If we had to ask each person before converting their text to audio, it just wouldn’t feasibly happen.
The way we thought about it was that >99.9% of people will be thrilled to have their writing read by more people. For the <0.01% who won’t, we made it easy for them to opt out, either for a particular article or for all their work. This way the whole community and hundreds of EAs can have access to great content and the <0.01% can also keep their writing in only written format.
This way everybody wins. :) I think the utilitarian case for it is strong.
Especially once it’s more known, people will know that if their post gets enough upvotes it’ll be converted, so they can request to not have it converted beforehand if they want. The potential harm is small and mitigated and the potential upside is huge.
FWIW I think I endorse Kat’s reasoning here. I don’t think it matters if it is illegal if I’m correct in suspecting that the only people who could bring a copyright claim are the authors, and assuming the authors are happy with the system being used. This is analogous to the way it is illegal, by violating minimum wage laws, to do work for your own company without paying yourself, but the only person who has standing to sue you is AFAIK yourself.
Not a lawyer, not claiming to know the legal details of these cases, but I think this standing thing is real and an appropriate way to handle
I’ve seen this reasoning a lot, where EA organisations assume they won’t get sued because the only people they’re illegally using the data of are other EAs, and and as someone whose data has been misused with this reasoning, I don’t love it!
This is a reason to fix the system! My point is that it reduces to “make all the authors happy with how you are doing things”, there is not some spooky extra thing having to do with illegality
TBC I do not endorse using people’s content in a way they aren’t happy with, but I would still have that same belief if it wasn’t illegal at all to do so.
And there are various things one could probably do to make it not illegal but still messed up and the wrong thing to do! Like make it mandatory to check a box saying you waive your copyright for audio on a thing before you post on the forum. I think if, like some of the tech companies, you made this box really little and hard to find, most people would not change their posting behavior very much, and would now be totally legal (by assumption).
I am generally pro more audio content, and sceptical of the goodness of current copyright laws.
<0.01% seems overconfident to me.
Once something is up on the internet, it’s up forever. Taking it down post-facto doesn’t actually undo the damage.
You only need one person to sue you for things to go quite badly wrong.
As such, flagrantly violating the law on a fairly large scale (and the scale is an important part of the pitch here) seems like a dubious idea. Especially if you also go on public record in a way that suggests you know it’s illegal and don’t care.
<0.01% is definitely overconfident given at that point I had already expressed misgivings and we do not have 10,000 authors on the EA Forum.
(I’m not against my writing being podcastified in principle but I want to check out any podcast services who broadcast my work in advance to decide if I’m happy to be associated with them. I’m strongly against someone else making that decision for me.)
Once something is up on the internet, it’s up forever. Taking it down post-facto doesn’t actually undo the damage.
I think this isn’t actually correct – I think it depends a lot on the type of content, how likely it is to get mirrored, the data format, etc. E.g. the old Leverage Research website is basically unavailable now (except for the front page I think), despite being text (which gets mirrored a lot more).
You only need one person to sue you for things to go quite badly wrong.
Whether it actually goes ‘badly wrong’ depends on the type of lawsuit, the severity of the violation, the PR effects, etc. It’s probably good to err on the side of not violating any laws, and worth looking into it a bit before doing it.
I’m focusing on the prudential angle here, but I’d also be quite sympathetic to an author who was mad that their work was used in this way without their permission, even if it was later taken down.
How would it not be a copyright violation? Seems better to require consent, presumably via a checkbox or an email. Consent also could improve the average quality a bit. Although then the question is whether the EAF/LW/AF designers can be bothered including that kind of email, or checkbox+API, etc as a feature.
It seems like an extremely good use of time for EA forum designers (and others) to implement this. I think this is a fantastic project and I really hope this goes ahead. I also think it’s valuable for the EA community to take less start-up style shortcuts as the movement gets older and more well-known. I think the risk of giving the impression of being low-integrity or messy is high enough that regardless of whether copyright laws are good or not, it’s worth following them.
If we had to ask each person before converting their text to audio, it just wouldn’t feasibly happen.
Which part isn’t feasible? If you have the skill and capacity on the team to write something which will scrape forum posts, check if they have karma above a threshold, convert them to speech, and post them as audio, it seems more likely than not that you’d have the skill/capacity to edit the tool such that it DMs the authors of the posts it wants to scrape, asking them to reply “Yes” or “OK”, and then only uploads posts where the author did respond to the DM with such a reply.
If you think that most authors wouldn’t reply, so this would make the tool much less useful, then this seems like a different claim. Especially if you’re only doing recent posts, it seems somewhat unlikely that the authors will not see their DMs, which would mean that a lack of reply is not that unlikely to indicate a preference against inclusion.
If we had to ask each person before converting their text to audio, it just wouldn’t feasibly happen.
