Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 9th, ’23

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"I strongly oppose [newly appointed FCC Commissioner] Anna Gomez’s radical left-wing agenda, including investment-killing and job-killing so-called net neutrality rules." – US Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas






































September 9th, 2023





Senate Confirms Biden’s FCC Nominee, Breaking Years-Long Deadlock

Move clinches Democratic majority at regulatory agency for the first time during President Biden’s term, unlocking its agenda
Cristiano Lima

The Senate on Thursday confirmed Anna Gomez, President Biden’s pick for the Federal Communications Commission, ending a lengthy partisan split at the regulatory agency and giving Democrats the power to carry out major agenda items.

Senators voted 55-43 to confirm Gomez, an FCC veteran who is a communications policy adviser for the State Department. Gomez will take the third Democratic seat on the five-member commission, which oversees broadband and communications regulation.

The move returns the agency to full strength for the first time under Biden, whose initial pick for the FCC role, Gigi Sohn, withdrew after a contentious 16-month confirmation battle. The impasse had left the agency without a Democratic majority for the entirety of Biden’s term until now.

Consumer advocates said the 2½-year delay hampered the FCC’s ability to carry out critical tasks aimed at protecting Americans from potential abuse by the telecom giants, including reinstating the Obama-era net neutrality regulations, which bar internet service providers from blocking or throttling content.

Gomez’s confirmation could also unlock the agency’s ability to carry out more aggressive oversight of the telecommunications sector, which Biden called for in a 2021 executive order, including potentially imposing more stringent utility-style regulation under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.

Biden initially nominated Sohn, another FCC alumna and longtime consumer advocate, for the agency’s third Democratic seat in October 2021. Senate Republican leaders sharply criticized Sohn as a “partisan,” citing her past remarks and social media activity on political matters, and conservative groups mounted a campaign to tank her nomination.

In March, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) dealt Sohn’s nomination a major blow by publicly opposing her and accusing her of holding “partisan alliances with far-left groups.”

Sohn withdrew hours later, citing what she called “unrelenting, dishonest and cruel attacks” against her spurred on by cable and media industry lobbyists.

Sohn, who would have been the agency’s first openly gay commissioner, said in an interview after withdrawing that she also faced repeated attacks over her sexual identity.

Biden nominated Gomez to fill the seat in June, with the White House touting her “extensive experience in domestic and international communications law and policy” in its announcement.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, expressed reservations about Gomez’s views during her June nomination hearing, saying he was not confident that she “possesses the independence and regulatory humility necessary for confirmation.” But the panel advanced her nomination in July.

Once sworn in, Gomez will become the first Latina to serve on the commission since Gloria Tristani stepped down from the agency in 2001, according to the National Hispanic Media Coalition advocacy group. Hispanic civil rights groups had long called on Biden to fill the FCC’s third seat with a Latina or Latino nominee, even as Sohn’s nomination was still pending.

Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Commerce communications subcommittee and one of a half-dozen Hispanic members of the Senate, said he was “proud” that Gomez’s confirmation would bring a “strong Latina” to the FCC, which has spearheaded efforts to boost diversity in the media industry.

“To me, diversity matters with thought and experience in this space,” Luján told The Washington Post in a brief interview Wednesday.

During the Trump administration, the Republican-led FCC spearheaded sweeping efforts to deregulate the telecommunications sector, moves that Democrats are now expected to reverse.

Ahead of Thursday’s vote, Cruz said he “strongly opposed” Gomez’s nomination during a floor speech, arguing that a Democratic majority would allow the FCC to pursue a “radical left-wing agenda, including investment-killing and job-killing so-called net neutrality rules.” The remarks offer a preview of the partisan sparring likely to ensue once Gomez is sworn in.

But while no Republican backed Sohn’s nomination in committee last year, five GOP lawmakers voted to confirm Gomez on the floor Thursday: Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Susan Collins (Maine), Mike Rounds (S.D.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Todd C. Young (Ind.).

Gomez also secured the support of key independents and Democrats seen as potential swing votes while Sohn’s nomination was pending, including Manchin, who opposed the prior nominee. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) did not vote.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...biden-nominee/





The Spectrum / Disney Blackout Led a US Open Player to Pirate the US Open
Chris Welch

Whenever there’s another of these drawn-out carriage disputes between cable providers and content owners — and they happen often — I always say that the customers are the ones who get hurt the most. Last week, nearly 15 million Spectrum subscribers abruptly lost their ability to watch ESPN, ABC, and other Disney-owned channels right as Labor Day weekend got underway — and smack dab in the middle of the US Open. In the days since, Disney and Spectrum parent Charter Communications have been throwing blame back and forth like a hot potato.

But many people are getting fed up with the blackout, and this includes the US Open athletes themselves. “I guess in a lot of hotels, they have Spectrum, so I cannot watch it on TV anymore,” Daniil Medvedev said at a press conference on Tuesday when asked if he’d be watching other matches to better prepare. So, like anyone else in his position would do, he turned to the legally questionable corners of the internet to stream the Open instead.

“But, I don’t know if it’s legal or illegal, but — I have to find a way because I cannot watch it on TV — so I got internet and this pirate website or something, so I watched tennis there. I had no other choice.”

There’s no sign of this spat being resolved anytime soon. So, as the tennis tourney continues on, Medvedev and many fans will likely need to keep pirating matches until Charter and Disney can finally stop bickering and get a deal done. A deal that will no doubt eventually raise customers’ cable prices. Like always.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other...en/ar-AA1gkEsF





The Battle Over Books3 Could Change AI Forever

Copyright activists are on a mission to wipe a popular generative AI training set from the internet. Success could alter the industry—and who controls it.
Kate Knibbs

After OpenAI released GPT-3 in July 2020, independent artificial intelligence researcher Shawn Presser and a few of his fellow machine-learning enthusiasts set a challenge for themselves: Could they recreate it? “We were like, OK, there’s actually not that much standing in the way of us doing this ourselves,” Presser says. So what if OpenAI had deep pockets and a head start?

