Art Wars II — Copyright Awakens
It’s been several decades already since the dawn of commercial use of the internet. Since then, there’s been one industry that has seemed to be struggling with the implication of this phenomenon. Well, industry. I’m talking about law. This Roman-based system full of Latin and seemingly obvious principles just couldn’t get the hang of it.
One of the issues that has been discussed during past several months is copyright. Yes, this one:

The usage of this twisted little C had been clear before the upraise of the online world. You simply don’t use artwork that isn’t yours. But during the past 5 years it has all become even more twisted. Eventually the EU lawmakers decided to step into it and adapt the copyright law to today’s conditions. They probably thought it would rise their preferences. It could make them look cool, up-to-date. But they were wrong — and really wrong.
The whole directive is too long to deal with it here. The friction is the article 13, or as some call it, the censorship machine article. Long story short, it addresses the providers of services that enable their users store audio-visual content (such as Youtube, Facebook, Pinterest). These should take all possible measures to ensure that the content they publish isn’t interfering with somebody’s intellectual property rights.
A lot of famous artists, such as Paul McCartney, spoke out in favour of this innovation. Us online people, we’re not so thrilled about that.
There are two possible outcomes here. First, people will check the potential breaches of law manually. This would take enormous amount of time and probably discourage the potential newcomers in the industry. Second, the whole copyright check would be automated. Which sounds good. But…
The AI isn’t nearly developed enough to be able to tell the difference between a serious breach of law and a joke. There are several situations in which using somebody’s else piece of art is completely legal. Satire. Caricature. Memes. All these would likely disappear due to computers’ insufficient ability to recognize nuance.
The EU parliament has already turned the original proposal down, saying a debate is needed on this matter. They will deal with it again in September. So, let’s just all cross fingers and hope the internet we know will survive these turbulences.
And by the way, in the Netherlands there’s a huge copyright war taking place right now as well. And the subject? Taste of a cheese spread. And the fighting isn’t done yet. So next time you cook something, taste it carefully and think about how unique it might be. Maybe you’re about to get rich.
Petr
