Internet Luminaries Urge EU To Kill Off Automated Copyright Filter Proposal (theregister.co.uk)

A large group of Internet pioneers have sent an open letter to the European Union urging it to scrap a proposal to introduce automated upload filters, arguing that it could damage the internet as we know it. The Register: The European Parliament's Legal Affairs (Juri) Committee will vote on the proposal contained in Article 13 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive next week. The proposal would see all companies that "store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works" obliged to "prevent the availability... of works... identified by rightholders." Despite the inclusion of language that says such measures need to be "appropriate and proportionate," it has caused many to worry that the law will lead to a requirement for all platforms to introduce automated content filtering, and shift liability for any copyrighted material that appears online from the user that posts it to the platform itself.

"By inverting this liability model and essentially making platforms directly responsible for ensuring the legality of content in the first instance, the business models and investments of platforms large and small will be impacted," warns the letter [PDF] signed by "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf, world world web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, as well a host of other internet luminaries including Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, security expert Bruce Schneier and net neutrality namer Tim Wu.

Comments

Re:" Internet pioneers " ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't bother reading the last paragraph of the summary, huh? None of the listed "pioneers" work for the companies you mentioned.

I knoq, never said they did?

Since you pointed it out anyway - according to wikipedia:

Vint Cerf - Born into a wealthy family, father worked as an "aerospace
executive". Cerf has worked for Google as a Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist since October 2005.

Tim Berners-Lee - Created what is HTML, currently chair of the w3c. The primary person behind web DRM being added as a standard. Actually has quite a background in politically motivated causes and does work directly with the companies I listed through

Bruce Schneier - Born into a wealth family, father is /was a Supreme Court judge. It's interesting despite his crypto background, we still have broken SSL.

Tim Wu - One of the most bizzare people to have listed, he's a lawyer who worked for the fucking FTC. Again quite wealthy and politically motivated. He has certainly worked extensively with Google.

I stand behind what I said.

Re:Next EU Problem

[AmiMoJo]

Actually they already won, they just don't seem to have realized it.

I've been following these rules as they develop. The early draft did have a requirement for websites to actively filter new content for copyright infringement, based on submissions by copyright holders. That was removed ages ago, but people still seem to be panicking about it for some reason.

There is a requirement to remove infringing material after it has been reported, the same as the DMCA. The DMCA isn't great, but it's main flaw is people spamming automated DMCA notices with bots.

And in fact most web sites do pre-screen material as it is uploaded anyway, e.g. to block known illegal images because their customers don't like their feeds being filled with child pornography and ISIS beheading videos.

Also the "link tax" is long, long dead. There was a proposal to allow charging for "snippets" in search results, but it looks like it may well be DoA because where it was been tried it was a disaster. In Spain Google shut down it's news service and news sites saw a 6-30% loss of traffic. In Germany the news sites gave Google a free licence to use snippets anyway.

So all in all it's mostly just panicking about out of date, long rejected draft proposals.