That summer, they pored over papers about GPT-3, strategizing in marathon Discord chats about how to best approximate its training data sets. Presser honed in on the books they needed. Suspecting that one of OpenAI’s data sets was sourced from an online “shadow library” like Library Genesis, which offers a vast repository of pirated text, he decided to reverse-engineer what he saw as a potentially similar corpus.

It was the right moment for Presser to dive into a new project. Unemployed, he struggled with making it to work on time. He’d get dressed, then fall asleep on the couch. Eventually, he’d get a narcolepsy diagnosis. At the time, he just felt frustrated. He wanted to contribute to society.

“I was poking around, Googling ‘how to download Library Genesis,’” Presser remembers. He found the website of a data archiving group called The Eye; to his amazement, it was hosting links to books from a shadow library called Bibliotik. “I was like, jackpot.”

He used a script written by the late open-access activist Aaron Swartz to convert the files he scraped, amassing a library of around 196,000 books, including works by popular authors like Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, and Zadie Smith. The project took him a week from start to finish. Since OpenAI had called its book data sets “Books1” and “Books2,” Presser decided to keep the tradition alive: He dubbed his pilfered corpus “Books3.”

Once Presser had assembled his library, he asked The Eye if it could host Books3, in large part because he and his buddies didn’t have the money to do it themselves. “We were just nerdy types doing this mostly out of intellectual curiosity.” The data-archiving collective agreed. Books3 went online in October 2020.

Books3 started as a passion project by a Midwestern guy going through a weird time. “I poured my soul into the work,” he says. He saw it as aligned with the open source movement, a way to democratize access to the kind of data sets OpenAI was already using. Some of his collaborators went on to found the nonprofit artificial intelligence collective Eleuther, and Books3 was released as part of Eleuther’s larger data set, The Pile. But Presser remains, at core, a bit player on the fringes of the generative AI boom.

Despite his obscurity, the data set Presser created is now at the center of a roiling controversy over the future of artificial intelligence. Books3 swiftly became a popular training data set, and not just among academic researchers and Eleuther—big companies, including Meta and Bloomberg, have trained their large language models with it. (Meta declined to comment on this story. Bloomberg did not respond to questions emailed to its lawyer.)

While Presser sees Books3 as a contribution to science, others view his data set in a far less flattering light, and see him as sincere but deeply misguided. For critics, Books3 isn’t a boon to society—instead, it’s emblematic of everything wrong with generative AI, a glaring example of how both the rights and preferences of artists are disregarded and disrespected by the AI industry’s main players, and something that straight-up shouldn’t exist.

To that point, one small Danish anti-piracy group is on a mission to wipe Books3 from the internet. The Rights Alliance, which represents the interests of creative workers in Denmark, is taking a multifaceted approach to its quest to obliterate Presser’s data set. And it is making a surprising amount of progress, especially considering it has only a handful of people working on the project from its Copenhagen headquarters.

After spending a week sifting through the data set (“tedious,” says Rights Alliance head of content protection and enforcement Thomas Heldrup, the leader of the crusade), they discovered at least 150 works by authors they represented. Heldrup decided to file Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices against the organizations hosting Books3, including The Eye. These efforts paid off. The Eye did, indeed, take the data set down, as did the research data-sharing site Academic Torrents. This did not permanently remove the data from the internet, of course. But it did make it harder to find.

(It also didn’t necessarily change any minds within these organizations. Academic Torrents director Joseph Paul Cohen complied with the takedown notice, but he says he doesn’t understand the intentions behind it. “The greatest authors have read the books that came before them, so it seems weird that we would expect an AI author to only have read openly licensed works,” he says.)

Rights Alliance isn’t stopping there. It also wants to block sites that host Books3 through the European court system. And in addition to pursuing the data set’s distributors, Rights Alliance has companies that have already trained their language models using Books3 in its sights, and it has contacted both Meta and Bloomberg on the issue. While Meta has not responded, Heldrup says that Bloomberg did—and that the company told Rights Alliance it does not plan to train future versions of its BloombergGPT using Books3.

Meanwhile, in the US, the Authors Guild has organized an open letter to generative AI companies using copyrighted data sets like Books3. “It is only fair that you compensate us for using our writings, without which AI would be banal and extremely limited,” the letter states. It’s been signed by more than 10,000 writers, many of whom have works that are contained in Books3. The Guild is also discussing a licensed version of The Pile (which includes Books3) with Eleuther. “The goal is to ensure that going forward the AI companies only use licensed data sets,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger says via email.

Some of these writers are taking the matter into their own hands. In a high-profile lawsuit filed against Meta, comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors allege that the company infringed their copyrights by training its set of large language models on Books3. (Silverman and the writers are also suing OpenAI in a similar case.)

Butterick disagrees. “A lawsuit can stop them,” he says. “If we prevail.”

One thing everyone WIRED spoke with could agree upon? All this increased scrutiny on data sets has made AI’s big players shy away from transparency. Meta is the prime example. It openly shared the data sets used to train the first version of its ChatGPT competitor Llama, including Books3. Now, it’s tight-lipped about what is used for newer versions. “It behooves these companies to be opaque about their sources,” McCarthy says. Knowing they’re likely to face lawsuits if they fess up to using copyrighted material in their data training sets is a powerful deterrent. This, in turn, will make it harder for writers to know when their copyright is potentially infringed.

Right now, it’s up to AI companies whether or not to disclose where their training sets come from. Without that information, it’s next to impossible for people to prove that their data was used, let alone ask for it to be removed. While the European Parliament has passed a draft law of AI regulations that would require increased data transparency, those regulations are not yet in effect, and other regions lag far behind.

