âStay Downâ rules reinforce monopoly and do nothing to put money in working creatorsâ pockets
The U.S. Copyright Office has issued a Notice of Inquiry, seeking comment on whether online services should be legally required to filter all their usersâ communications to block copyright infringement, as part of a âStay Downâ system.
The idea is that once a copyright holder notifies a service provider that a certain work canât be legally posted, the service must filter all their user communications thereafter to ensure that this notice is honored.
I think that creators and creatorsâ groups should oppose this. Hereâs why.
The âstandard measuresâ being discussed are not standard. Indeed, theyâre largely found in just two companies: Google (through its Content ID system for YouTube) and Meta/Facebook. Thereâs a reason only two companies have these filters: They are incredibly expensive. Content ID has cost $100,000,000 and counting (and it only does a tiny fraction of what is contemplated in the proposed rule).
That effectively cements Googbook as the permanent rulers of the internet, since they are the only two social media companies that can afford this stuff.
A nearly identical proposal to this one â Article 13 of the Copyright Directive, since renumbered to Article 17 â went through the EU Parliament in 2019, and both Facebook and YouTube came out in favor of it. They understand that this is a small price to pay for permanently excluding all competitors from the internet.
(Itâs worth noting that actually implementing Article 17 with automated filters is likely a violation of both the e-Commerce Directive and the GDPR, both of which ban automated judgements of user communications without explicit opt-in and consent, and thereâs every chance that Article 17 will not survive a constitutional challenge in the European Court of Justice.)
Now, some people may be thinking, why should I care if Googbook get to take over the internet, so long as theyâre forced to police my copyrights?
I think those people are going to be very disappointed, for three reasons:
Filters donât work;
Filters enable wage theft and censorship;
The most important factor determining compensation is competition, not copyright enforcement.
Filters donât work
Filters are blunt instruments. Itâs been nearly 15 years since my debut novel was fraudulently removed from online services that Iâd authorized to carry it by someone representing the Isaac Asimov estate. My book carried a favorable blurb from Gardner Dozois, editor of Isaac Asimovâs Science Fiction Magazine, and the automated process that the Asimov rep used to identify infringing works falsely flagged my own book. A decade later, filters hadnât improved, and Rupert Murdochâs lawyers fraudulently removed another of my novels.
Contemporary filters are not any better: They are rife with both false positives (wrongly identifying works as matches) and false negatives (when a copyrighted work is missed). Thatâs because certain phrases, sounds or arrangements of pixels are common to multiple works, and because quotation and incidental inclusion (such as a photograph of a street demonstration that includes a bus-shelter ad with a copyrighted stock image) are unavoidable in any broad-scale filter.
A panel of some of Americaâs foremost copyright experts gathered to discuss the controversial âBlurred Linesâ decision. Their discussion was removed from YouTube because it included short snippets of the relevant works. These experts â again, some of the countryâs leading copyright authorities â could not navigate YouTubeâs content âput-backâ system to get their video reinstated (they ended up creating a bad publicity storm that led to reinstatement â this is not a solution available to the average person).
New York Times bestselling author Lindsay Ellis depends on her 1,000,000+ YouTube subscribers to sell books. Her videos have been taken down so often that sheâs abandoned much of the (noninfringing) material she used to include. In particular, she was scared off by the âcopystrikeâ system that would terminate her account (and tank her writing career) if she continued to complain.
Despite all these false positives, the labels, publishers and other rightsholder groups backing âstay downâ filters will all tell you that Content ID routinely allows infringing materials through. Thatâs because it is such a blunt instrument: The matching heuristics it uses are easy to study and evadeâŠif you are an actual pirate.
So pirates study the system, figure out how to evade it, and post with impunity. By definition, then, filters only catch the people who donât think theyâre doing something infringing â while deliberate infringers slip through.
Filters enable wage theft and censorship
As the examples of Ellis and the copyright experts above make clear, the technical functioning of a filter is only half the story â the other half is the administration of the filter, that is, who gets to register a work, how disputes are adjudicated, etc.
On this administrative layer, filters have shown themselves to be tilted toward bad actors and away from working artists.
The most notorious examples of this are classical musicians, who perform public domain works. Sony Music has claimed their own vast musical library of classical performances, and the filters are incapable of distinguishing between Sonyâs performances and other working artistsâ performances. This impacts performers, of course. It is especially bad during lockdown, when performersâ only source of revenue is online performances.
But it also affects non-performers, including music teachers, who face account termination for posting instructional videos (funded by Patreon and other mechanisms) that teach the public how to play classical compositions.
Content IDâs âstandard measuresâ allow putative rightsholders to claim the ad revenue from âinfringingâ videos. This has led to mass-scale wage theft from classical performers whose works are claimed by Sony.
