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Thursday, April 10, 2014

News broke early this morning on Facebook that Wikipedian Adrianne Wadewitz died while rock climbing recently. Wadewitz was well known in the Wikimedia community for her activism drawing attention to the lack of female contributors on Wikipedia. She was also very involved in the Wiki Education Foundation, serving as a member of its board of directors.

Wadewitz was one of the most visible women in the media on the under-representation of women amongst contributors to Wikipedia, talking to media organizations like the BBC, the Huffington Post and non-English publications like Greek-language magazine LIFO. Some estimates put female participation rates at around 10% of contributors and there is a body of academic work talking about systemic bias against topics featuring women on Wikipedia.

She was involved in organizing several edit-a-thons aimed at encouraging greater female participation and improving content about women, including Wikipedia Takes America: Los Angeles, FemTech Edit-a-thon, Wikipedia Loves Eagle Rock, Wikipedia Loves WeHo, and Feminists Engage Wikipedia. Wadewitz’s own work to address systemic bias as an article contributor included improving English Wikipedia articles relating to women, including:

• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
• Mary: A Fiction
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman
• Timeline of Mary Wollstonecraft
• Fanny Imlay
• Mary Shelley
• Anna Laetitia Barbauld
• Sarah Trimmer
• Mary Martha Sherwood

She started contributing to English Wikipedia in July 2004. She had taught two classes on collaborative work on the project, and was involved with FemTechNet Wikistorming, an academic effort to encourage more women involved in academia to contribute to Wikipedia. In the past month, she had written several blog entries on HASTAC, an online collaborative platform dedicated to changing the way people learn, about how to write about academics on Wikipedia.

Fellow activist Sarah Stierch said in a public post on Facebook, “My heart hurts. Adrianne was a leading voice – and her legacy still is – in the work we have been doing to get more women and more diverse peoples contributing to Wikipedia. Two days ago she was quoted in the BBC, for godsake.” Stierch went on to say, “A sarcastic, feminist, smart, brilliant, to the point delivery type of academic genius who held an honest love life for all to see and a life in LA that was becoming one she owned.”

At the time of her death, she was a Mellon Digital Scholarship Fellow at Occidental College. In 2011, she earned her PhD from Indiana University.

Wikimedians are memorializing her on her Wikipedia talk page, which is adorned with a picture of a funerary arrangement of flowers. A notice at the top of the page invites condolences, which have been arriving in their dozens. “This is a crushing loss, for the Wikipedia community and the world. There was no one else like her.” wrote one contributor. Another noted “Adrianne embodied brilliance, determination, and enthusiasm in everything she did.”

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Google, the owners of YouTube, claimed in a court briefing today that the one billion dollar lawsuit against the company “threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information.”

Viacom Inc. is suing Google over 150,000 videos, for which Viacom owns the copyright, that were allegedly being shown on YouTube. Google has responded by saying that they followed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prevents companies from being prosecuted if they bring down copyrighted content as soon as they are made aware of it. “Viacom’s lawsuit challenges the protections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that Congress enacted a decade ago to encourage the development of services like YouTube,” said Google. “Congress recognized that such services could not and would not exist if they faced liability for copyright infringement based on materials users uploaded to their services. It chose to immunize these services from copyright liability provided they are properly responsive to notices of alleged infringement from content owners.”

“Looking at the online world today, there is no question that Congress made the correct policy choice,” Google continued. “Legitimate services like YouTube provide the world with free and authorized access to extraordinary libraries of information that would not be available without the DMCA — information created by users who have every right to share it.”

Google then claimed that “YouTube also fulfills its end of the DMCA bargain, and indeed goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works.”

Saturday, February 2, 2008

On February 4, NASA will digitally transmit the Beatles song Across the Universe in the direction of the star Polaris, commonly known as the North Star.

This will mark the first time music has been sent into deep space. The song will be transmitted from the DSS-63 radio antenna at the Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex in Robledo de Chavela, Spain at 12:00 am UTC.

The broadcast celebrates the 40th anniversary of the song’s recording, the 45th anniversary of NASA’s Deep Space Network, and the 50th anniversary of NASA itself.

Polaris is approximately 431 light years away from Earth, meaning it will take 431 years for the song to reach the star traveling at the speed of light.

NASA’s press release includes statements from Beatle Paul McCartney, who tells NASA to “send [his] love to the aliens”, and John Lennon‘s wife Yoko Ono, who sees the event as “the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe.”

The idea was hatched by Martin Lewis, a Los Angeles-based humorist and Beatles historian.

“It never had the highest profile and is a bit of a forgotten classic,” Lewis said of the song. “But it has universal appeal. It transcends ages, borders, language and other barriers.”

NASA invites astronomy fans and Beatles fans alike to play the song simultaneously as it is being transmitted into space.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Five years after its launch, Apple Computer‘s iTunes downloadable music service in February passed Wal-Mart to become the No. 1 music seller in the United States, according to figures released April 3 by NPD Group, a market research firm.

The firm said more than 4 billion songs had been downloaded from the iTunes store since its launch in 2003 and that as of February, the iTunes store accounts for 70% of all digital music sales. NPD said according to those figures, Apple’s iTunes store passes U.S. electronics retailer Best Buy for the No. 2 U.S. music retailer in 2007.

