Fact-Checking Servers to Reduce Libel Risk

Jul 4, 2033
PALO ALTO–In December, three of the top five U.S. ISPs plan to install new software to reduce the risk that their customers will be exposed to libel and gossip liability for content that they post. The software, developed by Black Hole Skunkworks, a joint venture of Stanford University and a consortium of newspaper and publishing multi-nationals, screens all user-generated content, alerting posters to possible legal liability for dissemination of libelous or gossipicuous information.

U.S. Supreme Court validation last year of the Responsible Network Speech Act has given the green light to a series of high-profile “personal liability” and “gossip” suits against posters with deep pockets. In Hanks v. Oinks a Ninth Circuit Appeals Court ruled that traditional First Amendment protections permitting publication of potentially libelous information by members of the press did not apply to individual on-line posters. Three months later, upholding a $19 million judgment of liability for “re-publishing, re-posting, or disseminating the libelous statement of another,” the Supreme Court, on a narrow 5-4 margin, affirmed for the first time that civil liability for “gossip” did not violate Constitutional principles.

“The Court had to settle the issue one way or another,” explains Columbia Law Professor Egger Shriev. “The openness of electronic media has created unprecedented opportunities for individuals to reach audiences previously only reachable by the traditional press. Most of us expected the Court to explicitly extend press protection to individuals, but the influence of the strict textualists was too great.”

The fact-checking software developed by Black Hole, according to company promotional materials, offers posters “protection from liability for inadvertently libelous or gossipicuous posts.” The software processes all of a user’s uploaded data through a parser that identifies the “propositional content” of the posts, which is then encoded in a low-profile, “Eigen-assertion” stored on the local client. A peer-to-peer query then searches for clients who have posted matching assertions. User-configurable lists determine which matching sources the user trusts for verification. Default configuration permits assertions to be confirmed by articles published by newspaper and magazines that have partnered with Black Hole.

Posts that could be confirmed by such major publications, however, have not been at the heart of recent court cases. The Oinks case, for example, dealt with a post on a semi-public discussion board in which a Peoria man described his neighbor as “a stinky, rude, bum” and a “mouth-breather.” Such posts are unlikely to be confirmable by citation of the traditional press. Black Hole addresses this problem by focusing its peer-to-peer query on sources judged to be likely to confirm the assertion, and then returns a weighted evaluation of the liability risk. “If Oinks had run our software, the query would have looked, for instance, for confirming assertions made by other neighbors, by Hanks’ family members and co-workers, ” explains CEO Pauline Snipe. “And, I feel pretty confident saying this, it would have warned him not to make the post.”

Free-speech advocacy groups frustrated by the recent run of court rulings consider the announced software a mixed blessing. “We’re happy this software exists in this difficult speech climate,” notes ACLU spokesperson Jack Jack. “To the extent that it gives individuals the confidence to speak, it should do something to ameliorate the chilling effect of the Act and the Court’s endorsement of it. On the other hand, to the extent that it makes things easier for people, it makes it harder for us to mobilize opinion against the seriously wrong-headed direction U.S. law has taken.”

“This is really just a ploy by traditional press and media to maintain their monopoly on dissemination of information,” points out media watchdog group EyeSpy spokesperson Henriette Oll. “Who do you think lobbied for the Responsible Speech Act? The same companies that have partnered with and invested in Black Hole. By ensuring that individuals would be held to a stricter standard than they would, the corporate run ‘Press’ was tightening their grip on information. And now they want to ‘protect’ us by selling us software that tells us not to say anything that isn’t confirmed by something they’ve already said? It’s about time we realized that the corporate Press doesn’t even give a shit about its own freedom, let alone ours.”

Miniature People Big Holiday Seller

Oct. 16, 2152
LUND, SWEDEN–Cutting-edge bioengineering and 20th century nostalgia are equally represented in a new line of products from Toyboy Factories. Humites(TM) and Humites Environs(TM), both new for the holiday season, include cadres of miniature, human-like creatures, each about the size of a fingernail. Consumers can keep their Humites in one of the elegant bookshelf or coffee table Environs Toyboy markets, and care for them with a range of Humite Foods and accessories.

“We worked hard to be sure that Humites naturally form co-operative, social groups,” notes Toyboy Marketing Director Bird Smollet. “Marketing research told us that there was a lot of interest out there in terrariums and miniature environments. Ant farms have enjoyed residual popularity for generations. We realized that, with recent developments in organism design, we could offer an ant farm with a modern twist.”

