France proposes upload filter law, “forgets” user rights
juliareda.eu
juliareda.eu
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.
It does not mention any. (ref: mostly page 31 of https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/content/download/16062/162304... , and also other relevant sections found by looking for the words "téléversé"/"téléverser", which mean "upload")
I wonder how a politician that supported the initiative would react if they had their campaign videos systematically taken offline?
These people are usually behind several layers of separation from real world.
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.
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.
> 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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law (DMCA doesn't even get mentioned in the article)
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.
What are they?
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://gamingph.com/2019/12/youtubers-hit-by-false-copyrigh...
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.
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).
Totalitarianism is slowly creeping up on us.
Sounds good. Just copyright strike the content of the party proposing this
It’s like the poor guy encouraging tax cuts because one day he’ll be rich and don’t want to keep his money when he’ll finally make it out.
(Which is the opposite of the poor guy situation)
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.
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”.
Indeed, that's why "Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down".
Banksy isn't likely to sue anyone.
https://www.artsy.net/news/artsy-editorial-banksy-sued-itali...
They're not Banksy direct.
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.
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.
Why and how would the provided exceptions to other laws do anything to this law?
Line 5 of script: Look at reply. Count the number of vowels on first line. Line 6 of script: now say, "we have reviewed your reply."
Outside of script, rejected claims that had "azertyuiop" as copyright owner, although it had the right amount of vowels.
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.
I'm hopeful but not convinced.
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.
So the comment will disappear with no understanding why. No learning is possible.
Human involvement didn't help here.
QED
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
They call you a consumer because your job is to shut up and buy the shit they shovel out and keep a grin on your face as you buy buy buy.
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)).
This is yet another example of EU politicians lying to the voters.
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.
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.
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.