On Tuesday, after years of negotiation and lobbying, and outcry and protests by activists online, members of the EU parliament voted to adopt the Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market, [PDF] – a collection of rules that ostensibly aim “to ensure that the longstanding rights and obligations of copyright law also apply to the internet,” as the European Parliament puts it.
By “internet,” EU officials are talking mainly about Facebook and Google, though not exclusively. Everyone using the internet in Europe and every company doing business there will be affected in some way, though no one is quite sure how. And therein lies the problem.
“When this first came up, even the original language was so difficult to imagine being successfully implemented, that it was hard to believe anyone would even try to pass it into law,” said Danny O’Brien, international director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in a phone interview with The Register. “Now after it has gone through the mincing machine of the negotiation, it’s even more incoherent.”
What’s in a name?
Among the rules adopted, two have received the lion’s share of attention: Article 15 and Article 17, which used to be called Article 13 and Article 15 until someone had the clever idea to renumber them.
Article 15 (née 13) will require news aggregators like Google News that want to display content from news providers to obtain a license for anything more than “very short extracts.” Google, predictably, has opposed the plan.
Article 15 has been derided as a “link tax” that will damage small publishers and news-related startups.
That’s not true, the European Parliament insists, noting that hyperlinking has explicitly been exempted in the directive.
As for paying up, Google and other content aggregators may choose to shun publishers that demand payment or bestow a competitive advantage (e.g. ranking) to publishers offering favorable licensing terms. Given how publishers in Europe have regretted the loss of visitor traffic that follows from Google excommunication, they may prefer low- or no-cost licensing to obscurity.
Article 17 (née 15) allows websites to be sued for copyright violations by their users, which websites in the US can avoid thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Article 17, it’s been said, will require internet companies to adopt upload filters to prevent copyright liability arising from users. Essentially, filters may be needed to stop folks submitted copyrighted work to social networks, forums, online platforms, and other sites. That’s a possibility, but not a certainty.
“The draft directive however does not specify or list what tools, human resources or infrastructure may be needed to prevent unremunerated material appearing on the site,” the European Commission explains.
“There is therefore no requirement for upload filters. However, if large platforms do not come up with any innovative solutions, they may end up opting for filters.”
The last time the EU tweaked its copyright laws was in 2001, so the idea of updating regulations in the information age made a lot of sense. But critics became alarmed by two sections of the bill: Article 11 (aka the “link tax”) and Article 13 (aka the “upload filters”). In 2018, critics like Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, began to warn that these portions of the legislation would have dire and unintended consequences.
Lawmakers hope to wrestle away some of the power that has been gobbled up by tech giants like Facebook and redirect money to struggling copyright holders and publications. Unfortunately, the law may create an environment that’s only navigable by the richest and most powerful organizations. As Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales put it, “This is a complete disaster.”
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If you’ve read our previousexplanations of the problems with the copyright directive, congratulations, you’re mostly caught up. The biggest issues remain the same, though Electronic Frontier Foundation adviser Cory Doctorow called this new version “the worst one yet.”
The final text of Article 11 still seeks to impose a “link tax” on platforms whenever they use a hyperlink to a news publication and quote a short snippet of text. Even a small business or individual running a monetized blog could face penalties for linking to an article and reproducing “single words or very short extracts” from the text without first acquiring a license.
The idea is to get a company like Google to cough up money that would be redirected to news outlets. But Google has said it may just shut down Google News in the EU, just as it did in Spain when similar legislation was implemented in that country. Publishers would lose the traffic boost they get from users being directed to their sites from Google News. And perhaps most importantly, smaller platforms and individuals will be discouraged from sharing and quoting information. According to Julia Reda, a member of European Parliament from Germany, “we will have to wait and see how courts interpret what ‘very short’ means in practice – until then, hyperlinking (with snippets) will be mired in legal uncertainty.”
Article 13 still requires platforms to do everything possible to prevent users from uploading copyrighted materials. We’ve become used to systems like YouTube’s that comply with takedown notices after a user has submitted content that doesn’t belong to them. But the EU wants platforms to stop it before it happens. It will be virtually impossible for even the biggest companies to comply with this directive.
Under the legislation, any platform will have to use upload filters to catch offending material. YouTube spends millions of dollars trying to perfect its system, and it’s still absolutely awful. The little guys will presumably have to license some sort of system if building one in-house isn’t an option. And as critics have emphasized from the beginning, paranoid webmasters will simply clamp down hard on anything that could possibly get themselves in trouble. Who would want to go to court to defend the fair use of a user-submitted Stranger Things meme?