Humite genealogy, it turns out, owes as much to ants and other social insects as to the humans they so closely resemble. “Humites look like people, but their physiology and psychology have deep roots in the genetics of social insects,” explains Engineering Director Pfifle Jubilee. “As the name suggests, much of the Humite genome comes from drone castes of social, mound-termites. The challenge, really, wasn’t to engineer tiny humans–we ruled that out fairly quickly as, physiologically, too difficult–but to genetically modify insects to very closely approximate human appearance, and to extend their encoded instincts to include human-like behaviors.”

The resemblance to humans is sometimes quite eerie. Not only do Humites look like miniature people, right down to their fine, micro-filament hairs, but they do some very human things, including wearing clothes. A variety of Humite wardrobes are available, typically coming in packages of a dozen matching coveralls which the consumer simply drops into the environment. Once the Humites discover the clothes, they put them on and spread the word to the rest of the group using chemical and pheromone signals and markers.

The Humite Environs Toyboy offers rival in elegance the ingenuity of the creatures themselves. The gracefully cut, grown-crystal Panoptifarm environment, which serves both as an attractive display case and a coffee table, is designed for large populations. Those with relatively small groups might favor one of the bookshelf cases, more reminiscent of the iconic ant farms of the past, and outfitted with detailed, brushed-aluminum cityscapes.

Unlike traditional ant farms, Humite Environs are dynamically expanded and re-designed by their residents. When supplied with a wedge of special, crystal building-resin (sold separately), Humites modify their environments, constructing transparent buildings, compounds, and, depending upon the size of the population and environment, villages and towns. By setting switches on Environs Access Points, consumers can enable their Humites to expand their environment as needed. One shelf unit filled with industrious and well-supplied Humites can be extended to adjoining shelves overnight through inter-connecting crawl-tubes and miniature, surface-tension elevators.

In order to ensure that Humite populations not spread in unwanted or inappropriate ways, Toyboy fixes the life span for individual Humites at about 36 months, and constrains their ability to reproduce. “In order to reproduce, Humites must receive a particular chemical signal that no Humite can, itself, produce, and that doesn’t occur in the natural environment,” explains Jubilee. “For those who want to expand their populations, we sell a special, proprietary breeding box treated with the appropriate chemical signal. By controlling access to and use of the breeding box, consumers can maintain or expand populations as they choose.”

“We’re anticipating a block-buster holiday selling season,” indicates Marketer Smollet. “Our first-run pre-sold in a little less than an hour. Everybody is going to want these cute little guys.”

Packaging Sales Surpass Album Sales, Sony Reports

Sept. 1, 2013
LOS ANGELES–Three short years after its controversial decision to stop selling albums and to focus exclusively on the marketing of licensed packaging, Sony Music reports that revenues from the sale of liner notes and associated packaging exceed those generated by sale of its music catalog. “At the time, the heads of all the Majors thought that we were crazy,” explains Sony A & R Chief Herb Iki. “But it was just that they refused to see the way in which the industry was developing. We realized pretty quickly that music, because it’s really just bits, was destined to be free; but packaging, that’s something we know about, and something we can sell.”

Sony launched its “albumless” strategy with the widely publicized release of “Nobitz,” the 33rd album from classic-rock stalwarts U2. At the time, fans lining up to purchase the disc were almost universally shocked to discover that “Nobitz” consisted entirely of brightly-colored cardboard and plastic packaging, with a stylish, burlap circle in the place of a disc. “We learned a lot from the ‘Nobitz’ launch,” recalls Iki. “First, we learned that it’s better to keep the packaging empty than to try to replace the disc with something. I don’t know how many people tried to play that burlap ‘disc,’ but I think every one of them called to complain that theirs was defective. Second, we learned that, overwhelmingly, fans will pay for the packaging, even when they can download the music for free.”

Three years later, Sony Music sales confirm that a business many thought destined for extinction merely needed to be re-thought. “I’ve raised my estimates on all the major music companies, largely because they’ve managed to redefine their markets,” notes JupiterScan analyst Helva Vexner. “For a while it looked like the labels were in serious trouble. Artists didn’t need their distributional networks in order to get product out there. But now, after Sony’s success, artists are re-signing in droves to get the licensing revenues from the packaging.”

