Article 13 – P2P Foundation

The EU’s Copyright Proposal is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even (Especially!) Wikipedia

P2P Foundation — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Republished from EFF.org

Cory Doctorow: The pending update to the EU Copyright Directive is coming up for a committee vote on June 20 or 21 and a parliamentary vote either in early July or late September. While the directive fixes some longstanding problems with EU rules, it creates much, much larger ones: problems so big that they threaten to wreck the Internet itself.

Under Article 13 of the proposal, sites that allow users to post text, sounds, code, still or moving images, or other copyrighted works for public consumption will have to filter all their users’ submissions against a database of copyrighted works. Sites will have to pay to license the technology to match submissions to the database, and to identify near matches as well as exact ones. Sites will be required to have a process to allow rightsholders to update this list with more copyrighted works.

Even under the best of circumstances, this presents huge problems. Algorithms that do content-matching are frankly terrible at it. The Made-in-the-USA version of this is YouTube’s Content ID system, which improperly flags legitimate works all the time, but still gets flack from entertainment companies for not doing more.

There are lots of legitimate reasons for Internet users to upload copyrighted works. You might upload a clip from a nightclub (or a protest, or a technical presentation) that includes some copyrighted music in the background. Or you might just be wearing a t-shirt with your favorite album cover in your Tinder profile. You might upload the cover of a book you’re selling on an online auction site, or you might want to post a photo of your sitting room in the rental listing for your flat, including the posters on the wall and the picture on the TV.

Wikipedians have even more specialised reasons to upload material: pictures of celebrities, photos taken at newsworthy events, and so on.

But the bots that Article 13 mandates will not be perfect. In fact, by design, they will be wildly imperfect.

Article 13 punishes any site that fails to block copyright infringement, but it won’t punish people who abuse the system. There are no penalties for falsely claiming copyright over someone else’s work, which means that someone could upload all of Wikipedia to a filter system (for instance, one of the many sites that incorporate Wikpedia’s content into their own databases) and then claim ownership over it on Twitter, Facebook and WordPress, and everyone else would be prevented from quoting Wikipedia on any of those services until they sorted out the false claims. It will be a lot easier to make these false claims that it will be to figure out which of the hundreds of millions of copyrighted claims are real and which ones are pranks or hoaxes or censorship attempts.

Article 13 also leaves you out in the cold when your own work is censored thanks to a malfunctioning copyright bot. Your only option when you get censored is to raise an objection with the platform and hope they see it your way—but if they fail to give real consideration to your petition, you have to go to court to plead your case.

Article 13 gets Wikipedia coming and going: not only does it create opportunities for unscrupulous or incompetent people to block the sharing of Wikipedia’s content beyond its bounds, it could also require Wikipedia to filter submissions to the encyclopedia and its surrounding projects, like Wikimedia Commons. The drafters of Article 13 have tried to carve Wikipedia out of the rule, but thanks to sloppy drafting, they have failed: the exemption is limited to “noncommercial activity”. Every file on Wikipedia is licensed for commercial use.

Then there’s the websites that Wikipedia relies on as references. The fragility and impermanence of links is already a serious problem for Wikipedia’s crucial footnotes, but after Article 13 becomes law, any information hosted in the EU might disappear—and links to US mirrors might become infringing—at any moment thanks to an overzealous copyright bot. For these reasons and many more, the Wikimedia Foundation has taken a public position condemning Article 13.

Speaking of references: the problems with the new copyright proposal don’t stop there. Under Article 11, each member state will get to create a new copyright in news. If it passes, in order to link to a news website, you will either have to do so in a way that satisfies the limitations and exceptions of all 28 laws, or you will have to get a license. This is fundamentally incompatible with any sort of wiki (obviously), much less Wikipedia.

