US Copyright Office Seeks Input On Mandatory DMCA 'Upload Filters' (torrentfreak.com) 83
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The U.S. Copyright Office has launched a public consultation to evaluate whether it's wise to make certain technical protection measures mandatory under the DMCA. The Office hopes to hear all relevant stakeholders and the public at large in what may become a de facto review of the recently introduced SMART Copyright Act. [...] Following repeated nudges from Senators Thom Tillis and Patrick Leahy, the Copyright Office started looking into automated tools that online services can use to ensure that pirated content can't be easily reuploaded. This "takedown and staydown' approach relies on technical protection tools, which include upload filters. This is a sensitive subject that previously generated quite a bit of pushback when the EU drafted its Copyright Directive. To gauge the various options and viewpoints, the Copyright Office launched a consultation last year, which triggered a wave of objections and opposition.
Last week, the Office followed up with yet another consultation, asking for input on shortcomings in the current DMCA legislation and what alternatives could help to improve things. As things stand, online services are allowed to implement their own upload filters, which many do. Scanning uploads for potentially copyright-infringing content isn't mandatory but that could change in the future. The consultation outline mentions several potential changes to the DMCA's Section 512, such as online services losing their safe harbor protection if they fail to implement specific "standard technical measures" (STMs). "Is the loss of the section 512 safe harbors an appropriate remedy for interfering with or failing to accommodate STMs?" the Copyright Office asks. "Are there other obligations concerning STMs that ought to be required of internet service providers?" the list of questions continues.
Stakeholders are asked to share their views on these matters. While it is uncertain whether any measures will be made mandatory, the Copyright Office is already looking ahead. For example, who gets to decide what STMs will be mandatory, and how would the rulemaking process work? "What entity or entities would be best positioned to administer such a rulemaking? What should be the frequency of such a rulemaking? What would be the benefits of such a rulemaking? What would be the drawbacks of such a rulemaking?"
Last week, the Office followed up with yet another consultation, asking for input on shortcomings in the current DMCA legislation and what alternatives could help to improve things. As things stand, online services are allowed to implement their own upload filters, which many do. Scanning uploads for potentially copyright-infringing content isn't mandatory but that could change in the future. The consultation outline mentions several potential changes to the DMCA's Section 512, such as online services losing their safe harbor protection if they fail to implement specific "standard technical measures" (STMs). "Is the loss of the section 512 safe harbors an appropriate remedy for interfering with or failing to accommodate STMs?" the Copyright Office asks. "Are there other obligations concerning STMs that ought to be required of internet service providers?" the list of questions continues.
Stakeholders are asked to share their views on these matters. While it is uncertain whether any measures will be made mandatory, the Copyright Office is already looking ahead. For example, who gets to decide what STMs will be mandatory, and how would the rulemaking process work? "What entity or entities would be best positioned to administer such a rulemaking? What should be the frequency of such a rulemaking? What would be the benefits of such a rulemaking? What would be the drawbacks of such a rulemaking?"
well there may be BIG 1st issues with it as well (Score:3)
well there may be BIG 1st issues with it. Also needs an way for an manual review and ways for an court to flag an video as (NO TAKE DOWN)
That's the kind of thing that should be in a comme (Score:5, Informative)
The copyright office may not have thought about a "don't take down" database / flag. That's the kind of thing that's useful to bring up during the comment period. I encou
https://www.copyright.gov/poli... [copyright.gov]
Hit submit too soon (Score:5, Insightful)
I accidentally clicked submit while typing with both thumbs.
I encourage you to flesh out that idea and submit it as a comment.
Some of my comments have been integrated into federal regulations. The key is to understand what the comment period is for. It's for pointing out something the agency may not have been aware of or an idea that may not have thought of, or might have misunderstood. It's NOT American Idol voting!
They may not have thought to require or encourage technical measures to define how they address "do not block", such as for proven fair use or other proven incorrect copyright claims. That's something that may be worth pointing out in a comment. I provided the link above.
