Copyright filters
How good are copyright filters? Not very. Julia Redd, a European Parliament member and Copyright Directive opponent, wrote:
“Upload monitoring software cannot tell infringement apart from legal uses like parody, specifically enabled by exceptions and limitations to copyright. Filters also frequently malfunction. As a result, legal content will be taken down.” Besides, she continued, these filters are “what amounts to surveillance technology.”
These copyright filter systems are also, to be kind, less than perfect. In a September EFF story, Doctorow wrote:
“The most well-known of the bunch is YouTube’s Content ID system, which cost $60,000,000 to build, and which works by filtering the audio tracks of videos to categorise them.” Even with this best-of-breed system, “legitimate works are censored by spurious copyright claims: NASA gets blocked from posting its own Mars rover footage; classical pianists are blocked from posting their own performances, birdsong results in videos being censored, entire academic conferences lose their presenters’ audio because the hall they rented played music at the lunch-break—you can’t even post silence without triggering copyright enforcement.”
Copyright trolls
You can also be certain that copyright trolls will claim copyrights to works they don’t actually own to rip off both content-containing websites and users. One such company, RightHaven, has brought over 200 copyright infringement lawsuits in Nevada federal court against anyone who ever posted content anywhere from Las Vegas Review-Journal stories.
RightHaven went out of business after being spanked in the courts. But you can count on dozens of copyright trolls following their business plan if Article 11 is passed. It’s just too easy.
What you can do
If you care about the internet, step up. Keep it from being strangled by these draconian laws. Both Article aren’t law yet. You can still help stop them from ever becoming law by signing this petition against the Directive. Or, if you’re a EU citizen, you call your MEP.
Related Stories:
Google: EU copyright rules will cut 45 percent of traffic to news sitesEU smacks internet in the face with link tax and upload filter lawsThe EU’s new Copyright Directive really is that bad
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