I'm sure you'll be able to fill out a form and get an email a day later, "We're sorry, we've reviewed your case but have decided against you (because we have no reason to ever take any risk)"
The DMCA is a shining example of just how well these appeals processes work...
I don't think that would satisfy the requirements of the directive:
> Any complaint
filed under such mechanisms shall be
processed without undue delay and be
subject to human review. Right holders
shall reasonably justify their decisions to
avoid arbitrary dismissal of complaints.
It also requires Member States to ensure "that users have
access to an independent body for the
resolution of disputes as well as to a court
or another relevant judicial authority to
assert the use of an exception or
limitation to copyright rules".
So damned if you do and damned if you don’t? How does this right here not destroy the prospect of any small company trying to scale operations in this space?
From the company’s perspective, it’s like a DDoS attack that is illegal to defend yourself against.
Small companies have lower requirements for what they need to do under the directive.
About the measures taken, for example:
> The measures
should be proportionate in order to avoid imposing disproportionately complicated or costly
obligations on certain online content sharing service providers, taking into account notably
their small size.
For small/micro enterprises this then means that for the DDoS attack you'd need the rightsholders to invalidly notify of large amounts of content that needs removing (each one specifically) which must be done with the intent of killing off the platform. Would that be legal? To submit false claims deliberately to hurt the company?
> The measures taken by the online content sharing service providers should be without
prejudice to the application of exceptions and limitations to copyright, including in particular
those which guarantee the freedom of expression of users. For that purpose the service
providers should put in place mechanisms allowing users to complain about the blocking or
removal of uploaded content that could benefit from an exception or limitation to copyright.
Replies to the users’ complaints should be provided in a timely manner. To make these
mechanisms function, cooperation from rightholders is needed, in particular with regard to the
assessment of the complaints submitted and justifications for the removal of users’ content.
Emphasis mine.
The section also says member states are free to put in place independent authorities to assess these, although I'm sure somewhere else it in this is a requirement rather than simply a suggestion. I'll update if I can find it.
That’s good info about #1, because it seems to be an O(n * m) problem where n is number of existing copyrighted works and m is the number of uploads.
I’m more concerned about the way copyright itself may need to change to work sensibly with this — according to several UK lawyers I’ve talked to, under UK law any work is copyrighted the moment it is put down in a fixed medium. For example, this comment, the moment it is recorded to any database or cache. It is not a sensible rule as-written, and common law saying “now now, don’t be silly” is the only reason things are not already out of hand. Unfortunately most of the EU isn’t common law and one of the few countries which is is the one which is about to leave. It might be fine, but I can’t tell. I only speak English, mediocre German, and tourist/subtourist French and Greek.
> For example, this comment, the moment it is recorded to any database or cache. It is not a sensible rule as-written, and common law saying “now now, don’t be silly” is the only reason things are not already out of hand.
It's the same in civil law countries, and the real reason things aren't out of hand is that every site that allows arbitrary users to upload content has some legal boilerplate such as
By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.
> That’s good info about #1, because it seems to be an O(n * m) problem where n is number of existing copyrighted works and m is the number of uploads.
This is likely very naive of me to ask but is it actually O(n*m)?
I don't know how the fingerprinting works but if it's anything like a hash I don't see why it couldn't be closer to O(n+m) since you only have to hash each copyrighted video once and then compare O(m) uploaded videos against the hashes.
I can imagine you can't actually compare against hashes of all copyrighted videos in O(1) since they can't just be kept in memory but I don't see why it can't be done in O(log n).
Of course this is very far out of my expertise so please someone explain to me why this is completely wrong =]
Hm, good point. I was thinking of the case of manual checking, but good point nonetheless.
Of course, the checksum would have to be invariant to pitch shift, rotation, horizontal flipping, framing, clipping, and length changes — all of which I know have been used to evade copyright filters on YouTube. (Also must resist mild noise audio or visual noise, mild convolution filters, and probably hue shifting, but I don’t know if those have been used by pirates yet)
There's stuff in every version I've read about the measures required being different due to size so I don't really follow the point here.
And people on the other end (the uploaders) must have recourse, there's a mandated appeals process unlike the current situation.