#when I make a bad take I post an uncontroversial meme

[vanilla-vivillon]

I picture them the same

[olderthannetfic]

How do we feel about the "Um just so you know the person you reblogged this from is an [insert undesirables category here]"? When it's some random meme or otherwise uncontroversial post, and not some elaborate political opinion post with a bunch of dogwhistles in it.

Because I just got it from a fandom acquaintance/friend and it felt really fucking unsettling.

Aside from the mutuals that I know from fandom and interact with, most of the other content I interact with on Tumblr is more about what it says than about who said it for me. I don't ever pay attention to who wrote what or which other Tumblr users they had beef with or whatever, I just read the post itself and decide if I like what it says or not. If someone posts something I REALLY dislike, I block them and move on, more in the hopes of seeing less of that sort of thing than with the intention of somehow eliminating that specific person. I never pay attention to who my mutuals are reblogging from and if I note that one of them reblogged something featuring a poster who's famously unhinged, I just assume they don't know and move on because I know my mutuals are reasonable people generally speaking. I like the anonymity of Tumblr and the focus on the content of the posts and not on specific people. It's why I hang out here and not on one of the platforms that are all about influencers and the like.

So today I was going through the blogs of a couple of people I don't follow to find a specific post and in the process I saw a fairly uncontroversial post I liked, reblogged it, and moved on. Then less than an hour later I was met with a wall of text in my DMs accusing that poster of having questionable political opinions and describing the beef they had with another person where they threatened them etc. etc.

TBH I felt incredibly uncomfortable with the level of scrutiny implied in paying attention to who I reblog random shit from, as well as the level of presumption in coming to my DMs and lecture me about it. I know nothing about the blogger they were talking about, have never interacted with him, and will probably never even have the opportunity or the desire to interact with him. He wasn't even the AUTHOR of the post, it was just on his profile. It makes me want to never post anything ever again.

I just... don't see the point of this sort of behaviour in general? "You shouldn't be giving [bad people] a platform" - look, I genuinely don't think that reblogging a pretty landscape from someone who turns out to be a TERF or whatever is platforming those beliefs in any way. I'm sorry, but I just don't see how my behaviour leads to any material harm to anyone. Even if I follow the person, the moment they start talking about TERF-y shit I'm gonna unfollow and/or block. The probability of me throwing all my well-developed political opinions down the drain and getting radicalized through the slippery slope of reblogging "CATS ARE SO CUTE WHEN THEY SWAT AT THINGS" from someone with a dogshit take about Palestine is literally zero. If it's the content of the post that's wrong, just explain why to me, or point out the dogwhistles or whatever. I'm open to being wrong in my opinions. I'm not open to my online friends acting like the fucking Stasi.

Maybe I'm just too old for these newfangled social politics but it just feels like either pointless catty high school drama or an attempt at social control that I can't help but interpret in a hostile manner. Even if it's followed by - as it was in my case - something along the lines of "obviously I'm not accusing YOU of anything!! I'm sorry it came off that way!!" when I pushed back against it. It feels like 1950s conservative housewives making sure you're not even greeting any of the town Undesirables at the grocery store, because you wouldn't want to be Morally Tainted by saying Hello to a divorcee!

It's kind of similar to the whole issue about people still writing HP fic. Am I interested in HP fic? TBH not at all - the author had soured it for me with her behaviour even before it was obvious how much she hated trans people. Do I think the people doing it are somehow harming anyone or putting money in JKR's pocket? I honestly can't see how, and so far none of the people adamantly against it have managed to explain it to me in a satisfying way, so I'm just gonna let it slide off me as another random internet hobby I don't get or care about.

--

My reaction is "Do you understand how Tumblr works? Do you?"

We have enough trouble with people reblogging barely-hidden anti-kink or homophobic shit. Who has time for cootie-based problems?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago Not in our name: Why European creators must oppose the EU's proposal to limit linking and censor the internet

The European Copyright Directive vote is in three days and it will be a doozy: what was once a largely uncontroversial grab bag of fixes to copyright is now a political firestorm, thanks to the actions of Axel Voss, the German MEP who changed the Directive at the last minute, sneaking in two widely rejected proposals on the same day the GDPR came into effect, forming a perfect distraction (you can contact your MEP about these at Save Your Internet).

These two proposals are:

1. "Censorship Machines": Article 13, which forces online providers to create databases of text, images, videos, code, games, mods, etc that anyone can add anything to -- if a user tries to post something that may match a "copyrighted work," in the database, the system has to censor them

2. "Link Tax": Article 11, which will only allow internet users to post links to news sites if the service they're using has bought a "linking license" from the news-source they're linking to; under a current proposal, links that contain more than two consecutive words from an article's headline will be illegal without a license.

