Latest EU Copyright Directive Still Demands Internet Companies Wave Magic Wands

from the this-is-not-how-you-regulate dept

The EU Copyright Directive continues to be a total and complete disaster. It's so bad that neither of the two main groups lobbying around it -- the legacy entertainment industry and the big tech companies (with the vast majority of the lobbying coming from the copyright sector) are both unhappy with the bill (though for opposite reasons). And yet, despite all of this, the EU continues to soldier forward with a new proposal and a new draft that still requires that internet companies do the impossible:

The specific suggestions being pushed in the revised Copyright Directive suggests that whoever is putting this stuff together still has no idea what they're talking about. There's an attempt at fixing Article 11 (the snippet tax) not by actually fixing it, but at least making sure that it doesn't apply to "individual words or very short extracts."

The rights referred to in the first subparagraph shall not apply in respect of uses of individual words or very short extracts of a press publication.

What does "very short extracts of a press publication" mean? Well, we'll have to see what courts think of it after extensive litigation, I guess.

More importantly, Article 13 remains an utter mess where they still think that internet companies can just wave a magic wand and suddenly they will stop all infringement without also taking down non-infringing content. The text still pushes for online platforms to have to take out licenses for everything -- and on the question of takedowns of stuff that isn't actually infringing, it just says "don't do that":

The steps taken by the online content sharing service providers should be without prejudice to the application of exceptions and limitations to copyright, including in particular those which guarantee the freedom of expression of users.

Users should not be prevented from uploading and making available content that they have produced and that contains existing works or other protected subject matter for specific purposes of illustration or parody when these uses do not create significant harm to rightholders.

First of all... how is that even possible to do these things without running afoul of the other parts of the law? The bureaucrats don't say because they don't understand any of this. Second, this new text basically only says that this applies to "parody" or when the uses "do not create significant harm to rightsholders." But, who determines that? We've seen rightsholders go nuts over all sorts of uses that wouldn't create actual harm (in some cases that would lead to more revenue). All of this is just left up to the idea that internet companies will magically figure out what's okay and what's not.

As the EFF notes in a thorough post, so much of Article 13 is really the EU putting out vague statements about what should be allowed and what should not be allowed, without any notion of how that'll work and then saying you two giant industries figure this mess out. Indeed, as scholar Annemarie Bridy pointed out recently in a wonderful (if terrifying) tweet storm, the entire Article 13 appears to be based on a model of the world that isn't accurate -- one where there are just a few internet companies negotiating with just a few content companies:

The whole thing remains an utter disaster that is moving forward even as no one is left who really seems to support it. The public doesn't want this shit. The big entertainment companies are now asking for Article 13 to be set aside. The big internet companies have always been against it. And yet it rolls ever forward, with a bunch of clueless, technically illiterate bureaucrats basically saying "well, if we just say big companies should do this without allowing any negative consequences to happen, surely they can figure it out..." and tossing it over the fence.

This is not how sane policy is made. This is how you fuck up the internet.

Filed Under: article 11, article 13, censorship, copyright, eu copyright directive, filters, intermediary liability, magic wand, safe harbors

Theresa May Again Demands Tech Companies Do More To Right The World's Social Media Wrongs

from the in-return,-politicians-promise-to-provide-more-bad-legislation dept

In the face of "extremist" content and other internet nasties, British PM Theresa May keeps doing something. That something is telling social media companies to do something. Move fast and break speech. Nerd harder. Do whatever isn't working well already, but with more people and processing power.

May has been shifting her anti-speech, anti-social media tirades towards the Orwellian in recent months. Her speeches and platform stances have tried to make direct government control of internet communications sound like a gift to the unwashed masses. May's desire to bend US social media companies to the UK's laws has been presented as nothing more than as a "balancing" of freedom of speech against some imagined right to go through life without being overly troubled by social media posts.

Then there's the terrorism. Terrorists use social media platforms to connect with like-minded people. May would like this to stop. She's not sure how this should be accomplished but she's completely certain smart people at tech companies could bring an end to world terrorism with a couple of well-placed filters. So sure of this is May that she wants "extremist" content classified, located, and removed within two hours of its posting.

May's crusade against logic and reality continues with her comments at the Davos Conference. Her planned speech/presentation contains more of her predictable demand that everyone who isn't a UK government agency needs to start doing things better and faster.

Although she is expected to praise the potential of technology to "transform lives", she will also call on social media companies to do much more to stop allowing content that promotes terror, extremism and child abuse.

She will say: "Technology companies still need to go further in stepping up to their responsibilities for dealing with harmful and illegal online activity.

"These companies simply cannot stand by while their platforms are used to facilitate child abuse, modern slavery or the spreading of terrorist and extremist content.

"We need to go further, so that ultimately this content is removed automatically. These companies have some of the best brains in the world. They must focus their brightest and best on meeting these fundamental social responsibilities."

"Go further…" but to what point? This is all May has said for years. Social media companies continue to struggle with moderating content, but it's not for a lack of trying. They're dealing with contradictory demands from multiple world governments, each of them declaring different types of speech to be unacceptable. The pressure isn't imaginary. Twitter has taken proactive measures in response to Germany's new hate speech law, resulting in some spectacular collateral damage. Other platforms are doing the same thing, even if the damage hasn't been as ironically glorious.

May wants harder nerding, up to and including all-knowing bots that kill objectionable content before it reaches human eyeballs. She wants the impossible. Even if it were theoretically possible to police speech better with AI, that's still years away from being the deployed at scale. Efforts that have been deployed have been routinely disastrous. Ask anyone how YouTube's Content ID is doing handling copyright infringement and you'll get a general idea of just how well algorithms police content.

For now, the problem is handled by a mixture of algorithms, human moderators, and crowd sourcing. The algorithms can't reliably target unwanted content. The humans are, well, human -- prone to error and bias. The last part -- reporting functions for users -- basically give every heckler a veto button, resulting in abuse of the system to bury content certain users don't want to see. All these efforts work well for the governments demanding them -- and these governments are the entities most likely to abuse them to silence dissent.

This is what the argument has been reduced to: calls for "more" without any interest in determining whether "more" will be helpful or even possible. The result will be the suppression of speech, rather than a victory over terrorism.

Filed Under: censorship, filtering, magic wand, social media, tech companies, theresa may