Listen to his story here.

Is anyone truly surprised by what he found? Should it come as a shock that while hundreds of thousands of Americans are perusing the latest gadgets at this week’s Consumer Electronic Show, children as young as 12 are working full-time in China in conditions so poor their manufacturing plants are surrounded by suicide-thwarting nets?

Have you ever considered how the heck that tiny miracle of a phone in your hand can cost just 300 US bucks? In July of last year, New York-based human rights group China Labor Watch released a report detailing egregious labor violations encountered through plant visits and worker interviews. The members of CLW visited ten different manufacturing plants that supplied Apple, Dell, Sony, Nokia, and Motorola, among others. According to the report, Apple pays about 3.99 British pounds, or about $6.11, to manufacture an iPhone.

Such poor working conditions seem even more criminal when reported alongside the epidemic of suicides and suicide attempts at electronic manufacturing plants. News broke Wednesday about an unconfirmed mass suicide attempt at a Foxconn plant in Wuhan, Hubei that produces Microsoft’s XBox; on January 2nd, 150 workers allegedly took to the roof over a pay dispute and were eventually talked down by the mayor of Wuhan. Microsoft is investigating the incident.

Of course, shortly after the suicides in 2010, technology firms HP, Dell, and Apple claimed to have investigated the working conditions at their respective plants. Some workers received pay raises—they now receive, on average, about $300 a month—and then stories of poor labor conditions faded in and out of media coverage.

But here we are again. Findings by Oekon Research published in December of last year put technology manufacturing dead last in sustainability and fair labor practices, after mining, textiles, chemicals, automobiles, and more. Right now, there is no such thing as “fair trade electronics”—which is how Apple gets away with paying $6.11 to manufacture a $300 iPhone—but I think the tide might be turning. For three years now, the Western world at large has been lackluster in response to these labor violations while technology companies continue to reap enormous profits.

In my household, we have two iPhone4s, two MacBooks, two Shuffles, and an iPad2. We bought them from smiley, enthusiastic Apple retail employees who are paid anywhere between $9-$17 an hour, sometimes with benefits. The bright lights and clean lines of the Apple store can make a person forget where electronics really come from—cramped, cruel places where, for some, death is a better option.

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Online video syndication services have been around for several years and are helping many businesses, advertising agencies and producers transition from paid television ads to paid online video ads. While many of these services provide legitimate ways of attracting consumers to the videos, others have developed ways of short-cutting the process to quickly increase view counts and other forms of engagement.

Video view seeding has been around nearly as long as online video. With the newfound success of brands using online video for advertising, seeding video views has become much more popular. One of the primary reasons for doing this is search engine optimization or SEO. Videos with higher views and engagement rates rank much higher in search engine results. This in turn motivates marketers and producers to artificially increase these numbers in the beginning to earn more organic engagement over the long run

The snag with online video is sites like YouTube have millions of videos uploaded everyday ,so unless you pay to increase your view count, your video can get lost and go unviewed. By rapidly increasing the view count using various techniques, marketers and producers are able to get their video off the ground and give it a better chance of going “viral”.

The cost of buying video views, comments and likes
While doing a simple Google search you will likely find many fancy websites offering a wide range of syndication packages. One website, WebVideoPromoters.com, offers 100,000 views for $1,000 or 10,000 subscribers for $2,800 and provides dozens of examples of well known brands they’ve worked with. Another site, BuyYouTubeViews.net, advertises geolocation targeted views as well as volume pricing for agencies.

While these may seem like excellent deals, things break down when you view their FAQ section to find out how the service actually works:

“Its a combination of being your promotions manager, a little bit of magic, and a whole lotta of hustling… actually it’s pretty complex involving sharing it out to other YouTubers, server technology, and more. But in all honesty, its a trade secret but you’ll love the results!” (webvideopromoters.com)

It really doesn’t take much to uncover some shady practices disguised as “server technology” and “trade secrets” yet because there is little if any regulation, many marketers and producers are willing to look the other way if they are able to save a significant amount of money.

In some cases, the companies that provide very little information online are not actually hiding anything and in fact provide legitimate ways of promoting videos through influencer outreach campaigns and other well-known industry practices. These industry leaders provide multiple reporting metrics including how much of the video was viewed and where it was embedded. They also have the power to target very specific demographics.