We're all busy and we all rely on trusted experts to give us guidance on what side of an issue to take, and creators often take their cues from professional societies and from the entertainment industry, but in this case, both have proven to be unreliable.

In a recent tweetstorm, Niall from the UK's Society of Authors sets out his group's case for backing these proposals. As a UK author, I was alarmed to see an organisation that nominally represents me taking such misguided positions and I tried to rebut them, albeit within Twitter's limitations.

Here's a less fragmented version.

Niall writes that Article 11 ("link taxes") will not stop you from linking to the news. That's just wrong. If you don't host your own blog on your own server, you'll going to posting your links from one of the platforms, either a multinational, US-based company like Facebook, or a smaller EU competitor. Under Article 11, you can't link to a news-site without a license.

Article 11 doesn't actually define what a "link" or a "news site" is (this is a pretty serious oversight). But Article 11 is an EU-wide version of local laws that were already attempted in Spain and Germany, and under those laws, links that included the headline in "anchor text" (that's the underlined, blue text that goes with a hyperlink) were banned. In the current amendments, Axel Voss has proposed that using more than two consecutive words from a headline would not be allowed without a license.

Niall says that memes and other forms of parody will not be blocked by Article 13's filters, because they are exempted from European copyright. That's doubly wrong.

First, there are no EU-wide copyright exemptions. Under the 2001 Copyright Directive, European countries get to choose zero or more exemptions from a list of permissible ones.

Second, even in countries where parody is legal, Article 13's copyright filters won't be able to detect it. No one has ever written a software tool that can tell parody from mere reproduction, and such a thing is so far away from our current AI tools as to be science fiction (as both a science fiction writer and a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at the UK's Open University, I feel confident in saying this).

Niall says that Wikipedia won't be affected by Article 13 and Article 11. This is so wrong, I published a long article about it. tl;dr: Wikipedia's articles rely on being able to link to analyses of the news, which Article 11 will limit; Wikipedia's projects like Wikimedia Commons are not exempted from Article 13; and commercial Wikipedia offshoots lose what little carveouts are present in Article 13.

Niall says Article 13 will not hurt small businesses, only make them pay their share. This is wrong. Article 13's copyright filters will cost hundreds of millions to build (existing versions of these filters, like Youtube's Content ID, cost $60,000,000 and only filter a tiny slice of the media Article 13 requires), which will simply destroy small competitors to the US-based multinationals.

What's more, these filters are notorious for underblocking (missing copyrighted works -- a frequent complaint made by the big entertainment companies...when they're not demanding more of these filters) and overblocking (blocking copyrighted works that have been uploaded by their own creators because they are similar to something claimed by a giant corporation).

Niall says Article 13 is good for creators' rights. This is wrong. Creators benefit when there is a competitive market for our works. When a few companies monopolise the channels of publication, payment, distribution and promotion, creators can't shop around for better deals, because those few companies will all converge on the same rotten policies that benefit them at our expense.

We've seen this already: once Youtube became the dominant force in online video, they launched a streaming music service and negotiated licenses from all the major labels. Then Youtube told the independent labels and indie musicians that they would have to agree to the terms set by the majors -- or be shut out of Youtube forever. In a market dominated by Youtube, they were forced to take the terms. Without competition, Youtube became just another kind of major label, with the same rotten deals for creators.

Niall says that Article 13 will stop abuses of copyright like when the fast-fashion brand Zara ripped off designers for its clothing. This is wrong (and a bit silly, really). What Zara did was illegal already, and since Zara's clothes are physical objects in shops (and not images on the web), web filters will have no effect on them.

Niall says that Article 13 isn't censorship. This is wrong. Copyright filters always overblock, catching dolphins in their tuna-nets. It's easy to demonstrate that these filters are grossly overblocking. When the government orders private actors to take measures that stop you from posting lawful communications, that's censorship.

Niall says that multinational companies will get a "huge victory" if Article 13 is stopped. That's wrong. While it's true that the Big Tech companies would prefer not to have any rules, they could very happily live with these rules, because they would effectively end any competition from new entrants into the field. Spending a few hundred million to comply with the Copyright Directive is a cheap alternative to having to buy out or crush any new companies that pose a threat.

I sympathise with Niall. As someone's who's volunteered as a regional director for other creators' rights groups, I understand that they're well-intentioned and trying to stand up for their members' interests.

But the Society of Authors and its allies have it wrong here. Articles 11 and 13 are catastrophes for both free expression and artists' livelihoods. They're a bargain in which Europe's big entertainment companies propose to sell Big Tech an Eternal Internet Domination license for a few hundred mil, cementing both Big Content and Big Tech's strangleholds on our ability to earn a living and reach an audience.

