11 ms·

Scribd taking down the Mueller Report is the future the EU has voted for

246 points by tareqak 8y ago

gruez 8y ago
>A spokeswoman for the company says that “a leading global publisher” released the report as a book, fooling Scribd’s systems into thinking the report was owned by the publisher Seems like the problem here is ContentID systems where large corporations are assumed to be owners of whatever they published, even if they published it later. The sad thing is that this is done by the platform and not through the legal system, so the companies making false claims don't get punished for it.
- mirimir 8y ago
  I wonder if said book included a false copyright claim. Is falsely claiming copyright for US government publications a federal crime? That'd be a trip.
  - gruez 8y ago
    That's the thing though, the publisher hasn't made any explicit copyright claims or issued any takedown requests, so they didn't do anything wrong. All of the actions taken were done proactively by the platform.
    - andy_ppp 8y ago
      This is the fault/design of the law isn’t it, not the platform?
    - mirimir 8y ago
      I don't know that. Do you? I took a look at editions of the report available for pre-order on Amazon. But there were several, and I didn't want to look at them all. I don't see any copyright claim in the Scribner edition. And to be clear, I'm not arguing that the publisher requested the takedown. I'm just curious whether there's a copyright claim on the title page.
      - gruez 8y ago
        [deleted]
        mirimir 8y ago
        Again, I'm not talking about what the publisher said or didn't say to Scribd. I'm talking about what appears on the title page of the book.
- rhizome 8y ago
  As it seems to be with many distasteful things these days, Alan Dershowitz just may be involved. He's the only person I've heard doing more than ebooking it, so...2 and 2 could possibly equal 4 here. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mueller-Report/Robert-S-Mueller/9781510750166 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mueller-Report/Ro...
stupidthrottle 8y ago
The real tragedy is that even after having a new generation born and grown up entirely digitally and connected, we still can’t rethink copyright into something which actually makes sense based on the world we now live in.
- mindslight 8y ago
  Generation has little to do with it. It's not the librarians who promulgated those stern warnings around the photocopiers providing support for the way things are, but rather the huge companies that continue to rake in gobs of money by claiming to own pieces of our culture in perpetuity.
  - delinka 8y ago
    I don't really get this "pieces of our culture" argument. I see it often in these discussions. Something "became part of our culture" after someone created it, after ownership was known, and 'we' allowed it to become meaningful to a large audience. Should that somehow transfer the ownership to those who find it more meaningful? Some brands are "cultural icons" (like it or not), but that doesn't mean the culture has any right to tell the brand owner what to do with their trademark.
    - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
      I don't know the history of copyright in other countries, but in the US copyright is explicitly to encourage the creation of artifacts that will then end up as public domain and part of our cultural legacy. If it isn't performing that function well, then it's probably time for a rethink.
- andjd 8y ago
  The notion that everything that can be digitalized should be free is a pernicious notion and trivializes the effort creators put into their work. Journalists, musicians, authors, and artists deserve to be able to make a living from their work, and they can't do that if their work is distributed for free.
EvilTerran 8y ago
> The company identified 32 copies of the document, all of which were removed and then reinstated > A separate request Quartz made to reinstate its own versions of the document was resolved 17 minutes after we sent it, seemingly after an employee review. I... don't see the problem here? Sure, it'd be better if their detector never got it wrong, but in the absence of the Sufficiently Advanced Technology that would require, a speedy manual review process is the best anyone's got.
- pacificmint 8y ago
  > a speedy manual review process Does the law require a speedy manual process, and quantify what speedy means? Because we hear complaints about the large tech companie's manual exception processes quite often, and speedy is not usually a word that is used to describe them
  - EvilTerran 8y ago
    I don't know off-hand. The claim that this "is the future the EU has voted for" was made by the article, not by me. I was, for the sake of argument, taking the article at its word on that - and observing that, in that light, its histrionics about Article 13 come across as misplaced. That being said, even if a speedy review process isn't required de jure, market forces should make it a de facto requirement. Over time, a platform with overzealous takedowns & inadequate appeals process will lose out to any competition which does better on either front. (Yes, I know it hasn't worked out like that with YouTube. They're close enough to a monopoly that market forces don't really apply, and that's a whole other problem.)
- gizmo686 8y ago