The finalized text of Article 13 also stipulates that platforms will be held liable for any copyright violations unless they demonstrate that they made “best efforts to obtain an authorisation.” If something slips by and the platform shows it did everything it could to prevent it, a platform can be given a pass as long as it acts “expeditiously” to remove the offending content and make “best efforts to prevent” any future occurrences. That leaves a good bit of room for interpretation, but MEP Reda interprets the rules to mean the only safe solution is to do everything in their power to “preemptively buy licences for anything that users may possibly upload – that is: all copyrighted content in the world.”
The BitTorrent protocol has a decentralized nature but the ecosystem surrounding it has some weak spots. Torrent sites, for example, use centralized search engines which are prone to outages and takedowns. Torrent-Paradise tackles this problem with IPFS, a searchable torrent indexer that’s shared by the people.
IPFS, short for InterPlanetary File System, has been around for a few years now.
While the name sounds alien to most people, it has a growing userbase among the tech-savvy.
In short, IPFS is a decentralized network where users make files available among each other. If a website uses IPFS, it is served by a “swarm” of people, much like BitTorrent users do when a file is shared.
The advantage of this system is that websites can become completely decentralized. If a website or other resource is hosted with IPFS, it remains accessible as long as the computer of one user who “pinned” it remains online.
The advantages of IPFS are clear. It allows archivists, content creators, researchers, and many others to distribute large volumes of data over the Internet. It’s censorship resistant and not vulnerable to regular hosting outages.
Copyright activists just scored a major victory in the ongoing fight over the European Union’s new copyright rules. An upcoming summit to advance the EU’s copyright directive has been canceled, as member states objected to the incoming rules as too restrictive to online creators.
The EU’s forthcoming copyright rules had drawn attention from activists for two measures, designated as Article 11 and Article 13, that would give publishers rights over snippets of news content shared online (the so-called “link tax”) and increase platform liability for user content. Concerns about those two articles led to the intial proposal being voted down by the European parliament in July, but a version with new safeguards was approved the following September. Until recently, experts expected the resulting proposal to be approved by plenary vote in the coming months.
After today, the directive’s future is much less certain. Member states were gathered to approve a new version of the directive drafted by Romania — but eleven countries reportedly opposed the text, many of them citing familiar concerns over the two controversial articles. Crucially, Italy’s new populist government takes a far more skeptical view of the strict copyright proposals. Member states have until the end of February to approve a new version of the text, although it’s unclear what compromise might be reached.
Whatever rules the European Union adopts will have a profound impact on companies doing business online. In particular, Article 13 could greatly expand the legal risks of hosting user content, putting services like Facebook and YouTube in a difficult position. As Cory Doctorow described it to The Verge, “this is just ContentID on steroids, for everything.”
More broadly, Article 13 would expand platform’s liability for user-uploaded content. “If you’re a platform, then you are liable for the material which appears on your platform,” said professor Martin Kretschmer, who teaches intellectual property law at the University of Glasgow. “That’s the council position as of May, and that has huge problems.”
“Changing the copyright regime without really understanding where the problem is is foolish,” he continued.
Still, today’s vote suggests the ongoing activism against the proposals is having an effect. “Public attention to the copyright reform is having an effect,” wrote Pirate Party representative Julia Reda in a blog post. “Keeping up the pressure in the coming weeks will be more important than ever to make sure that the most dangerous elements of the new copyright proposal will be rejected.”
With Tumblr’s decision this week to ban porn on its platform, everyone’s getting a firsthand look at how bad automated content filters are at the moment. Lawmakers in the European Union want a similar system to filter copyrighted works and, despite expert consensus that this will just fuck up the internet, the legislation moves forward. Now some of the biggest platforms on the web insist we must stop it.
YouTube, Reddit, and Twitch have recently come out publicly against the EU’s new Copyright Directive, arguing that the impending legislation could be devastating to their businesses, their users, and the internet at large.
The Copyright Directive is the first update to the group of nation’s copyright law since 2001, and it’s a major overhaul that is intended to claw back some of the money that copyright holders believe they’ve lost since the internet use exploded around the globe. Fundamentally, its provisions are supposed to punish big platforms like Google for profiting off of copyright infringement and siphon some income back into the hands of those to which it rightfully belongs.
Unfortunately, the way it’s designed will likely make it more difficult for smaller platforms, harm the free exchange information, kill memes, make fair use more difficult to navigate—all the while, tech giants will have the resources to survive the wreckage. You don’t have to take my word for it, listen to Tim-Berners Lee, the father of the world wide web, and the other 70 top technologists that signed a letter arguing against the legislation back in June.
So far, this issue hasn’t received the kind of attention that, say, net neutrality did, at least in part because it’s very complicated to explain and it takes a while for these kinds of things to sink in. We’ve outlined the details in the past on multipleoccasions. The main thing to understand is that critics take issue with two pieces of the legislation.
Article 11, better known as a “link tax,” would require online platforms to purchase a license to link out to other sites or quotes from articles. That’s the part that threatens the free spread of information.
