The New Freedom

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The other day, I clicked a link to some video footage of rather savage riot police beatings in Iceland which happened last week. The video was hosted on LiveLeak, a video sharing site similar to YouTube which bills itself as “Redefining the Media.” I had a few questions about the site, so I used the comment form on the site to send some in, and was pleasantly surprised to get a call back from Hayden Hewitt, co-Founder of the website, who was kind enough to answer my questions.

Rather than the usual worthless viral videos and clips of teenage girls dancing to bad pop music, LiveLeak has a community centered largely around politics and news, especially news about the war. The site was born out of the the ashes of Ogrish.com, which was home to a plethora of gory pictures and movies, similar to Rotten.com, both of which I remember disturbing the shit out of me as a kid. Just by looking through the Wayback Machine, you can see the site transition from being a straight shock and gore site (”Best Grotesque Movies and Pictures!”) to a site about the limits of human experience (”Can You Handle Life?”), ultimately to a running steam of grizzly details from events around the world (”Uncover Reality”). Ogrish finally became LiveLeak in November, 2006. The site grew rapidly in popularity after it first hosted the infamous video of the execution of Saddam Hussein. More recently, it was the first place to host Fitna, the highly controversial film about Islam in the Netherlands. The nature of the site draws a lot of tinfoil-hat types, but as Ogrish aimed to prove, sometimes these things do actually happen. The footage doesn’t lie.

The site has become a burgeoning haven for “citizen journalists,” a term which has become used for ordinary people who record news worthy events. This includes amateur journalists who investigate stories, but also largely includes people who just happened to be in the right place at the right time with a cameraphone on hand. With the horrendous quality of American journalism as of late, such as the obsession with trivial bullshit like lapel pins and the much more terrifying admission that the Pentagon has a media war unit and a long, continuing history of media manipulation, it is no wonder that there has been an upsurgance in independent media and citizen journalism. I was curious about where LiveLeak thinks it will lead, as well as their thoughts on relevant digital rights topics such as internet censorship, copyright, and net neutrality.

This is what Mr. Hewitt had to say. The questions which I asked are in bold. Also, keep in mind these are paraphrased from the notes I took during the interview.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Of course! I’m just glad to be talking to someone besides the mainstream media.

Has your organization ever received any DMCA or 2257 takedown notices?

No 2257 notices, as we don’t allow users to upload anything of that sort, but yes, of course we’ve dealt with DMCA notices. For things like Brittney Spears videos we’ll just take them down, it isn’t worth it. But for things that we think are important, we will fight them, yes.

So you have a legal team?

Well, we have a lawyer on our staff. We are a fairly small operation, distributed around the world. We’re still resisting moving into an office. It’s just much easier to be independent as a small, nimble organization.

Do you keep the servers in a foreign country to avoid copyright issues?

Actually, I’m located in the UK but our servers are in the US. We have a server farm of over thirty servers now, riding on the Rolls Royce of bandwidth. We’re really happy with our hosting.

A lot of the footage on the site appears to come from sources inside the military, despite the blanket ban on bloggers in the military, supposedly to increase troop safety. Have you received any type of legal threats about that?

Ah, yes. We’ll only take things down if there is a genuine threat to human life. We were actually contacted about one video, haha, of a soldier on the gunner turret of a jeep taking enemy fire, and they wanted it taken down because it could “give away troop locations.” We said Mate, if they’re shooting at you, they already know where you are!

Other than that, most of the contact with the military we have are requests for material for training videos.

Where does your organization stand on the issue of network neutrality legislation? This is such an important topic, but one which I still feel undecided about, which is why I don’t write about it on this site. On one hand, I don’t want my internet traffic to be filtered by companies trying to push their own products on me or restrict my access to their competitors, but I’m also extremely weary of the government becoming involved in regulating what the internet can and can’t be. It seems like too much of a slippery slope. It’s not far from the law saying “The internet should be Open” to saying “The internet should be Open..except for copyright infringing materials or people saying bad things about the government..” Where do you stand?

The only reason that net neutrality is an issue because of corporate greed. That’s all it is, pure greed. I remember being absolutely disgusted a few weeks ago when one of the heads of one of the largest ISPs in the UK called net neutrality “a load of bollocks.”

Ah, Virgin, right?

Yes, Virgin.

I’m constantly shocked by the staggering amount of apathy about the subject. It’s such an important issue but it seems like there is hardly any outrage about it. We can put up something every few weeks about it, but then we look preachy, and that deters people.

What we don’t want to see is the internet turn into television. Nothing but mindless crap like YouTube and MySpace, you know? We can’t let that happen.

Okay, but what about the problems of government regulation of the internet? I’m sure your site in particular would been one of the first to be censored.

