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https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211227/15395648187/copyright-industry-wants-everything-filtered-as-it-is-uploaded-heres-why-that-will-be-disaster.shtml>
"The history of copyright can be seen as one of increasing control by companies
over what ordinary people can do with material created by others. For the
online world, the endgame is where copyright holders get to check and approve
every single file that is uploaded, with the power to block anything they
regard as infringing. That digital dystopia moved much closer two years ago,
with the passage of the EU Copyright Directive. At the heart of the Directive
lies precisely these kind of upload filters – even though the legislation's
supporters insisted that they would not be needed. When the law was safely
passed – despite voting issues – only then did they admit that upload filters
would indeed be required.
The parts of the EU Copyright Directive dealing with upload filters are so
badly crafted that most of the EU’s Member States are struggling to implement
them in their national laws in any coherent way. This means the full impact of
the legislation's upload filters won't be known for some time.
Until then, we can look at the real-life effects of a similar approach, as used
by YouTube. Content ID is a digital fingerprinting system developed by Google
at great cost – around $100 million by 2018 – which is designed to spot and
block allegedly infringing material on YouTube. Content ID’s flaws are well
known, particularly in terms of overblocking perfectly legal uploads. This is
the fundamental problem with all upload filters: there is no way that an
automated, algorithmic system can encompass the complexities of global
copyright laws, which even trained lawyers struggle with. The problem of
overblocking is widely known on an anecdotal basis, but we have not had
reliable data about the scale of the problem. That has finally changed with the
release of YouTube’s first Copyright Transparency Report."
Via Glyn Moody.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
