That’s because rightsholder groups would insist that anything they claimed as their copyrights would need to be censored immediately,
not after some human had had a chance to review it (even giving it a
once-over might delay a blockade of a pre-release leak, to say nothing
of the many days it might take a skilled legal practicioner or archivist
to assess whether it would be appropriate to censor a piece of media).
This is an invitation to sloppy and malicious overreporting of
copyrighted works, resulting in massive, illegitimate censorship. For
example, newscasters routinely upload their entire evening broadcast to
Youtube’s Content ID filter, meaning that any public domain footage or
third-party materials (including clips from Youtube videos) are marked
as their copyrights – that’s how NASA came to be blocked from uploading its own Mars lander footage.
But it gets worse: the laws and threats that prompt tech companies to
institute copyright filters are aimed at preventing infringement at any
cost. That means that even if you have a repeat offender who routinely
claims copyright to things they don’t own, you can’t stop taking
requests from them, because if they ever do have a valid claim, they can sue you for ignoring it.
The world is full of sloppy, brutal copyright bounty hunters that use a
variety of tactics to remove their clients’ materials, and whose lax
standards mean that they often use those tactics to remove materials
that their clients have falsely claimed to own. Think of how the Social
Element Agency claimed that a tweet complaining about their sloppy copyright takedowns was a copyright infringement, and got Twitter to censor it.
The Social Element Agency firehoses copyright claims all over the
internet, and some of them are valid. If, after receiving hundreds or
thousands (or millions) of bogus claims from the Social Element Agency,
Twitter was to block them from submitting any more claims, then the new
EU Copyright Directive would make Twitter liable for any material that
infringed the Agency’s clients’ rights. That means that there is no
cost to being a bad actor, to committing rampant copyfraud. Bounty
hunters and rightsholders can be as reckless as they like in claiming
copyrights and they’ll still be able to load their works into the
copyright filters, no matter how much copyfraud they’ve committed in the
past. And since vetting your clients’ claims costs money, it will
always be cheaper to be reckless than to be careful, and the companies
that spend the least on checking their copyright claims before submitting them will earn the most money, and grow the fastest.
This dynamic plays out all the time, including this week, when the
text-hosting platform Scribd started to mass-delete copies of the
Mueller Report that its users had uploaded. The Mueller Report, being a
work produced by the US government, is in the public domain, which means
that anyone can publish it. There are several publishers making copies for sale already.
One or more of these publishers uploaded their copy of the Report to
Scribd’s copyright filter, a fully automated system that does not
include human review. We don’t know why the publisher uploaded something
they didn’t have the rights to. Maybe they were being malicious and
wanted to drive sales of their report; or maybe they just automatically
upload everything they publish to every copyright filter they
can find, and don’t bother to pay anyone to make sure they’re not
claiming copyright over something they don’t own.
Whatever the reason, this immediately triggered mass takedowns of dozens
of users’ copies of the report. Once Scribd received users complaints
and was embarrassed by public disapprobation, it unblocked the text, and
that’s fine – until the next time it happens.
Scribd is a relatively small platform. What happens when a broadcaster
claims copyright over a key Trump gaffe on the eve of an election, and
it doesn’t get unblocked until the election is over? What happens when a
stock art company’s claims take down a photo of police brutality at a
public demonstration because a bus-ad in the background uses one of its
photos? What happens when your kid’s first steps can’t be shared with
your family back home because they happened in a room with a cartoon
playing on the TV?
