From Plagiarism Today:
Back in February, hot on the heels of the Christiane Serruya plagiarism scandal, we took a look at how Amazon could fix its massive plagiarism problem.
The idea was fairly straightforward. Simple, cursory plagiarism checks as works are submitted for publication would help detect a large percentage of would-be plagiarists and would discourage the practice more broadly. However, we noted that such an effort would likely still require a massive human investment that Amazon is likely either incapable or unwilling to make.
Unfortunately for Amazon, a recent report by David Streitfeld at the New York Timeshighlights that the problem goes much deeper than plagiarism. Counterfeit books, AI-generated biographies and “bait and switch” titles are also rife on the service.
According to the article, this is largely owed to Amazon’s aforementioned “hands off” approach to its store and that it assumes all of its sellers are operating in good faith until an issue is brought to their attention.
. . . .
According to the Authors Guild, counterfeiting on Amazon is seeing a “massive rise” and Amazon itself has acknowledged the issue, noting that counterfeiting is a risk factor in financial disclosure forms.
There, they said they “May be unable to prevent sellers in our stores or through other stores from selling unlawful, counterfeit, pirated, or stolen goods, selling goods in an unlawful or unethical manner, violating the proprietary rights of others, or otherwise violating our policies.”
So what is going on? How is Amazon spending millions and having the problem only grow? The reason is that Amazon has built a platform that’s too big to police and it shares that honor with another site we all know very well.
. . . .
As we discussed back in May, YouTube has become almost as well known for its copyright failings as it has for being the host of videos. Its Content ID system routinely makes mistakes and flags non-infringing content while, at the same time, it is still very easy to find infringing videos on the site.
But the problem goes far beyond copyright. YouTube has become a haven for a wide variety of objectionable content including hate speech, terrorism, conspiracy theories, sexualization of minors and much, much more.
YouTube has responded to these issues in much the same way that it’s responded to copyright issues, with a mixture of technology and policy changes. Whether it’s demonetizing certain kinds of content, using algorithms to remove unwanted material or applying age gates to hide certain content from minors.
However, all of these approaches have one thing on common: Humans are never the front line of defense.
The reason is quite simple, they can’t be. With an estimated 500 hours of video being uploaded to the site every minute, there’s simply no way. Even if only a fraction of a percent of all videos have copyright, community guideline or other issues, (which would be phenomenally low) that’s still far more than can be done with humans.
So, YouTube uses bots, like Content ID, to detect and stop most of the problems. According to YouTube, Content ID handles about 98 percent of all copyright issues on the site. Even if we assume that Content ID is 99% perfect, that’s still a large number of videos that require human intervention.
Link to the rest at Plagiarism Today
I do like that while the problem is ‘massive’ they never give you any numbers to work with.
Reminds me of an old Ford ad. At the time Dodge would say how much better their pickups were than Ford or Chevy, Chevy would drop a Ford in the back and drive off, and with Ford they’d claim that ‘Quality was Job One’.
We had some die-hard Ford lovers in the shop when their new ad (1977-78) claimed that Ford had increased its quality by 47%. Of course no starting number was ever released – which allowed me to have a little fun playing with numbers.
47% sounds like a lot – but it all depends on your starting number. If you start at 66% then adding 47% almost gets you to 100. If you start at 50 you’re almost to 75. But if you were starting at 20% then you’re not quite to 30% (I actually used 2 and now almost to 3) doesn’t sound anywhere near as impressive.
So, what’s their “massive rise”? Was it doubled from 0.001% to 0.002? Was it 1% and now 2%? 10% to 20%? This matters as the cost to fight it may not be worth any gains Amazon/Youtube or the writers/publishers will see.
And of course we know the Authors Guild won’t mind if their cuts of sales profits go down to help pay for reducing the problems they’re whining about.
MYMV and your books be good – but not so good that they have problems with plagiarism.
The Federal Government, with all of the power of it’s courts and other law enforcement apparatus (plus Elliot Ness and his merry men with Tommy guns), couldn’t come close to shutting down alcohol production, smuggling, or consumption in this country.
Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, etc. don’t have that kind of power behind them (thank goodness).
All that can be done (at best) is to keep it down to a dull roar.