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As I said on one of the other threads... 26 March 2019. The day the Internet died. (at least in Europe) But of course -- "the Internet interprets censorship

As I said on one of the other threads... 26 March 2019. The day the Internet died. (at least in Europe) But of course -- "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- so what we're likely to see is a massive spike in people streaming video over encrypted tunnels into other countries. That'd be interesting. It'd render GeoIP rather moot, among other things. I suspect the EU and Member States' response would be either "VPNs are banned" or "no service catering for EU users may talk through a VPN endpoint".

dingaling 8y ago
> The day the Internet died. No. The day the ”Upload Other People's Work" Internet died. > what we're likely to see is a massive spike in people streaming video over encrypted tunnels Or just creating their own content. Wouldn't that be awesome?
- Hamuko 8y ago
  You sure about that? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523
  - philpem 8y ago
    Ooh, nice one. That's an even better example than Beethoven. Even better still: there's a song which consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. That's it - silence. "Your latest video upload contains 5 seconds of stunned silence, which has been identified as an extract of 4'33". This extract is copyrighted. Your video has been deleted."
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      The creative elements of Cage's work are that it's performed as a piece by an orchestra, and presented as a work (eg a specific length, sold as other works are). Your any-[other]-length-of-silence doesn't infringe. If it did then Cage's piece would lack the artistic distinctiveness needed to make it a work for copyright purposes. Just having a urinal doesn't infringe on Duchamp's "Fountain", not even if it's the same model, only if it is presented as artwork does it become a copy of Duchamp's "work".
      - simiones 8y ago
        You know that, the lawyers know that, but how do you expect the content filtering mechanism to know that??? True, for 4'33'' there is a simple rule that they probably follow - ignore silence :). But for Fountain (if it ever came up) it's hard to imagine that the difference between a protected copy and a non-protected similar image could really be automatically discovered.
        philpem 8y ago
        This is it. A human being can identify the context. Taking Fountain as an example -- a photo of a urinal on a building merchant's website is an illustration of the product they're selling, not an infringement. But the filter doesn't know about context, it just correlates two images... and you get "Comparison with copyrighted work 'Fountain', 75% match". 75% > 0%, so the filter says "non".
        amanaplanacanal 8y ago
        Isn't this: > decisions to disable access to or remove uploaded content shall be subject to human review intended to handle those cases? I'm not saying that it will be adequate.
- mrep 8y ago
  And do what with it? Most aggregaters won't host your content for you for fear of lawsuits and if you host it yourself, nobody will find your dinky website because nobody is going to pay you to link to it.
- makomk 8y ago
  All the people I know who create their own content are utterly pissed off about this, because it totally screws them over when it comes to sharing their content. It means that every platform they use will be forced to either shut down or instate odious, false-positive-prone, likely career-ruining content filtering. The only folks it's good for are the large corporate content factories who are effectively almost totally exempt from dealing with this mess.
- philpem 8y ago
  You need only look at the rampant abuse of Content ID to see what the likely result will be... "Sorry, the video you uploaded 'Me playing Beethoven on the piano' contains BEETHOVEN'S 5TH SYMPHONY by BMG-EMI-XYZ Music Corp. You cannot upload this video."
  - rurban 8y ago
    This would be an invalid flag. BMG-EMI-XYZ Music Corp does not own this work, they could only own a certain recording of a certain orchestra playing this piece. And we know that detecting that certain recording via music matching does not work, only checking the strong hash of it would work. Which would be trivial to circumvent by a single bit-flip.
    - philpem 8y ago
      Content ID uses some kind of fuzzy matching... a "single bit flip" (as you put it) isn't enough to confuse it. Yes it's true XYZ Music Corp would only own that performance (as it's Beethoven and the piece is long out of copyright). The problem is, the automatic filter is a fuzzy matcher: it compares the upload against every other performance of Beethoven's 5th it's been programmed to recognise. Let's say our uploader has been learning from one of those performances. Their performance will sound very similar to another pianist's -- at least to the fuzzy-matcher. And therein lies the problem: the uploader's piece is clearly copyright to them, but the magic upload filter can't tell the difference. It's like uploading a silent theatre production (let's say some kind of homage to silent films) and the upload being flagged for violating the copyright in 4'33".