For readers who do not have anything new to say, please do not use that link to spam a bunch of "I hate copyright" shit, without even reading the proposal. All that does is drown out the useful comments like the need for a "don't block, fair use" function. This comment period is NOT about whether you think copyright is a good idea. They aren't getting rid of copyright. It's not about whether or not you like whatever you think DMCA says. The person reading these comments can not get rid the statute. They CAN apply your ideas to the very specific regulations that are discussed in this proposal. They'll do so if they are persuaded by your comment pointing out something they hadn't thought of before in the year(s) they spent researching the issues around this proposal.
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You're thinking of Congress (Score:2)
The agencies don't get to decide whether or not they want to follow the law. if you dislike the law, write to your Congrescritter. No really, do - they DO notice what constituents send them, and you'd be one of only a very few who actually bother to write.
The copyright office and library of Congress don't get to make the law. So writing to them "this law sucks" is pointless- they may agree that it sucks; they still have to follow it.The executive agencies have to figure out HOW to implement the law. Comme
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You only use the word "an" before a word that begins with a vowel, otherwise it's "a".
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The whole point is: "If we don't make money off of it, it doesn't exist."
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well there may be BIG 1st issues with it.
Name one.
Goodbye independent music and movies. (Score:5, Insightful)
A technical measure that restricted uploads would be a great way to ensure that non-licensed, non-corporate, non-copyright-registered media cannot be uploaded at all.
Established players, who can afford the copyright registration fees for everything they produce would be minimally affected. But independent artists, musicians, videographers, photographers, playrights, and authors would effectively be silenced and shut out. Which is half of the intended effect - to return control over all media production and distribution to the large corporate players.
Re:Goodbye independent music and movies. (Score:4, Informative)
The EU version only applies to larger sites, and has strong protections e.g. self declared fair use. It seems like a reasonably balance, blocking blatant piracy and illegal imagery (child abuse, revenge porn etc.) while erring on the site of the uploader and requiring fair use to override filters.
Re:Goodbye independent music and movies. (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe I'm too cynical, but the fact the EU version has reasonable protection for fair use almost guarantees the US version won't have that..
Re:Goodbye independent music and movies. (Score:5, Interesting)
Witness what happened with YouTube where, in order to comply with a "Protect the children" law, comic artists disabled comments on all of their content because they feared a judge could consider it targeted toward children, and therefore trigger the law.
The issue is that even creators of original content could find themselves shut out by this. Look at how YouTube treats Rick Beato's videos. He's not making any money from his channel, so he doesn't bother fighting the copyright claims, even though he's been advised by lawyers that it's fair use. Very often, the threat of legal problems is enough to prevent online activity in the first place. And this is the kind of cultural exchange we want on the internet.
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Rick Beato's video and music snippets are, of course, fair use. No artist loses anything from his playing a few seconds of a song while reviewing (his song dissections are great, BTW). Recording industry lawyer
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Look at how YouTube treats Rick Beato's videos. He's not making any money from his channel, so he doesn't bother fighting the copyright claims,
Is there a way to fight the copyright claims on Youtube?
Last I heard there's absolutely no way to appeal a takedown or even get a human involved in the loop.
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Last I heard there's absolutely no way to appeal a takedown or even get a human involved in the loop.
Which is by design. Human beings have subjective judgement which could cost the company money. Also, humans making decisions costs a lot more than algorithms making decisions.
Ted Kaczinsky warned of a future in which humans would be controlled by computers, where a human being would be subject to rules imposed by computers, from which no appeal to a human being was possible. We're there. Had Ted h
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an copyright renewal fee is an good way to fix aba (Score:2)
an copyright renewal fee is an good way to fix abandonware.
What your media on this system then there is an fee to keep it there and if you don't pay then it's becomes an pubic work.
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A technical measure that restricted uploads would be a great way to ensure that non-licensed, non-corporate, non-copyright-registered media cannot be uploaded at all.
A government mandated technical measure that restricts some types of speech smacks of prior restraint. It's evidently not enough that copyright already infringes on the 1A, now they are proposing to make the amendment even more irrelevant.
can they guarentee (Score:2)
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Can they guarentee that this filters will be fair use friendly
LOL! Of course not.
ha ha no (Score:2)
I searched the docket number on regulations.gov and it's not even fucking there. If they hope to hear from anyone they're going to have to do their fucking jobs and get it up on the website where they say you have to submit all comments.
