In Mar 2019, the EU approved the new #CopyrightDirective by an absurdly slim margin (it passed by 5 votes and later 10 MEPs said they got confused and pressed the wrong button; due to procedural rules, despite an amended total showing a majority AGAINST, it still passed).
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Specifically, the part that passed through this bureaucratic, incoherent nonsense was #Article13 (now confusingly called #Article17), which imposed a duty on online platforms to stop their users from infringing copyright.
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This proposal has a bizarre history (everything about this is bizarre). It started as a mandate for copyright filters (like Youtube's ContentID, which cost $100m and counting). Then Axel Voss, the MEP in charge of it, said it absolutely was NOT a proposal to mandate filters.
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Then Voss admitted that there was probably no way to accomplish the Directive's goals without forcing all online speech through a copyright filter. Then the EU's various legal and human rights bodies said that the proposal could NOT require filters.
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Confused yet? So is everyone else.
The EU Commission is now preparing guidance for the EU member states, who must each turn the Directive into a national law. And that brings us to today.
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A coalition of giant entertainment companies has filed comments with the Commission that were the most bizarre turn in this saga yet, insisting that this was always about mandating filters and all countries should mandate that all speech be filtered:
They just pretended that subjecting every European citizen's every online utterance to interception and algorithmic processing wasn't a giant, glaring, radioactive violation of the #GDPR, the EU's privacy law (it most assuredly is!):
I. Crisply define what kind of online services this applies to
II. Clarify that while platforms have to try to obtain copyright licenses from rightsholders, the standard is "due diligence" and is tempered by the principle of proportionality and fundamental human rights
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III. No tech mandates
IV. No "general monitoring" allowed - governments can't order online services to spy on their user
V. Clarify that the fact that copyright filters exist does not mean that they are "best practices"
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VI. Don't burden small businesses with requirements designed for Big Tech
VII. Clarify that filters can't determine whether something is infringing - only humans who understand copyright law can do that
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VIII. You can't protect users' free speech rights by taking down their content and then telling them they can appeal the decision
IX: Address the fact that subjecting users' speech to filtering is a massive, illegal privacy violation
eof/
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A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and postdocs - for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The thing that LLMs have changed in my friend's law school is *letters of reference*. Historically, students would only ask a prof for a letter of reference if they knew the prof really rated them.
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I have an excellent excuse for this week's linkdump: I'm in Germany, but I'm supposed to be in LA, and I'm not, because London Heathrow shut down due to a power-station fire.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Which meant I spent all day yesterday running around like a headless chicken, trying to get home in time for my gig in San Diego on Monday (don't worry, I sorted it):
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Paula Le Dieu is one of the smartest, most committed archivists I know. Many years ago, she shared a neat analogy with me about the paywalling of public archives.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can't do your job:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
If you pay attention to the hype, you'd think that all the action on "AI" (an incoherent grab-bag of only marginally related technologies) was in generating text and images. Man, is that ever wrong.
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Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
My theory of the "shitty technology adoption curve" holds that you can predict the future impact of abusive technologies on you by observing the way these are deployed against people who have less social power than you:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: