Mulled EU copyright shakeup will turn us into robo-censors – GitHub Code-repository GitHub has raised the alarm about a pending European copyright proposal THAT could force it to implement automated filtering systems – referred to by detractors as "censorship machines" – that would hinder developers working with free and open source software. The proposal, part of Article 13 of the EU …
The main reason why I am heavily against proposals like these and would even label them as utterly stupid, narrow minded and a plain out scam is because this is yet another classic example of a government which gets TONS of money in the forms of taxes yet seems quite busy in coming up with ways to do less. While still getting paid the same insane amounts of taxes of course. Don't expect to get a tax break anytime soon.
When they feel that the law is being violated then they should act against that. That's in its very essence why the population is paying taxes: to allow the government to act on our behalf and work on the best interests of the community. That's it! The police are actually paid by us, you and me, and the idea is that they enforce the rules which have been set out so that we can have a safe and pleasant society.
So my problem with this, even though I can only look at what's happening in my country, is that I see the police do less and less. No kidding: if you want to report a crime in Holland then chances are high that you'll be told to either do this online, or to make an appointment; they can probably squeeze you in somewhere after 3 weeks. In all fairness: this does heavily depend on the police station you visit. But even so it still makes one wonder how much chances there will be left to solve a crime after 3 weeks.
I'm not out for a police state mind you, absolutely not, but I do think its fair to demand that the police does what we're paying them for. And that does NOT include getting bystanders to do their work for them, like in this case. Shouldn't these rules supposed to be here in order to protect us?
Instead of "working hard" to come up with new proposals which allows the government to do even less, why not come up with solid solutions which can help the police address these 'crimes' (assuming there actually are some, copyright infriction usually only boils down to monetary problems).
And I also feel a little bit insulted, even though I have hardly any ties with GitHub, but it's yet another (indirect!) attack on the freedom of expression to me. I mean... GitHub is mostly used to host open source projects, and people are mostly sharing their intellectual property in a way which can benefit everyone.
If you have a problem with someone's work take it up with them or with GitHub. But don't come up with stupidity like this. Especially because all this nonsense does is cater to some cry babies who - generally speaking - can't even provide a solid showcase in how much revenue was "stolen" from them when being asked to.
@ShelLuser
"...to allow the government to act on our behalf and work on the best interests of the community..."
"The police are actually paid by us, you and me, and the idea is that they enforce the rules which have been set out so that we can have a safe and pleasant society."
That may be the theory, and might even be the case in Scandinavia, but in the UK neither group see it like that. They really don't.
Their order of priority is:
1. Themselves
2. Themselves
3. Themselves
I think your basic point gets lost in the verbiage. (I often do the same.) The basic point that enforcing the laws is being passed on to others, be they corporations or to each individual is dead on. The state, which has a monopoly on force, is supposed to be doing the enforcement. Not GitHub, a personal or corporate websit, especially Google and that lot.
I understand that point.
Stupid counterexample: Say I own a house. I allow people to come in and peddle drugs or other illegal goods. I would argue that by letting people come in and openly do that I can be held complicit in any of these crimes - under current law. Similar if you allow people to share illegal material through your platform. As soon as you are aware of what's going on you have to stop and report it. Closing your eyes and going "lalalalalaaa, I cannot see you" doesn't help you.
As I said, that's a stupid but maybe sort of helpful example.
And no, I cannot think of a good solution. But I think if you are a copyright holder you should get paid for your work. And if you use a software library without a clear license agreement for anything production you deserve to be hit with a sockful of thinwire terminators - that argument by Github doesn't count.
Ehm, no - there are rules which states you have to act, and not wait for the state to come in.
For example you can't leave expired products on shelf, and wait for a customer to complain and call the police to remove them.
Receiving stolen goods is also a crime... and all these sites prosper hosting someone else's contents, often stolen - and the excuse "we are too large to abide to the rules" can't stand.
FM radio broadcasting was invented in 1933 says Wikipedia. The Big Bang, from which the oldest radio white noise originates, took place about 13.8 billion years ago. Either way, it is surely out of copyright by now. At worst, we have to look for the origin of FM radio receiver powered by battery, whose output degenerates to white noise as it runs out.
Science fiction reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stardroppers
An obvious allegory of the subversive social menace of teenagers passively littered all over the place listening to portable transistor radio with earpiece playing unworldly alien sounds like The Beatles and Who? and Purple Hayes and Terry Wogan And The Pirates. If any of that makes sense for 1962.
They are based in California. They block access to EU customers and if that's a problem for their EU customers, those customers can tell their local politicians about it, or they can set up their own "git repo-hosting" website and ignore complaints from US lawyers. It's not like GH is a technically complex web-site.
These constant wrangles about whose law applies to whose website amaze me. I can't think of any other domain of human activity where people *expect* that a single entity should abide by two contradictory sets of rules at the same time.
Precisely my point. After a certain point, I get up on my hind legs and give The Middle Finger. And in case they miss the point, it's in stereo. Has happened here with Toshiba & Ericsson, the US Government, Microsoft, and now the EU. They are pushing this shit on to the rest of us. Y'all want to force the non-EU population under your laws. Fuck off.
"I can't think of any other domain of human activity where people *expect* that a single entity should abide by two contradictory sets of rules at the same time."
Oh i dunno, marriage* has moments like that.
More correctly that one person expects the other to abide by the two contradictory sets of rules at the same time.
*most likely civil partnerships also.
