Scribd taking down the Mueller Report is the future the EU has voted for | Hacker News Reader

Scribd taking down the Mueller Report is the future the EU has voted for

qz.com

246 pointstareqak103 comments

>A spokeswoman for the company says that “a leading global publisher” released the report as a book, fooling Scribd’s systems into thinking the report was owned by the publisher

Seems like the problem here is ContentID systems where large corporations are assumed to be owners of whatever they published, even if they published it later. The sad thing is that this is done by the platform and not through the legal system, so the companies making false claims don't get punished for it.

I wonder if said book included a false copyright claim.

Is falsely claiming copyright for US government publications a federal crime? That'd be a trip.

That's the thing though, the publisher hasn't made any explicit copyright claims or issued any takedown requests, so they didn't do anything wrong. All of the actions taken were done proactively by the platform.

This is the fault/design of the law isn’t it, not the platform?

I don't know that. Do you?

I took a look at editions of the report available for pre-order on Amazon. But there were several, and I didn't want to look at them all. I don't see any copyright claim in the Scribner edition.

And to be clear, I'm not arguing that the publisher requested the takedown. I'm just curious whether there's a copyright claim on the title page.

[deleted]

Again, I'm not talking about what the publisher said or didn't say to Scribd. I'm talking about what appears on the title page of the book.

As it seems to be with many distasteful things these days, Alan Dershowitz just may be involved. He's the only person I've heard doing more than ebooking it, so...2 and 2 could possibly equal 4 here.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mueller-Report/Ro...

The real tragedy is that even after having a new generation born and grown up entirely digitally and connected, we still can’t rethink copyright into something which actually makes sense based on the world we now live in.

Generation has little to do with it. It's not the librarians who promulgated those stern warnings around the photocopiers providing support for the way things are, but rather the huge companies that continue to rake in gobs of money by claiming to own pieces of our culture in perpetuity.

I don't really get this "pieces of our culture" argument. I see it often in these discussions. Something "became part of our culture" after someone created it, after ownership was known, and 'we' allowed it to become meaningful to a large audience. Should that somehow transfer the ownership to those who find it more meaningful?

Some brands are "cultural icons" (like it or not), but that doesn't mean the culture has any right to tell the brand owner what to do with their trademark.

I don't know the history of copyright in other countries, but in the US copyright is explicitly to encourage the creation of artifacts that will then end up as public domain and part of our cultural legacy.

If it isn't performing that function well, then it's probably time for a rethink.

The notion that everything that can be digitalized should be free is a pernicious notion and trivializes the effort creators put into their work. Journalists, musicians, authors, and artists deserve to be able to make a living from their work, and they can't do that if their work is distributed for free.

This is patently wrong. But your problem is that you don’t supply any argument to support your statement so there’s nothing to discuss.

Maybe they just need a new business model. Google gives away plenty for free and they’re doing fine.

they're doing fine not because of giving away plenty for free.

The will also run into same problem, but they will be last man standing

Google gives nothing away for free. If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

You can still be the product even if you are paying for it. Take smart TVs for example that monetize their customers post purchase.

It is surprising to me that someone on hacker news believes this.

There is a vast gap between "able to make a living" and "able to stifle culture, censor citizenship, and lock up works for longer than a lifetime".

TBH, it's probably better to create a post scarcity society where a living isn't dependent on holding something hostage. Some variation of a basic income, that would support artists to create. But we don't have to go that far to say, copyright as it stands now is over-mighty and should have its claws harshly trimmed.

First: The legitimate rights of a free press, and an absolute stand against censorship.

Then: The rights of the content creators to make a living.

Not the other way around.

China seems to do okay without much in the way of professional journalists, musicians, authors, and artists.

I'm not saying it's right, but it should be pointed out that it can still work.

China has structured their society to operate without much copyright enforcement.

It should make people think about what kind of society they want.

China has plenty of professional journalists, musicians, authors and artists. China's newspapers are heavily censored and vehicles for propaganda but people still write for them. Musicians make money in China the same way they do in the West, gigging. Rampant piracy doesn’t stop people trying and occasionally succeeding in making a living as authors or artists either, anymore than the small chance of making a good living at it in the West does.