This fight cuts to the heart of the often vicious disagreements about what role AI should have in our world. Copyright law exists to balance the rights granted to creators with the collective right to access information, at least in theory. The battle over Books3 is about what this balance should look like in the age of AI.

Presser believes that if OpenAI has access to this kind of data set, the public deserves access to them too. From this perspective, attempts to crack down on Books3 may end up calcifying the industry, preventing smaller companies and researchers from entering without doing much to stop the current big players.

Copyright law exists to balance the rights granted to creators with the collective right to access information, at least in theory. The battle over Books3 is about what this balance should look like in the age of AI.

Pam Samuelson, a copyright lawyer who co-directs the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, concurs that a crackdown might benefit big corporations that have already been using the data sets. “You can’t do it retroactively,” she says. She also thinks regulations may change the landscape of where big players congregate. Countries like Israel and Japan have already adopted lax stances on AI training materials, so tighter rules in the EU or US may promote what she calls “innovation arbitrage,” where AI entrepreneurs flock to the nations friendlier to their ideas.

The heart of this fight boils down to whether we accept that generative AI training on copyrighted material is an inevitability. This is the stance Stephen King recently took after finding out that his work is in Books3. “Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces,” he wrote.

Idealists who want to wrest back control for creators, like Butterick and Hedrup, aren’t yet willing to give up the fight. There’s a movement to make generative AI training shift into an opt-in model, where only work that is in the public domain or freely given goes into the data sets. “It doesn't have to just be about scraping data sets off the web without permission,” emerging technology researcher Eryk Salvaggio says. If AI companies are pushed to scrap the work they’ve made on copyrighted materials and begin anew, it would certainly upend the current playing field. (Less certain? Whether it’s remotely possible.)

In the meantime, there are already stopgap efforts to persuade generative AI groups to respect the wishes of people who wish to keep their work out of data sets. Spawning, a startup devoted to this type of tool, has a search engine called “Have I Been Trained?” that currently allows people to check if their visual work has been used in AI training data sets; it is planning to add support for video, audio, and text next year. It also offers an API that helps companies honor opt-outs. So far, StabilityAI is one of the major players to adopt it, although Spawning CEO Jordan Meyer is optimistic that companies like OpenAI and Meta might one day get on board. And Meyer recently made contact with another potential collaborator: Shawn Presser.

After everything, Presser does want to help creative types feel they have some control over where their work ends up. “I think it's totally reasonable for people to be able to say, ‘Hey, don't use my stuff,’” he says. “That's like a basic sort of tenet of the internet.”
https://www.wired.com/story/battle-over-books3/





Phonies: J.D. Salinger and Wielding Copyright as Self-Protection

Salinger spent the second half of his career fighting for authors' right to privacy. Did it do any good?
Olivia Rutigliano

After J.D. Salinger published his story “Hapworth 16, 1924” in The New Yorker in 1965, he decided to stop publishing his works. Although he had resigned from his nearly twenty-year-long stint in the literary spotlight, retreating to a home in Cornish, New Hampshire, and beginning a reclusive lifestyle, he assured The New York Times in a rare interview in 1974, that “publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

Salinger’s most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye, has sold more than 65 million copies. His self-imposed exile was hardly acceptable to many among the throngs of readers longing for his next words, and, eventually, after years devoid of Salinger’s stories, some jilted readers turned Salinger’s inexplicable silence into the contemptible, purposeful isolation of a man who believed himself above the rest, with many attempting to do whatever they could to draw him, and the unpublished works he seemed to be hoarding, back into the public eye.

When these endeavors, some of which resulted in unauthorized adaptations of both his books and his own persona, came to light, occasionally exploding into unprecedented legal battles, the ever-resisting Salinger was regarded sort of as a cantankerous ghost of an author—a once welcome houseguest rattling dusty chains at the unassuming newcomers he thought were messing around with things he left behind. Thus, Salinger’s public legacy, a gnarled mess of copyright enforcement designs, First Amendment controversies, and the persistent desire to be left alone by the press, is one of America’s most unique. Yet his belief that total ownership is not relinquished with public publication, as well as his radical enforcement of copyright law and reliance on the right to privacy, revolutionized the role of the “author” in modern culture, and consequently helped preserve both his identity and his works as masterful and mythic American originals.

Though he led a shrouded life, there are aspects of Salinger’s life that remain indisputable facts, even through the monasticism and mystery, and Kenneth Slawenski, the diligent biographer (and manager of the Salinger fan website deadcaulfields.com for nearly two decades) released his own clear chronology of Salinger’s life shortly after the writer’s death in 2010 at the age of 91. In this biography, J.D. Salinger: A Life Raised High (later renamed J.D. Salinger: A Life), Slawenski details the private life of Salinger as much as he can—usually referring to historical and public documents.

Copyright protections can stop a work from being copied, pirated, poached. It can’t stop it from being misunderstood.

As he details Salinger’s personal life with very public records, Slawenski paints a vivid picture of Salinger without attempting to violate the privacy he desired in his later years, particularly detailing the relationship Salinger had to the character Holden Caulfield, as influenced by his numerous attempts to publish The Catcher in the Rye, as well as the stories about Holden that he had written for himself during the war. Slawenski draws a deep comparison between these two figures (the writer and his creation), perhaps extrapolating better than any other biographer the sensitivity and sincerity of the most famous recluse of the twentieth century.

Salinger was particularly sensitive to appropriation. “Suppose you had a coat you liked,” he told the Times in 1974, “and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That’s how I feel.” Decades before Slawenski, in 1986, Ian Hamilton, a popular British author and a literary critic for The London Sunday Times, had attempted to write his own biography of J.D. Salinger. Salinger refused to grant permission, but Hamilton wrote it anyway, relying on many of Salinger’s letters that belonged to collections in the libraries at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Texas. Salinger then sued for damages on the grounds of copyright infringement, unfair competition, and breach of contract, and the case went to court in 1987.

