"Rightsholders, unlike what the directive says, do not have to justify their initial requests to block content, but only have to respond once a user challenges the blocking of one of their uploads."
I wonder if the law will allow for any penalties or restrictions against a rightsholder who "mistakenly" claims that every piece of user-uploaded media on a website is infringing their copyright.
Presumably a rightsholder could be a company (or individual) based anywhere in the world, and therefore would face no legal risk in making such "mistakes". (A creative lawyer might attempt to use fraud or "hacking" laws against such a rightsholder, but might have difficulty bringing them to court).
Some of the rightsholder's claims may even be completely valid, meaning that the hosting website couldn't afford to just disregard all their claims.
> I wonder if the law will allow for any penalties or restrictions against a rightsholder who "mistakenly" claims that every piece of user-uploaded media on a website is infringing their copyright.
Then, couldn't you pose as a copyright owner and submit a takedown request on these legislators' personal or official content? Let them have a taste of their own medecine.
I wonder how a politician that supported the initiative would react if they had their campaign videos systematically taken offline?
Are there any penalties for rightsholders filing completely spurious DMCA takedown notices in the US? I'm not asking rhetorically, I'm curious and don't recall if the long-standing US law has any kind of recourse here. (Anecdotally, I haven't heard of any party ever being punished for DMCA takedown notices, and I've definitely heard of spurious notices.)
Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section—
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
--
Actual damages isn't much of deterrence, though, considering the typical scenario. Proving actual damages is costly and the ratio of typical damage amounts (nil to moderate) to litigation costs makes it an unattractive option.
The level of abuse at which a court may penalize a party independent of a statutory provision is quite high, so that's not a meaningful deterrent, either, though the situation is so bad there have been some high-profile cases.
For real deterrence you'd need statutory damages, similar to statutory damages for copyright infringement. But Fair Use is such a muddied area of law that litigation costs might still make it unattractive to pursue statutory damages for most people.
It's all kind of moot in the context of Youtube because most copyright disputes happen through Youtube's own internal policies and mechanisms, which are mostly controlled by the terms of Youtube's private contracts.
The best solution is twofold: 1) reform copyright by circumscribing copyrightable subject matter and clarifying fair use, and 2) make self-hosting of content easier, more in line with the late 1990s utopic vision of everybody as their own publisher--as opposed to the current situation where Youtube, Facebook, etc are the new publishers and individuals remain confined to content creation.
The key phrase there is "knowingly materially". So in other words, an automated content matching system which flags up any instance of 2 seconds of matching content, with no manual review step, would not fall afoul of this clause, because there is no law that says a use under 2 seconds is definitely not infringing.
Good point, and perhaps the most important reason this remedy isn't much of a deterrent. That said, once you dispute a takedown request I would imagine (hope!) that the moderating effect of automation is removed, making it easier to prove that element if the requester remains intransigent.
But even without automation, "knowing" is a steep burden when it comes to copyright considering all the legal grey areas.
And it just occurred to me that it cuts both ways--the subsection makes both copyright holder and infringer liable for misrepresentation in takedown disputes. If you make it easier to show knowledge of the copyright holder, you make it easier to show knowledge of the purported infringer. The easier it is to meet this element, the more financially risky is it to dispute takedowns.
Prenda Law has basically nothing to do with the DMCA, as I understand it. They did a lot of illegal things, but it isn't clear to me that they ever sent a DMCA takedown notice to a Online Service Provider[1]:
> In the 2013 civil ruling, Prenda Law and three named principals, John Steele, Paul Hansmeier, and Paul Duffy, were found to have undertaken vexatious litigation,[4]:FOF.5 p.4 identity theft,[4]:FOF.9 p.5 misrepresentation and calculated deception (including "fraudulent signature"),[4]:FOF.6 p.4, FOF.9–11 p.5, p.6–8 professional misconduct and to have shown moral turpitude.
They didn't get in trouble for filing spurious takedown notices; they got in trouble for extortion.
Their M.O. was to sue anyone they could identify by IP address from their own porn torrents and settle out of court for as much money as possible (and drop suits if the defendant wouldn't settle or couldn't pay — they wanted to avoid the scrutiny of a courtroom).
Sending DMCA takedown notices to the Pirate Bay would (1) not get them paid, which is about all they cared about, and (2) likely not actually result in content being taken down, if I understand the Pirate Bay.
> They didn't get in trouble for filing spurious takedown notices; they got in trouble for extortion.
As far as I saw from following Popehat's coverage of the case, they also didn't get in trouble for extortion. That was fine.
They got in trouble for owning the films they were suing over. (Without letting the court know they were the copyright owner as well as the legal representation.)
