UN's freedom of expression top dog slams European copyright plans

Re: Or to put it another way

TheVogon said: "... as soon as you make [liable] the companies that are basically just pipes to content, then loads of unrelated stuff is going to get censored..."

But these companies are not 'basically just pipes to content'

(1) They stick adverts on the content before they pipe it to us, and they make lots and lots of money out of doing so.

(2) They snoop meticulously on who is at the end of their pipes and they monitor what we are looking-at/listening-to so they can monetise the sh*t out of that information.

Basically, these companies make a lot of money off the back of other people's content, and if they didn't have access to content that people wanted to see/hear then they wouldn't have a business.

Broadcasters, print publishers, people who make physical stuff – they can all be held liable if they make money from other people's work without properly compensating them.

But this seemingly straightforward fairness/anti-parasite rule about profiting from other people's work does not currently apply to the internet publishers.

That is an in-plain-sight contradiction.

That is why this isn't going to go away.

Checksum checking would catch some small fraction of uploads, but as already mentioned, there are many, many workarounds that are both easy and well known.

To defeat all these well known workarounds, copyright owners would likely end up registering thousands of checksums per protected work, dealing with all the variations as they find them. Not long before that process gets automated, and all anticipated variations get registered at the time of publication. And then you have a situation where the index of forbidden checksums is growing by several million entries per day.

And that's assuming private individuals don't get into the act. In law, everything we write or photograph or record is a new copyrighted work. How long till someone creates a tool to register the checksums for every comment we type on a blog? If that happens, we're looking at billions of new entries per day. More, if the tool also applies the "minor variations" algorithm.

Apart from the sheer overhead of managing all that data, and comparing every new item to them, which frankly I can't even imagine, you also create a rapidly growing probability of false positives. After a few years of this regime, not only would it be a coin toss whether each new item was allowed, it would also take several minutes to do the screening. So then you have a situation where people don't know, often until much later, whether their posting was successful or not.

> With the much harder job being for the "ones who write checksum catchers" in this example.

They can make their jobs easier by aggressively marking anything and everything as copyright violation if at least a remote possibility exists it might be one. And by ‘can’ I mean they are already doing it. There is no penalty for false positive copyright harassment, so why not. And few are able or care to challenge ‘computers says no’...

Thanks, I'm fully aware of the issues of using checksum but it's really the only simple option other than analysing the data but that's going to add a lot of cost and time depending on how you decide to do it.

So you need something with the speed of a computer and the subjectivity of a human otherwise the load gets overwhelming and people lose. Either true works get copycat teddy to death or get wrongly tagged a copies, with no way to distinguish between them.