Hamilton argued that his use of Salinger’s personal letters was legitimate under the copyright policy of Fair Use, which legally allows the incorporation of works within others under certain circumstances. Hamilton believed that the use of the letters fell under the “criticism, scholarship, and research” category permitted under Fair Use, and therefore that his utilization was permissible, while Salinger argued that, as the letters were unpublished when Hamilton used them (although Salinger registered them for copyright protection during the beginning of the case), a defense under Fair Use would be invalid, since the policy really referred to published works.

The case was settled using the four principles of Fair Use. Factoring in Hamilton’s transformative utilization of the letters, the fact that letters were unpublished, the large amount of text taken, and the fact that any reproductions and interpretations of Salinger’s letters might interfere with the library traffic aimed at viewing the originals (Hamilton reproduced the “most interesting” parts of their contents) it was decided that Hamilton’s actions were not protected under Fair Use. Salinger’s copyright suit extended beyond this, though—at various points in the text, it is clear that Hamilton blurred paraphrases and quotes from these letters, mimicking Salinger’s style when recounting. According to the case brief, upon cross-examination, Hamilton explained that he used Salinger’s style to prevent using “a pedestrian sentence I didn’t want to put my name to.” The court declared that,

When dealing with copyrighted expression, a biographer (or any other copier) may frequently have to content himself with reporting only the fact of what his subject did, even if he thereby pens a “pedestrian,” sentence. The copier is not at liberty to avoid “pedestrian” reportage by appropriating his subject’s literary devices (Salinger v. Random House, [24]).

Salinger was declared the winner, and Hamilton’s mimicking biography was invalidated. In this moment, both Salinger’s rights and his individual voice were vindicated. However, several years later, Hamilton came out with another book, In Search of J.D. Salinger.

In this self-justificatory, first-person biographical narrative, Hamilton analyzes the Salinger he had just encountered at court, and does not responsibly detail Salinger for biographical purposes preferring to drag down to human level the aloof literary deity who had fought desperately to keep his elevated, and inaccessible status. And he succeeds—Hamilton’s memoir is exceedingly subjective, influenced by his own legal frustrations and the rather cartoonishly Caulfield-esque desire to tell his audience a sort of truth. “Obviously Seymour Glass is Salinger in disguise.” Hamilton writes, comparing Salinger to another lovable, suicidal teenager, this time from Seymour. “It’s evident Salinger has a saint complex. He wants to be a saint. The trouble is, he doesn’t have a saintly personality—quite the opposite—he is egotistical, ill tempered, unforgiving. But he wants to be a saint because saints are above the humans, they are unstoppably superior.” Hamilton is the proponent of this view of Salinger—a haughty relic frozen in time.

Despite his hammy, albeit sleazy, approach, Ian Hamilton helped build Salinger’s famous persona. He turned an introvert into an outsider, a writer into a caricature. The case gave Salinger a threateningly nitpicky reputation he would wear for the rest of his life—the verdict raised opposition because it seemed to infringe upon the First Amendment right to free speech, by censoring what people could reproduce in their own writing. However, Salinger’s lawyers argued, Salinger’s First Amendment rights had actually been trod upon, as, by publishing Salinger’s words without permission, Hamilton had infringed upon Salinger’s right not to speak.

*

In 1982, the writer W.P. Kinsella included a characterized version of Salinger in the 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, a story about an Iowa farmer who is encouraged by mystical voices to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield so the spirits of the eight scandalized baseball players of the Chicago White Sox could play ball again. When this literary Salinger learns about the baseball ghosts, he is delighted, and agrees to help the protagonist. Salinger the writer, however, was not amused with this harmless addition to Shoeless Joe. In a 2010 interview with McLean’s John Geddes, Kinsella mentioned, “his lawyers wrote my publisher’s lawyers saying he was outraged and offended to be portrayed in the novel and they would be very unhappy if it were transferred to other media.” Kinsella was careful in his construction of the character: “He was pretty much an imagined Salinger,” he said later “apart from being a recluse. I made sure to make him a nice character so that he couldn’t sue me.” Although Shoeless Joe is more of a commentary on the magic of American pop culture (baseball meets its match in the grown-up Catcher in the Rye), it does express Salinger as a character, instead of a person with a right to privacy.

Shoeless Joe was adapted into the film Field of Dreams in 1988. It starred Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones, Amy Madigan, Ray Liotta, a young Gaby Hoffman, and the legendary Burt Lancaster (in his last feature film performance). The film was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Writer/director Phil Alden Robinson removed Jerry from the story, replacing him with a similar but distinct enough character named Terry: Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), a major force in the 60s literary scene, author of the perennial classic The Boat Rocker, now a recluse. Ray is instructed, by the voice he hears in his cornfield, to find the writer Terrence Mann and take him to a baseball game.

In 1988, a headline reading “GOTCHA CATHER,” along with a black-and-white photo of a shocked, silver-haired, sixty-nine-year-old Salinger, appeared on the cover of the New York Post. Paparazzi photographer Paul Adao had jumped out at Salinger and taken the candid in Salinger’s town of Cornish, and the canted photo shows the elderly man attempting to punch the camera out of the photographer’s hands. Myles Weber suggests that it inspired Don DeLillo’s Pen/Faulkner Award-winning 1991 novel Mao ii, which is about an reclusive writer’s inability to shake his fame. However, not everyone received the photo with this same sympathy; the photo is the worst violation of privacy the author could have experienced—goofy, and disrespectful in its physical transformation of a rarely-seen, celebrated author into a kooky old hermit, or, given the title, an old Holden Caulfield.