What counts as a view? Is it changing?
In 2008 fans of Avril Lavigne attempted to bump her up to the top ranked YouTube video spot using an autoplaying and auto-refreshing embedded video player that added one pageview every 15 seconds. (Wired, 2008) Several weeks later YouTube stopped counting autoplays.

The table below provides a list of video hosting sites and what counts as a view:

Gaming the system
Currently there are at least three distinct methods being used to rapidly increase engagement stats. While all of these methods aren’t necessarily illegal, they do present ethical issues that should be addressed before they cause further harm to the industry.

Paid to view
Sites such as Paid2YouTube.com advertise services that allow YouTube videos to reach thousands of viewers. How do they work? Paid2YouTube pays 0.01 per view, 0.10 per comment, and 0.35 per subscription along with other referral based earning opportunities. Viewers surf through pages of embedded videos and are paid accordingly for each video they engage without ever leaving the Paid2YouTube site.

There are lots of sites offering automating computing scripts to game this method therefore viewers may not even be looking at their computer while these videos are playing. Not to mention that for advertisers, the idea that you’d pay people to watch your video runs counter to what you’re trying to do; you want them paying you!

Another potential way for viewers to be paid to view is through social games. According to an article in VideoNuze, a company called Jun Group has been a pioneer in this emerging space offering “virtual currency” in return for opt-in video views on major brands’ online video ads. (Richmond, 2011) Jun Group works with social game developers to offer targeted syndication that uses an embedded player. (Richmond, 2011) According to Jun Group’s CEO, gamers are responding positively with 90-95% completion rate and 3-5% engagement rates. Jun Group may actually be one of the more legitimate services as they promise “no auto-plays, pop-ups or other view-inflating tricks.” (Richmond, 2011) Depending on how these sites are run, there many be several related legal issues such as complying with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA).

Stream Fraud
According to Jim Louderback, an outspoken voice on this issue, Internet video has an ethics problem called “stream fraud” which he describes as a company reporting to an advertiser that a video was played when the video was not actually viewed. Louderback estimates in 2010 that stream fraud could have accounted for as much as 30% or more of paid views. (Louderback, 2010)

In some instances these videos can’t actually be stopped and play below the fold on the page with the sound turned off so the person viewing the page might not actually see or hear it at all.

Black pixel markets
Tod Sacerdoti, an author for Media Post’s Online Video Insider blog describes the syndicated black market as a “small number of video syndication firms, ad networks and tier-three publishers” that use invisible 1×1 pixel autoplayers hidden behind a banner ad with the sound turned off. (2010) This appears to be one of the most fraudulent of the three categories described.

Laws and Regulation
Many of the illegitimate practices associated with video syndication fall under case law and the U.S. Code. Similar to the current Google Adwords case, charging customers for video view impressions and using a group of incentivized viewers that regularly click on hundreds of videos to fill those impressions is fraudulent. While there may be some truth to the old adage – buyer beware, some of the companies such as Usocial use FAQs and terms of service agreements that are extremely hard to decipher.

There is nothing illegal about using a “vast network of partners”, but when you drill down and consider that these “partners” are likely incentivized for their actions and might view multiple ads simultaneously to earn more money, it becomes clear that conversion rates will remain low or nonexistent. What you’re really doing paying people to ignore your video, leave fake comments or to subscribe to your channel and then never watch it.

What should be done to stop this madness?
There will always be fly-by-night companies that bend and twist the rules to make a quick buck, whether it’s click fraud or cybersquatting, making it all the more important for legitimate companies to protect themselves. Creating strict industry standards and providing transparency around services and metrics is likely the best way for video syndication companies to avoid government oversight. In order to curtail fraudulent practices like stream fraud, marketers and producers need to educate themselves as to the risks of working with companies that hide under “trade secrets” and be willing to pay a fair price for a legitimate service.

We want to hear from you… Does your business pay for video syndication services? How do you decipher the legitimate services from the fraudulent ones? Is a video’s view count an important factor in determining whether or not you will share it?

This piece was originally written as a research paper for Theresa Simpson’s U.S. Digital Media Law and Policy course at the University of Washington.