But think broadly about how the Western world utterly dominates music and movies. It is probably due to copyright.

No it isn't. It’s because no one speaks Mandarin and Chinese music and movies are dreadful by comparison. One of the hardest things about studying Chinese is finding media to watch to improve listening comprehension that are actually enjoyable to someone used to Western levels of quality in production, writing and story telling. Khatzumoto of AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com took s break from learning Mandarin and learned Cantonese instead because the corpus of good movies is better, and it’s mostly pre-handover Hong Kong stuff. Widespread censorship leads to terrible movies.

I live in China and I’d say it’s plausible that people watch more Japanese, Korean and Anglophone media than Chinese, dubbed and subtitled. I wouldn’t bet on it but it’s at least 30%. Chinese tv and movies are dreadful.

Try quan zhi gao shou.

(I dont know the difference between mandarin and cantonese so sorry if im wrong)

Movies? Bollywood movies sell more tickets in India than Hollywood does in US+Canada, releases more movies, etc. Sure, they make less money but India is considerably poorer than US+Canada.

Well I'd hope a country with 1.4b would sell more tickets domestically than a country with 330m.

> Journalists, musicians, authors, and artists deserve to be able to make a living from their work

At least in the US, that is not the purpose of copyright. The constitution lays out why congress has the power to grant copyrights and patents:

> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

We can rethink it, we just can't get legacy institutions that profit from the old system to go along with it.

Many struggling artists I talk to want strong copyright laws. It's not just something rich corporations want.

That's because they've been duped by the propaganda from those corporations into thinking they actually benefit from copyright.

And they probably do benefit from it...

Not more than they are harmed by the looting of the public domain that media conglomerates are engaging in. Having a small public domain hurts everyone who can't afford a legal team to research and litigate for them. When you weigh the heavy costs against the slight benefits, it's a net loss.

I know a few artists that suffered quite a lot of theft primarily in art assets and concept work including their work being used as concept art for commercial projects and textures and 3D models even shipping in with some.

Even in such cases like bargain bin games which were made by a Russian and Chinese studios and were published in Europe by fairly large publishers and used stolen assets they had little to no legal recourse the Publisher didn’t care, the artists don’t have the money to fight a legal battle and even if they do win at best they’ll barely cover their legal fees if they even turn a profit and the game devs would just patch those assets out if they would even exist by the time the case is settled.

From their point of view it’s not that the public domain is too small but that the current copyright laws are too lax and can only be used by those with large legal teams on retainers.

I don't think any of the recent copyright reforms are going to solve the asymmetry in legal battles.

What you are talking about was already covered by the old copyright system. The new copyright system only adds protection against uploading the stolen work on an asset store.

Also the big publishers can now just submit your work to the copyright collectives and you will receive rakedowns on assets you own. Good luck proving that though.

Just wanted to chime in that I agree with you. I had some artist friends who were pro strong copyright, but personally I don’t think they realize the vast groves of information everyone on earth is being deprived of for this scheme. We absolutely need to find ways to compensate artists but I think the cost of copyright is far too great.

Yes, there are always going to be useful idiots to buy legal solutions that mostly benefit existing institutions and lawyers

Struggling artists have virtually zero political pull. The laws are maintained by corporate interests.

But the rights organizations, nominally artists guilds do have significant political pull.

They provide ideological cover and propaganda support fire. Every time there is anything controversial about music copyright, artists’ associations roll out spokespersons to justify the moves, because it plays well with their members.

Anyone can be a struggling artist. It takes no skill or ambition whatsoever. It's merely a poor economic choice and deserves no pity.

Why? If someone like UMG or Disney steals their work do you really believe they will be treated fairly?

I mostly just want to abandon copyright. Everything I create lately - software, robots, and writing - are released with unrestricted licenses. CC0 or BSD in most cases. I tried copyleft briefly but all it seemed to do was limit other people. I don’t want to do that anymore.