Article 13 dictates that online platforms install some sort of monitoring system that lets copyright holders upload their work for automatic detection. If something sneaks by the system’s filters, the platform could face full penalties for copyright infringement. For example, a SpongeBob meme could be flagged and blocked because of its source image belonging to Nickelodeon; or a dumb vlog could be flagged and blocked because there’s a sponge in the background and the dumb filter thought it was SpongeBob.
On the internet, there are certain institutions we have come to rely on daily to keep truth from becoming nebulous or elastic. Not necessarily in the way that something stupid like Verrit aspired to, but at least in confirming that you aren’t losing your mind, that an old post or article you remember reading did, in fact, actually exist. It can be as fleeting as using Google Cache to grab a quickly deleted tweet, but it can also be as involved as doing a deep dive of a now-dead site’s archive via the Wayback Machine. But what happens when an archive becomes less reliable, and arguably has legitimate reasons to bow to pressure and remove controversial archived material?
A few weeks ago, while recording my podcast, the topic turned to the old blog written by The Ultimate Warrior, the late bodybuilder turned chiropractic student turned pro wrestler turned ranting conservative political speaker under his legal name of, yes, “Warrior.” As described by Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky in the aftermath of Warrior’s 2014 passing, he was “an insane dick,” spouting off in blogs and campus speeches about people with disabilities, gay people, New Orleans residents, and many others. But when I went looking for a specific blog post, I saw that the blogs were not just removed, the site itself was no longer in the Internet Archive, replaced by the error message: “This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.”
Apparently, Warrior’s site had been de-archived for months, not long after Rob Rousseau pored over it for a Vice Sports article on the hypocrisy of WWE using Warrior’s image for their Breast Cancer Awareness Month campaign. The campaign was all about getting women to “Unleash Your Warrior,” completewithanUltimateWarriormotif, but since Warrior’s blogs included wishing death on a cancer-survivor, this wasn’t a good look. Rousseau was struck by how the archive was removed “almost immediately after my piece went up, like within that week,” he told Gizmodo.
Rousseau suspected that WWE was somehow behind it, but a WWE spokesman told Gizmodo that they were not involved. Steve Wilton, the business manager for Ultimate Creations also denied involvement. A spokesman for the Internet Archive, though, told Gizmodo that the archive was removed because of a DMCA takedown request from the company’s business manager (Wilton’s job for years) on October 29, 2017, two days after the Vice article was published. (He has not replied to a follow-up email about the takedown request.)
Over the last few years, there has been a change in how the Wayback Machine is viewed, one inspired by the general political mood. What had long been a useful tool when you came across broken links online is now, more than ever before, seen as an arbiter of the truth and a bulwark against erasing history.
That archive sites are trusted to show the digital trail and origin of content is not just a must-use tool for journalists, but effective for just about anyone trying to track down vanishing web pages. With that in mind, that the Internet Archive doesn’t really fight takedown requests becomes a problem. That’s not the only recourse: When a site admin elects to block the Wayback crawler using a robots.txt file, the crawling doesn’t just stop. Instead, the Wayback Machine’s entire history of a given site is removed from public view.
In other words, if you deal in a certain bottom-dwelling brand of controversial content and want to avoid accountability, there are at least two different, standardized ways of erasing it from the most reliable third-party web archive on the public internet.
For the Internet Archive, like with quickly complying with takedown notices challenging their seemingly fair use archive copies of old websites, the robots.txt strategy, in practice, does little more than mitigating their risk while going against the spirit of the protocol. And if someone were to sue over non-compliance with a DMCA takedown request, even with a ready-made, valid defense in the Archive’s pocket, copyright litigation is still incredibly expensive. It doesn’t matter that the use is not really a violation by any metric. If a rightsholder makes the effort, you still have to defend the lawsuit.
“The fair use defense in this context has never been litigated,” noted Annemarie Bridy, a law professor at the University of Idaho and an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “Internet Archive is a non-profit, so the exposure to statutory damages that they face is huge, and the risk that they run is pretty great … given the scope of what they do; that they’re basically archiving everything that is on the public web, their exposure is phenomenal. So you can understand why their impulse might be to act cautiously even if that creates serious tension with their core mission, which is to create an accurate historical archive of everything that has been there and to prevent people from wiping out evidence of their history.”
While the Internet Archive did not respond to specific questions about its robots.txt policy, its proactive response to takedown requests, or if any potential fair use defenses have been tested by them in court, a spokesperson did send this statement along:
Several months after the Wayback Machine was launched in late 2001, we participated with a group of outside archivists, librarians, and attorneys in the drafting of a set of recommendations for managing removal requests (the Oakland Archive Policy) that the Internet Archive more or less adopted as guidelines over the first decade or so of the Wayback Machine.