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I’ve got a lot of beef with the most recent social media vengeance story currently making the Internet rounds. On Friday night, according to Cha Cha/Bimbo’s waitress Victoria Liss, a customer ordered $28.98 worth of food and beverages, didn’t tip, and scrawled “you could stand to lose a few pounds,” on the bottom of the credit card receipt.

Really?

First and foremost, my sympathy lies with Liss, a woman working to earn her keep at a busy and crowded Capitol Hill establishment who undoubtedly deals with a slew of moderately-to-severely annoying customers daily. Over the past two years, at my own bar, I’ve been stiffed, mocked, smirked at, and ignored—but her insult was extremely personal, and regardless the quality of her service to this couple, it was cruel and unwarranted.  Furthermore, it was a sexist slight, perpetrated by a man who lives in a society in which women are scrutinized in every aspect of their lives by how they look.

Which leads me to this point—and my fellow bartender AJ put it best—her social media tirade should not be seen as a lesson in how to tip properly, but a genuine call to reality that in the age of social media, you can and will be held accountable for your actions. Liss shared that image on her Facebook on Saturday and by Monday the national Gawker blog Jezebel was calling out Seattle’s own culture commenter Dan Savage to “enter the fray.” He did, along with at least a dozen other local and national blogs.

When Sarah Palin’s daughter Willow made homophobic remarks on Facebook, the world took notice. In August of this year, an accused rapist saw his bail increased by $200,000 when incriminating Facebook comments were discovered by the victim’s father and brought in as evidence. Even before the damning repercussions of offensive Facebook comments, Clay Shirkey wrote about a woman who retrieved her stolen T-Mobile Sidekick by utilizing early social media to track down the thieves. In short, if you have a social media presence at all, anywhere on the Internet, and you decide to be a jerk (or worse), your odds of being caught are increased. This is generally a good thing.

The Bimbo’s case brings up some ethical issues involving social media, however. Some of the comments on Dan Savage’s Slog post (SLOG is the blog of the Seattle weekly The Stranger) question whether this was a case of the bullied becoming the bully. Is using his credit card to search for his public profile a breach of privacy? And, frankly, with a name like Andrew Meyer, how many perfectly well-behaved Andrew Meyers out there are suffering from the severe ire of an enormous Internet and neighborhood community out for blood? Where do we draw the line between “community action” and mob mentality?

Regardless, we can all learn a lesson from this instance—treat your bartenders, servers, and fellow human beings with courtesy, kindness, and respect, both in person and online, and you will probably escape the wrath of the Internet. Except if your name is Andrew Meyer, in which case, on behalf of many happy bartenders, I apologize, unless you are the person who left that note, in which I say, for your own sake, keep off the Hill.

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We are all familiar with digital payments, from PayPal to iTunes accounts, direct deposits and online bill payment—but all of these are tied directly to actual fiat currency, or governmentally regulated, internationally compatible money. In Second Life, players use Linden dollars in daily activities, but these are also for purchase through US dollars. Digital currencies such as Bitcoin, however, operate independently from any national government. Bitcoin is “a currency by the people, for the people,” according to NPR’s Planet Money reporter Jacob Goldstein. It exists only digitally, essentially a computer program designed and implemented by a reclusive and mysterious man named Satoshi Nakamoto—which may even be a psyuedonymn for the actual creator.

It took me a while to figure out exactly how Bitcoin functioned, but here is the gist. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer monetary system actually capable of purchase power. There is a finite amount of Bitcoins, “mined” by users who download the computer program, run it, and are hopefully fortunate enough that their computer discovers the hidden bitcoins by solving a complex mathematical equation. Bitcoin took off over a year ago and experienced a rush of interest—now very few Bitcoins are available for download. At this moment, one Bitcoin is worth fourteen dollars. But currently the only way to obtain Bitcoins was through an online trade, Mt Gox, purchased at the market rate using traditional currency. As of July 1 this year, the Mt. Gox trade has collapsed.

Bitcoin is experiencing a rocky start. After the gossip blog Gawker ran a story about linking Bitcoins to a website selling illegal drugs, the Bitcoin exchange rate went berserk. After Bitcoin was hacked and people were allegedly “robbed” of Bitcoins, the rate plummeted. Despite the ups and downs, Bitcoins are still exchanged and sold for cash. Aficionados and proponents of Bitcoin have developed a video shown in both English and Spanish. Interested? MyBitcoin.com allows you to sign up and open your own new wallet.

