January 2014

The long-running court battles between content owners and websites like YouTube often resembles the trench warfare of World War I: two sides engage in years of fighting at incalculable cost, and barely gain any ground. In recent months, however, one side -- the movie and music studios -- appears to have moved forward a few inches thanks to courts’ newfound willingness to invoke a “red flag” rule that makes websites accountable for copyright infringement committed by their users.

The rule, known as “red flag knowledge” is helping studios chip away at a so-called safe harbor law that is intended to prevent copyright law from squelching emerging technology. The result has been a spate of court victories for copyright holders, one that could even tilt the current balance of power between websites and content owners. Here’s a look at the recent developments and how they could make an interminable legal war even longer.

If you use Netflix, you've probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it's absurd. If Netflix can show such tiny slices of cinema to any given user, and they have 40 million users, how vast did their set of "personalized genres" need to be to describe the entire Hollywood universe?

This idle wonder turned to rabid fascination when I realized that I could capture each and every microgenre that Netflix's algorithm has ever created. Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies. Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented. Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness.

One analyst blacklisted several companies, citing a reason not often (or possibly ever) heard on Wall Street -- moral and ethical grounds.

In the report, Ronnie Moas, Standpoint Research's founder and director of research, downgraded Apple stock from a "hold" to a "sell," reiterated a "sell" recommendation for Amazon.com shares and initiated Philip Morris stock with a "sell" rating. "For Apple Computers to pay their workers $2 an hour while they have $150 billion in the bank is nothing short of obscene. I heard all of the arguments in their defense and they make no sense to me," wrote Moas.

If all our gadgets and gizmos are going to be connected to the Internet, and in turn one another, they’ll need to speak the same language.

Wolfram, a software company that runs the computational search engine Wolfram Alpha, is making a move to help write that language. The company’s founder announced that it was working with Intel to bring the Wolfram Language, a programming language that can help process and analyze data, to Intel Edison, a new SD-card-size computer from Intel. The Edison, which will be available this summer, is meant to be used with Internet-connected wearable and other small devices. Wolfram Alpha said the move was part of “Wolfram’s long-term plan to inject sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything, opening up new possibilities for embedded computation and providing a complete language for the Internet of Things.”