March 27, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
12:12
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| You may remember that in September 2018, UKIP sent Count Ankular and I to the European Parliament to do what we could to try and stop Article 13 from passing in the Parliament. | |
| Well, we gave talks, we spoke to MEPs, and we failed. | |
| And that was just one of a series of votes that was going to happen. | |
| And it was around this time that YouTube finally woke up to the danger that Article 13 posed to their platform and actually started to talk about it. | |
| In a creator blog posted over a month after the initial vote, YouTube finally decided to draw people's attention to the fact that Article 13 was going to radically change the internet in Europe as we know it. | |
| Article 13, as written, threatens to shut down the ability of millions of people, from creators like you to everyday users, to upload content to platforms like YouTube, and it threatens to block users in the EU from viewing content that is already live on the channels of creators everywhere. | |
| This legislation poses a threat to both your livelihood and your ability to share your voice with the world. | |
| If implemented as proposed, Article 13 threatens hundreds and thousands of jobs. | |
| European creators, businesses, artists, and everyone they employ. | |
| The proposal could force platforms like YouTube to only allow content from a small number of large companies. | |
| It would be too risky for platforms to host content from smaller original creators because the platforms would now be directly liable for that content. | |
| And that really is the crux of the issue. | |
| What the European Union is trying to do is change the burden of responsibility for the person who posts copyrighted content to be liable for any copyright that they infringe and transfer that to the platform itself that is hosting the content. | |
| What this means is that if I infringe someone else's copyright while posting to my channel, then I am responsible for that copyright infringement and the person who owns the copyright needs to sue me personally for posting it. | |
| The European Union would like to change that so that person would then instead be forced to sue YouTube. | |
| Now you might think, well, hey, that sounds fantastic as it's going to prevent me from being sued. | |
| But no, you would be wrong. | |
| It's going to force any social media company to have to take adequate protection against being sued from actions taken by the users. | |
| Now that means upload filters. | |
| And the European Union is well aware of that. | |
| Article 13 refers to Article 13 of the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Copyright in the Digital Market. | |
| And this is it in its entirety. | |
| Within it, they are well aware that these social media companies will have to use effective content recognition technologies. | |
| What that means is an algorithm that will be able to scan all content uploaded to the social media network and check that against a giant database of copyrighted work. | |
| And anything that is matched will have to be prevented from being uploaded. | |
| While an algorithm might recognize a piece of content as coming from a Disney movie, for example, there are various legal provisions that allow people to use content for satire, parody or educational purposes. | |
| Naturally, an algorithm is not going to be able to detect the context in which a piece of material is being used. | |
| What we did manage to achieve by raising the alarm about Article 13 was to get the European Union to revise it and rewrite it at least slightly and in part. | |
| And this legislation came back, and on the 4th of March 2019, YouTube produced this video, and this is what they had to say about it. | |
| Is the final version of Article 13 good for creators? | |
| We've had several lawyers and policy experts examine the text. | |
| The good news is that the latest text has improved over the version written by the European Parliament last September. | |
| This is also thanks to all of you who spoke up and made a big difference in having the creator point of view heard. | |
| At the same time, while there have been improvements, we believe the final Article 13 will still hurt, not help, European creators. | |
| So, what's the issue? | |
| The final text leaves a lot of ambiguity on what happens to content before YouTube receives notice from rights holders. | |
| This will result in online platforms like YouTube blocking content because they need to remain on the side of caution and reduce their legal risks. | |
| Specifically, the text is unclear on three things. | |
| First, the role of rights holders in providing the necessary level of detail to identify their content. | |
| Second, it's unclear what kind of content platforms like YouTube need to have licenses for. | |
| Images, paintings, photos, what else? | |
| Given that is unclear, there's no way of being 100% sure of whether all the rights are covered at the moment of upload. | |
| And lastly, it's unclear if there are any new legal responsibilities for creators. | |
| So not good news then. | |
| And one of the main problems really is that this isn't actually law in and of itself. | |
| This is actually a directive to the constituent member states of the European Union to create these laws themselves. | |
| They have to now figure out exactly how to fulfill the purpose of the directive using their own legal systems, which means that each country in the European Union will actually have a slightly different variant of the Article 13 law written into their own legal system. | |
| So while the actual effect of Article 13 is still highly uncertain, what is very likely is that it will lead to some form of mass censorship as Silicon Valley tech giants, as in the internet platforms that we are all using, try and find a way to actually accommodate the required laws for the countries in which they intend to operate. | |