Once you start collecting, don’t be surprised if your Bitcoin bank account looks something like this: 4.56739002. Bitcoins can be divisible down to multiple decimal points—tiny fractions that seem ridiculous but may translate into real money should Bitcoin ever gain substantial value.

The Planet Money podcast on Bitcoin points out a major advantage: they are essentially online cash, which doesn’t actually exist. Every payment online is either made through credit card or lengthy bank account-linked transactions that can be expensive. I admit that when the podcast mentioned that one user had already made over five thousand dollars trading Bitcoins, I was intrigued.

If Bitcoin isn’t the future of digital currency, I am convinced something else will take its place.

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What’s the big deal about letting young children onto Facebook? Isn’t it just natural for these digital natives to connect with their friends and share information and updates with each other online?

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg thinks it’s a great idea to let kids into the online community. In an interview following the Consumer Report, Zuckerberg said to Fortune Magazine that it would be a great “educational experience” for kids to be on Facebook.

“My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age,” Zuckerberg said in the interview with Fortune Magazine, adding that he’d like to see if he can change the federal rules over time. Child advocacy groups are less excited about minors on Facebook.

Personally, I suspect letting kids get on Facebook would be great mostly for Zuckerberg’s bottom line. With my background as a sports journalist, the issue reminds me of athletes doping. In cycling, for example, it’s the team owners that benefit the most from doping, not the athletes. After all, the athletes eventually risk ruining their health and their future earning potential.

Similarly, with Facebook, it’s the owners that benefit the most. The kids run the risk of damaging their self-esteem through cyber bullying, not having “enough” friends, or not being “friended” by the cool kids. Child advocates also worry about young internet users not recognizing the long-term impacts that online behavior might have on their reputations. The internet never forgets: pictures showing underage drinking and illegal drug use, or lies, rumors and innuendo aren’t easily wiped clean from an individual’s reputation.

There are good reasons for making doping illegal in sports and not all of them have to do with fairness. There are good reasons for banning young kids on Facebook and not all of that has to do with wasted time.

Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us (CC)

The State of the Union

According to the Los Angeles Times, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor testified before the Senate Commerce Committee and admitted that Facebook doesn’t spend a lot of time tracking the age of its users. In fact, they have only 100 employees tracking the activity of 600 million users. Facebook shuts down accounts if they find that users are younger than 13 but they often rely on other users to report underage account holders.

According to the Huffington Post, Facebook is currently being sued for failing to get parental permission before using minors’ personal information in its social ads.

Furthermore, Facebook is frequently under scrutiny for not having a good handle on protecting personal information. There have been frequent leaks of private information to third-party applications, where personal information on millions of users has been released and is not covered by Facebook’s terms of service.

And then there are the issues of predation, adult content, identity theft, economic scams and computer viruses.

Facebook is Forever

Maile Martinez, a program manager at Reel Grrls, a non-profit in Seattle that teaches media literacy and digital film making to girls age 9 to 19, is more concerned about what kids do online, and the kinds of personal data that they share online, than the potential for adult content and adults preying on kids though Facebook.

“We’re more concerned about cyber bullying. When we were kids, we would make prank phone calls. That was rude. Now, kids can post something that’s untrue about someone on their wall, and that’s much worse. The one being bullied can’t be sure how long the post has been up there and how many have seen it before it’s taken down,” Martinez says, pointing out that even deleted posts are traceable.

“Children and young teens don’t have a sense of the memory of Facebook. They don’t realize that their profiles can be searchable and content is traceable pretty much forever. Maybe in 10 years, they feel differently about what they would put out there,” she says.

Stressfully connected

Martinez worries that Facebook and the perceived need to be constantly connected, constantly in the loop of what everyone is doing, adds more stress to kids who are already under a lot of pressure from friends, school and other obligations.

“It’s a constant noise. Kids are stressed out in general, and this adds another layer of stress that is so constant. Kids tell us that feel like they always have to have their phones with them and be connected to know if there is any drama going on that involves them. Maybe someone posted a picture of them that was ugly. Maybe someone updated their status to ‘in a relationship’ when it was someone they were sort of interested in. It’s just stressful,” Martinez says.