As a user I'm pretty thankful for copyleft.

I probably wouldn't be able to run modern Linux on the laptop I'm using right now without it.

Maybe, but that’s speculative. Unless you’ve got some good examples of the BSD style of license failing where GPL has succeeded (I’d be genuinely interested!). I know GPL has had some good wins, but more and more I feel like we need to fight this battle in our culture, not through lawyers.

I don’t know if it’s possible for that to happen since the licenses are mutually exclusive.

There are plenty of situations where BSD (or similar) lisenced software is used and the changes are not published.

Just to clarify, you don't need to provide changes to GPL software if you're not distributing said software and only using it internally.

However, in case something ends up being distributed and because I don't believe that's been tested in the courts, many companies have blanket policies against the inclusion of copyleft licenses.

The recent kerfuffles with elastic, redis, and mongo will be interesting to follow and may provide examples where a strong copyleft, e.g. agpl3, would have been better than the Apache or mit/bad style licenses initially chosen.

In theory, I believe copyright is a way for individuals to defend their rights against big corps. In practice, it will only benefit big corps which have enough resources for judicial procedures, and force individuals to give up their creations for free...

That's also what I'm trying to do. Don't like non permissive copyright? Then just avoid it. However these filters are a threat to free software and the public domain. It wouldn't surprise me if github will wrongly take down projects in the future.

> a new generation born and grown up entirely digitally and connected

The 'new generation' seems to want to sit on their collective arses and watch movies & music for free, but not contribute to the cost of their creation.

I'm all ears as to why their selfish, immediate-gratification desires should be considered.

'The old business model is broken!' they exclaim. Well then, stop consuming its output and go out there and CREATE better content. But most of them decline to do so. Hypocrites.

Unnecessary.

With more than 100.000 millennials taking to the streets in parts of Europe alone [0], and many suggestions on how to do it differently and better, ignored by „the internet is a series of tubes“ politicians, your claim of „collective passive consumption arse sitting“ doesn’t sit right with me.

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-copyright-bill-protests-across-euro...

I don't think people have an issue with contributing to the cost of creation, at least enough movies etc are being made and paid for that they are still making money.

As for changing the system, the current problem with copyright is that it mixes control and payment, leading to stupid things like HBO not being available unless you pay for a gazillon channels you don't need.

I see a future where producers have to declare their prizes, but must offer the same deal to anybody who is willing to buy it. Any exlusive deal is automatically a violation of monopoly laws.

That "new generation" seems perfectly happy paying for Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.

They also seem happy to create content on Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc, with a handful of them becoming stars as big as the pop stars and TV/movie stars of earlier generations.

Attributing simplistic traits to entire generations, comprising hundreds of millions of people spanning many different countries, cultures and classes, never really goes well.

At any point in time, people just choose the most appealing and cost-effective options of those available to them.

It's up to those offering products and services to make their economic model work, but the ability of the big content companies to generate big revenues, either via subscriptions or advertising, shows that there are various models that can work well.

If you create content that does not follow the old business model then it will get blocked by the upload filters. Now this is truly hypocritical!

While you rethink it Disney is writing checks to politicians.

> The company identified 32 copies of the document, all of which were removed and then reinstated

> A separate request Quartz made to reinstate its own versions of the document was resolved 17 minutes after we sent it, seemingly after an employee review.

I... don't see the problem here? Sure, it'd be better if their detector never got it wrong, but in the absence of the Sufficiently Advanced Technology that would require, a speedy manual review process is the best anyone's got.

> a speedy manual review process

Does the law require a speedy manual process, and quantify what speedy means?

Because we hear complaints about the large tech companie's manual exception processes quite often, and speedy is not usually a word that is used to describe them

I don't know off-hand. The claim that this "is the future the EU has voted for" was made by the article, not by me. I was, for the sake of argument, taking the article at its word on that - and observing that, in that light, its histrionics about Article 13 come across as misplaced.

That being said, even if a speedy review process isn't required de jure, market forces should make it a de facto requirement. Over time, a platform with overzealous takedowns & inadequate appeals process will lose out to any competition which does better on either front.