Re:ha ha no (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like they just want the appearance of feedback for the appearance of an open process without one. You know, like net neutrality.
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Do you have a comment pointing out something they may not have thought about relating to the proposed implementation of this regulation? If so you can post it here and I'll copy / paste it to the appropriate person.
If your comment consists only of "fucking fuck do their fucking jobs", that's just garbage obscuring the useful comments that can actually improve things. Don't fucking bother.
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It needs a way for the uploader to indicate why its not violating copyright (original content, fair use, the uploader is the content creator, proper permission from copyright holder, etc). This indication should trigger a human to review before making the video publicly available.
Large-scale human review of submitted content is never going to happen, because on YouTube alone, videos are uploaded at the rate of 30,000 per hour. The best we can hope for is that the so-called "AI" algos get good enough for machines to do a satisfactory job of ALL the evaluating. I'm not holding my breath for that; even given that the algorithms might become good enough, the mere power consumption of the hardware required to execute them might be a deal breaker, never mind the cost said hardware.
The who
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Try this form
https://www.copyright.gov/poli... [copyright.gov]
For anyone who didn't read the other post, this is NOT the appropriate place to voice whether or not you think Congress should enact this law. Comments submitted here do not go to Congress.
Comments here should be things you think the copyright office may not have thought about in regards to how they go about executing the law that Congress enacts.
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Well, they tried to upload it, but it tripped some copyright tilt switch somewhere and got banned for infringement...
How about equal consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
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I like the EU's proposed solution to this. The uploader can declare that the copyrighted material used in their video is fair use. To challenge it the copyright holder must have a human being review it and swear that they think it isn't fair use.
They should go further though. Establish a Copyright Small Claims Court. The cost the uploader would be minimal, and everything would be done online.
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That's similar to what is already in the DMCA. The problem is most people can't afford to go to court, so they don't challenge the human reviewer.
Re:How about equal consequences (Score:5, Interesting)
The flaw in the DMCA is that it doesn't require a legal declaration that the work is infringing, only that the person submitting the DMCA notice is the copyright holder. So there are no consequences for wrongly flagging stuff. Under the EU scheme, there is a legal declaration that the work has been reviewed and found infringing and not fair use, which creates a legal liability if they are mistaken.
It also bans automated systems issuing claims without any human oversight.
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The flaw in the DMCA is that it doesn't require...
It's not a flaw, it's a feature.
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Wrongly flagging stuff needs to lead to statutory damages the uploader can demand, on a similar level to those for copyright infringement.
Statutory because sometimes the monetary damage is negligible, but the content deserves protection as free speech. So put a serious price tag on malicious or careless claims that a work is infringing. And no extra leeway for those using automated systems issuing claims. Your computer files 1000 false claims, you are liable for 1000 times the damage of a single false claim
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Automated systems have no idea about context. (Score:5, Insightful)
Upload filters simply can't work. There's no way to determine what is and isn't an infringing copy. It's technically possible to determine if something is copyrighted, I guess, if there's a large enough library. But is it fair use? Does the user have permission from the copyright holder? Does the party claiming copyright actually hold the copyright? Filters can't decide this.
Re:Automated systems have no idea about context. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly this. The church I’m at licenses the music it uses in its services each week from the CCLI licensing body (or else uses hymns and the like that are in the public domain). The license covers live “performances”, and we have an extension to the license to cover the streaming and subsequent uploading of those “performances”. If an automatic filter was in place, how would YouTube or whoever know that we had that license? Is the CCLI supposed to make an API available so that YouTube could validate our claims to have a license? What about churches that write their own music, of which there are many? Are they now legally required to establish a personal licensing body and stand up a server to validate that they own their own music?
Where’s the presumption of innocence?
It’s fine for platforms to make it easier to identify infringement, but the onus should be on the rights holder to assert infringement, rather than having platforms acting as gatekeepers for the lawful expression of free speech.
