But that's just for starters, because Youtube isn't the only place where a copyright enforcement bot is making billions of unsupervised, unaccountable decisions about what audiovisual material you're allowed to access.

Spotify is *yet another* monopolist, with a justifiable reputation for being extremely hostile to artists' interests, thanks in large part to the role that UMG and the other major record labels played in designing its business rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

17/

Spotify has spent hundreds of millions trying to capture podcasting, in the hopes of converting one of the last truly open digital publishing systems into a product under its control:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/enshittification-resistance/#ummauerter-garten-nein

Thankfully, that campaign has failed - but millions of people have (unwisely) ditched their open podcatchers in favor of Spotify's pre-enshittified app, so everyone with a podcast now must target Spotify for distribution if they hope to reach those captive users.

18/

Guess who has a podcast? The Engelberg Center.

Naturally, Engelberg's podcast includes the audio of that *Blurred Lines* panel, and that audio includes samples from both "Blurred Lines" and "Got To Give It Up."

So - naturally - UMG keeps taking down the podcast.

Spotify has its own answer to Content ID, and incredibly, it's *even worse* and harder to navigate than Google's pretend legal system.

19/

As Engelberg describes in its latest post, UMG and Spotify have colluded to ensure that this now-classic discussion of fair use will never be able to take advantage of fair use itself:

https://www.nyuengelberg.org/news/how-explaining-copyright-broke-the-spotify-copyright-system/

Remember, this is the *best case* scenario for arguing about fair use with a monopolist like UMG, Google, or Spotify.

20/

As Engelberg puts it:

> The Engelberg Center had an extraordinarily high level of interest in pursuing this issue, and legal confidence in our position that would have cost an average podcaster tens of thousands of dollars to develop. That cannot be what is required to challenge the removal of a podcast episode.

21/

Big corporate rightsholders claim that notice-and-takedown is a gift to the tech sector, one that allows tech companies to get away with copyright infringement. They want a "strict liability" regime, where any platform that allows a user to post something infringing is liable for that infringement, to the tune of $150,000 in statutory damages.

Of course, there's no way for a platform to know a priori whether something a user posts infringes on someone's copyright.

23/

There is no registry of everything that is copyrighted, and of course, fair use means there are lots of ways to legally reproduce someone's work without their permission even when they object). Even if every person who ever has trained or ever will train as a copyright lawyer worked 24/7 for just *one* online platform to evaluate every tweet, video, audio clip and image for copyright infringement, they wouldn't be able to touch even *1%* of what gets posted to that platform.

24/

The "compromise" that the entertainment industry wants is automated takedown - a system like Content ID, where rightsholders register their copyrights and platforms block anything that matches the registry. This "filternet" proposal became law in the EU in 2019 with Article 17 of the Digital Single Market Directive:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/today-europe-lost-internet-now-we-fight-back

25/

This was the most controversial directive in EU history, and - as experts warned at the time - there is no way to implement it without violating the GDPR, Europe's privacy law, so now it's stuck in limbo:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/eus-copyright-directive-still-about-filters-eus-top-court-limits-its-use

As critics pointed out during the EU debate, there are *so many* problems with filternets.

26/

For one thing, these copyright filters are *very* expensive: remember that Google has spent *$100m* on Content ID alone, and that only does a fraction of what filternet advocates demand. Building the filternet would cost so much that only the biggest tech monopolists could afford it, which is to say, filternets are a legal requirement to keep the tech monopolists in business and prevent smaller, better platforms from ever coming into existence.

27/