Spent the morning sightseeing in Google Maps 8-Bit, taking snapshots with my handy 1-Bit Camera.

(Click for larger size.)

I originally wrote this column over at Wired back on March 13 about my experience with patents at Yahoo, but forgot to republish it here on Waxy.org in my permanent archive.

This article received a bigger response, hands-down, than anything I’ve written for Wired so far, resting at the top of Techmeme for a full day, with widespread coverage from The Telegraph, The Verge, Fox News, and Business Insider. (That’s a good signal you’ve written something notable: when competing tech magazines start linking to your work.)

Almost two weeks later, I’m still angry but happy that the column ignited such a powerful discussion about the patent issue. I’m especially pleased that “weaponizing patents” is entering the lexicon; articles like these use the phrase without mentioning me at all. Awesome.

For two other perspectives on this issue, I enjoyed Mark Cuban’s linkbait take and Fred Wilson’s short, furious rant.

Anyway, if you hadn’t seen it, I hope you enjoy it.

While most of the tech world was partying at South by Southwest in Austin yesterday, Yahoo announced it was filing a lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly infringing on 10 patents from their 1,000+ patent warehouse.

I’m no fan of Facebook, but this is a deplorable move. It’s nothing less than extortion, expertly timed during the SEC-mandated quiet period before Facebook’s IPO. It’s an attack on invention and the hacker ethic.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have a small supporting role in this story. None of the patents I co-invented are cited in the Yahoo complaint, but a handful of applications I worked on with Yahoo were granted patents, weaponized now to use against people like me.

Here’s how the process worked, in my case:

In 2005, Yahoo acquired Upcoming.org, the collaborative events calendar I’d launched two years before.

Back then, the Web 1.0 behemoth seemed on the verge of turning things around. A series of smart moves — high-profile hires, the Oddpost and Flickr acquisitions, the launch of the Yahoo! Developer Network, and their Research Lab — was breathing new life into things. Two months after we were acquired, Del.icio.us and Webjay joined us in the Yahoo fold.

After we moved in, we were asked to file patents for anything and everything we’d invented while working on Upcoming.org. Every Yahoo employee was encouraged to participate in their “Patent Incentive Program,” with sizable bonuses issued to everyone who took the time to apply.

Now, I’ve always hated the idea of software patents. But Yahoo assured us that their patent portfolio was a precautionary measure, to defend against patent trolls and others who might try to attack Yahoo with their own holdings. It was a cold war, stockpiling patents instead of nuclear arms, and every company in the valley had a bunker full of them.

Against my better judgement, I sat in a conference room with my co-founders and a couple of patent attorneys and told them what we’d created. They took notes and created nonsensical documents that I still can’t make sense of. In all, I helped Yahoo file eight patent applications.

Years after I left I discovered to my dismay that four of them were granted by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office.

I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it.

I was naive. Even if the original intention was truly defensive, a patent portfolio can easily change hands, and a company can even more easily change its mind. Since I left in 2007, Yahoo has had three CEOs and a board overhaul.

The scary part is that even the most innocuous patent can be used to crush another’s creativity. One of the patents I co-invented is so abstract, it could not only cover Facebook’s News Feed, but virtually any activity feed. It puts into very sharp focus the trouble with software patents: Purposefully vague wording invites broad interpretation.

In their complaint, Yahoo alleges that Facebook’s News Feed violates “Dynamic page generator,” a patent filed in 1997 by their former CTO related to the launch of My Yahoo, one of the first personalized websites. Every web application, from Twitter to Pinterest, could be said to violate this patent. This is chaos.

Software patents should be abolished, plain and simple. Software is already covered by copyright, making patent protection unnecessary.

Ask any programmer — developing software is as creative and unique as writing poetry.

Yahoo’s lawsuit against Facebook is an insult to the talented engineers who filed patents with the understanding they wouldn’t be used for evil. Betraying that trust won’t be forgotten, but I doubt it matters anymore. Nobody I know wants to work for a company like that.

I’m embarrassed by the patents I filed, but I’ve learned from my mistake. I’ll never file a software patent again, and I urge you to do the same.

For years, Yahoo was mostly harmless. Management foibles and executive shuffles only hurt shareholders and employee morale. But in the last few years, the company’s incompetence has begun to hurt the rest of us. First, with the wholesale destruction of internet history, and now by attacking younger, smarter companies.

Yahoo tried and failed, over and over again, to build a social network that people would love and use. Unable to innovate, Yahoo is falling back to the last resort of a desperate, dying company: litigation as a business model.