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      Does it matter when the average person has little to no recourse in the matter? Does it matter when e.g. YT will _punish_ you if you decide to contest it and lose per their arbitrary process?
      - fock 8y ago
        Just have a look at what was passed today: > Article 17/9: Where rightholders request to have access to their specific works or other subject matter disabled or those works or other subject matter removed, they shall duly justify the reasons for their requests. Complaints submitted under the mechanism provided for in the first subparagraph shall be processed without undue delay, and decisions to disable access to or remove uploaded content shall be subject to human review. Member States shall also ensure that out-of-court redress mechanisms are available for the settlement of disputes. Such mechanisms shall enable disputes to be settled impartially and shall not deprive the user of the legal protection afforded by national law, without prejudice to the rights of users to have recourse to efficient judicial remedies. In particular, Member States shall ensure that users have access to a court or another relevant judicial authority to assert the use of an exception or limitation to copyright and related rights. So this also encourages to appeal in court against the current very opaque content upload policies. Certainly this is not strictly better than the current situation (where you can be arbitrarily banned), but definitely progress compared to the situation today, where platforms just act like they see fit. > Article 17/7: The cooperation between online content-sharing service providers and rightholders shall not result in the prevention of the availability of works or other subject matter uploaded by users, which do not infringe copyright and related rights, including where such works or other subject matter are covered by an exception or limitation. So overblocking will be costly as well, if enough suitable laws are signed into effect and people start complaining. And this really puts large scale commercial (remember non-profits are exempt) sites in a though spot: they either share revenue with content-creators/their organisations (which are mostly s*, but could be changed...) or they employ even more moderators (remember the small paragraph, where banning is to be done by humans ;)) – which all severly limits the current exploitation of the internet as a big chunk of empty space, where the strongest strongman is going to grab the biggest slice and employs an army of user-slaves. > Article 17/10: For the purpose of the stakeholder dialogues, users' organisations shall have access to adequate information from online content-sharing service providers on the functioning of their practices with regard to paragraph 4. I guess already today a lot of people would like to know, how Content-ID blocks their content, but Google can't and won't say (because it will show their dirty secrets...). => IMO: all in all, for the average person, the internet might develop back to where it was 20 years ago with select content-providers and quite a large proportion of actual people hosting fun stuff (and moderating their own boards...). If people are as IT-literate as they claim to be (although I doubt that for the large percentage of fortnite-playing #saveyourinternet-people) we might as well enter a real golden age of the internet.
- Xelbair 8y ago
  Yeah, i am really curious what approach will content hosting companies take. Will they analyze each video if it is a illegal or legal one, checking everything... or just implement a simple, fast and cheap filter that will block most of the content, with no way to appeal the ruling, just like youtube is doing now...
  - csunbird 8y ago
    While I do agree with your point on this, I do not think the Youtube's Content ID is cheap at all.
    - philpem 8y ago
      I seriously doubt Google would licence it to potential competitors either.
  - koonsolo 8y ago
    I hope they block the entire EU. And yes, I live in the EU. That way they need to shamefully roll back this law, and we're sure they don't try to pull off such a farce in the (near) future.
    - ivolimmen 8y ago
      Or we post a huge load of original content of the EU pm's making sure we the people own the copyrights. Making their digital life a hell...
      - Zekio 8y ago
        you could potentially email MEPs copyrighted work and they would be obligated to filter their emails
- koonsolo 8y ago
  > Or just creating their own content. Wouldn't that be awesome? People on YouTube are creating content, lots of it. Will they still create it when some filter keeps blocking them? If you want pirated stuff, just download torrents. They won't disappear with this new law. The only thing that will appear are filters.