Don't take my word for it. David Kaye, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, has condemned the proposals in the strongest possible terms.

And Wyclef Jean from the Fugees agrees, seeing Article 13 as a measure that will get between him and his audience by limiting his fans' ability to promote his work and pay his bills.

Meanwhile, Pascal Nègre (who recently stepped down after 20 years as President of Universal Music France) agrees, saying that the deal is "a net negative for artists, for the industry and, ultimately, for the public good."

Link taxes are a bad idea. In an era of fake news, anything that limits the ability of internet users to link to reliable news sources deals a terrible blow to our already weakened public discourse.

Copyright filters are an even worse idea. Not only will these both overblock and underblock, they'll also be ripe for abuse. Because the filters' proponents have rejected any penalties for fraudulently claiming copyright in works in order to censor them, anyone will be able to censor anything. You could claim all of Shakespeare's works on WordPress's filters, and no one would be able to quote Shakespeare until the human staff at the company had hand-deleted those entries -- and you could use bots to re-add those entries more quickly than they could be taken down.

More seriously, corrupt politicians and other public figures have already made a practice of using spurious copyright claims in order to censor unflattering news. Automating the process is a gift to any politician who wants to suppress video of an embarrassing campaign-event remark and any corrupt employer who wants to suppress video of an unsafe and abusive workplace incident.

Creators in the 21st Century struggle to earn a living -- just as we have in all the centuries since the invention of the printing press -- and we will forever be busy making things, and reliant on our professional organisations for guidance on which political currents run in our favour.

But there is a simple rule of thumb we can always follow that will keep us from being led astray: creators should always, always be on the side of free expression and always, always be opposed to censorship. We should always oppose anything that makes it easier to silence legitimate speech, anything that narrows who can control our public discourse by concentrating power into a few hands.

Creators, you have three days to talk to your lawmakers. Save Your Internet is the place to go to call, write and tweet them. This travesty is being undertaken in our name and we have a duty to stop it.

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/10/not-in-our-name.html

[nostalgebraist]

Emboldened by beer and the fact that no one yelled at me for the previous post, I am going to take that post further into ~unpopular opinion~ territory

The obvious possibility I elided in that post, for the sake of being uncontroversial, was this one: Richard Spencer does end up speaking at your college, or the college in your town.  The date and time of his speech arrive.  What do you do now?

If there’s a protest, the local WNs / neo-Nazis / etc. in the area are probably going to come and start fucking shit up, right?  I could be wrong but that is what I’d expect.  If you are going to protest, you are presumably aware of this and ready for it.

But one way or another that protest is going to get ugly.  A protester already got shot at a Milo event, and you can imagine how much worse it’s going to be with the kind of people Spencer attracts.

So if you don’t go to the protest, and people like you don’t go to the protest, and in fact the protest is very small or nonexistent, then . . . what, exactly?

I may be overly idealistic, but I do not, personally, think that many people (any people?) will be significantly influenced by simply experiencing Richard Spencer talking in person at a college.  This is largely because the internet already exists, and every horrible ideology out there is a few clicks away on the internet.  I suppose that Spencer’s physical presence there does “normalize” his ideology a bit: it sends the message that this is the kind of thing someone can end up giving a speech about at a college.  But college kids are not babies, and they’re not going to walk into that room normal and walk out chanting the Fourteen Words.  At most they’ll be pushed a little bit further down the gradient toward WN radicalization.  But little pushes like that are already happening, all the time, every time a white college kid reads a Slate article about the dark side of Pepe and starts curiously Googling and ends up binging The Right Stuff or something.

These sorts of ideologies get really flared up, largely, by the fear of physical violence.  That is what I think, anyway -- I mean that is my impression from what little learning and reading I have done.  Without that fear, what you have is a bunch of obnoxious kids posting Pepe memes and whining about feminazis.  You have the Milo crowd, basically.  When susceptible white people see incidents of violence that can be spun as “the Left hates white people and wants to kill us,” and the people they’re listening to spin them that way . . . that is how they get radicalized.  That is what makes them band together.  We do not want those bands to form.

Somehow the topic of discussion in my internet circles, in the last week, has become “is it OK to punch Nazis?”  This strikes me as a bizarre question.  Like, just a question that does not make any fucking sense as stated.  It seems to posit this abstract, trolley-problem-esque situation, in which you simply have the choices “punch Nazi” and “do not punch Nazi,” and nothing at all follows from this except that in one case the Nazi’s face hurts afterwards.