In the late 1990’s, however, two works were released which also challenged Salinger’s privatization of his life. The writer Joyce Maynard, who, at age nineteen, dropped out of Yale to live with the twice-divorced Salinger in 1972. In 1998, she published a memoir about her time with him called If You Really Want to Hear About It. In 2000, the long-suffering daughter of J.D. Salinger and his second wife (Claire Douglas, who also dropped out of college at age nineteen, in 1954, to live with him) published her own memoir, Dream Catcher, about her relationship with her father. Both books, with titles punning on The Catcher in the Rye (in a similar tradition to Hamilton’s Holden-heavy biography), reveal intimate details of Salinger life. Critics of Maynard’s book called hers opportunistic, especially considering she auctioned off her personal letters from Salinger shortly after the publication of her book. (They were bought by Peter Norton, who immediately returned them to Salinger.) But Maynard’s story revealed another important facet of Salinger, a creepy side—that he was an older man obsessed with young girls.

Margaret’s book, published while her father was still alive, should be the most accurate representation of her father thus far. However, her tale conjures up a lost soul, an ex-soldier, and an antisocial wanderer, and seems to be, at least in the tradition of her father’s prose, a kind of epic catharsis. Margaret justifies the publication of her book on the grounds that she has the First Amendment right to share her own story—which just happens to be influenced by her father.

However, shortly after it’s publication, Salinger’s son Matt (the caretaker of his estate), published an open letter in The New York Observer, discrediting his sister’s account on the basis that she was unwell:

Of course, I can’t say with any authority that she is consciously making anything up. I just know that I grew up in a very different house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes,” Salinger explained, going on to claim, “she remembers a father who couldn’t ‘tie his own shoe-laces’ and I remember a man who helped me learn how to tie mine, and even-specifically-how to close off the end of a lace again once the plastic had worn away.

Words like Matt Salinger’s are rare, in that they respectfully acknowledge Salinger’s personal desire for solitude. More importantly, they, in a rich, J.D.-esque tone, serve to remind audiences of a deeper Salinger, one who, as noted by Dennis L. O’Connor, wrote about the sadness of anti-Semitism, the horror of war, and the crime of sexual exploitation, the importance of spirituality, the wonderfulness of children, and “the importance of human dignity.”

Though Salinger, himself, was adapted often, his works faced this fate even more. According to Myles Weber’s “Reading Salinger’s Silence,” it is not uncommon for writers to long for solitude—Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo all chose lives outside the spotlight but, unlike Salinger, they also chose to keep publishing. In addition, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye uniquely defined a generation, so his case is closer to that of the equally dormant Harper Lee, author of the 1960 Pulitzer-Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird. In the 1993 edition of the novel, Harper Lee explained her unique silence in its short introduction: “Mockingbird still says what it has to say.” Lee’s refusal to publish is still distinct from Salinger’s, largely because she handed over the film rights to her masterpiece within two years of publication. Until the Times interview in 1974, Salinger’s perspective on his rights to his works were, according to Weber, “I have my reasons.”

He also adamantly refused to sell film rights. “The Catcher in the Rye” he explains in a letter, “Is a very novelistic novel. There are readymade ‘scenes’—only a fool would deny that—but, for me, the weight of the book is in the narrator’s voice, the non-stop peculiarities of it.” According to Weber, the main reason for Salinger’s onslaught of fan-driven literary boosterism is that only Salinger understood why he stopped publishing—and it’s because people don’t understand that he stopped.

However, the more Salinger’s fans tried to bring him back, the more he grew frustrated, and grew more antisocial. In 1977, Esquire magazine published an anonymous short story called “For Rupert—With No Promises” written with the intent of making it seem as if he had begun to publish again. As it turned out, Esquire’s fiction editor, Gordon Lish, wrote the story. He claimed, “If Salinger was not going to write stories, someone had to write them for him.” Ironically, Gordon Lish was the recipient of Don DeLillo’s dedication in Mao ii, the story allegedly inspired by Salinger’s desire for solitude.

*

On December 8, 1980, an ex-mental patient named Mark David Chapman shot world famous musician John Lennon to “stimulate the reading of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.” A few weeks after his arrest, he sent a note to the New York Times, explaining his motives.

He says that he desired to “’stimulate the reading of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye,’” and “’if you were able to view the actual copy of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ that was taken from me on the night of Dec. 8, you would find in it the handwritten words ‘This is my statement.’’”

According to his note, Chapman identified with the novel’s protagonist, Holden, who, in the book’s conclusion, is institutionalized and brokenhearted. Chapman said, ”My wish is for all of you to someday read ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ All of my efforts will now be devoted toward this goal, for this extraordinary book holds many answers. My true hope is that in wanting to find these answers you will read ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ At his trial, he read out loud the novel’s titular passage, about Holden’s wanting to catch children from falling off a cliff as they played.

In Daniel Stashower’s remarkable study, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Holden: Speculations on a Murder,” he suggests that

Holden Caulfield and Mark Chapman were faced with the same crisis: an assault on innocence. Holden Caulfield could not find a way to preserve innocence forever and was forced to entertain the notion of growing up. If I am correct in my speculation, Chapman found a way. Taking as a model the only character in The Catcher in the Rye who achieved perpetual innocence, Chapman found his course clear. For John Lennon’s innocence – which was essential to Chapman’s man’s own spiritual well-being—to remain intact, Lennon himself would have to die. Only then could his innocence, like [Holden’s deceased brother] Allie’s, be preserved forever.

Salinger’s themes, through the plight of Holden, are angsty, endearing, and easily relatable; the book, which finds new (mostly teenage) fans each year would not have needed Chapman’s help garnering publicity, but, this unfortunate linkage of the text to his action, presented a real-life association Salinger neither intended nor wanted: Holden’s appeal to frustrated, unwell, incel-trending young men. In 1981, following the attempted assassination of then-president Ronald Regan by John Hinckley Jr., police found a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his hotel room. In 1989, the actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered in her apartment by her stalker, Robert John Bardo, who was reported as carrying a copy of the novel when he broke into her home.

