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How copyright filters lead to wage-theft

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – “…content ID was created to mollify the entertainment industry after Google acquired Youtube. Google would spend $100m on filtering tech that would allow rightsholders to go beyond the simple “takedown” permitted by law, and instead share in revenues from creative uses. But it’s easy to see how this system could be abused. What if people falsely asserted copyright over works to which they had no claim? What if rightsholders rejected fair uses, especially criticism? In a world where the ownership of creative works can take years to untangle in the courts and where judges’ fair use rulings are impossible to predict in advance, how could Google hope to get it right, especially at the vast scale of Youtube? The impossibility of automating copyright judgments didn’t stop Google from trying to perfect its filter, adding layers of complexity until Content ID’s appeal process turned into a cod-legal system whose flowchart looks like a bowl of spaghetti…”

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