I think it may help clarify why I find this a bad question if we compare it to another question: “is it OK to punch cops?”  Note that the answer to this question does not automatically become “yes” if you just hate cops enough.  Thinking that all cops are bastards, that cops are racist and shoot black people all the time with no provocation, does not make the answer “yes.”  Even if someone who had the requisite privilege and/or good luck went up and punched some known-shitbag cop and caught it on video and escaped unseen, would we go around crowing about this ~epic win~ and remixing the video and shit?  Would anyone with their head on straight think that celebrating a performative non-lethal physical attack on an avatar of “racist cops” was going to do anything good for the people actually targeted by racist cops?  That guy will go home to his wife and kids and maybe have some extra medical bills, and meanwhile a thousand “Blue Lives Matter” type groups spring up on Facebook.

People talk about making neo-Nazis feel unsafe, so that they won’t come and bother your community.  This kind of thing makes sense in some cases and does not in others.  There are cases where these kinds of people have come into a town ready to wreak havoc, and the town bands together and shows them what they’re made of, and then they don’t bother that town anymore.  That works in certain kinds of situations.  For the situation that is “racist cops,” it obviously does not work.  Making racist cops “feel unsafe” is fucking terrifying.  They’re still going to come to your neighborhood, but now their trigger fingers are even itchier.  So we have a proof of concept there.

In the case at hand -- and let me be clear, this is me who knows next to nothing at all, I am just saying what appears to be true from little what I do know -- in the case at hand, I think it is crucial that the threat does not quite yet exist in coherent form.  There are not unified WN bands roving the streets of your city . . . yet.  There could be, if enough white people were stirred up by seemingly-alarming instances of violence, spun in the right way.  There could be, if Richard Spencer’s college tour turns into the occasion of a series of street brawls that makes a bunch of white people think they need to get organized with their fellows, instead of an series of boring non-events where a dweeb says the same things he’s said a hundred times before to a small, select audience of dweebs with smug anime avatars on twitter.

[theconservativebrief]

Today, Ted Cruz made a little Halloween joke, Tweeting a coded message patterned after the Zodiac, a notorious serial killer from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Happy Halloween pic.twitter.com/jIgTaIMzep

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 31, 2018

Displaying that he has a sense of humor about himself is part of a larger Cruz project over the past year to, under pressure from a surprisingly well-funded Beto O’Rourke campaign, render himself not so toxically disliked by his colleagues. Not so long ago, John Boehner even called him a “miserable son of a bitch.” Now he’s showing he can laugh about his bad reputation. Still, the fact remains that his reputation is really bad and that Republicans are only rallying to his side because they recognize that losing a senate seat in Texas would be a disaster.

So why does this keep coming up?

If I knew, I would be informing the proper authorities and not writing about it here.

The name, however, is used to denote an unknown serial killer who operated in northern California in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He murdered at least five people (and left two surviving victims) and is regarded as a leading suspect in four more murders. The Zodiac Killer corresponded with authorities and the public via letters and postcards sent to media organizations, occasionally cryptographically encoded, in which he claimed a total of 37 victims.

The perpetrator of these crimes was never identified, and the combination of the mystery with the publicity-seeking and cinematic flourishes — like signing his letters with a distinctive symbol and communicating in code — have made the killings a subject of national fascination for decades.

There are several books about the Zodiac Killer, one of which, by Robert Graysmith, was adapted into a 2007 film directed by David Fincher. The theory of Graysmith’s book — endorsed to a limited extent by Fincher’s film — is that the killer was Arthur Leigh Allen (who died in 1992), whom Graysmith links to the killings via a raft of circumstantial evidence.

But Allen’s culpability is contradicted by the fragmentary forensic evidence available. Allen’s DNA does not match DNA recovered from one of the Zodiac Killer’s stamps (Graysmith replies that the evidence was not stored with a view toward later DNA technology), and handwriting analysis indicates huge differences between the killer’s letters and any known writings of Allen’s.

The point is the Zodiac Killer’s true identity was never discovered, and he may well still be at large. Since the killings and the letters stopped, it seems likely that he abandoned murder as a hobby and moved into other social deviant behaviors like attending Princeton, working for George W. Bush, or spoiling the GOP’s best-laid plans to stop Donald Trump.

In all seriousness and as best we can tell, no. An exhaustive investigation by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump reveals that Cruz was born in 1970, while the Zodiac Killer’s first confirmed murder occurred in 1968. Therefore Cruz is not the Zodiac Killer.

Cruz’s birth certificate establishes this pretty clearly.

The same document also confirms that Cruz was born in Canada (specifically the province of Alberta, which is known informally as the Texas of Canada), and that his name is Rafael rather than Ted. (As Rafael is also my father’s name, I kind of wish Cruz went by Rafael, since it would make the Spanish spelling of this name better known in the United States and reduce the number of times his name gets misspelled “Raphael” like he’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle or a Renaissance painter.)

On the other hand, who even knows what an authentic Canadian birth certificate looks like? It could be a forgery. After all, a person capable of perpetrating the Zodiac Killer’s crimes — and getting away with it — could probably fake some paperwork.

