Article 11/13 for the EU and future of the site

[onlyonepinman 18072xp 1]

I think it’s a very bad move.  I don’t think big platforms should be liable for what is hosted on their platform doing that is far more such platforms less accessible to small creators.  It’s unlikely that YouTube or Facebook will risk lawsuits and as such they will place heavy restrictions on what can be uploaded and who can upload it, or they will have algorithms that are so strict that actually very little gets through making them all but useless as platforms. If they have to pay licence fees to any and all rights holders in order to allow users to freely post content, that’s a cost that will be passed on to users. The provisions themselves will likely prove to be pointless because the tech corps are going to erro on the side of caution with a Guilty until proven innocent approach. This means it is imcumbent on you as a user to prove that what you’re uploading is NOT subject to copyright after it has been blocked. However this will require a manual review by a human and the review is not likey to be sympathetic to the uploader but will be likely to protect the hosting platform – so any subjectivity will probaby side with rights holders. Such reviews will also not be quick because social media companies simply cannot employ the number of people required to maintain such a manual review system. So while it is possible to filter out potential copyrighted material at point of upload, it is absolutely not possible to implement a system that ensures that the what could be called fair use provision are also correctly implemented. Which is why I think people are rightly worried about articles 11 & 13

Also, with regards to intent.  Even if you believe the politcians (always a foolish course of action) when they explain the intent behind something, intent in no way governs end use.  Just because the EU has a particular intention in mind, it would hardly be the first time that something passed into law had unintended consequences and clumsy, poorly worded law is more likely to facilitate such unintended consequences.  Personally I do not believe the intention is to ensure small YouTube creators are fairly remunerated by social media platforms, I think it is to protect, or try to protect, the music, TV and film industries.  Even if I am wrong, and they are (for a change) being honest, this will have unintended consequences and I have no faith at all in our politicians to reverse or ammend the directive in the future because what is there right now favours large, wealthy organisations – exactly the kind of organisations the EU is set up to serve.

[mecha82Participant 10037xp 0]

Lot of politicians cross the western world serve those wealthy organizations but it’s no were as bad as it’s in USA. Whole political system in there is all about that with they politicians having to use more time for getting donations than spending time doing what they should and doing bidding of those with money. So while situation in EU and in Europe in general (including UK) might be bad it isn’t as bad as on other side of pond.

[skiptotheend 4525xp 0]

@robert to piggy back your point, Nintendo have already tried to limit people playing their games eg: ‘lets plays’ in the past. I believe through being a list of content providers which I think you had to pay for – otherwise the earnings people made from videos of Nintendo games would find themselves forced to give add revenue to them – simple hack people got round this was to de-monetize Nintendo content.

[mecha82Participant 10037xp 0]

To be fair Nintendo stopped doing that some time ago when they cancelled they creator program so they fixed they ways to better when it comes to that. That said with this they might take things back to that just because they can but we never know that they are going to do. They might be among some of less greedy video game companies but that doesn’t mean that they are perfect either.

[limburger 21775xp 1]

Here’s Jim Sterlings’ comment about the situation :

(fair warning : he does have a bit of a potty mouth … )

@khusrau : this law won’t do anything positive.
The current problems on YouTube as a result of the DMCA laws from the USA are well documented and have caused a ton of false positives (and that’s before the abuse by certain companies & individuals).
It has not worked and it won’t work because no automated system can detect ‘fair use’.

 

[andre77 13013xp 2]

I think too, it will have a massive influence on all sites with the possibility of uploading pictures.

It already started last year, with many german sites taking down pictures of our favorite hobby or worse deleting them. Whole paint logs gone forever, because they would not risk a legal case. They were unable to control the content, showing people faces. I mean which filter will notice the diffence between a painted face and a real human face. NUTS. Photo galleries had to close, because, they could not proove they had the rights to show the faces of the peoples.

Another problem i see, is: BoW will have to make a licensing contract with the people uploading pictures, as i understand. So they can use them further on the site, like for the Weekender or the community Spotlight. Or someone could sue them for using those, without further agreement. NUTS.

But it is just from what i heard. It is complicated und totally not userfriendly. But who am i to tell. My colleagues at work still ask me why the PED starts at 0,5 bar and if there is a way to bypass (there are ways, but not in our case).