That it’s Yahoo makes it even sadder. The complaint isn’t really wrong when it asserts that: “For much of the technology upon which Facebook is based, Yahoo! got there first.”

But being first with something generic that would have been invented by someone (like the wheel) — as opposed to something few could have imagined (like the Segway) — is a big difference.

Ask any start-up CEO — execution is everything.

As the fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg says in The Social Network, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”

Last Friday, a YouTube user named eeplox posted a question to the support forums, regarding a copyright complaint on one of his videos. YouTube’s automated Content ID system flagged a video of him foraging a salad in a field, claiming the background music matched a composition licensed by Rumblefish, a music licensing firm in Portland, Oregon.

The only problem? There is no music in the video; only bird calls and other sounds of nature.

Naturally, he filed a dispute, explaining that the audio couldn’t possibly be copyrighted.

The next day, amazingly, his claim was rejected. Not by YouTube itself — it’s unlikely that a Google employee ever saw the claim — but from a representative at Rumblefish, who reviewed the dispute and reported back to YouTube that their impossible copyright for nonexistent music was indeed violated.

Back at YouTube, eeplox found himself at a dead end. YouTube now stated, “All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content.” No further disputes were possible, the case was closed.

Whether caused by a mistake or malice, Rumblefish was granted full control over eeplox’s video. They could choose to run ads on the video, mute the audio, or remove it entirely from the web.

A History of Screw-Ups

On Sunday night, Reddit took notice. Within hours, the thread was on the homepage, commenters were freaking out and, to his credit, Rumblefish CEO Paul Anthony was fielding questions in an IAmA interview until 2:30am.

His argument: One of Rumblefish’s Content ID reps made a mistake by denying the dispute, and they released the claim on Sunday night. “We review a substantial amount of claims every day and the number is increasing significantly,” said Anthony. “We have millions of videos now using our songs as soundtracks and keeping up is getting harder and harder.”

This is the latest in a long series of foibles or outright abuses of YouTube’s Content ID system. Content ID was intended to help copyright holders manage the chaos of YouTube. They’d provide copies of their audio and video for analysis, which would then algorithmically match newly-uploaded videos. If a match was found, rightsholders could automatically block the video or, increasingly, claim money from video advertising.

Content ID’s monetization was a huge boon for copyright holders. Uploaders could keep their videos online, while copyright holders profited from the creative reuse of their work.

But the last couple years have seen a dramatic rise in Content ID abuse, using it for purposes that it was never intended. Scammers are using Content ID to steal ad revenue from YouTube video creators en masse, with some companies claiming content they don’t own, deliberately or not. The inability to understand context and parody regularly leads to “fair use” videos getting blocked, muted or monetized.

Bypassing the DMCA

The problem is that media companies and scammers are using Content ID as an end run around the DMCA.

With the DMCA, the process works like this. A rightsholder could file a claim against a video with YouTube, and YouTube would immediately take the video offline. If there was a mistake, the uploader could file a counter-notice. The video would then be restored by YouTube within 10-14 business days of the counter-notice, unless it went to court.

It wasn’t perfect, by any means, but it was fair. Disputes could always be appealed, and both parties were given equal power. And if a claimant lied about owning the copyright to the material in question, they could face perjury charges.

The current system, led by Content ID, tips the balance far in favor of the claimant.

Rumblefish never needed to prove they were the copyright holder, but were still given ultimate control over the video’s fate. Uploaders can dispute claims, but the only people reviewing claims are the Content ID partners that filed the claim in the first place, who are free to deny them wholesale.

A Simple Fix

The solution is simple: if a copyright holder wants to pursue a disputed Content ID match, they should file a DMCA claim. That’s the only way to guarantee their rights, and make the copyright holder legally responsible for telling the truth.

In fact, this is exactly how YouTube says that Content ID “fair use” claims should work. In practice, this doesn’t appear to be true any longer. Content ID partners, of course, can file a DMCA notice at any time, but why bother if they can reject the counter-claims themselves?

(Preferred partners like Universal Music Group can go a step further and block videos directly without filing a claim.)

This problem has been on YouTube’s radar for at least two years, but it’s only getting worse as unsavory companies discover this nascent business model. Claim copyright on media you may or may not own, and let Content ID do the rest.

By letting Content ID partners have the final word, and not trusting their own users, YouTube is violating its trust with its community and damaging fair use in the process.

Update

I originally published this article over at Wired, where a commenter pointed out that this process may actually violate YouTube’s “safe harbor” granted through the DMCA. If they choose to ignore disputes, they’re effectively giving content providers an end run around fair use and the DMCA.

