The future of the Internet in the EU

[glauxosdever]

Hi,


I suppose we have all heard about the new Copyright Directive in the EU. They say it will "protect the rights of authors".

However, it will actually endanger the rights of authors, as intellectual works (including code we write as a hobby and share afterwards) will have to be filtered before being uploaded. On most sites, it will be automatic filters that will do the job.

Automatic filters, as we can predict, aren't 100% fool-proof -- they have false-positives. Which means, they may (and will) sometimes mistake our works for being copyrighted by someone else. What if we use some code with permission from the author? Will the filters recognise it? No (the filter can't know we had permission). What about forks of code repositories (where the original permission explicitly allows that and is also preserved in the fork)? Will the filter recognise it? I doubt it (unless it's so artificially intelligent that it recognises every single possible license).

And it's not only code. It's also photos, videos and other kinds of data that will be affected. Imagine taking a photo of e.g. an eclipsed moon you just witnessed rising, only to find out it has been "copyrighted". Or recording a work by Scarlatti on the harpsichord (or the piano) and posting it, only to find out it can't be uploaded (or has been taken down) because someone copyrighted another recording of the same piece.

There is also the "link tax". I suppose their reasoning is that it will reduce spamdexing (I don't have any references to this). But, in reality, it will just make sharing costly.

I know it's a bit late (the EU committee has already voted for this), but the EU parliament hasn't yet. It can still be stopped.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm against violating copyrights. But I'm also against filters that decide what is copyrighted and reject everything that (falsely) falls into that category. Next step will probably be filters that decide what is politically incorrect and reject everything that (either falsely or truthfully) falls into that category.

What are your thoughts about this?


Regards,
glauxosdever

[dseller]

I think that most people that live in a EU country simply don't know or care what happens on EU-level legislation.

Personally, I think that the problem will solve itself. Once this actually becomes legislation, there will be a lot of backfire from both companies and civilians. But probably only after the law has been passed.

[iansjack]

Copyright abuse on the internet is a huge problem. Any means of controlling it can only be of benefit to those of us who produce intellectual property.

You are worrying about filters that don't exist; they are a figment of your imagination.

[Schol-R-LEA]

Copyright abuse on the internet is a huge problem. Any means of controlling it can only be of benefit to those of us who produce intellectual property.

You are worrying about filters that don't exist; they are a figment of your imagination.

ERR: Insufficient Sample Size - Sarcasm Status Undetermined.

Mind you, GlauxOSdever isn't saying the EU governments will filter things, but that large corporations will, in order to CYA against legal action and protect themselves. Since this is already the case, the concern is not unjustified.

Let's just say that the experience of copyright filtering on YouTube and Steam, relative to the DMCA in the US (where failing to comply can cause companies to lose the 'safe harbor' status as content carriers rather than content providers - IANAL, I may have this wrong), has left a lot of people concerned. The problem is that many companies rely on combination of algorithmic filters and community policing, rather than spend a lot of their money on more pro-active approaches (and keep in mind that most of these supposedly for-profit businesses and subsidiaries - Twitter, Google's YouTube, Valve's Steam - have never actually realized a profit, or have only done so infrequently) that would still be unable to cope with the volume no matter how much effort they put into it.

This has led to a lot of people getting the sort of copyright strikes mentioned, as well as a lot of people gaming the system - manually submitted copyright takedowns being made for spurious reasons have been a serious issue on YouTube for years. While most of these relate to game and film/video makers trying to shut down critics (mostly smaller, independent ones without a lot of professional business experience, but some established companies have played this game too, such as the threats by Atlus Games over Persona 5, and Wargaming.eu's threats against a former network partner), one of the biggest involved a composer who tried to put pressure on a company she was in a contract dispute with. Some relevant instance include (note that most of these are NSFW):

How to Dispute a Strike -- DMCA Process Explained (H3H3) - though unlike most instances, this one did go to court -
h3h3 wins! Let's read Judge Forrest's Opinion (Leonard French)

This video is no longer available: The Day One Garry's Incident Incident (Total Biscuit)
Another Copyright Takedown By Another Poopbrain Dev (Jim Sterling)
DMCA Takedown: The Dentola Studios Debacle Continues (SidAlpha)
Not Fur-Funny: The DalasGames DMCA (SidAlpha)