(Yes, I know it hasn't worked out like that with YouTube. They're close enough to a monopoly that market forces don't really apply, and that's a whole other problem.)

>a speedy manual review process is the best anyone's got.

This is a policy choice. We could not have copyright, and just leave the documents up.

We could give platforms immunity, and enforce copyright by going after the individuals who uploaded without the rights to do so.

We could give platforms immunity, but require them to respect court orders to remove specific copyright documents.

We could give platforms immunity, but require them to remove copywrote conent when notified. (A la DMCA)

We could give platforms immunity, require them to remove copywrote content, and require them restore content on a counter-claim and defer the dispute to the courts.

What we are doing is requiring, by policy, platforms to proactivly remove copywrote material but making no policy requirements against over-removal. If we are seeing the best possible implementation of this policy, then maybe it is simply a bad policy.

> copywrote

The past participle of "copyright" is "copyrighted" (note that it's derived from "right" rather than "write").

Something can be a "bad policy" and still be "the best anyone's got".

Efficient operation, speedy compliance, copyright enforcement. Pick 2 and watch the other group say policy is a choice and you've chosen badly.

There's no need for a bloody AI detector. If someone claims copyright, they submit a take-down request. And they must supply documentation to support that request.

People who have posted stuff first see the take-down request. If they object, they supply supporting documentation. If necessary, the matter goes to arbitration, or perhaps trial.

Stuff gets taken down only if the take-down request is not contested, or if the arbiter (or court) rules that it ought to be.

Also, for those who submit too many bogus take-down requests, future take-down requests get black-holed.

They need a detector to detect the case of someone re-uploading a copyrighted material that has previously been taken down. But there's no excuse for running this automatically against works that have not had a take-down notice submitted.

No they don't need that either.

If someone wants that document taken down another time, then they should send take down requests each and every time.

And then Scribd would get sued by publishers for making it too easy to simply repost content that they've been ordered to take down.

Well, not if publishers had immunity.

If someone wants that document taken down another time, then they should send take down requests each and every time.

As someone who has actually spent several days sleeping in shifts with a co-founder so we could keep sending takedown notices when the same group of people repeatedly uploaded our material to YouTube and Google apparently didn't care, I think we can safely assume that your proposal is not a viable general solution to this sort of problem.

"viable solution" and "what the law requires" in this case are not necessarily the same thing.

The law required that the operators of YouTube take stronger action against repeat offenders. They didn't. We were actually starting to line up the evidence to demonstrate beyond any doubt that they had been clearly informed about the repeated infringement and that DMCA-compliant takedown notices had been properly filed in each case, which would have set up a lawsuit against YouTube if we'd been inclined to pursue them. In practice, we never did, but not because of anything YouTube changed. The offending party slipped up so we could identify them, and then they stopped misbehaving after we contacted them directly and made clear that we were preparing to take legal action against them personally.

The problem wasn't that their AI was imperfect. The problem is twofold.

Firstly there are import decisions that are being based on an AI that's apparently not up to the task. Having no familiarity with concepts like public domain and fair use.

Secondly there is an AI that is granted supreme power to censor content. Not capable of legislating copyright, but more than capable of forcibly removing certain content.

> there is an AI that is granted supreme power to censor content

Its decisions were overruled by humans. That's not "supreme power".

In effect, some uploads were pre-moderated instead of retromodded. There's nothing novel about pre-moderation, some sites apply it to all user content - if you don't have a problem with that, I don't see how it's consistent to take exception to this.

The stupid mess that are the copyright laws today is something the US has voted for and imposed to the rest of the world. Funny US only wakes up when EU forces companies to follow the same rules as users.

Had the rule of law been applied equally to companies and individuals, youtube could never have existed as it is now. Solve the root of the damn problems. Fix the copyright laws.

Wrong, unfortunately. Copyright was dreamed up in medieval Europe, to protect manual copyists from fast copying by printing presses. The USA had a very relaxed way with copyright enforcement, until enough local culture was created. Europe was furious at the time but couldn't do much. Basically China today is doing to the USA what the USA did to Europe. And what parts of Europe did to other parts of Europe, for much the same reasons.