Earlier this year, we convened with a similar group to review those guidelines and explore the potential value of an updated version. We are still pondering many issues and hope that before too long we might be able to present some updated information on our site to better help the public understand how we approach take down requests. You can find some of our thoughts about robots.txt at http://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/.
At the end of the day, we strive to strike a balance between the concerns that site owners and rights holders sometimes bring to us with the broader public interest in free access for everyone to a history of the Internet that is as comprehensive as possible.
All of that said, the Internet Archive has always held itself out to be a library; in theory, shouldn’t that matter?
“Under current copyright law, although there are special provisions that give certain rights to libraries, there is no definition of a library,” explained Brandon Butler, the Director of Information Policy for the University of Virginia Library. “And that’s a thing that rights holders have always fretted over, and they’ve always fretted over entities like the Internet Archive, which aren’t 200-year-old public libraries, or university-affiliated libraries. They often raise up a stand that there will be faux libraries, that they’d call themselves libraries but it’s really just a haven for piracy. That specter of the sort of sham library really hasn’t arisen.” The lone exception that Butler could think of was when American Buddha, a non-profit, online library of Buddhist texts, found itself sued by Penguin over a few items that they asserted copyright over. “The court didn’t really care that this place called itself a library; it didn’t really shield them from any infringement allegations.” That said, as Butler notes, while being a library wouldn’t necessarily protect the Internet Archive as much as it could, “the right to make copies for preservation,” as Butler puts it, is definitely a point in their favor.
That said, “libraries typically don’t get sued; it’s bad PR,” Butler says. So it’s not like there’s a ton of modern legal precedent about libraries in the digital age, barring some outliers like the various Google Books cases.
As Bridy notes, in the United States, copyright is “a commercial right.” It’s not about reputational harm, it’s about protecting the value of a work and, more specifically, the ability to continuously make money off of it. “The reason we give it is we want artists and creative people to have an incentive to publish and market their work,” she said. “Using copyright as a way of trying to control privacy or reputation … it can be used that way, but you might argue that’s copyright misuse, you might argue it falls outside of the ambit of why we have copyright.”
We take a lot of things for granted, especially as we rely on technology more and more. “The internet is forever” may beacommonrefraininthemedia, and the underlying wisdom about being careful may be sound, but it is also not something that should be taken literally. People delete posts. Websites and entire platforms disappear for business and other reasons. Rich, famous, and powerful bad actors don’t care about intimidating small non-profit organizations. It’s nice to have safeguards, but there are limits to permanence on the internet, and where there are limits, there are loopholes.
Back in 2016, an ambitious group of fans began work on an Unreal Engine 4 “reboot” of role-playing, light-sabering classic Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic called Apeiron. The project has made impressive progress since then, but it emitted a tragic Wilhelm scream this week when Lucasfilm lawyers zapped it out of existence.
As is often the case with ambitious fan projects, Apeiron received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing the series its team was trying to pay homage to. Apeiron’s developer, Poem Studios, took to Twitter to share the news. “After a few days, I’ve exhausted my options to keep it [Apeiron] afloat; we knew this day was a possibility. I’m sorry and may the force be with you,” Poem wrote alongside a screenshot of a letter purporting to be from Lucasfilm.
“Notwithstanding Poem Studios affection and enthusiasm for the Star Wars franchise and the original KOTOR game, we must object to any unlicensed use of Lucasfilm intellectual property,” reads Lucasfilm’s letter. It goes on to call Apeiron’s use of Star Wars characters, artwork, and images on its website and social media “infringing” and demands that 1) Star Wars materials are removed, 2) the Apeiron team ceases development and destroys its code, and 3) they don’t use any Lucasfilm properties in future games.
Today, the EU held a routine vote on regulations for self-driving cars, when something decidedly out of the ordinary happened…
The autonomous vehicle rules contained a clause that affirmed that “data generated by autonomous transport are automatically generated and are by nature not creative, thus making copyright protection or the right on databases inapplicable.”
This is pretty inoffensive stuff. Copyright protects creative work, not factual data, and the telemetry generated by your car — self-driving or not — is not copyrighted.
But just before the vote, members of the European Peoples’ Party (the same bloc that pushed through the catastrophic new Copyright Directive) stopped the proceedings with a rare “roll call” and voted down the clause.
In other words, they’ve snuck in a space for the telemetry generated by autonomous vehicles to become someone’s property. This is data that we will need to evaluate the safety of autonomous vehicles, to fine-tune their performance, to ensure that they are working as the manufacturer claims — data that will not be public domain (as copyright law dictates), but will instead be someone’s exclusive purview, to release or withhold as they see fit.