I've never understood why Prenda Law's legal troubles seem to be viewed as some kind of victory against copyright trolling. They did things that were bad, and they did things that were illegal, and there was no overlap between those two categories. All of their practices that we think of as "copyright trolling" are still 100% OK. They didn't get in trouble for that.
> I wonder if the law will allow for any penalties or restrictions against a rightsholder who "mistakenly" claims that every piece of user-uploaded media on a website is infringing their copyright.
It presumably will once some small-time company copyright strikes a big company's media, or, equivalently, some pressure group tries to censor speech it considers harmful (same-sex relationships, media they consider blasphemous) using the copyright strike as a weapon. Once Disney or some big French content owner gets their hand slapped a few times, the law will be brought into line.
One simple way to think of it is that such mistakes are basic fraud. There are already laws to cover this in every country, whether this entails fines or damages or prison.
However it's mostly inapplicable in practice. Neither regulating agencies nor private parties have the resources or the will to go against the (many) abusers. Even if they did, laws and the legal systems are muddy across countries, not a lot could be done with offenders half way across the world. By the way while we're on this, "copyright" doesn't exist as such in France.
In the US, many people have tried and everyone has failed to ever cause a penalty for an abuser. So I wouldn't agree with your simple way, because it literally never works.
Noting however there was one recently for a patent troll, CloudFlare vs Blackbird Tech. It invalidated hundreds of patents from the abusing company and was upheld in the US court of appeal at the Federal level. Next, CloudFlare will try to get the owner removed from the bar.
I think it's comparable, although patent law is better codified than copyright. The internet and youtube are recent creations. Youtube was founded in 2005 and didn't care about copyright from the beginning. It took a decade for abuse to get there, it might take another decade for the legal system to adjust, but it will adjust eventually.
As an example of what can happen under regimes where 'right holders' are disproportional advantaged over content creators:
A third party rights management provider just copyright claimed seemingly any Youtube video that contained any soundparts that were also found in one of their client's videos.
Now their clients are often very small content creators such as people posting videos of their Twitch game playing streams to YouTube as a VoD archive.
Now imagine that this one gamestreamer client of theirs plays a game that contains a cutscene (as most games do). Now every other gamestreamer with YouTube archives will find every video that had them playing that game copyright striked, as the cutscenes from the game played where ofc identical to those cutscenes in the other guys video. This really happened [1], and resulting in those types of channels now having to manually dispute the demonetization on each and every one of their videos in their (sometimes very extensive) catalogues.
The very small company in question, Illustrated Sound Music, claims it was just a 'mistake', and yes, in most cases they will not gain more than a few pennies per video as apparently most of the stuff they hit has just a handful of views, but pennies per video from millions and millions of videos add up to a nice sum.
The "block and ask later" method seems valid for copyright owners. But for users it is essencially just "block". Not only because relevancy will be lower after some days pass. But mostly because algorythms will not show such content to people. Because it didn't receive any signals for several days makes it to be considered uninteresting.
For funny memes it is not a big deal, but for social and political discourse it is devaststing.
And it is already known copyright laws are used by media companies to control the narrative. For example when a politician says something people can find not right. Should a media company sympathasing with him, be able to wipe out the very existance of the situation?
Because this is actually what media companies will be to do. Wipe out parts of reality they dont like people to remember or know.
Actually it looks like politics made a deal with business. And it is something to oppose against.
> For funny memes it is not a big deal, but for social and political discourse it is devaststing.
I'm afraid that's the point.
Western governments, while pointing fingers at china, russia or <insert brown country>, have been hard at work trying to find creative ways to implement soft censorship (ie: don't outright ban the content or shutdown the website, but considerably limit their potential reach on dubious grounds such as copyright infringement).
This is an unfortunate law that was passed quite hastily and will bring a lot of challenges to the market. Even my company operates in this space, we were trying to convince politicians not to adopt it. We failed, as you can see.
We built a product [0] that introduces a balanced approach to the legislation where it actually considers all 3 sides (creators/uploader, rightsholders and platforms) and made it free of charge to all (we make money through licensing revenue carried through the system). We still wish that the legislation didn't pass, but at least we are hoping to level the playing field for everyone.
Copyright is not as important to society as Silicon Valley wants everyone to believe. It a property issue and not even a critical one. Most of the problems around it can be solved with money.
The collateral damage caused by this lawyer infused, never ending “copyright war”, though is real.
Not worth one good man.
Edit: I’m a “creator”. Never been “corporate”. I had my work “cloned”.
Yes, but mostly in a negative way. All of these industries would havea lot more freedom to innovate if there were significantly shorter copyright periods.
Insofar as it being one of the primary handcuffs preventing us from creating more compelling content, yes, it is important. Ending it (or at least returning it to a role more similar to a century ago) will be awesome for content creators.