- rurban 8y ago
  The problem is not uploading illegal content. The problem is that this legislation is technically impossible to fulfill, there does not exist foolproof content violation check mechanisms and there will none. This needs strong AI, and a not existing framework to recognize and handle "works". This is impossible without a court order. Therefore every platform provider visible in the EU (like Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, every blog, newspaper comment sections, ...) needs to stop accepting user content, because they cannot guarantee that copyright violations will not occur. They cannot be filtered and not detected. Think e.g. of song texts in images. Will you OCR every image for a work? There does exist a foolproof method to bypass AI, it's called captcha. Even if you install comment or upload submission queues with manual labor ("manual filtering"), you cannot guarantee copyright violations, only courts can do that. The politicians might have thought of an GEMA-like index to store hashes of protected content in some form or another, which could be distributed to content certain providers, but this doesn't affect the law, which is much broader and not fulfillable. Thus Web 2.0 is dead. If I would be Facebook I would rather ignore said new laws and go to court over it. The existing framework is good enough, the best way to handle copyright violations.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  A couple that might be affected by the lack of a fair use exemption in Article 13: - use of unlicensed samples in music. Goodbye, Soundcloud rap and EDM music scenes! - use of images and video clips in memes. Goodbye, Tumblr and Reddit!
  - friedman23 8y ago
    those sites aren't going to leave, they will just leave Europe.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  > Or just creating their own content. Wouldn't that be awesome? Until Disney/Comcast/Weyland-Yutani decides that their own your original content. Or the content-id'ing algorithm generates a false positive. Just think a little bit about how all of this will be implemented.
- mcv 8y ago
  You miss the point. It doesn't just filter other people's work, everything has to pass through filters that do not exist and are impossible to create for anyone smaller than Google. It will either be the end of any kind of user participation on the European internet, or everything that happens has to pass through Google's filter. Neither are good options for internet freedom. Note that Google's Youtube filter already has a tendency to block people's own content when it resembles content of the big copyright holders. For example: someone playing a piece from Bach on the piano when Sony has also released a recording of that piece from Bach. Youtube will flag that, Sony is fine with that, and small content creators don't have the resources to fight it. That situation will get a lot worse.
onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
What's weird to me is: Europe isn't exactly a content powerhouse. Why are they so concerned with copyright protections?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- apexalpha 8y ago
  A lot of European media sees their content stolen and re-uploaded by anonymous users on YT, FB, etc... FB in particular have not responded to this and thus content creators lose a lot of views and money. This video sums it up nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q
  - luiscleto 8y ago
    However, the fact that there is a problem, does not legitimize doing something regardless of what the something is. I haven't seen any support for the articles which actually shows the effects of the policy will be good, rather than arguments saying "it's meant to be good". Which is a fallacy that affects many politics which later end up having adverse effects. But ultimately bureaucrats are happy whenever there is an excuse to increase bureaucratic power. Edit: spelling Further edit: For the particular point you're putting out, to justify the EU policy you have to at least show that 1) those media outlets would receive all that traffic that those FB posts generated if the FB posts didn't exist in the first place, 2) that this outweighs costs from abusing that policy (claims over fair use, e.g. youtube copyright system) and content that simply will not get reshared, even if fair use and linking to the source material, out of fear of triggering the safeguards mechanism
    - apexalpha 8y ago
      Oh I agree that this law is shit, and a huge overreach. Like shooting a mosquito with a cannon. I was just trying to put in perspective WHY the politicians feel the need to do this. It's mostly backlash against Facebook for years of content stealing. Youtube and itś content ID system are actually what this law wants to introduce everywhere. While not perfect, it's still better than Facebook, which seems to be lawless on copyright.
prolepunk 8y ago
In my opinion it's naive to think that internet would 'just route' around censorship, this was an interesting idea in the 90s but as practice shown that the first thing any government would do shut down internet access in order to prevent mass protests. Not everyone who wants to route around has technical knowledge, so for the vast majority of people this would be the end of it. Then the governments will mandate ISPs to filter encrypted traffic etc, etc.. I don't believe "VPNs are banned" is as much of a big deal for EU to implement as you think.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> But of course -- "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" A friendly reminder that this was said about TCP/IP. It does not apply to the application layer (WWW), neither in theory nor in practice.