Original copyright laws were 21 years since first publication and made a lot of sense in a time when copies were costly to make.

They became increasingly stupid, going in the wrong direction long time after copies were basically free and this was because of American right holder's lobbying efforts.

I am well aware that places like Hollywood started as havens with lax enforcement of IPs. They seem to have forgotten that though and have been pushing very hard for destroying the kind of environment that made them possible.

This isn't a good example of what is wrong because Scribd appear to have acted very well and swiftly rectified the 'mistake'. If anything people could use this case as an argument for saying that the EU directive can work.

The Mueller Report is about as famous as you can get. That it can get taken down is proof of how messed up the system is; that it was put back up is not proof that, say, a unique, legal work you or I create would be put back up with the same speed.

The most stupid thing about the EU upload filter is it came only to effect because the Sweden delegation have pressed the wrong buttons!

Why not upload somewhere else? 'Embedding a document in a webpage'? seems a nobrainer,

Everybodys free - no one needs scribd in the first place to publish or republish.

Blog about what happend there and go on.

The web isn't meant to centralize stuff on specific hosts, controlled by corporations.

Funny, though it shouldn't be,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmTWhvWgST0

Oh yeah, Scribd was this company, SEOing publicly available talks and then putting a paywall in front, while also consistently top-ranking in google-searches for ehm copies of copyrighted work.

The EU-copyright directive might be not that great, but neither are greedy companies, embarking on shady, criminal or antidemocratic ventures under the banner of "we are progress, everybody loves us". Not sure what hinders distribution of the report on NYT/WaPo-frontpages if it's not copyrighted?!? Or hosting it on a Russian Onion Server like it's done for years (to come w/o a real copyright reform)?

For those who are curious why software companies and startups do NOT flourish in the EU - this is why.

When you trust government servants and politicians to keep internet "free" this is bound to happen.

And the reason for that report is the present that USA voted for in 2016.

Europe is irrelevant. By 2050 it's estimated that Europe will only account for 9% of the global GDP [1]. Down from 15% today. China will account for 20% of the GDP and India 15% by 2050.

I can not understand the Hacker News focus on European law given its declining prospects.

1. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/economy/the-world-in-2050.h...

> Europe is irrelevant.

15% of global GDP today, as you say, and considered the best place in the world to live by most measure.

> I can not understand the Hacker News focus on European law given its declining prospects. Europe is irrelevant.

I'd wager that a large percentage of users of this forum who are not from the US are from Europe.

Meh. My money is in emerging markets. Not European malaise. Maybe its a great place to retire - but it certainly isn't leading the world in technology output. Where is your Amazon? Where is your Alibaba?

It does not exist.

Where is your good quality food, vacation days, leaving-work-at-five-o'clock, unlimited sick leave, parental leave, social mobility, and happiness and life satisfaction?

"For me, Europe is more than just a single market. More than money, more than the euro. It was always about values." — President Jean-Claude Juncker, 2017 State of the Union Address.

How is GDP relevant to relevance of Europe?

It's relevant to investment. If I'm building a company, American Law, Chinese law, or Indian law is more important to me than European law.

Simply because there is more opportunity to be had.

The tiger which is chewing on my leg today will be dead in 20 years, so why should I worry about it?

The EU is the world's second largest economy in both straight GDP and GDP PPP. What it does today impacts the global marketplace. That is the point of the issue here.

Also your reasoning is flawed. Look at how tech companies bend over backwards to please Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, etc. Any large marketplace has an inertia of its own, and companies will always be willing to sell out their principles in order to ensure they lead in any decent-sized marketplace.

> "The tiger which is chewing on my leg today will be dead in 20 years, so why should I worry about it"

what does this expression mean?

It means that just because something may diminish with time does not mean it is not important today.

By that definition any country that is not china or india become less relevant. But the thing you're wrong about is that a relative decline does not automatically result in an absolute decline.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com