Super Seducer Richard La Ruina Falsely DMCAs My Video (I Am Pattyjack) - note that this wasn't even done as a serious takedown attempt, he reversed the claim immediately. He did it solely to throw his weight around.
Super Seducer's Super Sexy Censorship (The Know Game News)
Super Seducer's 'Dating Guru' Issues Fraudulent DMCA Takedown To Prove He's A Man (Jim Sterling)

Dirty Devs: Asset Flipper Attempts mass reporting of Game Critic Zaxtor99 (SidAlpha) - this was on Steam, rather than YT, but it was a similar sort of thing where automated systems were abused to take someone off of a site)

The Slaughtering Grounds: A Steam Meltdown Saga (Jim Sterling) - note that the DMCA takedown was just one part of a bigger debacle, which like with the H3H3 case, actually involved a lawsuit, (though not one over copyright infringement):
When Jim Sterling Was Sued For $10 Million By Digital Homicide (Jim Sterling)

Video relating specifically to Alex Mauer's alleged use of takedowns against game reviewers to put pressure on the game developers, Imagos Softworks -
Alex Mauer's Copyright Claim Abuse (Total Biscuit)
Alex Mauer enforces contract by DMCA extortion (Leonard French warning, this one is really long. Also, French was later the legal counsel for Imagos in the resulting lawsuits, but this was from before that)
Composer Files Tons of Spurious DMCA Takedowns For Extortion Purposes (Jim Sterling)
Imagos WINS! Alex Mauer agrees 'no more DMCAs' (Leonard French)
Alex Mauer DMCA Strikes Again (News Cartridge)
Alex Mauer: The Devil of DMCA Returns (SidAlpha - while he was not a participant in the legal case, Mauer had harassed him after he reported on the case)

[Mcmillan]

Copyright abuse on the internet is a huge problem. Any means of getting VyprVPN here and controlling it can only be of benefit to those of us who produce intellectual property.

You are worrying about filters that don't exist; they are a figment of your imagination.

Honestly, I'm so scared about the EU legislature simply because the top EU officials are not even democratically elected. They are not accountable to anyone. It's an abomination of a system and I hope it's torn down asap. Lets just revert to free trade only and call it a day.

[iansjack]

Free trade doesn't mean you are free to rip off other people's copyright material.

[Schol-R-LEA]

Free trade doesn't mean you are free to rip off other people's copyright material.

I don't think that this was McMillan's intent, though I can see why it might read that way. That having been said, I think that the issue of the legitimacy of the EU parliament is somewhat irrelevant in this conversation - especially since my understanding is that McMillan's statement isn't accurate, or perhaps I should say, would be just as accurate if applied to (for example) the UK's Minister of Defence, or the US Secretary of State - while that aren't elected positions, nut the appointment is made by a person or body which are (by the Prime Minister in the UK, or by the President in the US, and both with the agreement by the larger elected bodies they lead). The positions McMillan seems to be referring to are (IIUC) selected by the elected members of the EU Parliament, making those positions slightly more democratic than the two I mentioned (as there isn't a single main individual doing the appointing with permission, but are rather voted on by the body as a whole).

Admittedly, one might argue that any of these positions ought to be elected positions, but that's its own can of worms.

I would ask for confirmation on this, but frankly, it seems outside the scope of the thread (and my own view of politics doesn't really accept the premise that the official leadership of large organizations actually have decision-making input they nominally exist to have). If anyone wants to discuss this further, I suggest creating a separate thread for it.

That having been said: the key issue here is not with the existence or enforcement of copyright, but rather, with how the enforcement is implemented - and specifically, how the rules of how private organizations bear the burden of the enforcement, and the basic problem of how to enforce the laws at all given the scope and scale of the problem.

Basically, the recent experience is that most of the efforts to do so have been too coarse-grained, too sweeping, too heavily automated with little oversight, and too easily abused. This has been a learning experience, to be fair, but the problem is that the wording of the laws (especially the DMCA in the US) has not really given the companies in question the room to learn from that experience - and as a result, flawed processes stay in place, and so far most attempts to fix them make the problem worse.