What's so hard about finding copied copyright code automatically ?
It merely needs all the code that's to be protected be made available for diffing against github et al. That shouldn't be a problem for those with lots of code : companies like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. already have big server farms, right ?
It merely needs all the code that's to be protected be made available for diffing against github et al.
Hmmm how about; If you want something covered by copyright then you *MUST* register the source with a public registrar who will hand out a copyright number/code. That way we can all check to make sure that our code is not infringing... :)
What is even worse, even many multi-statement code sections are going to be similar, because sometimes there is just one or very few ways to do something, or the code section in both programs may have originated from a common source that is in the public domain, or liberalry licensed.
But no doubt this will be a gold mine for IP lawyers.
Software copyrights are evaluated partly on structure, treating variable names used in the same way as equivalent. I recall looking at the infamous "rangecheck" code for a bit under a minute and concluding that there were, in practical terms, exactly two ways to code it, unique up to choice of variable names. This means, of course, that if three programmers of modest skills addressed the problem rangecheck solves, it is a near certainty that at least one of them was an infringer.
Automating checks for such things on github seems a singularly bad idea.
Software to automatically generate nuisance litigation based on bogus software source code copyright violations was developed and deployed extensively by The SCO Group against DaimlerChrysler, Autozone, IBM, Novell, all Linux hosting companies and all Linux users. Although thoroughly debunked in days, the litigation went on for years funded by investors who presumably later switched to Theranos and license fees that The SCO Group withheld from Novell.
Although The SCO Group's epic folly should stand alone as the most ridiculous copyright claim of all time, Oracle stepped up to supply stiff competition by demanding billions for rangecheck.
We are lucky that Judge Alsup taught himself to program so he could understand what was going on. I have confidence that with automated software generating thousands of false positives per hour, most cases will not be dealt with as promptly and efficiently as The SCO Group and Oracle.
Say I write some code and have my copyright message in the code, maybe register copyright by whatever pointless method EU want ...
How no earth will a system detect infringement of my copyright?
Assuming the code is non trivial then there will be all sorts of clashes with other code
e.g. in my code is a helper method to read text from a file, yes it's trivial, but handy for unit tests and if anything alters in terms of file raeding needs it can be done in one place
lets assume signature a bit like this
string ReadFileAsText(string fullFilePath)
Its possible that within lots of other code in a repository is the same method signature
There certainly will be matches on small code fragments, who has not seen bits of code that do counting of something and have a line that defines and initializes the count
e.g. int count = 0
How much "match" will count as infringement 5%, 10%, 90%, 100%
What if its only 5% but the 5% happens to be the most innovative methods they have "stolen" from my code as thats the key "secret sauce" that made it of value?
What if they take the code and obfuscate it? All teh special functionality is there but code "text" looks vastly different to the stolen original
Lots of work parsing the code, will need to be language specific, so that comments can be "ignored" when evaluating code copying (otherwise just altering / increasing comments would easily take the degree of matching down)
Yet more magic thinking that can ony cause problems.
There's enough legislation dealing with copyright breaches already, making repository hosts do copyright scans (that will have masses of false positives & negatives) is not achieving much other than letting bureaucrat tick the "something must be done" box
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The only problem is, much code can become the same, not because of copying but because of using the same methods.
If you create a python script that for example fetches an image by running an open API's functions in some places, it is highly possible that a closed project which also uses said open API could have a function that is identical as it's performing the same task with the same API.
There are many situations where identical code can appear when performing the same task. Doesn't always mean it's been copied.
Then of course, there are patent laws which prevent you from coding something to do something which some big corp numpty has patented.
For example, our EPOS system synchronizes with our website (Selling in store notifies the website server, server adjusts stock levels online and visa versa, keeps a complete log and totals for each day including who sold what etc, don't panic though, the EPOS system uses an stunnel to connect to the web server directly! None of it flies over in plain text!), the whole thing is custom (which is why the EPOS can run Linux, keeping the company Linux only, this way the EPOS software gets to stay native instead of inside internet explorer or something :P). The downside of this is of course the issue that if the store looses internet connectivity it has to revert to an "offline mode" which has no sync.
I mention this because the methods I use are almost certainly copyrighted somewhere. But I did it myself and I'm not too fussed about copyright, I didn't take anyone else's code or copy anything. I just built it to task.
Should I be considered a pirate/thief for doing it myself instead of paying some big corp? In the eyes of the law almost certainly!
- Anon because of confession.
The EU parliament know this is bad, they pointed that out. The specific section was then redrafted, not by the parliament, but by someone working for the commission, who had drafted similar legislation in one EU country or the other (can't remember which), and ignored the objections raised.
It is a shame the EU parliament never exercises its ability to block legislation, but then what can we expect when we put people like Farage in there?
The Github content is freely examinable.
Why not instead mandate access to the repos to an accredited external review authority that could flag the issues? Developers that really care about this could then sign up for it. Mandate a need to act on a takedown request, with an arbitration/review mechanism.
If dev X has issue Y against repo Z, that is much better decided externally and then notified to Github. There is no reason for Github to host "stolen" content, once that has been established, but asking each hosting provider to review stuff against potentially multiple jurisdictions' infringement criteria is silly.
Of course, having a member of the Pirate Party come out against this dumb directive makes it easier to dismiss criticism as the moochers' wish to continue unimpeded. But I don't think a lot of the honest contributors to Github, and I assume they are in the majority, would find any great amount of merit in this proposal as it stands.
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