Yes. However, of the artists, the publishers, and the producers, only the artists are entitled to copyright, no? The Constitution limits copyright to artists and scientists [0], and in practical terms the Constitution is understood to refer to the artists who create works of art, and the scientists who describe physical inventions.
> The title of the proposed law gives a glimpse into the mindset of French legislators, presenting the enforcement of copyright laws in the interest of private entertainment companies as a matter of asserting France’s “cultural sovereignty”. It frames Article 17 as a means to support the European entertainment industry in its conflicts with American tech companies. Users’ interests are at best an afterthought in this struggle for “cultural sovereignty”.
I would imagine that the legislators of France and other EU countries are fairly accustomed to seeing through the lens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_indications_and_t... protections, and tend to apply that mindset to other "trade protection" issues.
In a sense, someone sharing a French-copyrighted work on Facebook with the source+watermarks stripped, is doing something kind of similar to an American winemaker who labels a sparkling wine they've produced as e.g. "Napa Champagne".... but in another sense, no, that's an awful analogy.
It's awful indeed. As a European citizen I am very much in favor of geographical marking of specialties (and I don't see why that wouldn't be beneficial to US agriculture either), but certainly do not extend that opinion to upload filters. Or dropping daylight savings time for that matter.
France already has laws covering exceptions like caricatures and quotations. That's why it's not detailed in the new article, it already exists.
The most interesting part of the PDF might be the article 17, section 4. In summary, platforms MUST provide a way for both users and copyright holders to handle complaints and -the important part- they MUST be reviewed by a human. This is gonna be fun for Google and co that want to automate everything with machine learning.
Plenty of call centers operate scripts that respond not much better than how I outlined it. The trick is to get out of the script as soon as you can find and trigger the escape clause.
My concern with companies like Google is that you can easily get yourself into a bizarre situation. Whereas with other systems you just need to escape the script to get to a human review, Google and similar structures mean you often need to find the escape from the escape from the escape. This is why people appeal on twitter rather than through google's own systems. (Yes there are exceptions)
The hope with putting humans into the loop is valid but I'm not convinced its the full answer. The overall attitude/culture of the environment they operate in is still important.
At least with putting people into the process those people can add their own attitude/culture. This is the saving grace however slim.
Same as you, just hopeful it will break the vicious cycle.
Google and co are trying very hard to have no support process and no support staff. Automating everything instead.
If and when they're forced to have a full support structure, it's a major change like a Trojan horse. Even if they're following a stupid script, they're not going to sit idle all days, they're going to actually review some cases, maybe read them in full sometimes.
Look at my parent comment as an example. There is no way for me to find out why it is now at -1 and frankly, the humans who made the decision are not obliged to comment.
So the comment will disappear with no understanding why. No learning is possible.
All of that because there wasn't a law and a process forcing them to review and explain the decision :p
Joking aside. I think you got downvoted because your comment is demeaning toward support and the example is over the top. Humans are not mindless robots who follow instructions to the letter, even if (especially if) formally instructed to count vowels in the message.
I've spoken to many call center staff who quite explicitly had no permission to deviate from a script. They were audio recorded to guarantee compliance. I'm not the one demeaning anyone.
"This call will be recorded for quality and training purposes"
Quality = making sure no one gets too far or deviates off script. Training = who to blame and who to make an example of.
HN often forgets that people who have swam at the bottom don't have the same rose colored glasses. I've seen some pretty harsh environments and plenty definitely script humans like bots.
The counting vowels example sounds over the top but its only over the top because you think its absurd. It seems absurd because you don't see it as a delay loop. But that is exactly what it is. Here's a real example of a delay when someone needs to resolve an issue that is trivial but the organisation doesn't want it commonly used: Put the person on hold. Wait 2 minutes. Resume the call. Say you've consulted your line manager. Etc.
Don't shoot the guy who reminds the world this has happened and is still happening. People as bots is a thing that is already happening.
If they're audio recorded, it means it's possible to get hold of a human on the phone, so miles ahead of Google support.
I know shitty support and shitty jobs, I haven't always worked in tech and I am not in the valley. Yet people as bots is progress over the current level of support from big tech companies.
Every time you buy media legally, you fund these kinds of laws. Not only are media conglomerates not our friends, they are openly hostile to the rights the growing IP laws have not yet robbed us of.
Most of the Disney stories are actually based on public domain works. Snow White is an obvious example from the Grimm stories but is even older than their collection. You'd definitely want a legal team's support if you were to release a Snow White story these days. This is an indicator of how far corporations have proceeded in "owning" the public domain.
Companies like to feed from the public domain but not so much the other way. No surprise there. Mickey Mouse would likely be public domain soon or already if not for constant intervention from Disney to move the date each time it gets even remotely nearby.