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If an automatic filter was in place, how would YouTube or whoever know that we had that license?
Presumably in exactly the same way that existing DMCA works - you receive a takedown notice, and then you file a counterclaim that what you have is actually allowed up there. YouTube or whoever will know that you had a license simply because you claimed you did. (as per DMCA, your claim is made under penalty of perjury, which is why you'll strive to avoid making false claims).
What about churches that write their own music, of which there are many? Are they now legally required to establish a personal licensing body and stand up a server to validate that they own their own music?
It sounds like you're imagining a "allow-only-permitted-stuff-through" filter. That conceptually doesn't even make sense. The only wa
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A) Matters of copyright can and do end up in criminal court. They are not limited to civil courts.
B) The presumption of innocence speaks more broadly to the human right that we are free to do as we please by default, rather than the onus being on us to demonstrate that we have the right to engage in a lawful, rightful activity before we can do so. While legally that right is most obviously seen in criminal courts, it applies civilly as well in the simple fact that until and unless somebody complains to the
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Where’s the presumption of innocence?
In the same place they put the other so called rights: In the trash with the others.
Buckle up people, the masters of the world are here to deny you access to information, and the general public is too busy fighting amongst each other to be wary of them.
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I'm not so sure it IS possible to automatically detect copyrighted works reliably:
For the sake of argument, this sentence is copyrighted.
F0r the sake of argument, this sentence is copyrighted.
For the sake of 4rgument, this sentence is copyrighted.
For the sake of argument. this sentence is copyrighted,
Copyrighted this sentence is, for the sake of argument.
Some idiot thinks this sentence is copyrighted.
Now, what is the algorithm that reliably flags the 2nd-4th as violations but doesn't mis-classify the 5th or
publish twice (Score:2)
Small businesses (Score:5, Insightful)
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While true, there is already a similar huge barrier: illegal material and trolling. Any platform that wants to enter the market needs to avoid becoming a haven for child porn and trolls.
It's surprisingly hard too. Meta/Facebook have practically infinite resources to throw at the problem, but the Metaverse is full of adults trying to abuse children: https://www.theguardian.com/tv... [theguardian.com]
If you are in the UK and can watch the documentary, the video of what it's like inside the Metaverse is pretty shocking.
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Scanning for DMCA is not trivial and will be a huge barrier to entry for a smaller firm
Why is it not trivial? One realization is that, say, the copyright office provides a file updated daily which contains MD5 hashes of proscribed material, the small business downloads that file at least once a week, and compares the MD5 of uploaded content against that file. Another realization is that the small business sends the MD5 hash to a server provided by the copyright office.
You might object that these realizations won't catch *all* copyright material. That's an unreasonable goal. Indeed even the ma
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You could also argue that it won't catch ANY. An MD5 hash of one particular encoding of a file? Just editing one byte of the metadata or trimming a single frame of video would give you a different hash. That would stop uploads of unmodified full stream rips from a streaming platform but literally nothing else. I don't even think that happens. Sites are already doing far better than that now.
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You could also argue that it won't catch ANY... Sites are already doing far better than that now.
Agreed. So it's in negotiation phase. Some proposals say that sites should use "industry best practices". Then it becomes a negotiation about what is considered best practice and feasible enough, and the onus is on the copyright industry to put forwards technically feasible solutions.
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As long as pro corporate candidates keep winning (Score:2, Insightful)
Americans need to form voting blocks based on our economic interests instead of on social issues and pet peeves.
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What the public believes doesn't matter. As long as the voting public chooses candidates based on who has the best advertisements and does the most fun rallies and who pushes their buttons the best rather than based on policy that affects their economic lives and politicians are going to cater to large corporations and not to voters.
Americans need to form voting blocks based on our economic interests instead of on social issues and pet peeves.
There used to be voting blocs based on economic interest. They were called "states".
That approach became attached to some ugly stuff, and roughly a century was spent dissolving its coherence and power.
