with financialized news outlets and billionaire playthings, by letting indies keep more of every ad-dollar and more of every subscriber-dollar – and to reach their subscribers without paying ransom to social media.

Ending monetary theft – rather than licensing news search and discussion – is something that workers are far more interested in than their bosses. Any time you see workers and their bosses on the same side as a fight against Big Tech, you should look more closely. Bosses are not on their workers' side. If bosses get more money out of Big Tech, they will not share those gains with workers unless someone forces them to.

That's where antitrust comes in. Antitrust is designed to strike at power, and enforcers have broad authority to blunt the power of corporate juggernauts. Remember Article 5 of the FTC Act, the one that lets the FTC block "unfair methods of competition?" FTC Chair Lina Khan has proposed using it to regulate training AI, specifically to craft rules that address the labor and privacy issues with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

This is an approach that can put creative workers where they belong, in a coalition with other workers, rather than with their bosses. The copyright approach to curbing AI training is beloved of the same media companies that are eagerly screwing their workers. If we manage to make copyright – a transferrable right that a worker can be forced to turn over their employer – into the system that regulates AI training, it won't stop training. It'll just trigger every entertainment company changing their boilerplate contract so that creative workers have to sign over their AI rights or be shown the door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Then those same entertainment and news companies will train AI models and try to fire most of their workers and slash the pay of the remainder using those models' output. Using copyright to regulate AI training makes changes to who gets to benefit from workers' misery, shifting some of our stolen wages from AI companies to entertainment companies. But it won't stop them from ruining our lives.

By contrast, focusing on actual labor rights – say, through an FTCA 5 rulemaking – has the potential to protect those rights from all parties, and puts us on the same side as call-center workers, train drivers, radiologists and anyone else whose wages are being targeted by AI companies and their customers.

Policy fights are a recurring monkey's paw nightmare in which we try to do something to fight corruption and bullying, only to be outmaneuvered by corrupt bullies. Making good policy is no guarantee of a good outcome, but it sure helps – and good policy starts with targeting the thing you want to fix. If we're worried that news is being financially starved by Big Tech, then we should go after the money, not the links.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/06/stealing-money-not-content/#content-free

[wraithlafitte]

⚠️ ATTENTION WRITERS ⚠️

This person has been copying fanfiction and reposting it as their own. I was just alerted to the fact that they have reposted one of my fics from January. I have made a DMCA report.

Here are my receipts:

(their post on the left, my original post on the right.)

You can also easily find my original post in my master list to see that the date is not photoshopped.

If you are a fanfic writer, I urge you to search their page and find out if your work has been stolen. They have fics from multiple fandoms.

Even if you don’t post fics on here- they clearly got my fic from my AO3 since it includes the AO3 tags and summary. You can report it as copyright violation, as the DMCA protects intellectual property.

‼️ PLEASE REBLOG ‼️

[mesetacadre]

one thing that eventually strikes you after not a lot of time exposed to them is the sheer shallowness of most liberals' reasoning. Usamerican democrats are not the only kind of liberal of course, but their incessant presence means this post is mostly based on them. Liberalism in itself isn't necessarily shallow, even if idealism is, IMO, a very limiting framework. But it is overwhelming how simplistic and even childish these people can get.

It's less that they argue with what you say but rather throw a series of phrases and simple ideas that sound related to what you said. It's uncountable the amount of times liberals' reply to posts of mine talking about electoralism and the marxist position on it (which is more nuanced than "don't vote") just boil down to "but trump", even though most times I'm not even talking about the US, or "well what else do you propose doing" and then ignore the many times I've talked about that, sometimes in the very same post they're replying to. And there is no depth here, there is no substance to take apart in the first place. What I'd consider a respectable liberal explanation on voting; civicism, the idea of representative democracy, how you have to make yourself heard, etc, do actually have some substance and an ideological background. But there is none in this case, none whatsoever. Lesser-evilism is probably the most complicated idea the common USamerican democrat will defend, but that framework only makes sense in actual dichotomies without any alternative choices, which electoralism never is. That's why they like the trolley problem so much, as well. It's an illusion of depth that falls apart as soon as it's constrated with reality.

Let's take another example, liberal opposition to revolutions. The developed liberal opposition to them goes along the lines of the violation of private property and an outright rejection of a class-based analysis of society, of course this argumentative line will vary depending on who's talking. But the vast, vast majority of usamerican democrat liberals who even engage with revolutionary ideas in the first place will not go there and instead, never thinking outside the context of the US of course, will argue nonsense and essentially just call you bloodthirsty, and parrot truisms like "at the end of the day, it will be the common people and/or minorities who suffer the most".

