On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway covers Amazon's new identity verification requirement for KDP authors, aimed at preventing fraud and improving the reader experience. He also discusses the NO FAKES Act, a US legislation designed to prevent the unauthorized use of people's likenesses and voices, particularly concerning AI and deepfakes. Also, Dan touches on a recent court ruling on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its implications for DRM and VPN usage.
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Listen to Self-Publishing News: KDP's New Identity Verification
New episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast: @agnieszkasshoes covers Amazon's new KDP identity verification, the NO FAKES Act, and recent DMCA rulings. Important updates for self-publishing authors. #indieauthor #selfpublishing Share on XDon't Miss an #AskALLi Broadcast
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcripts to Self-Publishing News
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another Self-Publishing News from a grey morning in Oxford, out to watch some more Olympic action. I couldn't help reflect a little bit on last week, and the fact that the my father's funeral is now done, and that if you ask someone who is an indie author to organise an event, you will get something that is a little bit different, and that the indie spirit has managed to pervade all the way through to ensuring that he got sent off to a track from his old band.
It's clearly in the blood, the indie way, and with a full-on red painted coffin topped with pink silk handkerchiefs instead of flowers, my indieness managed to stay indie until his end.
KDP Launches Identity Verification
Anyway, that is all done, and I returned to the news that KDP has been busy, and it has launched an identity verification.
So, this is a really important thing that is going to impact all of us. It won't impact everyone at once, as Amazon points out. At first, it's going to be rolled out to a limited number of authors, but we should all expect to be impacted, anyone who uses KDP, at some point.
It is designed to basically stop bad actors. It's designed to improve reader experience.
Amazon is obviously really worried about people passing themselves off as other authors. You'll hear that one of the other news stories that I have this week is about a new deepfake prevention piece of legislation in the US.
We know that authors like Jane Friedman have had real problems with people passing themselves off as someone they are not. There are also problems with writer farms producing gobbledygook content that they then create an account for, the money goes who knows where, and all of this swallows up funds from the KDP pool that would have gone otherwise to authors.
So, it's a really big problem. It creates a terrible reader experience, and it ensures that authors don't get the money that they're entitled to, and there's less to go around for authors. All of that because of problems with the identity of people who open accounts.
What that means for Amazon is that they are now going to start requiring people that open an account on KDP to verify their ID using, as they put it, government issued identity documentation.
Obviously, that raises some concerns, first and foremost around privacy. Amazon are very clear that they take privacy very seriously. They say that any documents that are used for the verification process will be immediately deleted from their systems, so we should not expect there to be any news stories at any point in which people's personal information has been leaked from Amazon as a result of a data breach, because there should be no data to breach.
So, that will be one I'll definitely be keeping an eye on to ensure that it does what it says.
One of the things that will be interesting as a possible development from this, I've talked about the European legislation that affects advertising and the fact that on large tech platforms adverts are required to have a real name of the person who is placing the advert, and that this has implications for everyone who writes under a pseudonym, for example, or for whistleblowers.
One of the things that would be interesting is to see whether something like this, which takes place behind the scenes, but nonetheless satisfies Amazon, that you do indeed have a verified identity, would be able to be tied in with requirements for specific verification for adverts. So, that even if your name isn't put prominently on the advert, Amazon can satisfy the legislation by saying, we know who this is, we're happy with who they are.
I'm not sure that will satisfy the legislation, which is very much about giving consumers transparency, but it would be interesting to see at least some work going on attempts to try and coordinate all these things, because one of the problems that happens when you get new systems put in place is that everyone does it their own way and as a result, for creators concerned it can be an absolute nightmare, and even if your data doesn't get breached from Amazon, someone somewhere won't necessarily be careful. And if you could just do it once wouldn't that be lovely?
Who knows whether that will happen, but anyway, it is going to affect all of us. People concerned will be sent an email from KDP. They will be given a deadline by which they need to complete the task. If they are unable to, because obviously not everyone has government issued ID, then they can speak to Amazon about another way of doing it. I have a feeling this might be why it's happening on a rollout pilot basis, because I can imagine those helplines will be absolutely overwhelmed initially, at least until they figure out some more FAQ based solutions for people who have problems with the process. So again, as always, watch this space.