Left: SFPD composite sketch of Zodiak Killer / Right: Cruz’s official portrait

It’s a joke. The joke appears to have originated way back in 2013 on the @RedPillAmerica Twitter account, which quipped during Cruz’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference that the subject of his address was going to be a confession of responsibility for the Zodiac Killer’s crimes.

#CPAC Alert: Ted Cruz is speaking!! His speech is titled: ‘This Is The Zodiac Speaking’

— Red Pill America (@RedPillAmerica) March 14, 2013

A few months later, in October, there was a two-week government shutdown largely as a result of a legislative strategy that Cruz hatched. His prominence grew. And it grew again as a result of his 2016 presidential campaign.

Cruz’s growing stature in American politics has provided occasion for more jokes about Ted Cruz. And one thing that happens on the internet is that when a joke has been made enough times it becomes a meme, and simply repeating the meme becomes a way of making a joke.

Many people think you can’t explain jokes, or that even trying to explain them ruins them.

The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant disagreed, explicating humor thusly:

Suppose this story to be told: An Indian at the table of an Englishman in Surat, when he saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth and overflowing, testified his great astonishment with many exclamations. When the Englishman asked him, “What is there in this to astonish you so much?” he answered, “I am not at all astonished that it should flow out, but I do wonder how you ever got it in.” At this story we laugh, and it gives us hearty pleasure; not because we deem ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man, or because of anything else in it that we note as satisfactory to the Understanding, but because our expectation was strained for a time and then was suddenly dissipated into nothing.

In Cruz’s case, what happens is that you expect to see someone criticizing him for his smarmy speaking style or his retrograde politics, but then your expectation winds up being strained for a time with the accusation that he is an infamous serial killer. When you realize that he is too young, dissipation strikes.

In addition, Cruz fits the basic serial killer profile. His colleagues in the GOP Senate caucus don’t like him. He’s a loner, ostracized by the key social networks among which he operates. Maybe he also kills people for pleasure? It’s difficult to say.

They sure seem to! After all, it was just in late February that Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, said of his Texas colleague: “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”

Graham was, of course, joking, but it’s a telling kind of joke. Nobody Cruz works with has anything good to say about him, and as of March 7 he’s in second place in the Republican Party primary and has zero endorsements from any of his fellow senators.

They really, really dislike him. What’s more, given that he’s a notorious serial killer, people really wouldn’t convict you if you killed him. You’d just be doing what had to be done to bring a dangerous criminal to justice.

On one level, it’s about the fact that he’s a cold-blooded killer who has evaded justice for decades. But on another level, Cruz has generated an enormous amount of ill will in Republican establishment circles by launching lines of political argument that they believe he knows to be false as part of a cynical scheme of self-promotion.

The standard Cruz move is to take some objective that is uncontroversial in conservative circles — repeal Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood — but also totally unacceptable to the Obama administration and not especially effective as a wedge issue, and then decide that congressional Republicans should achieve this goal all on their own. Cruz’s pitch will be that if Republicans simply exhibit sufficient solidarity and refuse to fund the government until Obama gives in to their goals, that Republicans will win. Then when it doesn’t work, Cruz blames his fellow Republicans rather than blaming President Obama.

The upshot of this is to create individual political problems for lots of Republican politicians while also undermining the GOP’s effort to do the one thing that could actually achieve these goals: win a presidential election.

In other words, they see Cruz as really the worst of all possible Washington worlds — an extremist who really just poses as more ideologically pure than colleagues, advancing his own personal agenda while setting back the movement’s cause.

That’s the kind of reputation that lands you friendless and alone, wandering the streets of Washington searching for the most dangerous game.

Original Source -> Ted Cruz and the Zodiac Killer, explained

via The Conservative Brief

[nothingman]

The European Copyright Directive vote is in three days and it will be a doozy: what was once a largely uncontroversial grab bag of fixes to copyright is now a political firestorm, thanks to the actions of Axel Voss, the German MEP who changed the Directive at the last minute, sneaking in two widely rejected proposals on the same day the GDPR came into effect, forming a perfect distraction (you can contact your MEP about these at Save Your Internet).

These two proposals are:

1. "Censorship Machines": Article 13, which forces online providers to create databases of text, images, videos, code, games, mods, etc that anyone can add anything to -- if a user tries to post something that may match a "copyrighted work," in the database, the system has to censor them.

2. "Link Tax": Article 11, which will only allow internet users to post links to news sites if the service they're using has bought a "linking license" from the news-source they're linking to; under a current proposal, links that repeat more than two consecutive words from an article's headline could be made illegal without a license.