Who will own this data? It’s unlikely that it will be the owners of the vehicles. Just look at the data generated by farmers who own John Deere tractors. These tractors create a wealth of soil data, thanks to humidity sensors, location sensors and torque sensors — a centimeter-accurate grid of soil conditions in the farmer’s own field.
But all of that data is confiscated by John Deere, locked up behind the company’s notorious DRM and only made available in fragmentary form to the farmer who generated it (it comes bundled with the app that you get if you buy Monsanto seed) — meanwhile, the John Deere company aggregates the data for sale into the crop futures market.
It’s already the case that most auto manufacturers use license agreements and DRM to lock up your car so that you can’t fix it yourself or take it to an independent service center. The aggregated data from millions of self-driving cars across the EU aren’t just useful to public safety analysts, consumer rights advocates, security researchers and reviewers (who would benefit from this data living in the public domain) — it is also a potential gold-mine for car manufacturers who could sell it to insurers, market researchers and other deep-pocketed corporate interests who can profit by hiding that data from the public who generate it and who must share their cities and streets with high-speed killer robots.
Before there was Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Ubisoft’s game about piloting the original Enterprise, there was Star Trek Stage-9, a fan project recreating the Enterprise-D from The Next Generation in Unreal Engine. This week the project is no more, following a cease and desist demand by CBS.
One of the leads on the project, who goes by Scragnog, posted a video on YouTube explaining why it would no longer be getting future updates and development was coming to an end. “On Wednesday, September 12, 2018, we received a letter from the CBS legal department,” he said. “This letter was a cease and desist order. The uncertain future we always had at the back of our minds had caught up to us.”
The team immediately shut down the project’s website and began trying to reach out to the company to try and work on an alternative outcome. After nearly two weeks of not being able to get ahold of anybody, a representative from the legal depart confirmed the Stage 9 team that CBS wasn’t going to budge and the game needed to stay down. CBS did not respond to a request by Kotaku for comment.
Which goes to show why copyright for such extended periods is such a bad idea. The innovation is killed off and for what? Extended corporate profits, even when they are not making much use of the possibilities? This project was way better than anything CBS churned out.
Remember when you decided to buy, rather than rent, that movie online? We have some bad news for you – you didn’t.
Biologist Anders Gonçalves da Silva was surprised this week to find three movies he had purchased through iTunes simply disappeared one day from his library. So he contacted Apple to find out what had happened.
And Apple told him it no longer had the license rights for those movies so they had been removed. To which he of course responded: Ah, but I didn’t rent them, I actually bought them through your “buy” option.
At which point da Silva learnt a valuable lesson about the realities of digital purchases and modern licensing rules: While he had bought the movies, what he had actually paid for was the ability to download the movie to his hard drive.
“Please be informed that the iTunes/App Store is a store front that give content providers a platform or a place to sell their items,” the company informed him. “We can only offer what has been made available to us. Since the content provider has removed these movies… I am unable to provide you the copy of the movies.”
Sure, he could stream it whenever he wanted since he had bought it, but once those licensing rights were up, if he hadn’t downloaded the movie, it was gone – forever.
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And it’s not fair to single out just Apple either: pretty much every provider of digital content has the same rules. Amazon got in hot water a few years ago when its deal with Disney expired and customers discovered that their expensive movie purchases vanished over night. In 2009 thee was a similar ruckus when it pulled George Orwell’s classic 1984 from Kindles without notice.
Internet users must ask for a photographer’s permission before publishing their images, even if the photos were already freely accessible elsewhere online, the European Court of Justice ruled Tuesday.
“The posting on a website of a photograph that was freely accessible on another website with the consent of the author requires a new authorisation by that author,” the EU’s top court said in a statement.
The court had been asked to decide on a case in Germany, in which a secondary school student downloaded and used a photo that had been freely accessible on a travel website for a school project. The photo was later posted on the school’s website as well.
The photographer who took the picture argued the school’s use of his photo was a copyright infringement because he only gave the travel site permission to use it, and claimed damages amounting to €400.
The ECJ ruled in the photographer’s favor, saying that under the EU’s Copyright Directive, the school should have gotten his approval before publishing the photo.
A controversial overhaul of the EU’s copyright law that sparked a fierce debate between internet giants and content creators has been rejected.
The proposed rules would have put more responsibility on websites to check for copyright infringements, and forced platforms to pay for linking to news.
A slew of high-profile music stars had backed the change, arguing that websites had exploited their content.
But opponents said the rules would stifle internet freedom and creativity.
The move was intended to bring the EU’s copyright laws in line with the digital age, but led to protests from websites and much debate before it was rejected by a margin of 318-278 in the European Parliament on Thursday.
What were they voting for?
The proposed legislation – known as the Copyright Directive – was an attempt by the EU to modernise its copyright laws, but it contained two highly-contested parts.