At the end of the day, we’re eventually going to have know what the government is doing, which isn’t the case with the corporations. And, theoretically, we can change it. Democracy, revolution.. Right, exactly.

The most important thing is that we keep the platform open. Once we have the open platform secured, we can deal with content regulation and ways around that as it comes up. And the only thing preventing is from keeping this open platform is sheer corporate greed.

The most important that separates your site from the other video sharing sites is the Citizen Journalism section. What do you think is the future of citizen media? Will it overtake traditional media?

Well, you need to understand that we aren’t trying to compete with the mainstream media. We’re trying to do something completely different. You know, they’re bloated and full of money, but they can still do things that we can’t. We need to be smart in a different way.

What we’re envisioning is a global information network. Rather than modern mainstream media, where you just sit and take in what they present to you, we want everything to be readily accessible. Not just the big stuff, even local stuff. Everybody should be able to know who’s doing what and who’s talking to who.

So what we have to do, one of the ways we can outsmart the mainstream media, is to use the social power of the internet. We’re going to create a social network of journalists. If you’re doing a story and need some information from the other side of the world, you’ve got a contact there. Everybody has sources all over the world.

Next year, we’re going to move beyond video sharing by giving people the tools that they need to do this. We’re going to have video creation tools and a social network, you know, way beyond Facebook type stuff, to give the citizen journalists what they need.

Running a video site, you know how videos spread around the internet regardless of copyright until somebody makes a takedown request. Are you going to use this to your advantage and let people use, perhaps, Creative Commons licences?

Well, I’d like to see the videos be Creative Commons, but I don’t know if we can do that right away. A big thing we’re worried about is being preyed on by the mainstream media, you know, they’ll just play our stuff without giving any credit or money to the video’s creator. This happens already. So what we’re talking about setting up is a way that our users can directly sell their content to wire services like Reuters and the like. We’ll let users choose a ring of sites which can embed their videos.

What caused the transition from Ogrish to LiveLeak?

Ogrish was an interesting experiment. You’ve got to understand that these are really smart guys who made it before I joined the staff, not emo kids with pale faces. Eventually, though, it just got to the point where we had to say there is no more good we can do with this. I enjoyed Ogrish from a conceptual standpoint rather than for the actual content.

We do like being subversive, so we wanted to be subversive on a huge scale. A lot of our content was coming from journalists already, so we opened it up and created LiveLeak.

Although some of the videos on LiveLeak can be pretty brutal, it isn’t anything like there was on Ogrish. Does this happen deliberately?

Ah, yes. At the end of the day, there has to be somebody with decision making ability, somebody with discretion. It’s even like that on Wikipedia, you know, there’s ultimately somebody who has the final say. The trick is not to step in too often.

Ogrish wasn’t just gory pictures, everything on the site had some context. And it’s the same on LiveLeak. What we’re after is reality with a good dose of politics.

So there are things that you won’t put up. Where is the line drawn?

When the violence doesn’t add anything to the story. There was one video of a 12 year old boy, a member of the taliban, was beheading a man. It was so disturbing, I wish I could unsee it. We didn’t show that. We ran a censored version which stops right before the violence starts. There wasn’t any reason to show it, it didn’t add anything that wasn’t there already.

How do you feel about community?

Love ‘em. Absolutely. You know I’m out there on the site everyday, interacting with the community. That’s the thing about our site, you’ll always be able to get in touch with a moderator or an admin or me. It’s not like on other sites where the process is automated. I’m out there on the front lines.

A lot of your videos come from Iraq and Afghanistan. Where in the 60s, that kind of footage was taken by journalists and circulated widely on television, now it seems to be made all by the soldiers themselves on hand-held equipment and posted straight to your site. That goes against the ban the military has on blogging and vlogging. How are they doing that, proxies?

Not just proxies. They have their ways. I’m not going to say too much more so that they can keep doing it.

One last question.. Does LiveLeak have an ultimate goal? Where do you see yourselves in five years?

Nahhh! Mission statements are for guys in shiny suits. We prefer to stay small and dynamic. Right now we’re working on this citizen media network project, but somebody could come up with a brilliant idea in 6 months and we could go off in entirely new direction. But I think we will always focus on staying as true to reality as possible.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me!
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Thanks again to Hayden Hewitt and LiveLeak.com for doing this. I’m off to England this week, so I’m going to write a post about digital rights and US border security before I go. After that, I have a few more articles in mind, and I’ll give periodic updates about my progress as part of my Google Summer of Code project, which is being mentored by David Hart.

And it looks like the Anomos project for pseudonymous and encrypted BitTorrent has a new site and some new life..fingers crossed we get a release out by the last HOPE conference in July..

Rich!

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