MUSTREAD How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards | #NeilGaiman #DrWho #Worldcon – Can we call Censorbots “Daleks”?

The story writes itself…

Last night, robots shut down the live broadcast of one of science fiction’s most prestigious award ceremonies. No, you’re not reading a science fiction story. In the middle of the annual Hugo Awards event at Worldcon, which thousands of people tuned into via video streaming service Ustream, the feed cut off — just as Neil Gaiman was giving an acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script, “The Doctor’s Wife.” Where Gaiman’s face had been were the words, “Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement.” What the hell?

Jumping onto Twitter, people who had been watching the livestream began asking what was going on. How could an award ceremony have anything to do with copyright infringement?

And then it began to dawn on people what happened. Gaiman had just gotten an award for his Doctor Who script. Before he took the stage, the Hugo Awards showed clips from his winning episode, along with clips from some other Doctor Who episodes that had been nominated, as well as a Community episode.

Continues at How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards [UPDATED].

Comments

3 responses to “MUSTREAD How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards | #NeilGaiman #DrWho #Worldcon – Can we call Censorbots “Daleks”?”

  1. Dave Walker

    Wow.

    Not “wow, that’s some really daft programming on the censorbots, that stream should have been whitelisted”, but “wow, people reckon they’ve successfully implemented a workable censorbot, and it’s actually been deployed live and at scale”.

    I’ve had a look at Vobile’s website, and it’s remarkably content-free when it comes to describing how the core technology actually works; it’s got to be some kind of fuzzy pattern-matching if it can pick up excerpts (as I’m unaware of copyright messages being inserted steganographically, yet; also it’s been shown (but I’ve lost the ref) that steganography which can survive lossy transcoding gets visibly / audibly intrusive…) which means it’s subject to false positive / false negative issues in normal operation anyway, and therefore probably “a bit fraught” for live deployment.

    Still, Doctor Who is a very easy target for a censorbot operating on these lines. While Gaiman’s (excellent) episode didn’t feature the programme’s favourite baddies, some of the other clips probably did – and it’s not hard for audio analysis to spot a voice going through a ring modulator ;-).

  2. Carl

    Time to give the parasites the hoof from *our* Internet, I think.

  3. Dave Walker

    Latest rumour (currently being investigated) is the censorbots also killed the feed from the Democrat National Conference, when Michelle Obama was speaking. If the rumour turns out to be accurate, I suspect the censorbots will go away again – for a while, at least.

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