The first of these, Article 11, was intended to protect newspapers and other outlets from internet giants like Google and Facebook using their material without payment.
Article 13 was the other controversial part. It put a greater responsibility on websites to enforce copyright laws, and would have meant that any online platform that allowed users to post text, images, sounds or code would need a way to assess and filter content.
The most common way to do this is by using an automated copyright system, but they are expensive. The one YouTube uses cost $60m (£53m), so critics were worried that similar filters would need to be introduced to every website if Article 13 became law.
There were also concerns that these copyright filters could effectively ban things like memes and remixes which use some copyrighted material.
Very glad to see common sense prevailing here. Have you ever thought about how strange it would be if you could bill someone every time they read your email or your reports? How do musicians think it’s ok to bill people when they are not playing?
The problems are huge, not least because the EU will implement an automated content filter, which means that memes will die, but also, if you have the money to spam the system with requests, you can basically kill any content you want with the actual content holder only having a marginal chance of navigating EU burocracy in order to regain ownership of their rights.
Memes, remixes and other user-generated content could disappear online if the EU’s proposed rules on copyright become law, warn experts.
Digital rights groups are campaigning against the Copyright Directive, which the European Parliament will vote on later this month.
The legislation aims to protect rights-holders in the internet age.
But critics say it misunderstands the way people engage with web content and risks excessive censorship.
The Copyright Directive is an attempt to reshape copyright for the internet, in particular rebalancing the relationship between copyright holders and online platforms.
Article 13 states that platform providers should “take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rights-holders for the use of their works”.
Critics say this will, in effect, require all internet platforms to filter all content put online by users, which many believe would be an excessive restriction on free speech.
There is also concern that the proposals will rely on algorithms that will be programmed to “play safe” and delete anything that creates a risk for the platform.
A campaign against Article 13 – Copyright 4 Creativity – said that the proposals could “destroy the internet as we know it”.
“Should Article 13 of the Copyright Directive be adopted, it will impose widespread censorship of all the content you share online,” it said.
It is urging users to write to their MEP ahead of the vote on 20 June.
Jim Killock, executive director of the UK’s Open Rights Group, told the BBC: “Article 13 will create a ‘Robo-copyright’ regime, where machines zap anything they identify as breaking copyright rules, despite legal bans on laws that require ‘general monitoring’ of users to protect their privacy.
“Unfortunately, while machines can spot duplicate uploads of Beyonce songs, they can’t spot parodies, understand memes that use copyright images, or make any kind of cultural judgement about what creative people are doing. We see this all too often on YouTube already.
‘This content is not available in your country’ – a damn annoying message, especially when you’re paying for it. But a new EU regulation means you can now access Netflix, Amazon Prime and other services from any country in Europe, marking an end to boring evenings in hotels watching BBC World News.
The European Commission’s ‘digital single market strategy’, which last year claimed victory over mobile roaming charges, has now lead to it passing the ‘portability regulation’, which will allow users around the EU to use region locked services more freely while travelling abroad.
Under currently active rules, what content is available in a certain territory is based on the specific local rights that a provider has secured. The new rules allow for what Phil Sherrell, head of international media, entertainment and sport for international law firm Bird and Bird, calls “copyright fiction”, allowing the normal rules to be bent temporarily while a user is travelling.
The regulation was originally passed in June 2017, but the nine-month period given to rights holders and service providers to prepare is about to expire, and thereby making the rules enforceable.
From today, content providers, whether their products are videos, music, games, live sport or e-books, will use their subscribers’ details to validate their home country, and let them access all the usual content and services available in that location all around the Union. This is mandatory for all paid services, who are also not permitted to charge extra for the new portability.
Sadly, this doesn’t mean you get extra content from other countries when you use the services back at home, just parity of experience around the EU. Another caveat to the regulation is that services which are offered for free, such as the online offerings of public service broadcasters like the BBC, are not obliged to follow the regulation. These providers instead may opt-in to the rules should they want to compete with their fee charging rivals.
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Brexit of course may mean UK users only benefit from the legislation for a year or so, but that’s as yet unconfirmed. For now though, we can enjoy the simple pleasure of going abroad and, instead of sampling some of the local sights, enjoy the crucial freedom of watching, listening, playing or reading the same things that we could get at home.
Nissan the car company never really cared who Uzi Nissan was. Then it decided he had something it wanted very much—the website www.nissan.com, which he created for his small retail computer business in 1994—and it sued him for $10 million. When the two Nissans went to war, Uzi Nissan prevailed in the end, but lost almost everything along the way.
If you visit nissan.com expecting a polished presentation of Nissan’s latest lineup, you’re in for quite a shock. What you land in is Uzi Nissan’s corner of the internet; a shrine to the years of his life spent fighting what is now the largest car company on the planet.