 

 

[tankkommanderParticipant 6429xp 1]

Yes, terrible news for Google, Youtube etc that they can no longer make money off creators and not pay them.

Good news for creators, bad news for bigternet exploiters.

And this won’t make a jot of difference to this site.

[khusrauParticipant 1169xp 1]

Potty Mouth? Ha ha ha..  I’m Scottish. What the US thinks of as potty mouth is genteel after dinner convetsation with your great-aunt here.

And I have no problem with content producers being paid for their content. I know way too many people who get their content ripped off, or asked to work for free, ‘for the exposure’.

[khusrauParticipant 1169xp 0]

Nope. BoW already should have a copyright agreement about people uploading pictures. Just like any other serious site. In Facebooks case for example, their agreement was that by posting there, you had voluntarily assigned them the right to reuse content.

[limburger 21775xp 1]

@tankkommander except it doesn’t work like that.
The things YouTube has had to do as a result of the DMCA have already proven that.

I’ll give you this :  Jim Sterling vs Digital Homicide

https://www.destructoid.com/jim-sterling-prevails-in-his-lawsuit-with-digital-homicide-420086.phtml
Sterling is lucky enough to have the resources to defend against such things and his channel is big enough to make this visible.

There has been zero evidence of the DMCA helping the little people.
There has been plenty of evidence of the DMCA being used to threaten & harass little people.

These things are the EU equivalent … except with the added disadvantage that we’ll have a slightly different variant of these laws in each country within the EU.

Also let’s not forget about Article 12 ( https://indivigital.com/resources/copyright/article-12/ ) which states that the publisher (! not the creator!)  is supposed to get a piece of the pie as well.

Home

 

[onlyonepinman 18072xp 0]

This isn’t about whether or not someone is in favour of copyright infringement, because I absolutely promise you I am not.  It’s the arse about face approach, the idea that something will be considered copyright infringement until proven otherwise.  This will necessarily be the case because algorithms cannot determine context and so will be programmed with a “if in doubt, bock it out” approach to prevent lawsuits against the hosting platform.  The manual review process simply will not work because there’s just too much being uploaded, once your upload, whatever it is, is blocked it will be in limbo potentially indefinitely – especially if you’re not a big corp who can pay people to put pressure on host platforms to review it.  And if videogames are fair game, why not wargames and board games?  Photos of painted miniatures?  None of these currently require a license to host and yet all of these could be considered copyright infringement.  Oh and how long before someone who has whatever kind of license is required gets it revoked for giving a bad review?  This isn’t about copyright really, it’s about control.  Large corporations aren’t losing money because people are infringing their copyright on YouTube, they’re losing money because people are communicating about them in a way they cannot control.  Social Media has given a voice to the masses enabling them to create their own narratives, make decisions based on untold numbers of opinions and sources;  the corporations want that control back, whether it’s music, film, news or whatever

[blinky465 17028xp 1]

@onlyonepinman – you’re right that it’s all arse-about-face and poorly thought through, but it’s also very unlikely to be the death knell some people are suggesting. To pick up and correct assumptions about what might happen, based on past precendent is not to support the (Article 13) law.

Admittedly, it was about 15 years or more ago, but *in my own experience* of taking photographs (of football grounds) I’m pretty sure that taking photos of miniatures (painted or otherwise) and sharing them on a website wouldn’t be in breach of the copyright of the miniature manufacturer.

I approached football teams for a licence to use their imagery/logo in some football database software I’d written. Many clubs refused most strongly, and some (Man Utd, I’m looking at you) even threatened legal action. So I, and a few friends, over the course of a number of months, attended games featuring each of the 92 teams of the football league and took photos of the players in action – and of the empty football grounds. We used these images – that we had taken, and to which we owned the copyright – in the software (and subsequently on the website) without penalty.

Sure, Arsenal FC were annoyed that I used a photo of Dennis Bergkamp (although we modified the photos to give them a “cartoony” look – hey, it was the early 2000s – it was still clearly him) and that their team colours and team badge were clearly legible. Had I recreated their strip as a graphic/icon (as I originally wanted to) I would have been in breach of copyright, and liable to pay licence fees. But taking photographs of an actual person (or thing) are not the same as recreating an image or likeness of them, or sharing a photo that someone else has taken (and thus breaching copyright).

As it was, we simply presented a footballer – here’s a guy called Dennis Bergkamp, he plays for Arsenal, this is what he looks like – and no copyright/trademarks were infringed.

