Posts Tagged: "fake news"

Deepfake technology has made headlines recently for its use in creating fake portrayals of celebrities, but the long term implications could be much more sinister than phony renderings of Scarlett Johansson appearing in porn videos or President Barack Obama calling Trump a profanity. While the California bill is chiefly aimed at criminalizing this particular type of technological deception, it has implications for IP in that it reaches conduct that may not be easily addressed by the enforcement of existing IP law.

In early May, the online creator advocacy group Content Creators Coalition (c3) published a digital ad calling on Congress to hold hearings to look into various illegal activities which have been enabled by abuse of online platforms maintained by Google. This push for Congressional oversight of Google comes after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared in hearings before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives in early April. Various matters concerning Capitol Hill’s policymakers during those hearings are only more pronounced with regard to Google, c3 argues.

In a remarkable judgment of 10 January 2018 a court in the Netherlands ordered a hosting provider to make a legitimate website permanently inaccessible because it was “part of an unlawful concept”. The plaintiffs in this case have been harassed on the internet by a non-existing organization called G|A|B|M|E, which supposedly stands for ‘Global Advisory Board Middle East’. One of the plaintiffs received an e-mail on 1 December 2017 warning him that in a few hours a “report” would be released revealing him, his companies and some employees as frauds. Indeed, a few hours later a publication was distributed via the internet with the title ‘International Security and Fraud Alert Iranian Fraud’. In this publication (the ‘report’) the plaintiff, his companies and some employees were wrongly accused of fraud, corruption and money laundering… The decision has definitely broadened the liability of hosting providers and has rendered those who are the victims of defamation a new tool to fight accusations on the internet, but one has to bear in mind that the circumstances of this case were and are exceptional.

On January 19th, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would increase its efforts against “fake news” by asking its users to rate the trustworthiness of news sources being posted to the social media platform. Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook will utilize ongoing quality surveys to ask users if they are familiar with a particular news source. Using this data, Facebook will then rate each publication based on the user ratings and prioritize those that are most trusted to surface on news feeds. “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them.”

RPost has been unfairly described as a patent troll. In fact, RPost is a privately held cybersecurity technology company that has been in operation since 2000. For at least the past two years, RPost has been listed as representative of vendors in Gartner’s Market Guide for Electronic Signature… Microsoft promotes RPost on its partner website for offering “an Outlook add-in that puts advanced email capabilities in the hands of any Microsoft Outlook or Office 365 user.” Its RMail product was even favorably reviewed and recommended by the American Bar Association.

In the days since the U.S. presidential election the scourge of fake news has been tearing at the soul of Internet media. An interview with a satire news website editor published by The Washington Post on November 17th discussed how shares of fake news stories on social media platforms may have had a real effect on the recent election. Fake news websites have been a lucrative business model, too… U.S. Patent Application No. 20160328453, titled Veracity Scale for Journalists, would protect a method programmed into a device’s memory which would acquire input from a user regarding an article or a journalist, collating and storing the input in a database, filtering the input to generate filtered data, applying a user-specific filter to that data to generate veracity information associated with the article or journalist and then displaying the veracity information.