  >a speedy manual review process is the best anyone's got. This is a policy choice. We could not have copyright, and just leave the documents up. We could give platforms immunity, and enforce copyright by going after the individuals who uploaded without the rights to do so. We could give platforms immunity, but require them to respect court orders to remove specific copyright documents. We could give platforms immunity, but require them to remove copywrote conent when notified. (A la DMCA) We could give platforms immunity, require them to remove copywrote content, and require them restore content on a counter-claim and defer the dispute to the courts. What we are doing is requiring, by policy, platforms to proactivly remove copywrote material but making no policy requirements against over-removal. If we are seeing the best possible implementation of this policy, then maybe it is simply a bad policy.
KorematsuFred 8y ago
When you trust government servants and politicians to keep internet "free" this is bound to happen.
gxwmg 8y ago
I haven't voted for shit. I want out of the EU.
Iv 8y ago
The stupid mess that are the copyright laws today is something the US has voted for and imposed to the rest of the world. Funny US only wakes up when EU forces companies to follow the same rules as users. Had the rule of law been applied equally to companies and individuals, youtube could never have existed as it is now. Solve the root of the damn problems. Fix the copyright laws.
- hyperman1 8y ago
  Wrong, unfortunately. Copyright was dreamed up in medieval Europe, to protect manual copyists from fast copying by printing presses. The USA had a very relaxed way with copyright enforcement, until enough local culture was created. Europe was furious at the time but couldn't do much. Basically China today is doing to the USA what the USA did to Europe. And what parts of Europe did to other parts of Europe, for much the same reasons. Copyright is a mess, but not one concocted by the USA.
  - Iv 8y ago
    Original copyright laws were 21 years since first publication and made a lot of sense in a time when copies were costly to make. They became increasingly stupid, going in the wrong direction long time after copies were basically free and this was because of American right holder's lobbying efforts. I am well aware that places like Hollywood started as havens with lax enforcement of IPs. They seem to have forgotten that though and have been pushing very hard for destroying the kind of environment that made them possible.
maxhedrome 8y ago
TIL just spamming articles as “published books” will completely destroy scribd’s algorithm.
justinzollars 8y ago
Europe is irrelevant. By 2050 it's estimated that Europe will only account for 9% of the global GDP [1]. Down from 15% today. China will account for 20% of the GDP and India 15% by 2050. I can not understand the Hacker News focus on European law given its declining prospects. 1. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/economy/the-world-in-2050.html https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/economy/the-world-in-2050.h...
- trophycase 8y ago
  > Europe is irrelevant. 15% of global GDP today, as you say, and considered the best place in the world to live by most measure. > I can not understand the Hacker News focus on European law given its declining prospects. Europe is irrelevant. I'd wager that a large percentage of users of this forum who are not from the US are from Europe.
  - justinzollars 8y ago
    Meh. My money is in emerging markets. Not European malaise. Maybe its a great place to retire - but it certainly isn't leading the world in technology output. Where is your Amazon? Where is your Alibaba? It does not exist.
    - Symbiote 8y ago
      Where is your good quality food, vacation days, leaving-work-at-five-o'clock, unlimited sick leave, parental leave, social mobility, and happiness and life satisfaction? "For me, Europe is more than just a single market. More than money, more than the euro. It was always about values." — President Jean-Claude Juncker, 2017 State of the Union Address.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - justinzollars 8y ago
        lol.
rimliu 8y ago
And the reason for that report is the present that USA voted for in 2016.
reneberlin 8y ago
Why not upload somewhere else? 'Embedding a document in a webpage'? seems a nobrainer, Everybodys free - no one needs scribd in the first place to publish or republish. Blog about what happend there and go on. The web isn't meant to centralize stuff on specific hosts, controlled by corporations.
kwhitefoot 8y ago
This isn't a good example of what is wrong because Scribd appear to have acted very well and swiftly rectified the 'mistake'. If anything people could use this case as an argument for saying that the EU directive can work.
- Malician 8y ago
  The Mueller Report is about as famous as you can get. That it can get taken down is proof of how messed up the system is; that it was put back up is not proof that, say, a unique, legal work you or I create would be put back up with the same speed.
fock 8y ago
Oh yeah, Scribd was this company, SEOing publicly available talks and then putting a paywall in front, while also consistently top-ranking in google-searches for ehm copies of copyrighted work. The EU-copyright directive might be not that great, but neither are greedy companies, embarking on shady, criminal or antidemocratic ventures under the banner of "we are progress, everybody loves us". Not sure what hinders distribution of the report on NYT/WaPo-frontpages if it's not copyrighted?!? Or hosting it on a Russian Onion Server like it's done for years (to come w/o a real copyright reform)?
sinuhe69 8y ago
The most stupid thing about the EU upload filter is it came only to effect because the Sweden delegation have pressed the wrong buttons!
HocusLocus 8y ago
Funny, though it shouldn't be, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmTWhvWgST0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmTWhvWgST0
algaeontoast 8y ago
For those who are curious why software companies and startups do NOT flourish in the EU - this is why.

