Tag: Article 13

@GTP_Updates May Explain Concentrations of Article 13 Astroturf

There probably has never been as revealing an insight into Google’s short, loathsome and treacherous lifespan as the Article 13 legislative process in the European Parliament.  It has put a microscope on Google’s fake lobbying campaign, but it also shows the extent of Google’s influence peddling to protect its profits from the European version of what we call the DMCA safe harbor.

The concentration of the Article 13 astroturf campaign seems to be centered in Germany and Poland.  No surprise there–Google has been investing in European academics for a decade.  Thanks to the Google Transparency Project, we know considerable detail about the extent of that investment.

Google has spent millions of euros funding European academics to write papers on digital policy, bankrolling university institutes and think-tanks in London, Berlin, Brussels, Paris and Warsaw

Over the past decade, Google has invested heavily in European academic institutions to develop an influential network of friendly academics, paying tens of millions of euros to think tanks, universities and professors that write research papers supporting its business interests.

Those academics and institutions span the length and breadth of Europe, from countries with major influence in European Union policymaking, such as Germany and France, to Eastern European nations like Poland….

For example, Google has paid at least €9 million to help set up the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) at Berlin’s Humboldt University. The new group launched in 2011, after German policymakers voiced growing concerns over Google’s accumulated power.

The Institute has so far published more than 240 scholarly papers on internet policy issues, many onissues of central importance to Google’s bottom line. HIIG also runs a Google-funded journal, with which several Google-funded scholars are affiliated, to publish such research….

And in Poland, Google has funded the Digital Economy Lab (DELab) at the University of Warsaw, similarly described as an interdisciplinary institute that will research and design policies governing technology issues. Second, Google has created and endowed chairs at higher-learning institutions in European countries including France, Spain, Belgium, and Poland. Those chairs have often been occupied by academics with a track record of producing research that closely aligns with Google’s policy priorities….

Europe’s importance for Google cannot be overstated. It is both a key market, with usage rates above 80 percent in many countries, and the most organized source of opposition to its expansion plans. The European Commission is arguably the only regulator beyond the U.S. with sufficient clout to cause Google to alter its conduct. European officials have levied billions of dollars in fines for antitrust violations and have enacted some of the most stringent laws in the world to protect consumer privacy.

Strangely enough–sarcasm alert–the countries where Google has made its most significant purchase of academic mind share are also the countries where opposition to Article 13 seems the greatest, especially Germany and Poland.

But the larger point is that there should be no doubt in the mind of any artist anywhere in the world that Google and its fellow travelers are not your friends, never were and never will be.

Read the report here.

Ben Sizer (@kylotan): Must read myths & facts on Article 13

We’re told that Article 13 will ‘break the internet’, and one of the ways it would cause that is by forcing YouTube and similar sites to shut down, or block EU users from uploading or accessing the site, or impose some other draconian resolution. This would supposedly happen because there is far too much content being uploaded – e.g. 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute, according to Google’s own data – and Article 13 makes the content-sharing sites liable for all of it. Opponents claim this is insurmountable because:

  1. It’s too much content for a human moderating team to manually check every upload.
  2. It’s too complex a task for a computer to automatically check without causing many false positives (i.e. videos judged to infringe when a human assessment would rule otherwise).

These two points are true, at least for a massive general purpose site such as YouTube, maybe even smaller ones such as Tumblr. However, what Article 13 opponents are missing is that not only is it not a choice between one or the other, but there are other tools, processes, and policies available to augment content checking by humans and computers. For example, why is Wikipedia (another top-10 website, like YouTube) not rife with copyright infringement, even though you don’t need an account to edit it? Why do we not keep hearing tales of Bandcamp being full of other people’s music, even though it’s obviously designed to allow users to distribute music to the public? It turns out that ensuring your platform is mostly free of infringement is not as impossible as some people would have you believe.

Read the post by Ben Sizer on Ebony Fortress

@crispinhunt: Critics of Article 13 are Weaving a Narrative with No Relationship to Fact

[An excellent post by songwriter and BASCA chair Crispin Hunt on the remarkable disinformation campaign being waged by legacy tech companies against safe harbor reform in Europe.]

A recent article by Rhett Jones, which appeared in Gizmodo, perfectly encapsulated the feverish disinformation campaign around Article 13 being undertaken by US tech companies and their minions. So I thought it would be worth taking a few minutes to help Parliamentarians to closely examine it.

Let’s start with the title: The End of All That’s Good and Pure About the Internet.

One might be forgiven for thinking that was written ten years ago when the promise of the internet was still bright – and not blighted by things like revenge porn, doxing, phishing, sex trafficking of minors, rampant theft, fake news, interference in elections, massive privacy violations, etc.

But no, Rhett Jones, and the entire campaign against Article 13, is very much premised on this idea that the internet as we know it is “good and pure,” and that any change to its governance would end this wondrous medium.

Read the post on Music Business Worldwide

@andreworlowski: OK, Google? Probably not! EU settles on wording for copyright reform legislation

The EU has finally settled on the wording of its Digital Single Market copyright reform package, a three-years-in-the-making effort, greeting the agreement with a sizzling rebuke of the “misinformation campaigns” around the measures….

In a press conference today announcing the measures, MEP and Conservative legal affairs spokesman Sajjad Karim said the process had highlighted a disturbing development in the “political culture”.

“The ability of some of the platforms to carry out campaigns [against the legislation] is a good thing,” Karim said. “But the way some of these have been carried out really has been against the grain of how a democratic society should function.”

Individual staff members had been targeted, he said, by “elements that have misled the public about what we’re trying to achieve, and we’re sure will mislead the public as to what we have actually achieved. It strengthens our resolve to make sure we don’t allow European citizens to fall victim to that sort of misinformation.”

Read the post on The Register