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  TCP/IP is literally the internet, it's in the name. Nobody said WWW.

dingaling 8y ago

> The day the Internet died. No. The day the ”Upload Other People's Work" Internet died. > what we're likely to see is a massive spike in people streaming video over encrypted tunnels Or just creating their own content. Wouldn't that be awesome?

Hamuko 8y ago
You sure about that? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523
- philpem 8y ago
  Ooh, nice one. That's an even better example than Beethoven. Even better still: there's a song which consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. That's it - silence. "Your latest video upload contains 5 seconds of stunned silence, which has been identified as an extract of 4'33". This extract is copyrighted. Your video has been deleted."
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    The creative elements of Cage's work are that it's performed as a piece by an orchestra, and presented as a work (eg a specific length, sold as other works are). Your any-[other]-length-of-silence doesn't infringe. If it did then Cage's piece would lack the artistic distinctiveness needed to make it a work for copyright purposes. Just having a urinal doesn't infringe on Duchamp's "Fountain", not even if it's the same model, only if it is presented as artwork does it become a copy of Duchamp's "work".
    - simiones 8y ago
      You know that, the lawyers know that, but how do you expect the content filtering mechanism to know that??? True, for 4'33'' there is a simple rule that they probably follow - ignore silence :). But for Fountain (if it ever came up) it's hard to imagine that the difference between a protected copy and a non-protected similar image could really be automatically discovered.
      - philpem 8y ago
        This is it. A human being can identify the context. Taking Fountain as an example -- a photo of a urinal on a building merchant's website is an illustration of the product they're selling, not an infringement. But the filter doesn't know about context, it just correlates two images... and you get "Comparison with copyrighted work 'Fountain', 75% match". 75% > 0%, so the filter says "non".
        amanaplanacanal 8y ago
        Isn't this: > decisions to disable access to or remove uploaded content shall be subject to human review intended to handle those cases? I'm not saying that it will be adequate.
mrep 8y ago
And do what with it? Most aggregaters won't host your content for you for fear of lawsuits and if you host it yourself, nobody will find your dinky website because nobody is going to pay you to link to it.
makomk 8y ago
All the people I know who create their own content are utterly pissed off about this, because it totally screws them over when it comes to sharing their content. It means that every platform they use will be forced to either shut down or instate odious, false-positive-prone, likely career-ruining content filtering. The only folks it's good for are the large corporate content factories who are effectively almost totally exempt from dealing with this mess.
philpem 8y ago
You need only look at the rampant abuse of Content ID to see what the likely result will be... "Sorry, the video you uploaded 'Me playing Beethoven on the piano' contains BEETHOVEN'S 5TH SYMPHONY by BMG-EMI-XYZ Music Corp. You cannot upload this video."
- rurban 8y ago
  This would be an invalid flag. BMG-EMI-XYZ Music Corp does not own this work, they could only own a certain recording of a certain orchestra playing this piece. And we know that detecting that certain recording via music matching does not work, only checking the strong hash of it would work. Which would be trivial to circumvent by a single bit-flip.
  - philpem 8y ago
    Content ID uses some kind of fuzzy matching... a "single bit flip" (as you put it) isn't enough to confuse it. Yes it's true XYZ Music Corp would only own that performance (as it's Beethoven and the piece is long out of copyright). The problem is, the automatic filter is a fuzzy matcher: it compares the upload against every other performance of Beethoven's 5th it's been programmed to recognise. Let's say our uploader has been learning from one of those performances. Their performance will sound very similar to another pianist's -- at least to the fuzzy-matcher. And therein lies the problem: the uploader's piece is clearly copyright to them, but the magic upload filter can't tell the difference. It's like uploading a silent theatre production (let's say some kind of homage to silent films) and the upload being flagged for violating the copyright in 4'33".