We're all busy and we all rely on trusted experts to give us guidance on what side of an issue to take, and creators often take their cues from professional societies and from the entertainment industry, but in this case, both have proven to be unreliable.

In a recent tweetstorm, Niall from the UK's Society of Authors sets out his group's case for backing these proposals. As a UK author, I was alarmed to see an organisation that nominally represents me taking such misguided positions and I tried to rebut them, albeit within Twitter's limitations.

Here's a less fragmented version.

Niall writes that Article 11 ("link taxes") will not stop you from linking to the news. That's just wrong. The Article calls for new rights for publishers to block even very short quotations of articles and headlines. Those pushing the Article have suggested that quoting a "single word" might be acceptable to them, but not more.

Article 11 doesn't actually define what level of quotation is permitted (this is a pretty serious oversight). But Article 11 is an EU-wide version of local laws that were already attempted in Spain and Germany, and under those laws, links that included the headline in "anchor text" (that's the underlined, blue text that goes with a hyperlink) were banned. In the current amendments, Axel Voss has proposed that using more than two consecutive words from a headline would not be allowed without a license.

Niall says that memes and other forms of parody will not be blocked by Article 13's filters, because they are exempted from European copyright. That's doubly wrong.

First, there's no EU-wide exemption for parody. Under the 2001 Copyright Directive, European countries get to choose zero or more exemptions from a list of twenty permissible ones. And as you can see from this patchwork map of those exceptions, there are plenty of countries where you can still be sued for infringement for a parody. Which means that a site operating in that country will be liable.

Second, even in countries where parody is legal, Article 13's copyright filters won't be able to detect it. No one has ever written a software tool that can tell parody from mere reproduction, and such a thing is so far away from our current AI tools as to be science fiction (as both a science fiction writer and a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at the UK's Open University, I feel confident in saying this).

Niall says that Wikipedia won't be affected by Article 13 and Article 11. This is so wrong, I published a long article about it. tl;dr: Wikipedia's articles rely on being able to link to analyses of the news, which Article 11 will limit; Wikipedia's projects like Wikimedia Commons are not exempted from Article 13; and commercial Wikipedia offshoots lose what little carveouts are present in Article 13.

Niall says Article 13 will not hurt small businesses, only make them pay their share. This is wrong. Article 13's copyright filters will cost hundreds of millions to build (existing versions of these filters, like Youtube's Content ID, cost $60,000,000 and only filter a tiny slice of the media Article 13 requires), which will simply destroy small competitors to the US-based multinationals.

What's more, these filters are notorious for blocking lawful uses, blocking copyrighted works that have been uploaded by their own creators (because they are similar to something claimed by a giant corporation), and even missing copyrighted works.

Niall says Article 13 is good for creators' rights. This is wrong. Creators benefit when there is a competitive market for our works. When a few companies monopolise the channels of publication, payment, distribution, and promotion, creators can't shop around for better deals, because those few companies will all converge on the same rotten policies that benefit them at our expense.

We've seen this already: once Youtube became the dominant force in online video, they launched a streaming music service and negotiated licenses from all the major labels. Then Youtube told the independent labels and indie musicians that they would have to agree to the terms set by the majors -- or be shut out of Youtube forever. In a market dominated by Youtube, they were forced to take the terms. Without competition, Youtube became just another kind of major label, with the same rotten deals for creators.

Niall says that Article 13 will stop abuses of copyright like when the fast-fashion brand Zara ripped off designers for its clothing. This is wrong (and a bit silly, really). Zara's clothes are physical objects in shops (and not files that Zara posts to user-generated content sites), so web filters do not address any infringement of this type.

Niall says that Article 13 isn't censorship. This is wrong. Copyright filters always overblock, catching dolphins in their tuna-nets. It's easy to demonstrate that these filters are grossly overblocking. When the government orders private actors to take measures that stop you from posting lawful communications, that's censorship.

Niall says that multinational companies will get a "huge victory" if Article 13 is stopped. That's wrong. While it's true that the Big Tech companies would prefer not to have any rules, they could very happily live with these rules, because they would effectively end any competition from new entrants into the field. Spending a few hundred million to comply with the Copyright Directive is a cheap alternative to having to buy out or crush any new companies that pose a threat.

I sympathise with Niall. As someone's who's volunteered as a regional director for other creators' rights groups, I understand that they're well-intentioned and trying to stand up for their members' interests.

But the Society of Authors and its allies have it wrong here. Articles 11 and 13 are catastrophes for both free expression and artists' livelihoods. They're a bargain in which Europe's big entertainment companies propose to sell Big Tech an Eternal Internet Domination license for a few hundred mil, cementing both Big Content and Big Tech's strangleholds on our ability to earn a living and reach an audience.

Don't take my word for it. David Kaye, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, has condemned the proposals in the strongest possible terms.

