EU Wants To Require Platforms To Filter Uploaded Content (Including Code) (github.com)

A new copyright proposal in the EU would require code-sharing platforms like GitHub and SourceForge to monitor all content that users upload for potential copyright infringement. "The proposal is aimed at music and videos on streaming platforms, based on a theory of a 'value gap' between the profits those platforms make from uploaded works and what copyright holders of some uploaded works receive," reports The GitHub Blog. "However, the way it's written captures many other types of content, including code."

Upload filters, also known as "censorship machines," are some of the most controversial elements of the copyright proposal, raising a number of concerns including: -Privacy: Upload filters are a form of surveillance, effectively a "general monitoring obligation" prohibited by EU law
-Free speech: Requiring platforms to monitor content contradicts intermediary liability protections in EU law and creates incentives to remove content
-Ineffectiveness: Content detection tools are flawed (generate false positives, don't fit all kinds of content) and overly burdensome, especially for small and medium-sized businesses that might not be able to afford them or the resulting litigation Upload filters are especially concerning for software developers given that: -Software developers create copyrightable works -- their code -- and those who choose an open source license want to allow that code to be shared
-False positives (and negatives) are especially likely for software code because code often has many contributors and layers, often with different licensing for different components
-Requiring code-hosting platforms to scan and automatically remove content could drastically impact software developers when their dependencies are removed due to false positives The EU Parliament continues to introduce new proposals for Article 13 but these issues remain. MEP Julia Reda explains further in a recent proposal from Parliament.

Comments

first post

[Anonymous Coward]

$ git push ...
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (2/2), completed with 2 local objects.
remote: error: GH013: Your push could infringe someone's copyright.
remote: If you believe this is a false positive (e.g., it's yours, open
remote: source, not copyrightable, subject to exceptions) contact us:
remote: https://github.com/contact
remote: We're sorry for interrupting your work, but automated copyright
remote: filters are mandated by the EU's Article 13.
To github.com/vollmera/atom.git
  ! [remote rejected] patch-1 -> patch-1 (push declined due to article 13 filters)

The more the EU embraces censorship

[AHuxley]

The more freedom after speech in the USA becomes attractive again.
How did all that censorship work out for the Warsaw Pact nations?
Keep the population from talking and thinking?

Re:The more the EU embraces censorship

[BlueStrat]

The US encourages free speech...so it can illegally monitor it, surveil it, wiretap it, store it in a datacenter, catalog it, and index it.

Free speech? Yes, keep speaking please.

Indeed, because:

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu

Strat

Re:The more the EU embraces censorship

[AHuxley]

AC:
In the US you are free to give a speech.
To publish a book. To write a message about the news online. To engage in any political discussions about politics and talk about any part of history.
In the USA you don't have to be a government approved reporter or academic to comment within set laws about politics or history.
In the USA you are still free after the speech.
In the USA a person is still free after researching a book. A person is free to publish a book. The author can self publish. The author and publisher do not face jail time for the content of a political or history book.
In the USA you can upload an interview talking about your book to people who are free to ask any question about the book.
Nation in the EU would try to investigate everyone at all such events.
The US supports the freedom to talk about the book in public.
The EU supports nations investigating anyone who reads a book.
To give an interview about their book that mentions politics or history. The freedom to give talks about history. To go online and join in any discussion about their book.
The USA protects their citizens from any gov that wants to ban their publication and free speech.
In the EU a nations police record the speech.
The EU nation then investigates the person speaking, their work, their bank accounts, their politics, any publications. Who they are and what they do.
What was the topic and why did the person think they have a right to give speeches?
An EU nation starts a formal investigative police interview into why a person wanted to write a book. Has the person go over the political content of their speech in a formal legal setting.
The EU nations then support and consider court action and fines for speech.
The EU supports its nations using jail time to stop speech.
The US is the freedom to publish and talk again on any topic. The EU supports jail time for talking for the first time.

Re:The more the EU embraces censorship

[AHuxley]

Read up on the Pentagon Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... AC.
Publication and later discussion is not a problem in the USA as freedoms are fully protected.

Re:The more the EU embraces censorship

[BlueStrat]

In the USA you are still free after the speech.

Maybe you should ask Edward Snowden about that.