You’re greeted with a straight-out-of-the-’90s web design with 3D-effect link buttons, minimal advertising, crossed-out Nissan Motor badges and a Nissan Computer logo design that seems to resemble a stamped business card.
[…]
If you further postpone your quest to get a quote on an Altima or a Rogue Sport and spend time to explore the site, you find pages and pages of articles on the Nissan Motor vs. Nissan Computer lawsuit, taught in business schools and law schools as one of the most notable domain cases from the age of the dotcom bubble.
“The study there is that you should first have your domain before you decide your name of business, and in law school it’s just to show that sometimes even the little guy can win,” he said.
[…]
At the time, it didn’t seem like the start of an all-consuming legal battle, a David vs. Goliath fight that took nearly 10 years and cost the small business owner millions of dollars—to say nothing of the incalculable toll on his personal life.
The story is well told and shows you how ridiculous it is that this guy who clearly had prior ownership to the Nissan name and domain name had to pony up near to $3m and 8 years of his life to keep what is rightfully his. There is no punishment for the big guy throwing resources to wast another person’s time and money in the courts.
This is the list of patents (Attachment 1) covered by the MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License as of January 1, 2018. Under the MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License, royalties are payable for products manufactured or sold in countries with an active MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio Patent at the time of manufacture or sale. Please note that the last US patent expired February 13, 2018, and patents remain active in Philippines and Malaysia after that date.
A Danish man has become the first European to be convicted of taking part in the promotion of an illegal online film site.The 39-year-old man was handed a six-month suspended sentence by an Odense court for promoting the illegal online film streaming service Popcorn Time via his website popcorntime.dk.
[…]
More specifically, the man was convicted of offering a guideline about how Danish users could download the Popcorn Time app, how to install and use it, and how to avoid being discovered by the authorities.
Aside from his suspended sentence, the court also ruled to confiscate 500,000 kroner the man had earned in advertising income via his website. He also faces 120 hours of community service. He has two weeks to appeal to the higher courts.
The case was brought by the movie mafia trying to sustain their outdated business model. Now I wonder how worried Google and Bing and other search engines should be, as they link to quite a few illegal places on the web.
More than a decade ago, Hollywood was struggling to get to grips with the file-sharing phenomenon. Sharing via BitTorrent was painted as a disease that could kill the movie industry, if it was allowed to take hold. Tough action was the only way to defeat it, the suits concluded.
In 2007, however, a most unusual turn of events showed that piracy could have a magical effect on the success of a movie.
After being produced on a tiny budget, a then little-known independent sci-fi film called “The Man from Earth” turned up on pirate sites, to the surprise of its creators.
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“A week or two before the DVD’s ‘street date’, we jumped 11,000% on the IMDb ‘Moviemeter’ and we were shocked.”
With pirates fueling interest in the movie, a member of the team took an unusual step. Producer Eric Wilkinson wrote to RLSlog, a popular piracy links site – not to berate pirates – but to thank them for catapulting the movie to fame.
“Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download. Most of the feedback from everyone who has downloaded ‘The Man From Earth’ has been overwhelmingly positive. People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the net!” he wrote.
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“Once we realized what was going on, we asked people to make donations to our PayPal page if they saw the movie for free and liked it, because we had all worked for nothing for two years to bring it to the screen, and the only chance we had of surviving financially was to ask people to support us and the project,” Schenkman explains.
“And, happily, many people around the world did donate, although of course only a tiny fraction of the millions and millions of people who downloaded pirated copies.”
Following this early boost The Man from Earth went on to win multiple awards. And, a decade on, it boasts a hugely commendable 8/10 score on IMDb from more than 147,000 voters, with Netflix users leaving over 650,000 ratings, which reportedly translates to well over a million views.
[…]
Yesterday the team behind the movie took matters into their own hands, uploading the movie to The Pirate Bay and other sites so that fans can help themselves.
“It was going to get uploaded regardless of what we did or didn’t do, and we figured that as long as this was inevitable, we would do the uploading ourselves and explain why we were doing it,” Schenkman informs TF.
“And, we would once again reach out to the filesharing community and remind them that while movies may be free to watch, they are not free to make, and we need their support.”
The release, listed here on The Pirate Bay, comes with detailed notes and a few friendly pointers on how the release can be further shared. It also informs people how they can show their appreciation if they like it.
On Thursday, Tomczak tweeted a screenshot of the complaints that have been lodged against his video, “10 Hours of Low Level White Noise.” The clip is exactly what its title advertises, and the absurdity of someone claiming ownership of a bunch of frequencies with equal intensity playing simultaneously—that’s all white noise is—clearly illustrates just how beyond broken YouTube’s automated copyright system really is.