According to an April 2nd report in Ars Technica, an internal memo at Apple showed the company passed Wal-Mart as the top U.S. music seller Wal-Mart at the beginning of the year. Their projections showed that as of January 2008, Apple’s iTunes held 19 percent of the U.S. music market with Wal-Mart at 15 percent, followed by Best Buy at 13 percent. Rounding out the top five were Amazon.com and Target at 6 percent each.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Yesterday, code-sharing and hosting service GitHub re-enabled the public access to youtube-dl repository, a software which can download videos from the internet via the command-line. This move comes after Mitchell Stoltz, a Senior Staff Attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), sent a letter to GitHub on the behalf of youtube-dl’s maintainers. The repository was previously blocked on October 23, after GitHub received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notice from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Started in July 2008, youtube-dl is a free/libré open source software written in Python which can download videos from various websites. Citing alleged violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201 Circumvention of copyright protection systems, RIAA’s takedown notice had alleged youtube-dl was intended to circumvent the technological protection measures of streaming services and to redistribute music videos without authorisation. youtube-dl’s source code had a number of unit tests to check if the software works in different circumstances or not. Some of the test cases included URLs of some copyrighted songs.

In the letter to GitHub, EFF’s attorney Stoltz said “This file contains series of automated tests that verify the functionality of youtube-dl for streaming various types of video. The youtube-dl source code does not, of course, contain copies of these songs or any others […] the unit tests do not cause a permanent download or distribution of the songs they reference; they merely stream a few seconds of each song to verify the operation of youtube-dl. Streaming a small portion of a song in a non-permanent fashion to test the operation of an independently created software program is a fair use.” The letter stressed “youtube-dl does not decrypt video streams that are encrypted with commercial DRM technologies”.

The URLs to copyrighted songs were removed from the source code yesterday, and replaeced with a test video that uploaded on YouTube by Philipp Hagemeister, former maintainer of youtube-dl. Philipp Hagemeister had previously spoken about the takedown with Wikinews.

youtube-dl comes with a small JavaScript interpreter where it acts as a web-browser would behave while receiving video data from the server. The script has “extractors” for various websites to handle videos from different sources. “Any software capable of running JavaScript code can derive the URL of the video stream and access the stream, regardless of whether the software has been approved by YouTube”, the letter read. It borrowed an analogy of Doors of Durin from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for explanation: travelers come upon a door that has writing in a foreign language. When translated, the writing says “say ‘friend’ and enter.” The travelers say “friend” and the door opens. As with the writing on that door, YouTube presents instructions on accessing video streams to everyone who comes asking for it.

Yesterday, Sergey M, one of the maintainers of youtube-dl wrote on GitHub, “We would like to thank @github for standing up for youtube-dl and making it possible to continue development without dropping any features. We appreciate [GitHub] for taking potential legal risks in this regard. We would also like to thank [EFF] and personally [Mitch Stoltz] for invaluable legal help. We would also like to heartily thank our main website hoster Uberspace who is currently being sued in Germany for hosting our essentially business card website and who have already spent thousands of Euros in their legal defense.”

After GitHub restored the public access to the repository, Stoltz tweeted “I think of youtube-dl as a successor to the videocassette recorder. The VCR empowered people to take control of their personal use of free-to-air video, but it had to be saved from the copyright cartel. The same goes for youtube-dl. GitHub did the right thing here.”

youtube-dl is used by thousands of people around the world. Multiple Creative Commons-licensed and public domain videos on Wikimedia Commons are uploaded via a tool called video2commons, which relies on youtube-dl to download media. youtube-dl also lets users download videos from LiveLeak — a video-sharing platform for citizen journalism. Videos downloaded using youtube-dl are also used for the purpose of fair use, or for evidence.

In the blog post announcing “youtube-dl is back”, GitHub said, “Although we did initially take the project down, we understand that just because code can be used to access copyrighted works doesn’t mean it can’t also be used to access works in non-infringing ways. We also understood that this project’s code has many legitimate purposes, including changing playback speeds for accessibility, preserving evidence in the fight for human rights, aiding journalists in fact-checking, and downloading Creative Commons-licensed or public domain videos.”

GitHub also announced any new 1201 takedown notices will be “carefully scrutinised by legal experts” to reject “unwarranted claims”, and said it will side with software developers if the claims are ambiguous. The announcement also mentioned GitHub Trust and Safety team would treat developer’s tickets as a “top priority”. GitHub also pledged donation of USD 1 million for developer defense fund “to help protect open source developers on GitHub from unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims”.

GitHub had blocked public access to many forks of youtube-dl upon receiving the DMCA notice in October. Wikinews notes public access is not yet restored for the forked repositories listed in RIAA’s copyright notice and still displays “Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown”.

During the period when GitHub had disabled public access for the repository, Sergey M had been developing youtube-dl and hosting it on GitLab, another code-sharing and hosting site. However, since GitHub has restored public access of youtube-dl, Sergey M has made the GitLab repository private.

Wikinews reached out to Sergey M. about the future developments of youtube-dl as well as GiHub to explain about developer defense fund.

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