A key part of the problem is that most copyright laws have provisions for 'fair use' - that is to say, that some parts of a work may be used for the purpose of reviewing the work, quoting the work for illustration of a point, for parody, or for works which use the IP in 'substantially transformative' ways. A big part of the Fair Use doctrine revolves over whether the use is directly competitive with the original. Further, another aspect of this whether the alleged infringing party made a 'minimal use' of the original - that is to say, that they use exactly enough to suit their purposes, and no more.

All of these require a certain amount of mindful judgement is needed in order to determine whether a piece actually is infringing. However, when the concept of copyright was introduced in the mid-19th century, no one foresaw the sheer scale of something like the modern Internet, or the ease with which copies could be made (which, contrary to what some seem to think, is a fundamental aspect of electronic data - it is not possible, even in principle, to prevent someone from viewing data if you can physically access it, at most you can make it impractically difficult). At the heart of it, the problem is that the enforcement methods used in the past simply do not, cannot, scale.

(Yes, copyright was introduced pretty late in the day. There had been patents before then, but the legal basis of patents is completely different - they are an issued monopoly, not a fundamental right of the creator. Trademarks also arose around the same time as copyright, but they too have a different legal foundation, being primarily a type of consumer protection law. IIRC, two of the biggest advocates for the original copyright laws in the UK were Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll, who had seen several unauthorized versions of their novels published, which meant they weren't realizing any royalties on them.)

This video does a good job of discussing several of these aspects, at least in regard to US law.

While the immediate problem can be laid at the feet of Google and similar companies, the core of the problem has been due to the laws being poorly written. I don't know if the EU regulation is better or worse than the US laws in this regard (I haven't really looked at them), but the consensus seems to be that the only way to enforce them is to outright ban anything that could be interpreted as infringing. This basically would result in either the Fair Use doctrine being abandoned, or else lead to both the companies' legal teams and the courts being flooded by copyright cases.

[glauxosdever]

Hi,


Given Schol-R-LEA's parallelisation of this directive to DMCA, I got reminded of how a single bogus DMCA notice resulted in taking down the entire IMSLP domain. While IMSLP also hosts files that are not Public Domain globally (but are Public Domain in at least some among EU, US or Canada):

• They manually (as in "done by a group of intelligent people") review the copyright status of each file uploaded and mark them appropriately;
• They ask the user to verify copyright status before downloading.

While this doesn't actually stop cases like "I'm European and I can download a file that is PD only in Canada (but not Europe)", I think that it was it was still unfair to take down the entire domain (as most of the scores aren't copyrighted anymore). On the other side of the coin, IMSLP could indeed have a stricter policy of hosting only files that are PD everywhere (or in all major areas). IMSLP is, either way, a big resource of non-copyrighted scores.

Another incident was when the open movie "Sintel" was blocked on youtube, after a false copyright claim made by Sony. While you may argue that IMSLP may be doing illegal things, there is simply no justification for this one though. Sintel was made entirely by Blender people.

I definitely agree that copyright infringement is unethical, and that regulation on file-sharing sites should exist in some form (like at IMSLP, maybe a bit stricter in the ways I suggested). However, it's not to be done by either automated filters (yes, they do exist and they are employed by e.g. Youtube) or by mindless people (e.g. the registrar of IMSLP).

Let's see what happens tomorrow...


Regards,
glauxosdever

[Schol-R-LEA]

It should be added that, with YouTube and some other sites, false negatives are just as much of a problem as false positives - leading to a situation where the automatic filtering often misses actual infringement while issuing strikes or advertisement revenue entailment requests on non-infringing material.

Note that most of these scanning and filtering systems aren't even run by YT - the major IP holders such as Sony, Nintendo, Warner, Fox, etc. all have systems to raise both automatic DMCA takedown requests and ContentID advertising entailment. While most companies weight their systems towards entailing advertisement rather than outright takedown (as it acts to preserve some degree of fair use, thus limiting litigation, while also being much harder to challenge on YT and most other content services), they tend to assume that the automatic system is correct by default, leaving the burden of proof on the accused. YouTube does have a certain amount of automated filtering, but they most rely on reports by the IP holders.

It also means that, whether intentionally or not (presumably not), the systems are heavily biased in favor of IP holders with the deep pockets needed to run these systems. Smaller content creators generally can only do manual strikes/entailments on things they happen upon personally.