“Historically, artists relied upon labels for distribution and promotion while labels depended upon artists to supply the product” explains OVA super-agent Maxim Maxim. “The labels finally realized that, in the packaging, they were supplying a product worth money in its own right. Every serious fan craves the iconic connection that’s possible only through a physical product. I have, systematically, encouraged all of my artists to sign licensing deals.”

The viability of Sony’s new strategy, however, remains uncertain. New printing technologies, in concert with a peer-to-peer file distribution system known as Packster, threaten the newfound stream of “Paper & Plastic” or “P&P” revenues. Recent improvements in Materials Printers from Compackard have enabled fans to produce, in their homes, packaging nearly identical in quality to that offered by Sony and other traditional record companies. With a Materials Printer, a block of resin “toner,” and a file describing the desired packaging, users can make for themselves the products companies like Sony are coming to rely on.

Sony’s Iki remains sanguine. “Packster is just another in a series of technologies that have challenged the way we do business. But that’s a good thing. It makes us evolve and innovate, forces us to realize value in ways we didn’t previously think possible. It’s true that we are in the marketing business, not the music business. But that’s why we make money. People will buy marketing. They won’t always buy music.”

Suicide Artist Fakes Death, Defrauds Patrons

April 23, 2022
NEW YORK CITY–The recent arrest of former suicide artist Bran McGeady has galvanized suspicions in the suicide art world that the genre has become too popular to be effectively monitored for fraud and forgery. The recently celebrated McGeady was discovered by NEA officers during a routine serial-number trace of pawned audio and video equipment in Fairfield Outer-Borough. “Apparently he pretty desperately needed to raise some funds,” explains Sergeant McNee Tracey. “It looks like his replacement identity wasn’t well-capitalized, so he pawned some of the Endowment equipment he had taken into hiding with him.”

Patrons of the McGeady Suicide Cooperative are universally scandalized to discover that McGeady is still alive and that the performance they sponsored was a forgery. “I’m shocked,” exclaims Aiken Petral III, one of the key shareholders in the Cooperative. “We dedicated billions of dollars to our sponsorship of Bran, to the parties, the successful finance career we arranged for him, the best education, the extravagant lifestyle…all of the potential we put into that kid, I just can’t believe that he wouldn’t end it all as we had contractually arranged.”

NEA officials are quick to point out that this is the first known case of fraud in the still young industry. “We don’t want suicide art to get a bad reputation in the market,” explains NEA spokesman Henry Chuff. “There’s still lots of protection for those thinking about investing in a suicide artist. SACA [the Suicide Artists’ Certification Agency] offers a relatively inexpensive way to insure the authenticity of your artist’s work. In fact, McGeady was fully bonded by SACA, guaranteeing nearly 100% reimbursement for shareholders.”

The NEA has good reason to want to reassure public confidence in suicide art. In the seventeen short years since Cynthia Fern’s legendary performance pioneered the genre, suicide art and suicide artists have generated more revenue attributable to artistic endeavor than the sum of all arts spending for the past 350 years. “The financial success of suicide art is really unprecedented in the art world,” explains Columbia University Professor Reginald Coale. “It’s something on an industrial scale, and it came not a minute too late for art. Technical advances in media have always altered the form and cultural meaning of art, but no significantly marketable value filled the vacuum left when artisanship and genius were made redundant by digital and nano-reproductive media. It’s ironic in a way: the last thing that artists have to offer us is suicide.”

Debate about the value of suicide art continues, despite the tremendous economic growth surrounding it. “The popular success of suicide art isn’t really much of a mystery,” contends Times critic Denise Pruple. “Medical technologies have made death a scarce commodity. Production, information, and transportation technology has given us efficiency on scales unimaginable even sixty years ago. Like the potlatches of old, suicide art announces an abundance so great that, to declare its value, it must be wasted. So, suicide art coops sponsor for these artists lives and careers of extravagant wealth and social status precisely in order to see them wasted. It makes perfect sense.”

“I don’t care about the money,” complains McGeady Cooperative shareholder Vincent Eggs. “I found Bran’s suicide very moving. The hush in the theater as he breathed his last breath; that was incredibly intense. To find out now that it was all a lie really hurts. I don’t know if they can, but I’m encouraging the prosecution to treat this as a capital offense. That’s the only thing that will make what he did all right.”