NO FAKES Legislation Launches in U.S. to Improve Identity Protection
That's amazon and KDP, and I mentioned that there is a new piece of legislation in the United States that is also focused on this area of identity protection, identity verification, and security.
I've also mentioned before that the Americans absolutely love their acronyms. This is the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act, and if you are following along, you will realise that spells out NO FAKES. So, congratulations again to the person who managed to come up with that acronym.
What this is, it is a piece of legislation that is designed to basically stop people using other people's image or voice in their own works and passing themselves off as someone else. A case that sprung to mind, or three cases sprung to mind very quickly.
The first of all, and this is the headline case that they're obviously trying to think about, is the case that Spotify has had all sorts of problems with people putting tracks up, allegedly by artists. Drake was a very high-profile instance. They've had to take them down.
Obviously, with a streaming service like Spotify, the same as with KDP, and this is the second of those cases that I spoke about earlier with Jane Friedman, there is a pool of money from which creators take their slice, according to how much of the time listeners have spent, or readers have spent, with their work as opposed to someone else's work. If you've got faked work pretending to be yours in there, that is money that readers and listeners intended to go to you but is actually going to someone else, so it's directly taking money out of your pocket.
A slightly more interesting instance that I thought of was the OpenAI/Scarlett Johansson debacle from a few weeks ago. Of course, OpenAI asked Scarlett Johansson if she would be the voice of ChatGPT 4.0. She said no, thank you. They then had a very high-profile launch with this fabulously advanced AI whose voice sounded remarkably like Scarlett Johansson's. And she said, hang on a minute, this feels wrong. They then apologized and said, we didn't intend this at all, and took the voice away. It now doesn't sound like Scarlett Johansson, but had this legislation been in place when that happened, would she have actually been able to sue OpenAI for what they did?
That's an interesting side effect of the legislation. It will be interesting to see when it comes into force, how vigorously it is pursued.
Judge Rules DMCA is Not a Breach of the First Amendment
Talking of legislation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation a long time ago argued that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which actually DMCA, it's an acronym we're familiar with, but it's not quite as impressive as NO FAKES. They argued that it was a first amendment breach.
In particular, it was a first amendment breach because it stopped people using what is called technological search to access the files that creators had protected.
So, basically, they argued that everyone has a right to read, everyone has a right to use what they read in their own work, and that technological circumvention should be allowed if you're going to use it to do things that you should have the right to do.
A judge in this case, in the DC Circuit Court has said, I don't think so. The opinion says very clearly, The First Amendment protects the right to read, but it does not grant unimpeded access to every reading material a reader might wish for. Similarly, the First Amendment does not guarantee potential fair users unfettered or privileged access to copyrighted works they seek to use in their own expression.
Examples that I could think of technological circumventions, the obvious one is where people strip out DRM. So, people protect their digital work using DRM, so digital rights management tools, or maybe using a watermark or something like that, and people use technology to strip those out and then to either read or redistribute that material.
It would be interesting to see if this also applies to VPNs. You'll know that a lot of adverts for VPNs, so that's Virtual Private Networks, such as NordVPN, other VPNs are available. They play on this fact that if you access the web through a VPN, it doesn't know where you're based. So, if material, for example, on Netflix, say you have Netflix but you are Netflix in the UK and you want to access Netflix in the US or somewhere else and they have different material that you can't access in the UK, if you go through a VPN then you would theoretically be able to change your location so that it thinks you're somewhere else and you can access material in that area.
That feels to me like a technological circumvention. I'm not sure if it's something that the Act had in mind, but it will be interesting to see if it means that this opinion now means that is not something that VPNs advertise or possibly enable, or it could just be that this is another example that legislators are somewhat behind technology.
So, there we go, lots of interesting stuff about identity and technology this week. Very best to everyone and I look forward to speaking to you again next week. Thank you.