(Also, YouTube's ContentID itself can be gamed, both by the IP holders and those trying to stymie their ad entailments. Jim Sterling infamously found a way to block all ContentIDing of his videos by deliberately forcing contradictory claims, which he refers to a 'copyright deadlock'. Regardless of what you think of either him, or this specific 'petty little trick' (his words), it does highlight the flaws in the automatic systems, and did lead to Google trying to fix some of the problems with ContentID. Oh, and dancing the 'Chains of Love' became a signature of his...)

A true solution would require both better filtering, and manual oversight and review of potential strikes before issuing them (and by the content carriers when they receive them), but both of those would be ruinously expensive.

Again, this is as much a problem of how both IP holders and content carriers react to the laws as it is with the laws themselves, but much of it does stem from the specific provisions of the laws regarding matters such as copyright negation (which requires IP holders to be pro-active about their copyrights or risk the work devolving to the public domain) and the inherently subjective nature of both substantive similarity (which can cover use of likenesses to a work, meaning that it can apply even if the infringement isn't a direct copy) and fair use (which acts as a counterbalance to that, as well as creating a safe harbor for both criticism and parody).

[iansjack]

The EU Parliament has rejected the proposed new law, so you can all stop worrying. This is not like some countries where a dictatorial President can do pretty well as he pleases.

[Schol-R-LEA]

The EU Parliament has rejected the proposed new law, so you can all stop worrying.

Fair enough. While this isn't an unalloyed blessing IMO - there really is a need for the laws to catch up with the tech, and indeed much of the trouble we're seeing is due to the current laws being written for the period of 1996-2003 or so - but if this bill was as bad as they say, it is probably for the best.

This is not like some countries where a dictatorial President can do pretty well as he pleases.

Or - hypothetically speaking - one who simply claims he's doing a lot of things which he isn't really doing (and, in most cases, doesn't have the authority to do even if he really meant to, which he never does because his whole strategy is based on bluffs), and have everyone think he did it (often before he's actually said he will do it, just hinted that he will).

All the while giggling behind his hand as he watches both his opponents and those who think he is their ally (despite the fact that he has blatant, screaming contempt for all of them) run around like chickens with their heads cut off, because he only ran for the position For The Lulz, knowing full well what a booby prize the position really is but being unable to pass up on the opportunity because he gets a boner every time his face is on a screen or his words are quoted in a newspaper headline.

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

[dseller]

The EU Parliament has rejected the proposed new law, so you can all stop worrying. This is not like some countries where a dictatorial President can do pretty well as he pleases.

278 voted for the law, while 318 voted against. That's quite a narrow margin there, only 40 votes.

[glauxosdever]

Hello,


Today, 2018-09-12, the EU parliament voted for Article 13. It is also today that RMS (coincidence?) linked from his political notes to a post that talks about a case similar to what I described in my first post in this thread (uploading performances of public domain music). Article 13 is probably only going to reinforce fraudulent copyright claims, i.e. actually causing more problems than it claims to solve.

And, at least here in Greece, they said nothing in the media about this, neither in June, nor on 5th July, nor one week ago when MEPs were given a deadline until today, nor today. Isn't that, um, interesting? And I'm almost positive that the EU cleverly imposed the sanctions against Hungary just today, so they overshadow the Internet Directive voting, so there is an even lower probability of hearing about it on mainstream media.

Congrats, EU...

[iansjack]

The purpose of Article 13 is to require that platforms proactively work with rightsholders to stop users uploading copyrighted content.

That seems eminently sensible to me, protecting those who produce original material. (But to be fair, I spent a lifetime in an industry that depended upon the protection offered by copyright.)

[StudlyCaps]

The purpose of Article 13 is to require that platforms proactively work with rightsholders to stop users uploading copyrighted content.

That seems eminently sensible to me, protecting those who produce original material. (But to be fair, I spent a lifetime in an industry that depended upon the protection offered by copyright.)

Although I strongly support some form copyright protection, personally I think the current system heavily favours corporate interests over both the public and independent creatives. Again only personal philosophy, but democratic governments shouldn't legislate for corporate interests over the greater good of society.
I think it goes against the ideals of democracy for a government body to attempt to reduce public knowledge of unpopular legislation. Also stronger IP laws probably wouldn't be in the best interests of most EU member states, I would think it serves to concentrate wealth because the countries which are already wealthy produce the most IP, but then again I don't know as much as maybe I should about the political structure of the EU.