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    Does it matter when the average person has little to no recourse in the matter? Does it matter when e.g. YT will _punish_ you if you decide to contest it and lose per their arbitrary process?
    - fock 8y ago
      Just have a look at what was passed today: > Article 17/9: Where rightholders request to have access to their specific works or other subject matter disabled or those works or other subject matter removed, they shall duly justify the reasons for their requests. Complaints submitted under the mechanism provided for in the first subparagraph shall be processed without undue delay, and decisions to disable access to or remove uploaded content shall be subject to human review. Member States shall also ensure that out-of-court redress mechanisms are available for the settlement of disputes. Such mechanisms shall enable disputes to be settled impartially and shall not deprive the user of the legal protection afforded by national law, without prejudice to the rights of users to have recourse to efficient judicial remedies. In particular, Member States shall ensure that users have access to a court or another relevant judicial authority to assert the use of an exception or limitation to copyright and related rights. So this also encourages to appeal in court against the current very opaque content upload policies. Certainly this is not strictly better than the current situation (where you can be arbitrarily banned), but definitely progress compared to the situation today, where platforms just act like they see fit. > Article 17/7: The cooperation between online content-sharing service providers and rightholders shall not result in the prevention of the availability of works or other subject matter uploaded by users, which do not infringe copyright and related rights, including where such works or other subject matter are covered by an exception or limitation. So overblocking will be costly as well, if enough suitable laws are signed into effect and people start complaining. And this really puts large scale commercial (remember non-profits are exempt) sites in a though spot: they either share revenue with content-creators/their organisations (which are mostly s*, but could be changed...) or they employ even more moderators (remember the small paragraph, where banning is to be done by humans ;)) – which all severly limits the current exploitation of the internet as a big chunk of empty space, where the strongest strongman is going to grab the biggest slice and employs an army of user-slaves. > Article 17/10: For the purpose of the stakeholder dialogues, users' organisations shall have access to adequate information from online content-sharing service providers on the functioning of their practices with regard to paragraph 4. I guess already today a lot of people would like to know, how Content-ID blocks their content, but Google can't and won't say (because it will show their dirty secrets...). => IMO: all in all, for the average person, the internet might develop back to where it was 20 years ago with select content-providers and quite a large proportion of actual people hosting fun stuff (and moderating their own boards...). If people are as IT-literate as they claim to be (although I doubt that for the large percentage of fortnite-playing #saveyourinternet-people) we might as well enter a real golden age of the internet.
Xelbair 8y ago
Yeah, i am really curious what approach will content hosting companies take. Will they analyze each video if it is a illegal or legal one, checking everything... or just implement a simple, fast and cheap filter that will block most of the content, with no way to appeal the ruling, just like youtube is doing now...
- csunbird 8y ago
  While I do agree with your point on this, I do not think the Youtube's Content ID is cheap at all.
  - philpem 8y ago
    I seriously doubt Google would licence it to potential competitors either.
- koonsolo 8y ago
  I hope they block the entire EU. And yes, I live in the EU. That way they need to shamefully roll back this law, and we're sure they don't try to pull off such a farce in the (near) future.
  - ivolimmen 8y ago
    Or we post a huge load of original content of the EU pm's making sure we the people own the copyrights. Making their digital life a hell...
    - Zekio 8y ago
      you could potentially email MEPs copyrighted work and they would be obligated to filter their emails
koonsolo 8y ago
> Or just creating their own content. Wouldn't that be awesome? People on YouTube are creating content, lots of it. Will they still create it when some filter keeps blocking them? If you want pirated stuff, just download torrents. They won't disappear with this new law. The only thing that will appear are filters.