Hereâs the tldr: Warner lost a $2.8m copyright lawsuit in which the Christian gospel act Dark Horse claimed that a Katy Perry song it had released was too similar to Dark Horseâs own work. A Katy Perry fan posted a video defending Perry and Warner, playing the Dark Horse clip to show that it was not similar to Perry. Warner then sent an automated takedown over the Dark Horse clip, claiming it was a Katy Perry clip.
When the creator disputed this, Warner manually affirmed that the clip in question was from Katy Perry, doubling down on its removal demand for this poor guyâs video. Remember, Warner had previously argued in court that this specific clip was easily distinguished from Katy Perryâs own performance.
The big labels â and other big rights holders â are incredibly sloppy, possibly even maliciously so, about their pride of place in YouTubeâs Content ID ecosystem, and they routinely overclaim and refuse to back down when they get it wrong, to the detriment of working creators and others who simply use the system as part of their daily lives (scientific symposia, for example).
The reason theyâre able to do this is that the appeals system for Content ID is literally impossible to navigate (recall that in the previous section, the nationâs foremost copyright experts couldnât get it to work). Hereâs a breakdown of how it works:
The most important factor determining compensation is competition, not copyright enforcement
Itâs worth asking why the system isnât better administered, then? This has two answers:
The scale. YouTube gets hundreds of hours of videos posted every minute. Copyright questions are fact-intensive (for example, distinguishing a skilled classical YouTube performerâs Beethoven recording from Sony Musicâs; or figuring out whether a copyright professor is allowed to play a Pharrell Williams clip in a learned discussion of the Blurred Lines case). YouTube doesnât just need tens of thousands of moderators to assess claims â it needs tens of thousands of skilled moderators, people with extensive training in multiple copyright systems. There literally arenât enough of those people alive today to fill that role;
The scale (again). YouTube and Facebook have formed a monopoly (80% of search and display ads flow through Googbook), largely through anticompetitive mergers (for example, Google buying YouTube when its own Google Video service flopped). As Lily Tomlin used to say, âWe donât have to care, weâre the phone company.â Monopolists donât need to keep their customers or suppliers happy, because thereâs nowhere else to go.
These mergers have a negative effect on writersâ incomes because large firms donât have to worry about their writers seeking better deals elsewhere â after all, four or five publishers can easily converge on a set of unfavorable-to-writers terms without having to explicitly collude (though they may do that, too).
Writers have seen our ebook rights, then worldwide English rights, then audiobook and graphic novel rights, become nonnegotiable in standard Big Five (Soon-To-Be-Big-Four) contracts. All of the major publishersâ standard contracts now include a nonnegotiable morals clause allowing them to cancel any book deal at any point if an online scandal erupts over the writerâs conduct, alleged or proven.
Filters are effectively useless at preventing copyright infringement, but they do constitute a major barrier to entry for new companies â and they also stand in the way of breaking up Big Tech.
After all, if we say that anyone offering a public speech forum needs $100,000,000 (plus!) to build their own Content ID, we both exclude any new market entrants who donât have a hundred mil, and we establish that Google canât be subjected to breakups that would make it unable to afford to build and maintain filters like Content ID.
A scrappier, more scared online sector would be more responsive to appeals, too. Jamie âJWZâ Zawinski owns the DNA Lounge, San Franciscoâs leading independent (non-TicketMaster/LiveNation) club. A band he booked supplied him with a promotional video for an upcoming appearance, which Instagramâs (Facebook!) filter blocked. It took him 28 months to reinstate that video â 27.5 months after the band had come and gone.
These companies are able to steal our wages because they are monopolists. Filters reinforce monopoly by creating durable barriers to entry and also durable barriers to breakup.
Focusing on stay-down is an exercise in looking for our keys under the lamppost â we donât think we can move regulators and lawmakers to do something about corporate dominance, so we seek out remedies that make us feel better by cracking down on users.
Do you think that Google or Facebook or Apple or Amazon or Microsoftâs appeals system will be able to figure out whatâs going on? Are you prepared to have your own work withdrawn from circulation for 28 months while thatâs happening?
Are artistsâ rights groups prepared to staff a separate volunteer committee that does nothing but plead with Big Tech when crooks beat us to registering our works with them and then file copyright claims against us when we try to post our own books?
âStandard Measuresâ are a terrible idea. Arts groups could do excellent work in fighting monopolies â for example, the DoJ is suing to block the Simon and Schuster/Penguin Random House merger (thanks in part to complaints from the Authors Guild), and there is merger scrutiny on Big Techâs waves of acquisitions (more than one per week!). We could be in those dockets, demanding an end to wage theft. We could be amicus to the 200 newspapers suing Googbook.
But supporting âStandard Measuresâ is just a way to intervene on behalf of a handful of giant corporate monopolists who are hoping to shift a few balance points away from another handful of giant corporate monopolists. It only reinforces monopoly â and does nothing to put money in working creatorsâ pockets.