Selfish Crab wrote:

It seems like by providing the Content ID system, Youtube was trying to pre-emptively identify copyrighted material, like a first-pass dispute system. Their lawyers probably concluded that so long as the content ID system falls back onto DMCA takedown procedure, they are still in compliance with the DMCA sufficiently to retain their safe harbor.

So if Content ID claim disputes do not fall back onto DMCA takedown, as Andy’s article suggests, there’s a case to be made that YouTube no longer has liability protection from users. It is a whole another can of worms to analyze what a legal claim against youtube would look like. You’d have to look at the YouTube Terms of Service (i.e., the contract) to see if maybe they contracted around this problem already, you’d have to figure out damages, etc etc. Or I guess you can just raise a shitstorm and that’s enough of a moral victory.

In a Google+ comment last December, senior copyright counsel for Google and former EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann acknowledged the problem.

Yes, we’re aware of that problem in the Content ID dispute process and are looking at what we can do to fix it. It’s the result of a complicated collision of how to handle geographically limited Content ID claims, disputes, and global DMCA removals. Turns out to be a hard problem to figure out. But we’re thinking on it.

Virginia law student Patrick McKay got in touch with Annie Baxter, a public relations manager at YouTube, about this issue.

This is one of those corner-case outcomes that emerges from several different rules, none of which was intended to yield the result you’ve encountered (i.e., DMCA takedowns are global, but Content ID ownership claims are territorial). Unfortunately, addressing it YouTube-wide is going to take some time, both for pondering and implementing.

So while we can promise you that we’re thinking about this, we can’t promise you a fix or time-table. And feel free to tell the OVC we’re looking at it and trying to come up with something.

In the meantime, anyone in the Content ID program is offered free rein to claim copyright on your videos and profit directly from them. I’m hoping this gets cleared up soon.

So, I made a weird new thing with my 15-year-old nephew, Cooper McHatton. It’s experimental and has lots of rough edges, but quite frankly, I’m tired of working on it, so here you go.

Playfic is a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka “text adventures”) entirely from your browser, using a “natural language”-inspired language called Inform 7.

Inform 7 is incredibly awesome and weird. For example, this is a fully functional game:

East of the Garden is the Gazebo. Above is the Treehouse. A billiards table is in the Gazebo. On it is a trophy cup. A starting pistol is in the cup. In the Treehouse is a container called a cardboard box.

Type that into Playfic, and you end up with this simple game, ready to send to the world.

The official documentation is extensive, with a great manual and recipe book. I’ve collected a list of resources to help you get started.

For now, there’s very little documentation on Playfic itself, but you can click the “View game source” link on every game to see how it was made, and Cooper’s adding sample games from the official Recipe Book.

My hope is that Playfic opens up the world of interactive fiction to a much wider audience — young writers, fanfic authors, and culture remixers of all ages.

While the language can be tricky, building simple games is surprisingly easy. Cooper had never coded anything or made a game before trying Playfic, and within 30 minutes of futzing around, he’d made his first game.

Some stuff is broken and missing, but I’d love to hear what you make of it. Open to any and all feedback. Go make some games!

The other day, I tried out Unroll.me, a clever new service that reads your inbox to let you unsubscribe from mailing lists and other unwanted e-mail flotsam with a single click.

As I was about to connect my Gmail account, my finger hovered over the “Grant access” button.

Wait a second. Who am I giving access to my Gmail account, anyway? There was no identifying information on their site — no company address, no team page listing the names of its team members, and broken links to their privacy policy or terms of service.

For all I knew, it could be run by unscrupulous spammers or an Anonymous troll looking for lulz. And I was about to give them unfettered access to eight years of my e-mail history and, with password resets, the ability to access any of my online accounts?

I had to dig around online to find out who’s behind it, and fortunately, Unroll.me is a totally legit NYC-based startup providing a useful service. I spoke to Perri Blake Gorman, Unroll.me’s cofounder and CMO, who assured me they’ll add all the company information as they roll out their public beta.

But since Gmail added OAuth support in March 2010, an increasing number of startups are asking for a perpetual, silent window into your inbox.

I’m concerned OAuth, while hugely convenient for both developers and users, may be paving the way for an inevitable privacy meltdown.

The Road to OAuth

For most of the last decade, alpha geeks railed against “the password anti-pattern,” the common practice for web apps to prompt for your password to a third-party, usually to scrape your e-mail address book to find friends on a social network. It was insecure and dangerous, effectively training users how to be phished.

The solution was OAuth, an open standard that lets you grant permission for one service to connect to another without ever exposing your username or password. Instead of passwords getting passed around, services are issued a token they can use to connect on your behalf.

