Content warning Long thread/19
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.
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Content warning Long thread/20
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.
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Content warning Long thread/21
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.
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Content warning Long thread/22
Automated takedown systems are the tech industry's answer to the "notice-and-takedown" system that was invented to broker a peace between copyright law and the internet, starting with the US's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA implements (and exceeds) a pair of 1996 UN treaties, the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the Performances and Phonograms Treaty, and most countries in the world have some version of notice-and-takedown.
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Content warning Long thread/23
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.
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Content warning Long thread/24
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.
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Content warning Long thread/25
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
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Content warning Long thread/26
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:
As critics pointed out during the EU debate, there are *so many* problems with filternets.
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Content warning Long thread/27
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.
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Content warning Long thread/28
Filternets are also incapable of telling the difference between similar files. This is especially problematic for classical musicians, who routinely find their work blocked or demonetized by Sony Music, which claims performances of all the most important classical music compositions:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music
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Content warning Long thread/29
Content ID can't tell the difference between your performance of "The Goldberg Variations" and Glenn Gould's. For classical musicians, the *best* case scenario is to have their online wages stolen by Sony, who fraudulently claim copyright to their recordings. The worst case scenario is that their video is blocked, their channel deleted, and their names blacklisted from ever opening another account on one of the monopoly platforms.
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