All that said, I'm not sure illegal downloads are the answer. Heavy political pressure / people power is more likely beneficial. Reining in copyright laws in general is still something on the overall worlds "todo" list but there are a few other issues with higher priority. General awareness of how copyright/IP laws and agreements impact cost of medicines and health might be part of the way forward.
> Companies like to feed from the public domain but not so much the other way.
> Mickey Mouse would likely be public domain soon or already if not for constant intervention from Disney to move the date each time it gets even remotely nearby.
Yeah. They're probably going to try and extend copyright duration once more in the 2020s. It's infuriating.
The social contract behind copyright was "we'll pretend you have exclusive access to your work for some time so that you can make your money and when the time is up the work will belong to public". Copyright holders obviously have no intention to fulfill their part of the contract: they employ lobbyists to extend copyright duration to infinity, weaken fair use by mandating automated and indiscriminate blocking and generally erode the rights and freedoms of citizens.
So why should people recognize copyright as legitimate? It's a phony, artificial concept that should be abolished before the billion dollar copyright industry abuses it any further. People who infringe copyright are guilty of nothing but civil disobedience.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. The biggest backers of the ridiculous copyright and IP laws are media companies - Disney, News Corp, etc being the most egregious examples. And these companies are only getting bigger as they consolidate and merge and it gives them even greater power and leverage within governments around the world. These media conglomerates are some of the largest ad sellers and buyers and have too much influence over everything. There is so much talk about how bad and powerful social media companies are. Disney, News Corp, etc are even more powerful and in my opinion, more destructive to human beings, than social media.
It's time to break up, not just the biggest social media companies, but all major media conglomerates. Lets get some diversity in the media space - social and traditional.
When many people copy media (not take it away from someone), they do it because it is not worth 100x-1000x the amount the creator receives to them. Many, if not most or virtually all those people would be willing to pay a more reasonable price without the draconian war enacted by "publishers", who now, in the age of the internet, bring little more than a gate rather than actual distribution. It is certainly more complex than "pay any price, accept any consequence, or you are evil". A strong correlate to this is the fact that many content creators, despite entering into agreements with publishing houses, really could not care less about piracy. The modern history of piracy, legislative creep, and enforcement has been a battle between consumers and publishers, not artists.
The title is a bit click-baity, but I'm not sure whether it's sufficiently bad to "editorialise"[0] the title.
The context is the French implementation of the EU copyright directive (the one that contained Articles "11" and "13" (though the numbering was later changed)).
The title is like a headline that I would expect from a professional left-wing publisher, though; it doesn't seem unreasonable at all, and I'm not sure what it could be changed to since the author is a politician and this is basically a political speech that focuses on the topics brought up by the title.
If we had sites where content couldn't be blocked, all this angst about blocking would just be lulz.
And it's not even hard. Torrenting and streaming through VPN services still work well enough. We just need implementations at mass market scale. Some of those cryptocurrency whales ought to get on it.
Belated edit: I recall in the mid-late 90s that the internet was headed toward P2P, mix networks, and other noncommercial stuff. We got Usenet newsgroups, Cypherpunk/Mixmaster remailers, Freenet, Tor, Napster, BitTorrent, etc.
But now we've gone commercial/centralized again. Like AOL/Prodigy reborn. And worse than that, we have smartphones designed to neutralize privacy and foster dependency on commercial bullshit. More like game systems than PCs.
Sure, there's cool stuff like IPFS and Signal. But mostly it's all so depressing.
> I've said this 1000 times, but garbage like Facebook or Twitter could be replaced overnight by a protocol. There is really zero reason it couldn't be built from existing distributed tooling, be secure and just as useful without lizard people getting in the way. -- scottlocklin
But there's nothing about privacy, and the only comment that mentions "censor" is in favor.
I couldn't really find the core arguments of the article. I wasn't really sure what it is was arguing for or against or what the exact laws are that we should be concerned about. Can someone elaborate?
the European Union (EU) enacted a copyright directive this year, this directive has to be implemented in national law by the EU member states. Part of this copyright directive is that platforms are liable for copyright infringement of their users unless they take measures to prevent those. they are also provisions in the directive which were supposed to keep user's right in check.
Now the French government put forward a bill in the French Parliament to implement this directive. It seems to be a bill which favors the rightsholders above else, which was to be expected because France was one of the biggest proponents of this part of the directive.
I wonder if the law will allow for any penalties or restrictions against a rightsholder who "mistakenly" claims that every piece of user-uploaded media on a website is infringing their copyright.
Presumably a rightsholder could be a company (or individual) based anywhere in the world, and therefore would face no legal risk in making such "mistakes". (A creative lawyer might attempt to use fraud or "hacking" laws against such a rightsholder, but might have difficulty bringing them to court).
Some of the rightsholder's claims may even be completely valid, meaning that the hosting website couldn't afford to just disregard all their claims.