If you’ve ever granted permission for a service to use your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account, you’ve used OAuth.

This was a radical improvement. It’s easier for users, taking a couple of clicks to authorize accounts, and passwords are never sent insecurely or stored by services who shouldn’t have them. And developers never have to worry about storing or transmitting private passwords.

But this convenience creates a new risk. It’s training people not to care.

It’s so simple and pervasive that even savvy users have no issue letting dozens of new services access their various accounts.

I’m as guilty as anyone, with 49 apps connected to my Google account, 80 to Twitter, and over 120 connected to Facebook. Others are more extreme. My friend Sam is a developer at Kickstarter, and he authorized 148 apps to use his Twitter account. Anil counted 88 apps using his Google account, with nine granted access to Gmail.

For Twitter, the consequences are unlikely to be serious since almost all activity is public. For Facebook, a mass leak of private Facebook photos could certainly be embarrassing.

But for Gmail, I’m very concerned that it opens a major security flaw that’s begging to be exploited.

The Privacy Danger

A long list of services, large and small, request indefinite access to your Gmail account.

I asked on Twitter and Google+ for people to check their Google app permissions to see who they’ve granted Gmail access to. The list includes a range of inbox organizers, backup services, email utilities, and productivity apps: TripIt, Greplin, Rapportive, Xobni, Gist, OtherInbox, Unsubscribe, Backupify, Blippy, Threadsy, Nuevasync, How’s My Email, ToutApp, ifttt, Email Game, Boomerang, Kwaga, Mozilla F1, 0boxer, Taskforce, and Cloudmagic.

Once granted, all of these services are issued a token that gives unlimited access to your complete Gmail history. And that’s where the danger lies.

You may trust Google to keep your email safe, but do you trust a three-month-old Y Combinator-funded startup created by three college kids? Or a side project from an engineer working in his 20 percent time? How about a disgruntled or curious employee of one of these third-party services?

Any of these services becomes the weakest link to access the e-mail for thousands of users. If one’s hacked or the list of tokens leaked, everyone who ever used that service risks exposing his complete Gmail archive.

The scariest thing? If the third-party service doesn’t discover the hack or chooses not to invalidate its tokens, you may never know you’re exposed.

In the past, Gmail’s issued security warnings to accounts being accessed from multiple IP addresses. I spoke to OtherInbox founder Joshua Baer, and he said that Google’s eased up on the warnings because of the prevalence of third-party services.

It’s entirely possible for someone with a stolen token to read, search, and download all your mail to their server for months, and you’d never find out unless they exposed themselves, or you were diligently auditing your “Last account activity” history.

Stay Safe

Clearly, we’re not going to stop using awesome new utilities just because there’s a privacy risk. But there are best practices you can follow to stay safe.

• Clean up your app permissions. The best thing you could do, right now, is to log into each service you care about and revoke access to the apps you no longer use or care about, especially those that have access to Gmail. Finding the permissions pages can be tricky, but the nice folks at MyPermissions.org made a handy dashboard linking to every one.
• Think before you authorize. Before authorizing an account, find out who you’re granting access to. Look for a staff page, contact address, and take a look at the privacy policy to make sure they’re not sharing or selling your info with third parties. Bonus points if they outline their security policies and offer a way to disconnect service from within the app. If anything seems off, don’t do it.
• When in doubt, change your password. Have a feeling that someone might be reading your mail, but not sure which app is to blame? Changing your password instantly invalidates all your Google and Facebook OAuth tokens, though Twitter tokens persist after password changes.

Google could improve, as well. Their permissions page is too hard to find, even for experienced users, and it’s impossible to see which apps have accessed your account recently.

Facebook does an excellent job with this, but Google only shows you the IP address and the protocol it used to connect. Surfacing this information, as a periodic e-mail or on-site notification, would go a long way to averting a potential disaster.

The Greatest Troll of All

So, I originally published everything above over on my Wired column yesterday, but I left off something else I’ve been thinking about.

While I think a compromised database is the most likely scenario, there’s another possibility that disturbs me more.

Imagine that a brand new service pops up, offering a simple, fun service that uses your Gmail account. Maybe a neat visualization like Tout’s Year in Review, or maybe something more practical like sending all your attachments to Dropbox.

But it’s all just a giant troll, where the app’s creators are silently running targeted searches, downloading your mail, and looking for compromising photos and sensitive documents behind-the-scenes. They could collect the documents for months or years, and then release it all online in an anonymous blast. Lulz!

You’d likely never find out where the data came from, and the perpetrators would never be caught. Hell, if you’ve Gmail-authed a questionable app, this could be happening to you right now and you’d never know. Whee!