It also means that the websites that Wikipedia relies on for its reference links may face licensing hurdles that would limit their ability to cite their own sources. In particular, news sites may seek to withhold linking licenses from critics who want to quote from them in order to analyze, correct and critique their articles, making it much harder for anyone else to figure out where the positions are in debates, especially years after the fact. This may not matter to people who only pay attention to news in the moment, but it’s a blow to projects that seek to present and preserve long-term records of noteworthy controversies. And since every member state will get to make its own rules for quotation and linking, Wikipedia posts will have to satisfy a patchwork of contradictory rules, some of which are already so severe that they’d ban any items in a “Further Reading” list unless the article directly referenced or criticized them.

The controversial measures in the new directive have been tried before. For example, link taxes were tried in Spain and Germany and they failed, and publishers don’t want them. Indeed, the only country to embrace this idea as workable is China, where mandatory copyright enforcement bots have become part of the national toolkit for controlling public discourse.

Articles 13 and 11 are poorly thought through, poorly drafted, unworkable—and dangerous. The collateral damage they will impose on every realm of public life can’t be overstated. The Internet, after all, is inextricably bound up in the daily lives of hundreds of millions of Europeans and an entire constellation of sites and services will be adversely affected by Article 13. Europe can’t afford to place education, employment, family life, creativity, entertainment, business, protest, politics, and a thousand other activities at the mercy of unaccountable algorithmic filters. If you’re a European concerned about these proposals, here’s a tool for contacting your MEP.

Photo by ccPixs.com

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SAVE, CODE, SHARE! Current EU Copyright Review threatens Free and Open Source Software. Take action now!

Stacco Troncoso — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 08:00:00 +0000

Current EU Copyright Review threatens Free and Open Source Software. Take action now to preserve the ability to collaboratively build software online!

The P2P Foundation supports the SAVE, CODE, SHARE campaign to defend our Internet sovereignty and digital collaborative spaces. Click here to sign as an individual or organization. The letter below, along with the signatures signatures, will be delivered
the Members of the European Parliament and the EU Council. The following is taken from SaveCodeShare.eu:

Open Letter to Secure Free and Open Source Software Ecosystem in the EU Copyright Review

Your mobile device, your car, your wifi router at home, your television, the airplanes in which you travel all contain Free and Open Source Software. This widespread reuse is possible because Free and Open Source Software can be shared openly, studied and customised to meet any need.

The EU is getting ready to vote a “Copyright Reform” package which fundamentally undermines the foundations upon which Free and Open Source Software is built. The proposed Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive targets every online service that allows its users to upload and share content with each other, including code hosting platforms.

Under this proposal code hosting platforms will be compelled to prevent any possible copyright infringement by developing fundamentally flawed filtering technologies. These filtering algorithms will ultimately decide what material software developers should be allowed to share.

As a result of this ongoing copyright review, every user of a code sharing platform, be they an individual, a business or a public administration, is to be treated as a potential copyright infringer: their content, including entire code repositories, will be monitored and blocked from being shared online at any time. This restricts the freedom of developers to use specific software components and tools that in return leads to less competition and less innovation. Ultimately this can result in software that is less reliable and a less resilient software infrastructure for everybody.

We, individuals, developers, organisations and companies that develop or rely on the Free and Open Source Software ecosystem call upon European decision makers to protect open, collaborative software ecosystems. We call upon European policy makers to fundamentally rethink or delete Article 13 of the EU Copyright Reform in order to avoid the threat it poses for Free and Open Source Software.

Save Europe’s digital future, by making sure that there is a re-think or deletion of Article 13 in the EU Copyright Reform.

Please Save Code Share!

Take Action Now

Sign the open letter which we will hand over to the Members of the European Parliament and the EU Council
Read our White Paper

About the initiative

#SaveCodeShare is an initiative launched by the FSFE and OpenForum Europe in September 2017. It aims to bring awareness about the unintended impact of Article 13 of the proposed Copyright Directive on software sharing platforms. Through the research presented in our White Paper, the initiative shows that better awareness is needed to understand where and how innovation takes place in the current market. This is a first step in order to create a proper regulatory framework. And this is what this initiative aims to achieve.