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What’s most egregious about the situation is that the claimants aren’t just disputing Tomczak’s right to upload the video—they’ve elected to monetize it and leave it up. Tomczak isn’t missing out on any big profits (the video only has 1,485 views), but running around YouTube monetizing white noise has plenty of opportunities to be a moneymaker. A simple search pulls up millions of white noise videos and many of them have millions of views. A lot of the offerings are relaxing sounds like rain or a fan, but there’s plenty of good, old-fashioned TV static that’s quite popular.
Several organizations and gaming fans are asking the Copyright Office to make a DMCA circumvention exemption for abandoned online games, to preserve them for future generations. The exemption would allow museums and libraries to offer copies of abandoned online servers, so these games won’t turn to dust.
The U.S. Copyright Office is considering whether or not to update the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, which prevent the public from tinkering with DRM-protected content and devices.
These provisions are renewed every three years. To allow individuals and organizations to chime in, the Office traditionally launches a public consultation, before it makes any decisions.
This week a series of new responses were received and many of these focused on abandoned games. As is true for most software, games have a limited lifespan, so after a few years they are no longer supported by manufacturers.
To preserve these games for future generations and nostalgic gamers, the Copyright Office previously included game preservation exemptions. This means that libraries, archives and museums can use emulators and other circumvention tools to make old classics playable.
However, these exemptions are limited and do not apply to games that require a connection to an online server, which includes most recent games. When the online servers are taken down, the game simply disappears forever.
According to Julia Reda’s blog, the only Pirate in the EU Parliament, the European Commission in 2014 paid the Dutch consulting firm Ecorys 360,000 euros (about $428,000) to research the effect piracy had on sales of copyrighted content. The final report was finished in May 2015, but was never published because the report concluded that piracy isn’t harmful. The Next Web reports:
The 300-page report seems to suggest that there’s no evidence that supports the idea that piracy has a negative effect on sales of copyrighted content (with some exceptions for recently released blockbusters). The report states: “In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films. The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”
On her blog, Julia Reda says that a report like this is fundamental to discussions about copyright policies — where the general assumption is usually that piracy has a negative effect on rightsholders’ revenues. She also criticizes the Commissions reluctance to publish the report and says it probably wouldn’t have released it for several more years if it wasn’t for the access to documents request she filed in July.
As for why the Commission hadn’t published the report earlier, Reda says: “all available evidence suggests that the Commission actively chose to ignore the study except for the part that suited their agenda: In an academic article published in 2016, two European Commission officials reported a link between lost sales for blockbusters and illegal downloads of those films. They failed to disclose, however, that the study this was based on also looked at music, ebooks and games, where it found no such connection. On the contrary, in the case of video games, the study found the opposite link, indicating a positive influence of illegal game downloads on legal sales. That demonstrates that the study wasn’t forgotten by the Commission altogether…”
The courts in the Hague has forced ISPs to block the Pirate Bay. Surprisinly they haven’t foced a block of Google and Bing, that also link to copyrighted materials. Anyhway, this is on the insistence of BREIN, who – like the RIAA – think they should be getting the income from music so that they can give it to random musicians (instead of the musicians whos music is being listened to). Because we all know that when you have done a days work, you should be paid again and again for it. Like the Euro I get for every time someone reads my email.
Subtitle lovers, beware: a court just ruled that making fan subtitles or translations is not protected by the law. A Dutch group called (translated) the Free Subtitles Foundation took anti-piracy group BREIN to court over “fansubbing.” BREIN has previously been active in taking fan subtitles and translations offline, and the Foundation was hoping a Dutch court would come down on the side of fair use.
The court didn’t quite see it that way. It ruled that making subtitles without permission from the property owners amounted to copyright infringement. BREIN wasn’t unsympathetic, but said it couldn’t allow fansubbers to continue doing what they’re doing (using the word “illegal” so many times I’ve almost forgotten what it means):
With this decision in hand it will be easier for BREIN to maintain its work against illegal subtitlers and against sites and services that collect illegal subtitles and add movies and TV shows from an illegal source.
While this only effects the Free Subtitles Foundation and BREIN at the moment, it could set legal precedent for subtitle-makers all over the world.
Cited in a DMCA takedown request filed against Google on behalf of Paramount Pictures, and spotted by TorrentFreak (and tipped to us by reader ~nonanonymous) is an innocuous link to a 32-bit alternate install image Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS.
The takedown request seeks to remove links to a number of torrent URLS that are alleged to infringe on Paramount movie ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction‘.
Ubuntu clearly doesn’t. All it takes is a quick glance at the URL in question to see that. It’s very much a stock iso of an old Ubuntu release.
And yet Google has complied with the request and scrubbed the link to the page in question from its search index.
The writers of this article don’t blame Google for this, citing the amounts of DMCA takedowns Google has to cope with, but Google did manage to not take down Warner Brothers automated DMCA