| As we saw from YouTube themselves, they are not particularly optimistic about how flexible this is going to be. | |
| They seem to think that it's going to cause a great deal of censorship themselves. | |
| And if you're wondering what this is all about, you can always just go and look at Guy Verhofstadt's Twitter feed because he has a habit of revealing the actual reasons that the European Union does anything. | |
| He says, in Europe, we create more content than in the US, mostly used on American platforms. | |
| We urgently need a European model in which its creators get their fair share and citizens control their own data. | |
| Put simply, this is part of a giant power struggle between the European Union and Silicon Valley. | |
| And I don't think that continent-wide censorship is going to leave the victor many spoils, especially when this threatens the ability of creators that Guy Verhofstadt seemingly is so interested in protecting. | |
| But the worst thing about all of this is, is that there is an article going around that is claiming that Article 13 has passed because Swedish MEPs accidentally pushed the wrong voting button. | |
| According to BoingBoeing.net, the European Parliament voted to pass the whole copyright directive without a debate on Articles 11 and 13 by a margin of five votes. | |
| But actually, a group of Swedish MEPs are revealed that they have pressed the wrong button and have asked to have the record corrected. | |
| They have issued a statement saying they intended to open a debate on amendments to the directive so they could help vote down articles 13 and 11. | |
| Adding that they had intended to vote the other way to the record does not change the vote, and there is no method of recourse or altering your decision after the vote has been cast. | |
| But I know what you're thinking. | |
| You're thinking, well, have you seen them vote in the European Union? | |
| It's a remarkably quick process. | |
| In fact, I'll show you the whole thing. | |
| The vote is now open. | |
| Have you all voted? | |
| The vote is now closed. | |
| So you'd be forgiven for thinking, well, I mean, it's a fairly easy mistake to make, in all fairness, given the haste with which the procedure takes place. | |
| Except, I think this might be total bullshit, and the Swedish MEPs are lying in order to cover their asses from the backlash that they are going to get from signing into the law mass censorship of the internet. | |
| Two days before, Tech Dirt were reporting that Swedish MEPs had announced their support for Article 13 after demonstrating their total ignorance of what it actually entails. | |
| I see before me a mechanism being developed that doesn't exist today, where we now have recognition technology but no appeals process. | |
| In the future, it should become second nature for platforms to examine whether content is satirical so it can be reposted quickly. | |
| That means it's about recognition becoming a two-stage process where today it's only one. | |
| That way it becomes easier to make judgments. | |
| Now at this point you might be thinking to yourself, well that's wildly optimistic. | |
| These people sound out of touch like they don't understand the internet or Silicon Valley in the slightest and you would be right. | |
| That is wildly optimistic and is never going to happen as this Swedish MEP envisaged. | |
| But Axel Voss, the man who's behind Article 13, is very pleased that this passed, as you might imagine. | |
| You have a lot of frustrated young people. | |
| You're having them still in a situation, probably totally frustrated. | |
| And this is something I would say this is not necessary. | |
| And this message I would like to send out in saying everything what they have in mind, what might now happen or that we are breaking the internet, this is not true. | |
| We are just trying to balance the situation better and to get the platforms in a better or oblige them to remunerate more fair than what they are doing now. | |
| And this is the intention of Article 13. | |
| And we are not intending to breaking the internet or getting rid of YouTube or whatever all these strange ideas are. | |
| Well, that's very reassuring. | |
| I mean, if they don't intend it to happen, nothing has ever had an unintentional consequence before. | |
| So we know it's not going to happen because Axel Voss clearly knows exactly what he's talking about. | |
| But it's weird that he said, you know, getting rid of YouTube. | |
| Who was saying anything about getting rid of YouTube? | |
| Oh, wait. | |
| Axel Voss was saying stuff about getting rid of YouTube. | |
| He said that about two weeks ago, in fact. | |
| Axel Voss says maybe YouTube shouldn't exist. | |
| If you have a massive platform like YouTube, you will have to use a technological solution. | |
| Everyone has these obligations. | |
| They have created a business model with the property of other people on copyright-protected works. | |
| If the intention of the platform is to give people access to copyright-protected works, then we have to think about whether this kind of business should exist. | |
| That is the most backwards interpretation of what YouTube is that I have ever seen. | |
| But it is definitely something that has come from the mind of someone who I would describe as a technocrat. | |
| Someone who looks from the top of the system down, rather than from the bottom of the system and up. | |
| Because YouTube is a platform on which small copyright holders, as in people who create individual videos by just recording themselves in their living room, can publish these to the wider world. | |
| It gives people easy access to the market. | |
| While the European Union, I'm sure, doesn't intend to hurt creators, it obviously doesn't care that much if that's an unexpected by-product. | |
| Because who knows what the consequences of this are actually going to be? | |
| Who knows how Silicon Valley will react? | |
| It is Silicon Valley versus the European Union which is fighting on behalf of the giant record labels of Europe. |
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