Read up on the Pentagon Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... AC.
Publication and later discussion is not a problem in the USA as freedoms are fully protected.

In theory you are correct. However, in practice it's quite a different story as Wikileaks/Assange and the US's vendetta against them for merely publishing what was leaked to them demonstrates. The NYT could not be punished for printing the so-called "Pentagon Papers" and there is even less legal, jurisdictional, and Constitutional standing to go after Wikileaks/Assange.

Snowden is a whistle-blower on the US Government's widespread, blatant, ongoing, illegal, and unconstitutional domestic surveillance programs. He is a hero who will eventually be written about as such in future works on US history. These US domestic surveillance programs are one of, if not *the* top threats to a relatively free and open society and if not stopped, a certain path to an authoritarian police state the likes of which would make the former East German rulers green with envy.

Operation Choke-point is another example of blatantly unconstitutional censorship and extrajudicial interference and punishment for involvement in legal activities and commerce that those in power want to harass, intimidate, and/or force out of business and/or into silence/out of publication/off the 'net/etc, depending.

Strat

Re:The more the EU embraces censorship

[rastos1]

The US has civil asset forfeiture.
The US has citizens, that did nothing wrong, barred from voting.
The US has TSA and constitution free zone.
The US does not have universal health care.
The US has gerrymandering.
The US does not mandate paid parental leave.
The US has trigger happy cops with tanks.
The US has death penalty.
The US has for profit private jails.
And even if all of that was resolved, you still have Trump for president ;-).

And, contrary to you, I can back all that with links.

Call me an idiot, but I'd take banned holocaust denial over that any day.

So do they have some kind of proposal....

[mark-t]

.... for how, technologically, they are going to make this apparently magic filter?

Free speech matters aside, what they are wanting to implement is actually technologically impossible without so many false positives as to render the technology utterly useless even at best.

Re:So do they have some kind of proposal....

[gweihir]

These people are politicians. They
a) think they define reality
b) have no clue what is actually possible and what is not due to a)

Re:So do they have some kind of proposal....

[AmiMoJo]

They do. I read the proposal, and for a start it doesn't say what Github thinks it says. It also doesn't propose any magic filters or even any new tech.

Most sites that allow user uploads already have some filtering in place for illegal material like known child pornography images. The EU is simply proposing that these existing filters might also be used for known copyright infringing files, which in fact many sites already do anyway.

Basically they are saying that once an infringing file is identified and checked, its hash would be added to the database to prevent further uploads rather than the copyright holder having to spam copyright claims.

Personally I'm still opposed to it, but if you read the actual proposal they have done extensive impact assessments and gone to some lengths to ensure that the burden isn't too great.

Re:So do they have some kind of proposal....

[mark-t]

That's because they think that tech exists because they don't understand it.... neither do you, apparently, if you think there's any similarity between checking hash similarities on binary files to identify copies or copyright infringement and being able to identify meaningful similarity in computer source code that has any relevance whatsoever to copyright infringement,

Most code is built up around a relatively small set of patterns, and it is not possible to identify the similarity of two programs that might use similar patterns to accomplish the same result without also falsely identifying two entirely different programs which happen might use the same pattern as being similar as well. At best, you'd be able to accomplish it in a meaningful way for such a narrow class of use cases that it would be less than useless in any practical sense.

It's like solving the fucking Turing halting problem, which is mathematically proven to be unsolvable except in an extremely narrow class of instances where very precise limitations on what the code may contain can be known in advance to exist.

Re:More generally

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello, someone who actually works at the European Commission here. The EU in general loves the idea of open source, but they love the idea of 'consumer protection' even more.

Consumer protection is a fancy way of confusing the protection of citizens rights against large corporations, while simultaneously allowing those corporations to define the laws that protect the citizens.

This legislations is the EPITOME of the sorts of problems we see in the EC. A good intentioned protection written by 'consumer protection groups' (media companies in this case) handed off to clueless functionaires who don't know what source code actually is...or worse, the consumer protection groups go directly to the parliamentary parties and convince them to pass legislation requiring the EC to do this, and then rinse and repeat the situation.

Intentions are good. Its not a conspiracy, unless you think a ship of fools is a conspiracy. Its a damn shame and will be looked back on as one of the primary things that COULD have stopped the next war... :(