Stephen Whitfield notes that a commentary on the appropriation of Catcher by mentally ill young men can be found in John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation from 1990. The troubled young protagonist, Paul, who lies to a wealthy New York Family to ingratiate himself into their home, discusses Catcher with his new family, reading the play as

…a touching story, comic because the boy wants to do so much and can’t do anything. Hates all phoniness and only lies to others. Wants everyone to like him, is only hateful, and is completely self-involved. In other words, a pretty accurate picture of a male adolescent. And what alarms me about the book-not the book so much as the aura about it-is this: The book is primarily about paralysis.The boy can’t function. And at the end, before he can run away and start a new life, it starts to rain and he folds….

Stashower notes, of the popular misreadings of Catcher,

Simply put, it appears Chapman misread The Catcher in the Rye. He took the ‘catcher’ passage to be the novel’s solution, when in fact it is the crisis. No one who has read The Catcher in the Rye will argue that Holden Caulfield was a seriously disturbed sixteen-year-old. He wanders through New York with a genuine desire, to quote an old Beatles tune, to “take a sad song and make it better,” but he doesn’t know how to begin. As a result he develops an all-purpose, self-protective cynicism… Holden Caulfield wants to stop reality. He wants to keep the children in the rye field from growing up. But growing up is the natural order of things. It cannot be stopped.

Meaningful critical interventions, aside, The Catcher in the Rye became cursed by such misreadings, such real-life appropriations. Copyright protections can stop a work from being copied, pirated, poached. It can’t stop it from being misunderstood.

*

Perhaps after this flurry of horrific, real-life infringements, the legacy of Catcher began to wear on its creator. In 2009, Salinger encountered a different kind of brazen opportunism in the Swedish writer Fredrik Colting, who published an unauthorized sequel to Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye in 2009, under the pseudonym J.D. California.

As Salinger had consistently renewed the copyright on The Catcher in the Rye, his estate sued Colting for copyright infringement. The unauthorized sequel, Coming Through the Rye: 60 Years Later, tells the story of “Mr. C,” a 76-year-old Holden Caulfield, who escapes from his nursing home and travels back to New York City to recapture his forgotten youth, before he meets none other than J.D. Salinger, his creator, who has magically brought Holden to life, so he can kill him and finally be rid of his annoying legacy.

By 2009, Salinger was ninety years old and completely deaf. The court evaluated 60 Years Later as a Fair Use case. While the book transformed the original, the new work took far too much (including the “heart”) from the original, and it might destroy the market for authorized sequels. (For those interested, pages 6-7 of the affidavit signed during the case by literary agent Phyllis Westburg detail Salinger’s specific contractual appropriation/adaptation rights).

The court declared Salinger the winner of the dispute. Although this second decision was extremely reminiscent of the 1986 decision, which many feared rattled too close to the First Amendment, Salinger was within the right. According to “Copyright for Functional Expression,” by Lloyd L. Weinreb and published in the Harvard Law Review, an author of a work automatically has copyright over their works, even if it is has not been formally approved, and regardless of the personality of the author. Coulting, and many others, violated that basic principle. Although it does increase his miserly image, Salinger’s reinforcement of this right is justified.

However, Salinger’s militant enforcement of law to protect his own personal interests also set negative precedents. For example, the verdict in Salinger v. Random House, which had prevented the copying of unpublished materials, made it impossible for the University of Maryland to legally microfilm their deteriorating collection of personal papers bequeathed to the library by Katherine Anne Porter. Therefore, at the time, it was both impossible and illegal for the University of Maryland to perform a necessary procedure to save some of their highly valuable documents. The laws towards unpublished works have since changed, but this instance indicates absurd and unexpected social ramifications of national verdict that Salinger had only sought for his personal vindication.

Although the circumstance involving the University of Maryland is tied to a copyright decision that Salinger unluckily and coincidentally spurred, Salinger has reacted with surprising zeal against innocent adaptations, as well.

In 1998, for example, Salinger threatened to sue the Lincoln Center Film Society if they screened an Iranian film called “Pari,” based loosely on Franny and Zooey, and directed by Dariush Mehrjui, who did not want any compensation for showing the film in America, preferring to give the film to the United States as a peaceful “cultural exchange” (McKinley, The New York Times). In this case, Salinger’s desire for privacy borders on inappropriate and obsessive—refusing to overlook a slight infringement in the name of the global peace he, a World War II veteran, allegedly desired badly.

Salinger’s ultimate legacy will be preserved by his estate—which is currently run by his widow, Colleen Salinger, and his son, Matt. Matt Salinger has already sent a bill through the New Hampshire legislature that would allow commercial use of one’s identity to be inheritable after death. The bill, which Salinger had hoped would prevent the sale of popular merchandise (t-shirts, hats, mugs, etc) with the Paul Adao photo (as well as the ubiquitous 1950 black-and-white photograph by Lotte Jacobi) on them, was vetoed on the grounds that, it would “inhibit constitutionally protected speech and result in needless litigation to judicially establish what should have been made explicit in this bill,” according to New Hampshire Governor Lynch (Ramer, The Huffington Post). History has come full circle—Salinger’s legacy has once again been tied to restrictions of the First Amendment.

The estate has not resisted the publication of Slewenski’s biography, perhaps because Slewinski clearly wants little from Salinger or his estate, and prefers to present the facts, allowing them, and not yet another interpretation of the man, to speak for themselves.