And Wyclef Jean from the Fugees agrees, seeing Article 13 as a measure that will get between him and his audience by limiting his fans' ability to promote his work and pay his bills.

Meanwhile, Pascal Nègre (who recently stepped down after 20 years as President of Universal Music France) agrees, saying that the deal was "a net negative for artists, for the industry and, ultimately, for the public good."

Link taxes are a bad idea. In an era of fake news, anything that limits the ability of internet users to link to reliable news sources deals a terrible blow to our already weakened public discourse.

Copyright filters are an even worse idea. Not only will these both overblock and underblock, they'll also be ripe for abuse. Because the filters' proponents have rejected any penalties for fraudulently claiming copyright in works in order to censor them, anyone will be able to censor anything. You could claim all of Shakespeare's works on Wordpress's filters, and no one would be able to quote Shakespeare until the human staff at the company have hand-deleted those entries.

More seriously, corrupt politicians and other public figures have already made a practice of using spurious copyright claims in order to censor unflattering news. Automating the process is a gift to any politician who wants to suppress video of an embarrassing campaign-event remark and any corrupt employer who wants to suppress video of an unsafe and abusive workplace incident.

Creators in the 21st Century struggle to earn a living -- just as we have in all the centuries since the invention of the printing press -- and we will forever be busy making things, and reliant on our professional organisations for guidance on which political currents run in our favour.

But there is a simple rule of thumb we can always follow that will keep us from being led astray: creators should always, always be on the side of free expression and always, always be opposed to censorship. We should always oppose anything that makes it easier to silence legitimate speech, anything that narrows who can control our public discourse by concentrating power into a few hands.

Creators, you have three days to talk to your lawmakers. Save Your Internet is the place to go to call, write and tweet them. This travesty is being undertaken in our name and we have a duty to stop it.

via Deeplinks

[neptunecreek]

Not In Our Name: Why European Creators Should Oppose the EU's Proposal To Limit Linking and Censor The Internet

The European Copyright Directive vote is in three days and it will be a doozy: what was once a largely uncontroversial grab bag of fixes to copyright is now a political firestorm, thanks to the actions of Axel Voss, the German MEP who changed the Directive at the last minute, sneaking in two widely rejected proposals on the same day the GDPR came into effect, forming a perfect distraction (you can contact your MEP about these at Save Your Internet).

These two proposals are:

1. "Censorship Machines": Article 13, which forces online providers to create databases of text, images, videos, code, games, mods, etc that anyone can add anything to -- if a user tries to post something that may match a "copyrighted work," in the database, the system has to censor them.

2. "Link Tax": Article 11, which will only allow internet users to post links to news sites if the service they're using has bought a "linking license" from the news-source they're linking to; under a current proposal, links that repeat more than two consecutive words from an article's headline could be made illegal without a license.

We're all busy and we all rely on trusted experts to give us guidance on what side of an issue to take, and creators often take their cues from professional societies and from the entertainment industry, but in this case, both have proven to be unreliable.

In a recent tweetstorm, Niall from the UK's Society of Authors sets out his group's case for backing these proposals. As a UK author, I was alarmed to see an organisation that nominally represents me taking such misguided positions and I tried to rebut them, albeit within Twitter's limitations.

Here's a less fragmented version.

Niall writes that Article 11 ("link taxes") will not stop you from linking to the news. That's just wrong. The Article calls for new rights for publishers to block even very short quotations of articles and headlines. Those pushing the Article have suggested that quoting a "single word" might be acceptable to them, but not more.

Article 11 doesn't actually define what level of quotation is permitted (this is a pretty serious oversight). But Article 11 is an EU-wide version of local laws that were already attempted in Spain and Germany, and under those laws, links that included the headline in "anchor text" (that's the underlined, blue text that goes with a hyperlink) were banned. In the current amendments, Axel Voss has proposed that using more than two consecutive words from a headline would not be allowed without a license.

Niall says that memes and other forms of parody will not be blocked by Article 13's filters, because they are exempted from European copyright. That's doubly wrong.

First, there's no EU-wide exemption for parody. Under the 2001 Copyright Directive, European countries get to choose zero or more exemptions from a list of twenty permissible ones. And as you can see from this patchwork map of those exceptions, there are plenty of countries where you can still be sued for infringement for a parody. Which means that a site operating in that country will be liable.

Second, even in countries where parody is legal, Article 13's copyright filters won't be able to detect it. No one has ever written a software tool that can tell parody from mere reproduction, and such a thing is so far away from our current AI tools as to be science fiction (as both a science fiction writer and a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at the UK's Open University, I feel confident in saying this).