That dissolution also completely destroyed national discourse and debate. Without discrete, coherent, locally-governed groups there's no possibility of real discussion or negotiation, because you have no way to identify the stakeholders and gather them at the table. All you can do is send out a mass survey to
After which the republic collapses (Score:2)
[Problem statement]
So far, so good...
Americans need to form voting blocks based on our economic interests instead of on social issues and pet peeves.
After which the Republic collapses into bread-and-circuses looting.
(Just as the Europeans thought republics and democracies always did - so monarchies or other elitist systems were required - before contact with the Iroquois Federation gave the US Founders a proof-of-concept sample of how it COULD work.)
Agreed that US voters are often led into voting against th
control (Score:3)
Sure, yes, as long as... (Score:3)
Seems fine, as long as there are serious penalties for flagging material incorrectly, and those penalties are enforced.
If it's a one-off accident, then they pay the a fine to whoever they falsely flagged. Repeat offenders can be presumed to be doing it intentionally, and the individuals should be charged with something like fraud.
Put all that in place, starting now with DMCA notices. Then we can talk.
encrypted uploads. Key to follow... (Score:1)
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5 minutes later, I suspect the response from the pirate community will just be to encrypt uploads with something as simple as a password-protected zip, then release the key after the upload is available.
Thus giving the bastards an excuse to have another ill-fated, doomed-to-failure go at banning encryption, or prohibiting public upload of encrypted content, or some such ridiculousness.
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prohibiting public upload of encrypted content
How do you know it's encrypted content? And not the latest Word document format.
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You don't, reliably, hence ill-fated. Though, at present, the tendency is to wrap encrypted content in a package with easily detected headers. Posting a raw stream with no headers, using an agreed-upon algorithm, would be much harder to detect. The most likely attempt would be by measuring the randomness of the content and arbitrarily defining anything over a threshold without specific ID data as "encrypted," and then we'll get inefficient steganography. The whole concept is stupid, but that's never sto
Comment not currently being accepted ... (Score:5, Informative)
I went to https://www.copyright.gov/poli... [copyright.gov] to submit the following comment:
,p>I am a private stakeholder, who holds or co-holds more than two dozen copyrights on recorded music of my own composition or co-composition, as well as more than 100 copyrights on textual material of which I am the author. I strongly advise against the use of automated filters to take down material claimed to be infringing under the DMCA and followon legislation. As currently implemented by major online video sites (e.g. - YouTube), they identify as infringing material that is either not the property of the complainant(s), or that the use of which is protected by fair use provisions of the existing Copyright Act. Worse still, the process for appealing such automated takedowns is unobvious, non-transparent, and is itself too often exclusively automated, with no actual human involved in deciding the merits of the appeal. This proposal would enshrine this broken system, to the detriment of the general public. In addition, undeserved DMCA "strikes" can result in uploaders who have not actually infringed the DMCA's provisions being permanently barred from uploading their own, unique, non-infringing material, with no effective avenue of appeal. This is both fundamentally unfair and antithetical to the intent of the DMCA and U.S. copyright law.
When I clicked the submit button, I immediately wound up at https://www.regulations.gov/co... [regulations.gov] - which says that comments are not currently being accepted on this proposed rule.
Evidently the public participation part of this proposed rulemaking is currently as broken as the automated takedown systems already in use.
The irony is so thick you could cut it with a spoon ...
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The link you posted allowed me to submit a comment about 3 hours after you posted it. Not sure if this was because the comments are just now opening or if they're receiving lots of comments.
I'd say try to post your comment, history has indicated that however polite the people are, the lobbyists will come up with some nonsense reason why the public comments should be disregarded.
Not feeling this at all, for all the usual reasons (Score:2)
What's truly nightmarish is that this feels like The Ghost Of Hillary Rosen in cluele
Lazy corporate lawyers... (Score:2)
... don't want to have to look at everything on the Internet and want web sites that accept uploads to do their work for them? Boo effin' hoo.
Computers soon to be Airports... (Score:2)
My computer is not an Airport. I can have goods or things on there *MERCHANTS* don't like.