Blurring lines between marketing and content

Martinez also worried about the amount of marketing and advertising that kids are exposed to on Facebook and online in general.

“Younger teens and elementary school kids really don’t understand when they are being marketed to,” she says, pointing out that the internet increasingly weaves ads into the rest of what you are seeing, which makes it harder to sort from other content.

“Say you follow Justin Bieber on Twitter and he writes a lot about a product he is using, then you think that since you like Justin Bieber, you’ll want to have that product. Kids have a harder time interpreting when people are pushing a product,” she says.

Kids Don’t Need to be on Facebook

Ingrid Butler, an MCDM student and mother of two young girls in Seattle, also sees perils for tweens on facebook. She points out that what gets uploaded on the Internet can remain there indefinitely, and travel far beyond the circles for which it was intended.

“There are so many reasons that kids DO NOT need to be on Facebook that I don’t know where to begin. I think it’s great that today’s kids are comfortable with computers and surfing the internet but it’s not as ‘cool’ as one may think. There are a lot of dangers our there such as predators, adult content and worst of all…bullies,” Butler says.

“My 12-year-old daughter is not on Facebook or anything else because I understand the dangers and have expressed them to her. She has experienced a good helping of the bullying this year and we are both so grateful that she did not have an account. A couple of weeks ago she said, ‘I’m so glad I’m not on Facebook.’ That statement means a lot to me, because that means she heard what I was saying to her and she understands the consequences of playing with fire,” Butler explains.

Butler produced a video about the impacts of bullying on her daughter for her Multimedia Storytelling class this quarter

Click here to view the embedded video.

She says she sees several issues with parents allowing their kids to lie about their age in order to set up Facebook accounts.

“When parents decide to help their kids trick the system, what does that say to the child? That lets them know it’s ok to tell a lie and I don’t agree with that parenting practice at all,” she concludes.

Taking a Stand

Martinez is happy to see that many parents are taking a personal interest in what their kids do online, and moderating what they can be engaged in.

“I recently heard some news about the Obama family where a reporter asked if the Obama girls were on Facebook, and Michelle Obama said that ‘no, they do not need to be on Facebook.’ I love it when our First Family makes such a positive statement,” Martinez concludes.

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There was a lot of clamor in digital music world last week as Amazon unveiled their new Cloud Player. Industry experts labeled it as a move to increase pressure on competitors such as Apple and Google, which are rumored to be releasing similar digital locker products later on this year.

Launched last Tuesday, Amazon’s Cloud Player gives users the ability to listen to their music collection anywhere they have an Internet connection, either via a Web app that’s compatible with all major browsers or an Android app. Amazon trumped Google by creating the first digital locker of it’s kind on Google’s own Android operating system. That’s no small accomplishment, although that makes you think Google is likely planning something even better.

Naturally, all of this is drawing staunch criticism from major record companies who aren’t happy with the Seattle company’s decision not to secure music licenses from labels and publishers before releasing its service.

Sony Music Entertainment already released a statement saying, “We are disappointed that the locker service that Amazon is proposing is unlicensed by Sony Music, and we hope that Amazon will resolve the situation quickly by agreeing to a license with us. We are keeping all our legal options open.” Amazon is now attempting to work with major record companies to reach licensing deal agreements, but until that happens (if that happens) Amazon’s stance is that they essentially do not need licenses to launch their Cloud Player. That’s an issue that major record companies are not prepared to accept, and here’s why.

Major most major record companies have been losing money since ’98/’99 and are clutching at any revenue opportunity they can find to help get them back in the black. What they want is more money and the opportunity to get two points of sale for one item of music. Dume Forwan, owner of Seattle independent music label Fresh Chopped Beats put things in perspective in an email interview:

“This griping is a case of large companies trying to dip their beaks in the pool once and come up with two catches. They want you, the consumer to buy the product up front, and then they want Amazon to pay them again for your right to play it on a different device. Instead of being concerned with what users do with the music they legally own, these companies ought to reconsider their revenue model, take advantage of ‘the long tail’ and prosper.”

He said that most indie labels don’t take umbrage with Amazons Cloud Service at all.  It’s mostly the greedy majors that are complaining, but they’re focusing on the wrong angle to make money.