The way we thought about it was that >99.9% of people will be thrilled to have their writing read by more people. For the <0.01% who won’t, we made it easy for them to opt out, either for a particular article or for all their work. This way the whole community and hundreds of EAs can have access to great content and the <0.01% can also keep their writing in only written format.
This way everybody wins. :) I think the utilitarian case for it is strong.
Especially once it’s more known, people will know that if their post gets enough upvotes it’ll be converted, so they can request to not have it converted beforehand if they want. The potential harm is small and mitigated and the potential upside is huge.
These responses do seem curiously blithe about the question of whether or not this is legal.
FWIW I think I endorse Kat’s reasoning here. I don’t think it matters if it is illegal if I’m correct in suspecting that the only people who could bring a copyright claim are the authors, and assuming the authors are happy with the system being used. This is analogous to the way it is illegal, by violating minimum wage laws, to do work for your own company without paying yourself, but the only person who has standing to sue you is AFAIK yourself.
Not a lawyer, not claiming to know the legal details of these cases, but I think this standing thing is real and an appropriate way to handle
I’ve seen this reasoning a lot, where EA organisations assume they won’t get sued because the only people they’re illegally using the data of are other EAs, and and as someone whose data has been misused with this reasoning, I don’t love it!
This is a reason to fix the system! My point is that it reduces to “make all the authors happy with how you are doing things”, there is not some spooky extra thing having to do with illegality
TBC I do not endorse using people’s content in a way they aren’t happy with, but I would still have that same belief if it wasn’t illegal at all to do so.
And there are various things one could probably do to make it not illegal but still messed up and the wrong thing to do! Like make it mandatory to check a box saying you waive your copyright for audio on a thing before you post on the forum. I think if, like some of the tech companies, you made this box really little and hard to find, most people would not change their posting behavior very much, and would now be totally legal (by assumption).
but it would still be a bad thing to do.
My more detailed response is:
I am generally pro more audio content, and sceptical of the goodness of current copyright laws.
<0.01% seems overconfident to me.
Once something is up on the internet, it’s up forever. Taking it down post-facto doesn’t actually undo the damage.
You only need one person to sue you for things to go quite badly wrong.
As such, flagrantly violating the law on a fairly large scale (and the scale is an important part of the pitch here) seems like a dubious idea. Especially if you also go on public record in a way that suggests you know it’s illegal and don’t care.
<0.01% is definitely overconfident given at that point I had already expressed misgivings and we do not have 10,000 authors on the EA Forum.
(I’m not against my writing being podcastified in principle but I want to check out any podcast services who broadcast my work in advance to decide if I’m happy to be associated with them. I’m strongly against someone else making that decision for me.)
I think this isn’t actually correct – I think it depends a lot on the type of content, how likely it is to get mirrored, the data format, etc. E.g. the old Leverage Research website is basically unavailable now (except for the front page I think), despite being text (which gets mirrored a lot more).
Whether it actually goes ‘badly wrong’ depends on the type of lawsuit, the severity of the violation, the PR effects, etc. It’s probably good to err on the side of not violating any laws, and worth looking into it a bit before doing it.
I otherwise agree with your points!
I’m focusing on the prudential angle here, but I’d also be quite sympathetic to an author who was mad that their work was used in this way without their permission, even if it was later taken down.
How would it not be a copyright violation? Seems better to require consent, presumably via a checkbox or an email. Consent also could improve the average quality a bit. Although then the question is whether the EAF/LW/AF designers can be bothered including that kind of email, or checkbox+API, etc as a feature.
It seems like an extremely good use of time for EA forum designers (and others) to implement this. I think this is a fantastic project and I really hope this goes ahead. I also think it’s valuable for the EA community to take less start-up style shortcuts as the movement gets older and more well-known. I think the risk of giving the impression of being low-integrity or messy is high enough that regardless of whether copyright laws are good or not, it’s worth following them.
Possibly, it is enough to just have a disclaimer like “by submitting, you agree to have this turned into an audio format” to satisfy copyright laws?
Seems like a good idea if it were easy
Very minor point, but 100%-99.9% = 0.1%
Which part isn’t feasible? If you have the skill and capacity on the team to write something which will scrape forum posts, check if they have karma above a threshold, convert them to speech, and post them as audio, it seems more likely than not that you’d have the skill/capacity to edit the tool such that it DMs the authors of the posts it wants to scrape, asking them to reply “Yes” or “OK”, and then only uploads posts where the author did respond to the DM with such a reply.
If you think that most authors wouldn’t reply, so this would make the tool much less useful, then this seems like a different claim. Especially if you’re only doing recent posts, it seems somewhat unlikely that the authors will not see their DMs, which would mean that a lack of reply is not that unlikely to indicate a preference against inclusion.
If I were to receive such messages, I would likely fail to respond (unintentionally) at least 20% of the time.
This seems roughly consistent with “somewhat unlikely”, I expect the fraction is similar for me.