rurban 8y ago
The problem is not uploading illegal content. The problem is that this legislation is technically impossible to fulfill, there does not exist foolproof content violation check mechanisms and there will none. This needs strong AI, and a not existing framework to recognize and handle "works". This is impossible without a court order. Therefore every platform provider visible in the EU (like Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, every blog, newspaper comment sections, ...) needs to stop accepting user content, because they cannot guarantee that copyright violations will not occur. They cannot be filtered and not detected. Think e.g. of song texts in images. Will you OCR every image for a work? There does exist a foolproof method to bypass AI, it's called captcha. Even if you install comment or upload submission queues with manual labor ("manual filtering"), you cannot guarantee copyright violations, only courts can do that. The politicians might have thought of an GEMA-like index to store hashes of protected content in some form or another, which could be distributed to content certain providers, but this doesn't affect the law, which is much broader and not fulfillable. Thus Web 2.0 is dead. If I would be Facebook I would rather ignore said new laws and go to court over it. The existing framework is good enough, the best way to handle copyright violations.
jakelazaroff 8y ago
A couple that might be affected by the lack of a fair use exemption in Article 13: - use of unlicensed samples in music. Goodbye, Soundcloud rap and EDM music scenes! - use of images and video clips in memes. Goodbye, Tumblr and Reddit!
- friedman23 8y ago
  those sites aren't going to leave, they will just leave Europe.
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
> Or just creating their own content. Wouldn't that be awesome? Until Disney/Comcast/Weyland-Yutani decides that their own your original content. Or the content-id'ing algorithm generates a false positive. Just think a little bit about how all of this will be implemented.
mcv 8y ago
You miss the point. It doesn't just filter other people's work, everything has to pass through filters that do not exist and are impossible to create for anyone smaller than Google. It will either be the end of any kind of user participation on the European internet, or everything that happens has to pass through Google's filter. Neither are good options for internet freedom. Note that Google's Youtube filter already has a tendency to block people's own content when it resembles content of the big copyright holders. For example: someone playing a piece from Bach on the piano when Sony has also released a recording of that piece from Bach. Youtube will flag that, Sony is fine with that, and small content creators don't have the resources to fight it. That situation will get a lot worse.

onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago

What's weird to me is: Europe isn't exactly a content powerhouse. Why are they so concerned with copyright protections?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
apexalpha 8y ago
A lot of European media sees their content stolen and re-uploaded by anonymous users on YT, FB, etc... FB in particular have not responded to this and thus content creators lose a lot of views and money. This video sums it up nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q
- luiscleto 8y ago
  However, the fact that there is a problem, does not legitimize doing something regardless of what the something is. I haven't seen any support for the articles which actually shows the effects of the policy will be good, rather than arguments saying "it's meant to be good". Which is a fallacy that affects many politics which later end up having adverse effects. But ultimately bureaucrats are happy whenever there is an excuse to increase bureaucratic power. Edit: spelling Further edit: For the particular point you're putting out, to justify the EU policy you have to at least show that 1) those media outlets would receive all that traffic that those FB posts generated if the FB posts didn't exist in the first place, 2) that this outweighs costs from abusing that policy (claims over fair use, e.g. youtube copyright system) and content that simply will not get reshared, even if fair use and linking to the source material, out of fear of triggering the safeguards mechanism
  - apexalpha 8y ago
    Oh I agree that this law is shit, and a huge overreach. Like shooting a mosquito with a cannon. I was just trying to put in perspective WHY the politicians feel the need to do this. It's mostly backlash against Facebook for years of content stealing. Youtube and itś content ID system are actually what this law wants to introduce everywhere. While not perfect, it's still better than Facebook, which seems to be lawless on copyright.

prolepunk 8y ago

In my opinion it's naive to think that internet would 'just route' around censorship, this was an interesting idea in the 90s but as practice shown that the first thing any government would do shut down internet access in order to prevent mass protests. Not everyone who wants to route around has technical knowledge, so for the vast majority of people this would be the end of it. Then the governments will mandate ISPs to filter encrypted traffic etc, etc.. I don't believe "VPNs are banned" is as much of a big deal for EU to implement as you think.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> But of course -- "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" A friendly reminder that this was said about TCP/IP. It does not apply to the application layer (WWW), neither in theory nor in practice.

dingo_bat 8y ago
TCP/IP is literally the internet, it's in the name. Nobody said WWW.