How The EU May Be About To Kill The Public Domain: Copyright Filters Takedown Beethoven

from the ending-the-public-domain dept

Over in the EU Parliament, they're getting ready to vote yet again on the absolutely terrible Copyright Directive, which has serious problems for the future of the internet, including Article 13's mandatory censorship filters and Article 11's link tax. Regrading the mandatory filters, German music professor Ulrich Kaiser, has written about a a very disturbing experiment he ran on YouTube, in which he kept having public domain music he had uploaded for his students get taken down by ContentID copyright claims.

After exploring ways to teach his students Beethoven's music, and putting together a collection of public domain recordings, he encountered the following thanks to YouTube's filters:

The first video I uploaded to YouTube promoted the website where my digitized copies of public domain recordings are available to download. In this video, I explained my project, while examples of the music played in the background. Less than three minutes after uploading, I received a notification that there was a ContentID claim against my video. ContentID is a system, developed by YouTube, which checks user uploaded videos against databases of copyrighted content in order to curb copyright infringement. This system took millions of dollars to develop and is often pointed to as a working example of upload filters by rights holders and lawmakers who wish to make such technology mandatory for every website which hosts user content online. However, these claims ignore the widespread reports of its often flawed execution.

That inspired him to test this more thoroughly... and you'll absolutely guess what happened next:

I decided to open a different YouTube account “Labeltest” to share additional excerpts of copyright-free music. I quickly received ContentID notifications for copyright-free music by Bartok, Schubert, Puccini and Wagner. Again and again, YouTube told me that I was violating the copyright of these long-dead composers, despite all of my uploads existing in the public domain. I appealed each of these decisions, explaining that 1) the composers of these works had been dead for more than 70 years, 2) the recordings were first published before 1963, and 3) these takedown request did not provide justification in their property rights under the German Copyright Act.

I only received more notices, this time about a recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5, which was accompanied by the message: “Copyrighted content was found in your video. The claimant allows its content to be used in your YouTube video. However, advertisements may be displayed.” Once again, this was a mistaken notification. The recording was one by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Lorin Maazel, which was released in 1961 and is therefore in the public domain. Seeking help, I emailed YouTube, but their reply, “[…] thank you for contacting Google Inc. Please note that due to the large number of enquiries, e-mails received at this e-mail address support-de@google.com cannot be read and acknowledged” was less than reassuring.

And, again, this is in the strongest situation for filters to test themsevles. Google has spent more resources and money on ContentID than on any other filter. It's been tested much more thoroughly than just about any other filter out there. And music is one of the easiest cases to match. And yet, it still got it all wrong. And it caused significant collateral damage:

I wish I could tell you that the ending to this tale was wholly happy. It is true that many of my contestations of these copyright violations were successful, and the videos were not taken down from YouTube. However, I intended to release all of my videos under a free license, so that they could be used in the future for others to educate and inform students about these beautiful works. Even in cases where my defense to the ContentID claims were successful, the videos were not reverted to this free license, making it much more difficult for others to use and share these digitized works in the way I originally had intended.

Now expand this out to other kinds of content, which aren't as easy to match. Or companies who don't have $60 million to spend on filters. Or where companies don't have the time to review every disputed takedown. And what do you end up with? A serious impact on the public domain (not to mention fair use, parody and more).

And here's the thing: mandatory filters are totally unnecessary. Most large platforms already have invested in ContentID-like systems. It's the smaller sites and the upstarts who can't afford such a thing. So all Article 13 will really do is lock in YouTube/Google as the dominant player. And maybe that's what the RIAA and their friends really want: they believe that as long as there's just one other big company they can sit across a table and demand cash from, that'll somehow cover up for the fact that it sold its members a bill of goods about the internet for the past couple of decades. But, it will do enormous harm to creativity and content creators in the long run.

Filed Under: article 13, automated filters, beethoven, contentid, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, mandatory filters, public domain
Companies: google, youtube

Learning From Beethoven: Speeding Up The Exchange Of Scientific Knowledge

from the it's-good-to-share dept

There is a general belief that science proceeds by smooth cycles of discovery and sharing � that scientists formulate theories, investigate problems, produce data and then publish results for other scientists to check, reproduce and then build on.

That may be the theory, but in practice the frictionless sharing of scientific results is greatly impeded by two factors: the huge profits that scientific publishers make from acting as a tollgate for knowledge through their journals, and the Bayh-Dole Act that encourages educational establishments to try to make money by not freely sharing the discoveries of their academics, but patenting them instead.

Open access arose in part to combat the first of these, and now there's a new project that wants to build on its achievements by updating scientific knowledge more rapidly:

We want to change the way research is communicated, both amongst researchers, as well as with health practitioners, patients and the wider public. Inspired by Beethoven, we want to build a research version of his repository and try to tackle the question "What if the public scientific record would be updated directly as research proceeds?"

"Inspired by Beethoven" refers to this quotation from one of his letters, written in 1801:

There should be only one repository of art in the world, where an artist would only need to bring his creations in order to take what he needed.

Here's how this new project hopes to start creating a repository for science:

There are already over 100,000 scholarly articles available online under a Creative Commons Attribution License and thus free for anyone to read, download, copy, distribute, modify and build upon, provided that proper attribution is given. We will start building Beethoven's open repository by taking 10,000 of these (especially review articles), convert them into a common format, interlink them like topics are linked on Wikipedia, and update them with fresh information as new research findings become available. This will turn the original 10,000 articles into Evolving Review Articles - in other contexts called Living Reviews - available under that same Creative Commons license. We expect that this will help research to be communicated faster, with the ability to promptly correct errors or misconceptions, and in a way that better incorporates the interests of the public. The Evolving Reviews will have a public version history, so that anyone can see in what state the article was at any given time in the past. Over time, this feature can develop into an important tool for exploring the history of science, or of ideas more generally.

Obviously this idea is close to that of wiki-based projects like Wikipedia, and that's no bad thing, since the format has proved its power in multiple contexts. Interestingly, the people behind what they seem to be calling "Beethoven's open repository of research" want to write some new software for the job:

we think that Beethoven's open repository of research should be federated rather than centralized. This means that if you edit a page in the repository, this act will create a personal copy for you. You can decide whether you want to feed these changes back to others, they can decide whether they accept your changes, and there must be options for authorizing certain versions for certain purposes. Such federated systems for the collaborative structuring of knowledge are only just emerging, and producing a working prototype platform that allows anyone to contribute to Beethoven's open repository is an important milestone in our project. Once the platform is up and running, the 10,000 seed articles will have to be imported, and a selection of them will be used to demo the Evolving Review concept. You can help shape the project by making suggestions as to what topics we should concentrate on. Finally, we want to facilitate the reuse of the Evolving Reviews in contexts outside research, especially in education and in supporting patients.

They've launched an appeal for funds using RocketHub, a platform similar to Kickstarter, and are seeking a fairly modest $12,000. But you have to wonder whether that's really enough for what sounds an interesting but ambitious project.

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Filed Under: beethoven, science, sharing