Salinger’s tradition has already begun to change, simply because his static identity had changed—he died. Both Myles Weber and Ian Hamilton suggest that Salinger had already created his own posthumous identity by retreating into solitude so early into his career. Therefore, Salinger’s real death brought about his public rebirth. For example, fifty letters that Salinger had exchanged with his English friend Donald Hartog from their meeting in 1938 through the 1980’s, which had clandestinely been possessed by University of East Anglia since Hartog’s death in 2007, were being made available to the public to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Salinger’s death. In these letters, Salinger discusses average things with his friend (such as his love for Burger King Whoppers and his favorite tennis player Tim Henman). Salinger’s death is slowly unfurling his humanity (Gabbatt, The Guardian).

The last book published by J.D. Salinger, a 1963 collection of stories called Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour—an Introduction, has a curious, and similarly human, dedication. “If,” Salinger briefly states, “there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.” It is hard to imagine, however, that this anxious and extant idealist who, with the dedication in Seymour, entrusted his most autobiographical work simply to anyone who cared enough to read it, is the same man accused of being a strange, old version of his own characters, in the words of Weber, “a fledgling actor in his adolescence… now sinking his teeth into the role of a lifetime, that of a reclusive artist,” and, in the words of Hamilton, “an egotistical, ill-tempered, unforgiving man… who wants so badly to be canonized.” Salinger was well aware of his inadvertent public persona; in the 1974 Times interview, he stated, “I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.”

In other words, before his death in 2010, Salinger became the ghost in the machine of American literature, embodying the battle between preservation attempts of his exterior works, and therefore the maintenance of their immortality, and the need for self-preservation and an undisturbed, peaceful human existence. And a battle it was, indeed.
https://crimereads.com/j-d-salinger-copyright/





Sony Copyright Claims for Bewitched Spell Trouble for Group that Preserves Old TV [Updated]

Nonprofit Museum of Classic Chicago TV fights termination of YouTube channel.
Jon Brodkin

[Update at 6:56 pm ET: It looks like Rick Klein will be able to keep the YouTube channel running. Sony's copyright office emailed Klein after this article was published, saying it would "inform MarkScan to request retractions for the notices issued in response to the 27 full-length episode postings of Bewitched" in exchange for "assurances from you that you or the Fuzzy Memories TV Channel will not post or re-post any infringing versions from Bewitched or other content owned or distributed by SPE [Sony Pictures Entertainment] companies."

Sony said it's taking that step because "this is the first time we have become aware of your YouTube Channel posting unauthorized versions of SPE-distributed content, and the unique circumstances therein." However, Sony told Klein that his channel must remove "similarly infringing posts for other SPE-distributed shows," pointing out that he had posted episodes from other Sony shows.]

The Museum of Classic Chicago Television has about 5,000 videos, including many decades-old commercials and news shows, posted on its YouTube channel and its own Fuzzy Memories website. President and chief curator Rick Klein's "quest to save vintage Chicago TV shows and commercials" was featured in a WBEZ story two years ago.

But after 16 years of Klein and his group, who rely on donors and volunteers, archiving old videos, the TV museum's YouTube channel on August 30 received six copyright strikes for posting 27 Bewitched episodes owned by Sony Pictures Television. Copyright complaints were sent by MarkScan, a "digital asset protection" firm that content owners hire to enforce copyrights. MarkScan has been sending copyright complaints on Sony's behalf since at least 2014.

Klein told Ars today that he's not opposed to the Bewitched videos' deletion and that he has no intention of reposting them. But over the past few days he has been trying to reach anyone at MarkScan or Sony who can reverse the copyright strikes so he can continue the Museum of Classic Chicago Television's YouTube channel.

"We have received copyright strikes before, and the majority of the time were able to resolve them outside of the YouTube system—just by, you know, two humans talking to each other," Klein told us in an email. "It's hard to have a conversation with a faceless corporate behemoth, though."

YouTube owner Google provides copyright holders the option of scheduling a removal request to take effect in seven days, which gives the uploader a week to delete the content and avoid a copyright strike. Klein wishes MarkScan had used that less punitive option. "We would have just immediately deleted the videos and that would have been the end of it," he said. "But they decided to go right to takedowns with immediate strikes, and without even emailing us ahead of time to simply ask if we would remove the videos—which we would have."

“Arbitrary” copyright strikes

Klein's predicament was reported yesterday by TorrentFreak, which noted that MarkScan's copyright enforcement on behalf of Sony is sometimes a bit sloppy. MarkScan last year sent a copyright complaint to Google about Sony content posted on an India-based streaming service that is owned by Sony itself.

Copyright strikes are issued to YouTube page operators when a copyright owner has "submitted a complete and valid legal takedown request for using their copyright-protected content," according to a support page on YouTube copyright strikes. Three strikes within a short time period makes a YouTube channel "subject to termination."

Copyright strikes expire after 90 days, but that doesn't help Klein because he received six in one day. The other options provided by YouTube owner Google are to "get in touch with the person who claimed your video and ask them to retract their claim of copyright infringement" or submit a counter-notification arguing that "your video was removed by mistake, or qualifies as fair use."

The notification from YouTube to Klein, which he shared with Ars, shows that the channel got five strikes containing five Bewitched videos each and a sixth strike containing two Bewitched videos. Klein said the 27 Bewitched videos were all "from broadcasts and specialty 16mm network prints." They were all removed automatically as part of the copyright claim process.

"To say this is arbitrary is blatantly obvious," Klein told Ars. "The videos were all of the same 'offending' material... why not just issue one strike for the whole batch? Those videos would still be removed, so MarkScan/Sony would still get what they want. What is the purpose of issuing multiple strikes if not to be cruelly and senselessly punitive?"

Klein said he contacted MarkScan by sending "multiple emails at multiple times from multiple accounts, and to multiple email addresses that we were able to find—all to no avail." He also sent an email to Sony's copyright email address.

"We have no issues deleting the material and never uploading it again—that was never the complaint, nor are we asking for more rights to display material than the copyright holder is willing to grant—we're just asking that if a company doesn't want something uploaded to let us know first or give us a chance to remove it voluntarily before destroying 16+ years of effort and tens of thousands of hours of work," he told us.