A lot of border protection stuff is actually about protection of MERCHANTS. My favorite is the supposed agriculture protection where they stop all sorts of food or imported goods under the guise that people are bringing over mass plague crop-ruining invaders. Actually this is funny if you think about it because drug shipments make it past the border all the time and they admit it! So if they aren't stopping 100% of the
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Many of your points about the regime being primarily about protecting the interests of certain big businesses against small-operator competition and individual customer escape from their rakeoff-seeking tollbooth are valid. But:
My favorite is the supposed agriculture protection where they stop all sorts of food or imported goods under the guise that people are bringing over mass plague crop-ruining invaders. Actually this is funny if you think about it because drug shipments make it past the border all the
How Will Anyone Respond to their World? (Score:2)
How would people respond to their politicians?
How about (Score:2)
Enshrining in law that bad faith takedowns get companies blacklisted permanently from submitting DMCA takedowns. Kind of like how CBS is doing to bad reviews of Halo by submitting a "manual review" which includes FIVE SECONDS of copyrighted content used for the purposes of reviews.
As if the current shit wasn't already bad enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now, frivolous takedown-notices by copyright owners to squelch criticism of their crappy products are already running rampart around YouTube. With crap like that, anyone who actually wants to do any kind of criticism of copyrighted material (read: wants to do a review of yet another movie that carpet bombs diarrhea all over a franchise) will be silenced even faster.
Barrier to entry, mainstream media is trash anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
...and the public at large... (Score:2)
That's funny. We all know the weasels in congress will vote for whoever lines their pockets. Big media companies can collectively afford to donate billions.
boy am i in a negative mood today
Well, most of you you asked for this (Score:5, Insightful)
An internet where the speech that you upload can be filtered and controlled can certainly be an internet where the files you upload can be filtered and controlled.
After all, it's for the children ... or for the protected minority of the month ... or for the "fortified" election, or ...
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For all of you who said: "They don't have to provide you a platform." You were also declaring: "I don't need the ability to speak."
How could this be misused (Score:4, Insightful)
Just as planned (Score:2)
If this USCO is anything like the BATFE there will be thousands of comments against the proposal and then they will ignore them and plow through whichever way the politicos and big money want them to go with it.
the DMCA is corruption in motion (Score:2)
No such thing as infringing content (Score:5, Insightful)
Scanning uploads for potentially copyright-infringing content...
There is no such thing as copyright-infringing content. The entertainment has corrupted the words and concepts we are using. Repeat after me folks: "There is no such thing as infringing content." Let me explain:
If I own a copy of a movie, and I choose to upload it to my private YouTube channel so that I can stream it back to my phone, then there is no copyright infringement because I am permitted to time and format shift my content. If I then watch the movie from my neighbor's wifi, no copyright infringement has happened. I watched my copy of my movie. But if I give my neighbor the link and *they* stream the movie, then copyright infringement has happened.
There is no technological measure that can determine if a copyright has been infringed. The only thing these automated systems can do is say "This content is copyrighted." But it has no way to ask the copyright holder: "Is this okay?" It does not have a way to ask the person uploading it or downloading it "Are you complying with the copyright?"
So what we are moving toward is that every hard drive has to somehow police the data and ask "Am I the copyright holder of this?" If the answer is no, it assumes that the person uploading it is committing piracy so they block it. But that's not copyright protection! And as more and more storage goes into the cloud, this problem gets worse. If I download a movie from Netflix, where can I even put it? Can I put it on my phone? A NAS? Can I mirror that to my OneDrive? Can I mirror it to dropbox? Can I upload it to a service that burns it onto a DVD? Microsoft and DropBox and the DVD service don't know the answer to that question, because they don't know if I'm keeping the file for myself or if I'm going to make 100 copies and sell them on the street corner.
The only logical thing such a filter can do is ask *me* if I'm infringing. Only I know.
The very fundamental concept of an upload or download filter is inherently flawed. But the industry has corrupted and confused what copyright even is, so much so that even the savvy among us fall into the trap of "infringing content" and just assume that "oh, you can't upload that, it's copyrighted." That's wrong.
Redundant (Score:2)
How does your ISP tell, for instance... (Score:2)