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It’s been a long tradition here on Techdirt to show examples of politicians and political parties pushing for stricter, more draconian, copyright laws are often found violating those same laws. But the French Rassemblemant National (National Rally Point) party is taking this to new levels — whining about the enforcement of internet filters, just as it’s about to vote in favor of making such filters mandatory. Leaving aside that Rassemblemant National, which is the party headed by Marine Le Pen, is highly controversial, and was formerly known as Front National, it is still an extremely popular political party in France. And, boy, is it ever pissed off that YouTube took down its YouTube channel over automatically generated copyright strikes. Le Pen is particularly angry that YouTube’s automatic filters were unable to recognize that they were just quoting other works:
Marine Le Pen was quoted as saying, “This measure is completely false; we can easily assert a right of quotation [to illustrate why the material was well within the law to broadcast]”.
Yes, but that’s the nature of automated filters. They cannot tell what is “fair use” or what kinds of use are acceptable for commentary or criticism. They can just tell “was this work used?” and if so “take it down.”
Given all that, and the fact that Le Pen complained that this was “arbitrary, political and unilateral,” you have to think that her party is against the EU Copyright Directive proposal, which includes Article 13, which would make such algorithmic filters mandatory. Except… no. Within the EU Parliament, Rassemblemant National is in a coalition with a bunch of other anti-EU parties known as Europe of Nations and Freedoms or ENF. And how does ENF feel about Article 13? MEP Julia Reda has a handy dandy chart showing that ENF is very much in favor of Article 13 (and the Article 11 link tax).
So… we have a major political party in the EU, whose own YouTube channel has been shut down thanks to automated copyright filters in the form of YouTube’s ContentID. And that party is complaining that ContentID, which is the most expensive and the most sophisticated of all the copyright filters out there, was unable to recognize that they were legally “quoting” another work… and their response is to order every other internet platform to install their own filters. Really?
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For the past few years, there’s been a dedicated effort by some to get mandatory filters into EU copyright rules, despite the fact that this would destroy smaller websites, wouldn’t work very well, and would create all sorts of other consequences the EU doesn’t want, including suppression of free speech. Each time it pops up again, a few people who actually understand these things have to waste a ridiculous amount of time lobbying folks in Brussels to explain to them how disastrous the plan will be, and they back down. And then, magically, it comes back again.
That appeared to happen again last week. EU Parliament Member Julia Reda called attention to this by pointing out that, despite a promise that mandatory filters would be dropped, they had suddenly come back:
A huge scandal is brewing in the European Parliament on the #CensorshipMachines. Last week, rapporteur @AxelVossMdEP had shown signs to drop the harmful filtering obligation. Now it’s back, and it’s worse than ever. Read it here: https://t.co/ejmGCcwgLU #FixCopyright
— Julia Reda (@Senficon) March 14, 2018
The draft of the proposal included a requirement that any site that doesn’t have licensing agreements with rightsholders for any content on their site must take “appropriate and proportionate technical measures leading to the non-availability of copyright or related-right infringing works….” In other words, a mandatory filter.
Incredibly, as Reda discovered, despite the fact that this issue is now in the hands of the EU Parliament, rather than the EU Commission, the metadata on the draft rules showed it was created by the EU Commission. After meeting with the MEP who is in charge of this, Reda posted that that individual, Axel Voss, claimed it was a “mistake” to include the requirement for “technical measures” (uh, yeah, sure), but still plans to make platforms liable for any infringement on their platforms.
One of the many problems with this is that the people who demand these things tend to have little to no understanding of how the internet actually works. They get upset about finding some small amount of infringing content on a large internet platform (YouTube, Facebook, etc.) and demand mandatory filtering. Of course, both YouTube and Facebook already have expensive filters. But this impacts every other site as well — sites that cannot afford such filtering.
Indeed, Github quickly published a blog post detailing how much harm this would do to its platform, which in turn would create a massive headache for open source software around the globe.
Upload filters (“censorship machines”) are one of the most controversial elements of the copyright proposal, raising a number of concerns, including:
- Privacy: Upload filters are a form of surveillance, effectively a “general monitoring obligation” prohibited by EU law
- Free speech: Requiring platforms to monitor content contradicts intermediary liability protections in EU law and creates incentives to remove content
- Ineffectiveness: Content detection tools are flawed (generate false positives, don’t fit all kinds of content) and overly burdensome, especially for small and medium-sized businesses that might not be able to afford them or the resulting litigation
Upload filters are especially concerning for software developers given that:
- Software developers create copyrightable works—their code—and those who choose an open source license want to allow that code to be shared
- False positives (and negatives) are especially likely for software code because code often has many contributors and layers, often with different licensing for different components
- Requiring code-hosting platforms to scan and automatically remove content could drastically impact software developers when their dependencies are removed due to false positives
A special site has been set up for people to let the EU Parliament know just how much damage this proposal would do to free and open source software.
Of course, the requirements would hit lots of other platforms as well. Given enough uproar, I imagine that they’ll rewrite a few definitions just a bit to exempt Github. It appears that’s what they did to deal with similar concerns about Wikipedia. But, that’s no way to legislate. You don’t just build in a list of exemptions as people point out to you how dumb your law is. You rethink the law.
Unfortunately, when it comes to this zombie censorship machine, it appears it’s an issue that just won’t die.
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Android 4.2 malware filter works only with 15% of the… known malware …
Android Authority And the fact that Google is trying to improve Android security should certainly help, even if what the company is offering is still not perfect yet. At the same time, the company could and should do better than that, and that includes improving that … Android 4.2 detects only 15 percent of known malware Boffin: Android's on-board malware scanner utterly FAILS |