You may well be right about what happens in future, with Youtube/Facebook failing to create the necessary algorithms; but a site like BoW could easily change to a different video hosting platform that does have the intelligence to filter content – I’d be speculating as much as you are to claim that this is what would happen, and extrapolate this into saying “obviously that means all kinds of content will be banned”.

My own personal experience (albeit a while ago, though I’m not aware that actual copyright laws have changed in the UK) suggests that the threshold for breaching copyright is higher than some might assume (yet, paradoxically, much easier to prove than others – who are happy to share copyrighted material – might think).

Just sharing my experiences in this area, rather than speculating on conspiracies.

It’s interesting to note that Youtube has the technology to identify (and mute) music videos that even contain cover versions of songs and songs that are significantly different (in key/pitch/tempo) to the original – it’s not impossible for them to match videos against “content fingerprints” for identifying content to be blocked, they just currently choose not to implement it.

[onlyonepinman 18072xp 0]

Up until now I may well have agreed with you however as has already been reported, Germany already has similar laws and the effect has been that online galleries have closed. We have seen large companies already placing copyright strikes against games streamers. It’s not really much of a stretch to say that while it may not be intended to stop you posting a photograph of your painted miniatures, that may well be an unintended consequence. The system being proposed and likely implemented favours those with the money to press their claim. The current system is the reverse, although it is definitely possible for those with enough money/influence to push a dubious copyright claim and win simply by picking on people without the means to make a meaningful defence. I think that this is definitely a step in the wrong direction both liberty and the internet.

[khusrauParticipant 1169xp 0]

And I think people are also extremely naive about the capacity for automated content screening. AI and machine learning are making this stuff much more sophisticated every day. I know you all get worried because FB tries to get you to tag the names of the miniatures you’ve posted, but that’s just the crude stuff, the real smarts are getting more and more impressive, plus the speeds have improved beyond all recognition making near real time processing possible.

[tarrox 249xp 1]

@khusrau Problem here is that you and the Politicians (also managers etc) are overestimating the abilities of AI. Yes certain things are simple and more doable but others aren’t and some never will be. Currently we are still exploring what is doable. Basically we are like in the people in the 19 hundreds imagining what the year 2000 would be like.

For example last year Sony had to remove their copyright claim for one of their Bach performances, as it resulted in nobody being able to upload their rendition of this Bach piece, without it being copyright claimed (which is more than legal as Sony only holds the right for this specific performance not the music itself). Problem was that there was no way to change the filter to make this work without making the filter useless (It would have been very easy to trick it and thus making it useless and not what copyright holders want).

Second the application of AI filters is really fast but creating them can take weeks or even months. For example googles voice recognition needs to train for several months to improve itself. That is the reason why voice recognition is advancing so slowly as it takes a lot of time to create the models. And a lot of it is so fast due to improvement of computer technology, in other words it is fast but to get that fast you need big computing rigs.

Third, one of the biggest issues here is that no AI is capable of recognizing parody, satire and the like, even the research is just now starting to check if this is even possible. And even if it is theoretically possible, the complexity of doing this task could be so costly computing wise that it is not practically viable. For example a correct recognition would require to include picture recognition, voice recognition, recognition of the pitch of the voice of each word, a understanding of the context (Oh this will be fun believe me) and combing all of it together. I myself work on a project that worked with logic problems, that even a 6 year old could solve but the moment the machine tried it, it needed way more time than a human and we are talking about laughable problem sizes, we were not even close to something even remotely practical (Even though we improved a lot of the stuff by factors of 1000 and more).

In addition just last month a bunch of scientist proofed that there are problems that AI’s are incapable of solving to the point it is even impossible for them to determine that they fail at the task. So keep that in mind when saying AI will solve the problem, without knowing if the given problem was already solved by an AI.

To sum it up, the current approach of AI is, that AI is a hammer and we try every problem as though it is a nail. A lot of the times it works (especially as we use AI on the problems we know it can work), but now that we try it on things that aren’t nails we will see it fail. Often we already know it will fail or is a hard to do but to know this you need to look into the research work, as that is where failed stuff is written about due to the fact that companies not writing about their failed attempts so the stuff you see is heavily biased towards success. For example every few moons you see someone try to create a medical AI to tell you what is wrong and it never works as good as you need it to.

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