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Article 13 will set back creativity. We let the artists speak for themselves.

Stacco Troncoso — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Content filtering, bots scanning for copyrighted content and then blocking what they find, will seriously harm creativity in Europe. That’s why artists are joining together to speak out against it.

Continuing our coverage of the European Parliament’s heinous proposition for filtering uploaded content, Ruth Coustick-Deal consults with the artistic community. Republished from OpenMedia.org.

Ruth Coustick-Deal: Last week we asked our community to let us know how people in their profession will be harmed by content filtering (Article 13) and the link tax (Article 11).^[1]We’ve heard from more than 1000 people already, and more responses are still coming in every day.

Now it’s time to take the message to the person at the front of this decision. Axel Voss MEP is both in charge of the key committee and a leader in his party.

Axel Voss MEP today published his “compromise” (in name only) today. Essentially he kept Oettinger’s original flawed proposal. Despite public voices. Despite tens of thousands of people speaking up against. Despite robust academic critique. We are still faced with unaccountable censorship machines.

Axel Voss MEP needs to directly hear why the public are so opposed to automated censorship machines. He has the most influence on this law. He has all this power, and is still clinging on to broken, unpopular proposals.^[2]

If MEPs like Voss want to the web to work for artists, they need to start listening to the individuals, not just the big industry groups.

They try to tell us that automated content filtering, bots scanning for copyrighted content and then blocking what they find, will help creativity flourish. We know that it won’t. Consider Adam Neely.^[3] A YouTube-based jazz teacher couldn’t play short snippets of music to analyse them. Because the music was owned by Universal Music Group; they got it blocked and taken down. We will see more and more of this kind of censorship, which will take place across Europe, if these filters are legally demanded.

That’s why we are working with the Create/Refresh coalition.^[4] They are a network of artists from across Europe who are opposed to Article 13. These creators produced a video which illustrates all of their talents, and their unity against these rules. Watch the video to find out more.

We need Axel Voss to see this! Let’s make sure he can’t ignore it, and knows that the very people he claims to be speaking for, oppose him.

This is just a small sample of art made possible because we don’t have these excessive restrictions that do nothing for creators.

Please give them a voice. Share the video with Axel Voss on Facebook and Twitter demanding he rejects content blocking and the link tax.

We know that tweeting at MEPs can be hugely effective if we raise a chorus too loud to ignore – MEPs pay attention to what people are saying on social media. Lets show Axel Voss that artists are not asking for his “protection”, what they want is freedom to create.

Footnotes

[1] Help our censorship impact research AND speak to your MEPs. Source: OpenMedia
[2] Green light for upload filters: EU Parliament’s copyright rapporteur has learned nothing from year-long debate. Source: Julia Reda
[3] When I want to teach but can’t, thanks to Universal Music Group. Source: Adam Neely
[4] Create Refresh Coalition website.

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Stop #CensorshipMachine: EU copyright threatens our freedoms

Xnet — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 08:55:00 +0000

Europe wants Internet companies to filter all of your uploads. (It is a censorship machine.)
An upload filter can’t recognize your legal use of copyrighted content. (Like parody, citations and – oh, noes! – memes.)
And you will have no meaningful protection from unfair deletion. (So, the proposed safeguards will not save you.)
This needs to change: we need to save the meme! (Article 13 of the proposed Copyright Directive must be deleted.)
And you can be of a tremendous help!
Call a member of the European Parliament now – for free.

Visit SaveTheMeme.net for more!

Art 13 of the new EU copyright reform threatens our right and freedoms.
Act now to STOP the #CensorshipMachine at: https://savethememe.net
Mashup video by: Xnet
With the support of: EDRi, EFF, La Quadrature du Net, Bits of Freedom and Open Media.
Music by Revolution Void.
Xnet https://xnet-x.net/en/

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