“Your channel is scheduled to be terminated”

YouTube's system gives channel operators like Klein seven days to work things out before strikes result in termination. "You now have 6 copyright strikes. As a result, your channel is scheduled to be terminated in 7 days... Your channel will remain live for the next 7 days to allow you to seek a resolution and keep your channel up," an automated email from YouTube on August 30 said.

Klein can delay the termination for a little while by filing a counter-notification claim but may not be able to get it reversed completely. "If you submit a counter-notification, your channel won't be disabled while the counter-notification is unresolved. If the counter-notification is resolved in your favor, or the claim is retracted, your channel won't be impacted," Google says.

Klein told us he plans to submit counter-notifications for each video before the channel deletion tomorrow if Sony's copyright claims aren't retracted in time. Klein has already written the appeal and provided us with the draft text.

"We claim a Fair Use exemption for this material: The quality is sufficiently degraded; the program itself is combined with historical broadcast ephemera as well as advertising examples, which transforms the base material into a unique historical artifact, suitable for research," the draft text says, in part. "All of these factors, combined with our non-profit status, also provide relevant purpose and character of use, and are, at the bare minimum, sufficient enough evidence of Fair Use to allow the counter-notifications to be forwarded to the claimant."

Klein's planned appeal argues that there "were no Content ID claims on the videos to give any indication that the material's copyright was being actively enforced. Had there been, we would not have uploaded the material. Lastly, all our attempts to reach the (purported) copyright owner MarkScan were ignored, so filing counterclaims to prevent our channel's termination is our only option."

Fuzzymemories.tv will live on

Even if Google accepts the counterclaims, Klein said the museum is "planning on deleting the offending videos and not uploading them again." Klein said he isn't optimistic that YouTube will rule in his favor, though.

"If YouTube doesn't accept the rationale for the counterclaims, they can reject them outright and not forward the text or anything else to the claimant, and that will officially be the end of the road for this particular avenue. There is no way to appeal YouTube's decision if a counterclaim is rejected," he said.

Rejecting counterclaims without forwarding them to the claimant "effectively short-circuits the process and takes away your rights," Klein argues. The system helps copyright owners "but doesn't help those who are trying to stretch the boundaries of Fair Use or at least to fight against unfair takedowns," he said. At the very least, he wants to exercise "our legal right to work this out directly with the claimant."

While the YouTube channel may not have much time left, the fuzzymemories.tv site will continue hosting the videos. The videos on fuzzymemories.tv "are in no danger, except perhaps from a danger of the site being woefully outdated, slow, and in need of a major overhaul. Perhaps this is the time to pivot to that project," Klein said.

We contacted MarkScan, Sony, and Google about the Museum of Classic Chicago Television case today. MarkScan replied to our email and wrote, "Please allow us some time to look into the matter." We'll update this article if we get new information from any of the companies.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...serves-old-tv/





Cerabyte Ceramic Storage Poised to Usher in 'Yottabyte Era'

Firm's roadmap contains 'CeraTapes' which boast TB/cm2 densities.
Mark Tyson

A technology startup has made startling claims for its innovative ceramic nanolayer-based storage. Cerabyte asserts it will disrupt the $500B storage market by reducing data center storage TCO by 75%. More specifically, its roadmaps sketch out CeraMemory cartridges (2025-30) storing between 10 PB and 100 PB, and its CeraTape (2030-35) with up to 1 EB capacity per tape. According to the startup, these new formats are poised to address density, performance, and access paradigms, as well as the cost and sustainability demands of datacenters.

Cerabyte, a German storage startup, has published an abstract from its upcoming presentation at the 2023 Storage Developer Conference in Fremont, California (h/t Blocks and Files). Here, for the first time, it will detail how it will introduce CeraMemory with inorganic nanolayers, using 50-100 atoms thick ceramics to store information. Scaling ceramic data storage technology from 100nm to 3nm bit sizes will scale the corresponding data density from GB/cm2 to units measured in TB/cm2, reckons Cerabyte.

To record data to CeraMemory, Cerabyte says that a laser beam or particle beam structures data matrices similar to QR codes. Data reading can be done with equipment using high-resolution microscopic imaging techniques or electron beam microscopy. Initially, there will be no need for particle beams/electron microscopy, as those technologies will only be required later in the roadmaps at the highest densities.

So, capacities look impressive, but what about performance? In its abstract from the 'Ceramic Nano Memory – Data Storage for the Yottabyte Era' presentation, Cerabyte says its technology can read and write data at GB/s class speeds. These read/write technologies are "low power," according to the storage startup.

Another seemingly excellent inherent property of ceramic storage is the touted media durability and longevity. On its website, Cerabyte says that its media can last "5,000+ years" and that the data stored can ensure through "a wide temperature range of -273°C (-460°F) to 300°C (570°F)." We have used quotes here, as those are extraordinary figures. Additionally, it is boasted that CeraMemory is resistant to corrosive, acidic, radioactive environments and EMP disruption.

Blocks and Files has some background information about the two road-mapped storage formats mentioned above. The first Cerabyte solution, CeraMemory, will come as a cartridge that contains sheets with ceramic coatings. If you looked closely at the data stored, it would look like "quasi-punched cards in nano-scale." That might be another way of describing a tiny QR code.

Meanwhile, CeraTape (2030-35) gives away the storage medium type in its name. These data tapes will have a 5 µm thick substrate with a 10 nm thick ceramic coating. The arrival of these multi-layered tapes will usher in TB/cm2 scale densities.

Cerabyte says it works closely with major players in related tech/manufacturing segments. Its presentation at the 2023 Storage Developer Conference, which takes place between September 18 and 21, looks set to be one to watch.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ce...-yottabyte-era
















Until next week,

- js.



















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