There are no traces of actually engaging with what the other person says, they have lodged themselves in the narrowest worldview possible and will not even let their gaze stray from it, let alone venture out of it. No intellectual curiosity, no willingness to think about other contexts than the US post-2016 and maybe Reagan's years. I can't decide if this attitude is more pathetic or pitiful. Not even expecting them to agree with me, that's their prerogative. There seems to be just no desire to ever change an opinion

[hallowpen]

The Legalities of GMMtv's Yfind

Some of us have probably moved on already... but I finally heard back from my mother's coworker [X] regarding the legalities of GMM's Yfind process as laid out in their terms and conditions, which I have translated here. For privacy reasons, I'm not going to name my source, but just know they are a qualified contract lawyer currently working for CUIPI. My mother and I have both profusely apologized for bothering them with this matter, for which they've been incredibly gracious.

As I've stated, the 'contract' is creatively worded to skirt around company liability, though I didn't exactly have the legal know-how to explain why. Now that I am armed with that information, let's dive in...

First things first: the Terms and Conditions are, in fact, considered a binding contract as you are required to have read them before you can submit your work. This initial contract is considered to be legally sound in its use of specific terminology as to not violate Thailand's "Unfair Contract Terms Act". What really matters, however, is the final negotiated contract between the winning applicants and the company... which is unavailable for inspection.

The Prize Money. So... this is where things get a little exploitative. Because it's hard to put a price on someone's work when there aren't any 'clockable' hours. Some might be thinking, "Three pages doesn't seem like a lot of work," but you can do a lot with three pages. It was pointed out that spacing, font size, and margins were not specified beyond the standard default document settings. Meaning, if an applicant were to submit a document using the default normal spacing, 11 point font, and 1 inch margins, they can average anywhere between 1500-2000 words. Not to mention... there's pre-planning, brainstorming, and drafts that must happen before the writing of a final 'submittable' synopsis. AND they are allowing a total of two works per submission. Story developers within a production company typically do not work alone. Your normal story developer, as part of a low-end production company (so not GMMtv), averages about ฿300/hr. For an average nine-hour work day, the prize money works out to be equal to twelve and a half days of work. Work that would typically get done as part of a development team... who would be earning much higher than the average salary given GMMtv's stature. The 'reward' money is the only compensation applicants will be receiving should they agree to transfer ownership of their property to the company, there are no royalties (this is standard for novel to television adaptation rights, as well). You can decide for yourself if that seems fair.

Liability. (Without seeing the final contract negotiations and transfer documents, a lot of the information provided to me is purely speculative) The company has, essentially, ensured that they will not be held liable for any copyright or intellectual property lawsuits... should they arise. They have avoided explicitly stating their sole legal responsibility of the property once ownership has been transferred. Meaning, that even though winning applicants will no longer own their work, they can still be held liable (by those claiming infringement AND by the company themselves) for these types of lawsuits. And where the company has access to a lot more financial and legal resources, the burden placed on applicants is a lot heavier. This is where the next point comes into play.

Legal Advocation. It is highly recommended that, should the company not already provide one, winning applicants should seek legal representation to negotiate on their behalf. They are within their rights to request an advocate be provided for them on the company's dime. The company is also within their rights to refuse... but at that point, it's a clear sign to back out from negotiations and not sign any legal documentation. If they really are this desperate for ideas, then there shouldn't be a problem... unless GMM are purposefully looking to take advantage of someone who doesn't know any better. If applicants are under the age of consent (in Thailand, that's anyone under 20), an advocate must be provided for them regardless, otherwise all binding contracts are considered null and void.

IP Retention Rights. It was also pointed out to me that it was interesting to see GMMtv [barely] address intellectual property retention rights in their FAQ rather than in their terms and conditions. What does that mean? If GMMtv do not legally obtain the rights to an applicant's work, it should remain the sole property of the applicant. BUT intellectual property ownership is a lot harder to prove in a court of law than, say, filed patents and copyrights. So even though GMMtv will not own the property per se, they do retain access to it after it's already been submitted. (Again, speculative ->) They have teams who can develop and change enough of a property to avoid infringement liability. And even still, should a case be made for infringement, it's the applicants (who are at a disadvantage) vs. GMMtv's wealth of financial and legal resources.

Bottom Line... Yfind is bullshit (my words) and unfortunately, there will be people who are going to fall for it.