It’s important to note that Amazon’s Cloud Player is not the only digital music locker that’s available. Rdio currently offers similar services and does have a licensing agreement with major record companies, but one has to wonder if that was even necessary. Amazon’s position is this that because the files belong to users, Amazon isn’t required to obtain licenses to be able to store them on its servers and make them accessible to users. From a legal perspective, that seems true.

Let’s not forget that Amazon has a larger war chest than Rdio and is able to go toe to toe in a courtroom over this issue with Sony if that day ever comes.

“Matt Sullivan, head of Seattle indie label Light in the Attic which focuses mostly on licensing retro compilations, also shared his thoughts on the new Cloud Player.”
He admitted not really seeing this as a big issue either and said it was a problem of major record labels trying to “find income from any source possible.”

But he does have concerns about artists being paid properly as their music continues to proliferate via the Web.

“I hope that artists and copyright holders are fairly compensated. Sadly though, that seems to be getting harder and harder with the technology moving at the speed of sound,” he said via email.

Sullivan is right. The onus is on labels like Light in the Attic and others to create record contracts that are favorable to both the music artist and the label itself. Still, expecting music service providers such as Amazon to be strong-armed into paying big record companies doesn’t make sense. If cloud services live up to their potential, this issue will have huge implications for the future of digital music. Let’s all stay tuned.

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Students in Kraig Baker’s Digital Media Law course already appreciate his insistence that we understand the legal risks associated with new media and platforms. Understanding all the ramifications of taking these risks is “difficult under the best of circumstances,” Baker said during his SALu presentation Wednesday evening at UW’s Kane Hall.  Whether a strong union successfully defends a woman’s right to rip her workplace in a Facebook post, or a woman loses her job for calling her friended-in boss “dumb” (Oops!), there seems no real rhyme or reason to who or what is protected, and who or what is not.

“Social media and digital media offer unparalleled access to creative tools, new art forms like mash-ups [and] almost frictionless distribution through social media platforms,” said Baker, but these same media “jumble” the many traditional legal approaches to media and technology.

With the same style, timing and deadpan delivery of popular comedian Stephen Wright, Baker appears determined to show law for what he tells his students it is: “Just a word.” He relishes the challenge of clarifying basic legal structures “governing free expression, intellectual property and privacy” – ever evolving in this age of digital and social media.

When it comes to free expression, even (and perhaps especially) celebrities like Kim Kardashian enjoy no free pass to libel another celebrity – even in only 140 characters of a tweet. But it is OK for Yelp! to host Joe next door to rain on the parade of a restaurant by tweeting how horrible their food tastes (but, of course, Joe next door is not off the hook).

As for privacy, Baker points out even so much as “Liking” someone or something on Facebook sacrifices more than a little privacy. In fact, your friends’ privacy may also be compromised in just the half second it takes to click “Like.”

Intellectual (digital) property might just be the slope most slippery to navigate. Legend by now is Baker’s experience of meticulously sifting through decades of documents to untangle a Six Degrees of ‘Kevin Bacon-style’ web of Walt Disney, Star Trek genius Gene Roddenberry and, almost comically, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez.

When push comes to shove, Baker is fond of encouraging those who will listen to check with an attorney about anything that might expose you to liability for libel, slander or infringement upon intellectual property rights. However, he is quick to make one thing crystal clear with little more than a smirk:  If you open a social media account and are asked to confirm you’ve read all the terms and conditions, you are on your own. After all, Baker tells his students, “Writing all those things in fine print is what I do for a living.”

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Special to Flip the Media from Mike Katell

The sixth annual iConference takes place in Seattle from February 8-11, 2011 and is hosted by the University of Washington Information School. This conference will bring together faculty and students from 28 academic institutions as well as researchers and practitioners from a diverse array of fields, including library science, health, information management, law, government and data security.

A feature in this year’s conference is a panel on “Information, Values and the Justice System”. The workshop, which takes place on Tuesday the 8th, is organized by members of the Technology Committee of the Access to Justice Board, of which I am the current committee Chair.  The panel will examine the role that technology plays in assisting access to the resources of the Washington State court system. Technology and access are key components in how citizens can make effective use of government services.  The policy implications of how government agencies can provide technological access to services across geographical, cultural, social and economic areas are immense.

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