Niall says that Wikipedia won't be affected by Article 13 and Article 11. This is so wrong, I published a long article about it. tl;dr: Wikipedia's articles rely on being able to link to analyses of the news, which Article 11 will limit; Wikipedia's projects like Wikimedia Commons are not exempted from Article 13; and commercial Wikipedia offshoots lose what little carveouts are present in Article 13.

Niall says Article 13 will not hurt small businesses, only make them pay their share. This is wrong. Article 13's copyright filters will cost hundreds of millions to build (existing versions of these filters, like Youtube's Content ID, cost $60,000,000 and only filter a tiny slice of the media Article 13 requires), which will simply destroy small competitors to the US-based multinationals.

What's more, these filters are notorious for blocking lawful uses, blocking copyrighted works that have been uploaded by their own creators (because they are similar to something claimed by a giant corporation), and even missing copyrighted works.

Niall says Article 13 is good for creators' rights. This is wrong. Creators benefit when there is a competitive market for our works. When a few companies monopolise the channels of publication, payment, distribution, and promotion, creators can't shop around for better deals, because those few companies will all converge on the same rotten policies that benefit them at our expense.

We've seen this already: once Youtube became the dominant force in online video, they launched a streaming music service and negotiated licenses from all the major labels. Then Youtube told the independent labels and indie musicians that they would have to agree to the terms set by the majors -- or be shut out of Youtube forever. In a market dominated by Youtube, they were forced to take the terms. Without competition, Youtube became just another kind of major label, with the same rotten deals for creators.

Niall says that Article 13 will stop abuses of copyright like when the fast-fashion brand Zara ripped off designers for its clothing. This is wrong (and a bit silly, really). Zara's clothes are physical objects in shops (and not files that Zara posts to user-generated content sites), so web filters do not address any infringement of this type.

Niall says that Article 13 isn't censorship. This is wrong. Copyright filters always overblock, catching dolphins in their tuna-nets. It's easy to demonstrate that these filters are grossly overblocking. When the government orders private actors to take measures that stop you from posting lawful communications, that's censorship.

Niall says that multinational companies will get a "huge victory" if Article 13 is stopped. That's wrong. While it's true that the Big Tech companies would prefer not to have any rules, they could very happily live with these rules, because they would effectively end any competition from new entrants into the field. Spending a few hundred million to comply with the Copyright Directive is a cheap alternative to having to buy out or crush any new companies that pose a threat.

I sympathise with Niall. As someone's who's volunteered as a regional director for other creators' rights groups, I understand that they're well-intentioned and trying to stand up for their members' interests.

But the Society of Authors and its allies have it wrong here. Articles 11 and 13 are catastrophes for both free expression and artists' livelihoods. They're a bargain in which Europe's big entertainment companies propose to sell Big Tech an Eternal Internet Domination license for a few hundred mil, cementing both Big Content and Big Tech's strangleholds on our ability to earn a living and reach an audience.

Don't take my word for it. David Kaye, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, has condemned the proposals in the strongest possible terms.

And Wyclef Jean from the Fugees agrees, seeing Article 13 as a measure that will get between him and his audience by limiting his fans' ability to promote his work and pay his bills.

Meanwhile, Pascal Nègre (who recently stepped down after 20 years as President of Universal Music France) agrees, saying that the deal was "a net negative for artists, for the industry and, ultimately, for the public good."

Link taxes are a bad idea. In an era of fake news, anything that limits the ability of internet users to link to reliable news sources deals a terrible blow to our already weakened public discourse.

Copyright filters are an even worse idea. Not only will these both overblock and underblock, they'll also be ripe for abuse. Because the filters' proponents have rejected any penalties for fraudulently claiming copyright in works in order to censor them, anyone will be able to censor anything. You could claim all of Shakespeare's works on Wordpress's filters, and no one would be able to quote Shakespeare until the human staff at the company have hand-deleted those entries.

More seriously, corrupt politicians and other public figures have already made a practice of using spurious copyright claims in order to censor unflattering news. Automating the process is a gift to any politician who wants to suppress video of an embarrassing campaign-event remark and any corrupt employer who wants to suppress video of an unsafe and abusive workplace incident.

Creators in the 21st Century struggle to earn a living -- just as we have in all the centuries since the invention of the printing press -- and we will forever be busy making things, and reliant on our professional organisations for guidance on which political currents run in our favour.

But there is a simple rule of thumb we can always follow that will keep us from being led astray: creators should always, always be on the side of free expression and always, always be opposed to censorship. We should always oppose anything that makes it easier to silence legitimate speech, anything that narrows who can control our public discourse by concentrating power into a few hands.

Creators, you have three days to talk to your lawmakers. Save Your Internet is the place to go to call, write and tweet them. This travesty is being undertaken in our name and we have a duty to stop it.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2CGlU7Z

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