246 points by tareqak 8y ago

>A spokeswoman for the company says that “a leading global publisher” released the report as a book, fooling Scribd’s systems into thinking the report was owned by the publisher Seems like the problem here is ContentID systems where large corporations are assumed to be owners of whatever they published, even if they published it later. The sad thing is that this is done by the platform and not through the legal system, so the companies making false claims don't get punished for it.

mirimir 8y ago
I wonder if said book included a false copyright claim. Is falsely claiming copyright for US government publications a federal crime? That'd be a trip.
- gruez 8y ago
  That's the thing though, the publisher hasn't made any explicit copyright claims or issued any takedown requests, so they didn't do anything wrong. All of the actions taken were done proactively by the platform.
  - andy_ppp 8y ago
    This is the fault/design of the law isn’t it, not the platform?
  - mirimir 8y ago
    I don't know that. Do you? I took a look at editions of the report available for pre-order on Amazon. But there were several, and I didn't want to look at them all. I don't see any copyright claim in the Scribner edition. And to be clear, I'm not arguing that the publisher requested the takedown. I'm just curious whether there's a copyright claim on the title page.
    - gruez 8y ago
      [deleted]
      - mirimir 8y ago
        Again, I'm not talking about what the publisher said or didn't say to Scribd. I'm talking about what appears on the title page of the book.
rhizome 8y ago
As it seems to be with many distasteful things these days, Alan Dershowitz just may be involved. He's the only person I've heard doing more than ebooking it, so...2 and 2 could possibly equal 4 here. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mueller-Report/Robert-S-Mueller/9781510750166 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mueller-Report/Ro...

stupidthrottle 8y ago

The real tragedy is that even after having a new generation born and grown up entirely digitally and connected, we still can’t rethink copyright into something which actually makes sense based on the world we now live in.

mindslight 8y ago
Generation has little to do with it. It's not the librarians who promulgated those stern warnings around the photocopiers providing support for the way things are, but rather the huge companies that continue to rake in gobs of money by claiming to own pieces of our culture in perpetuity.
- delinka 8y ago
  I don't really get this "pieces of our culture" argument. I see it often in these discussions. Something "became part of our culture" after someone created it, after ownership was known, and 'we' allowed it to become meaningful to a large audience. Should that somehow transfer the ownership to those who find it more meaningful? Some brands are "cultural icons" (like it or not), but that doesn't mean the culture has any right to tell the brand owner what to do with their trademark.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    I don't know the history of copyright in other countries, but in the US copyright is explicitly to encourage the creation of artifacts that will then end up as public domain and part of our cultural legacy. If it isn't performing that function well, then it's probably time for a rethink.
andjd 8y ago
The notion that everything that can be digitalized should be free is a pernicious notion and trivializes the effort creators put into their work. Journalists, musicians, authors, and artists deserve to be able to make a living from their work, and they can't do that if their work is distributed for free.

EvilTerran 8y ago

> The company identified 32 copies of the document, all of which were removed and then reinstated > A separate request Quartz made to reinstate its own versions of the document was resolved 17 minutes after we sent it, seemingly after an employee review. I... don't see the problem here? Sure, it'd be better if their detector never got it wrong, but in the absence of the Sufficiently Advanced Technology that would require, a speedy manual review process is the best anyone's got.

pacificmint 8y ago
> a speedy manual review process Does the law require a speedy manual process, and quantify what speedy means? Because we hear complaints about the large tech companie's manual exception processes quite often, and speedy is not usually a word that is used to describe them
- EvilTerran 8y ago
  I don't know off-hand. The claim that this "is the future the EU has voted for" was made by the article, not by me. I was, for the sake of argument, taking the article at its word on that - and observing that, in that light, its histrionics about Article 13 come across as misplaced. That being said, even if a speedy review process isn't required de jure, market forces should make it a de facto requirement. Over time, a platform with overzealous takedowns & inadequate appeals process will lose out to any competition which does better on either front. (Yes, I know it hasn't worked out like that with YouTube. They're close enough to a monopoly that market forces don't really apply, and that's a whole other problem.)
gizmo686 8y ago
>a speedy manual review process is the best anyone's got. This is a policy choice. We could not have copyright, and just leave the documents up. We could give platforms immunity, and enforce copyright by going after the individuals who uploaded without the rights to do so. We could give platforms immunity, but require them to respect court orders to remove specific copyright documents. We could give platforms immunity, but require them to remove copywrote conent when notified. (A la DMCA) We could give platforms immunity, require them to remove copywrote content, and require them restore content on a counter-claim and defer the dispute to the courts. What we are doing is requiring, by policy, platforms to proactivly remove copywrote material but making no policy requirements against over-removal. If we are seeing the best possible implementation of this policy, then maybe it is simply a bad policy.

KorematsuFred 8y ago

When you trust government servants and politicians to keep internet "free" this is bound to happen.

gxwmg 8y ago

I haven't voted for shit. I want out of the EU.

Iv 8y ago

The stupid mess that are the copyright laws today is something the US has voted for and imposed to the rest of the world. Funny US only wakes up when EU forces companies to follow the same rules as users. Had the rule of law been applied equally to companies and individuals, youtube could never have existed as it is now. Solve the root of the damn problems. Fix the copyright laws.

hyperman1 8y ago
Wrong, unfortunately. Copyright was dreamed up in medieval Europe, to protect manual copyists from fast copying by printing presses. The USA had a very relaxed way with copyright enforcement, until enough local culture was created. Europe was furious at the time but couldn't do much. Basically China today is doing to the USA what the USA did to Europe. And what parts of Europe did to other parts of Europe, for much the same reasons. Copyright is a mess, but not one concocted by the USA.
- Iv 8y ago
  Original copyright laws were 21 years since first publication and made a lot of sense in a time when copies were costly to make. They became increasingly stupid, going in the wrong direction long time after copies were basically free and this was because of American right holder's lobbying efforts. I am well aware that places like Hollywood started as havens with lax enforcement of IPs. They seem to have forgotten that though and have been pushing very hard for destroying the kind of environment that made them possible.

maxhedrome 8y ago

TIL just spamming articles as “published books” will completely destroy scribd’s algorithm.

justinzollars 8y ago

Europe is irrelevant. By 2050 it's estimated that Europe will only account for 9% of the global GDP [1]. Down from 15% today. China will account for 20% of the GDP and India 15% by 2050. I can not understand the Hacker News focus on European law given its declining prospects. 1. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/economy/the-world-in-2050.html https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/economy/the-world-in-2050.h...

trophycase 8y ago
> Europe is irrelevant. 15% of global GDP today, as you say, and considered the best place in the world to live by most measure. > I can not understand the Hacker News focus on European law given its declining prospects. Europe is irrelevant. I'd wager that a large percentage of users of this forum who are not from the US are from Europe.
- justinzollars 8y ago
  Meh. My money is in emerging markets. Not European malaise. Maybe its a great place to retire - but it certainly isn't leading the world in technology output. Where is your Amazon? Where is your Alibaba? It does not exist.
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    Where is your good quality food, vacation days, leaving-work-at-five-o'clock, unlimited sick leave, parental leave, social mobility, and happiness and life satisfaction? "For me, Europe is more than just a single market. More than money, more than the euro. It was always about values." — President Jean-Claude Juncker, 2017 State of the Union Address.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - justinzollars 8y ago
      lol.

rimliu 8y ago

And the reason for that report is the present that USA voted for in 2016.

reneberlin 8y ago

Why not upload somewhere else? 'Embedding a document in a webpage'? seems a nobrainer, Everybodys free - no one needs scribd in the first place to publish or republish. Blog about what happend there and go on. The web isn't meant to centralize stuff on specific hosts, controlled by corporations.

kwhitefoot 8y ago

This isn't a good example of what is wrong because Scribd appear to have acted very well and swiftly rectified the 'mistake'. If anything people could use this case as an argument for saying that the EU directive can work.

Malician 8y ago
The Mueller Report is about as famous as you can get. That it can get taken down is proof of how messed up the system is; that it was put back up is not proof that, say, a unique, legal work you or I create would be put back up with the same speed.

fock 8y ago

Oh yeah, Scribd was this company, SEOing publicly available talks and then putting a paywall in front, while also consistently top-ranking in google-searches for ehm copies of copyrighted work. The EU-copyright directive might be not that great, but neither are greedy companies, embarking on shady, criminal or antidemocratic ventures under the banner of "we are progress, everybody loves us". Not sure what hinders distribution of the report on NYT/WaPo-frontpages if it's not copyrighted?!? Or hosting it on a Russian Onion Server like it's done for years (to come w/o a real copyright reform)?

sinuhe69 8y ago

The most stupid thing about the EU upload filter is it came only to effect because the Sweden delegation have pressed the wrong buttons!

HocusLocus 8y ago

Funny, though it shouldn't be, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmTWhvWgST0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmTWhvWgST0

algaeontoast 8y ago

For those who are curious why software companies and startups do NOT flourish in the EU - this is why.