Please Don’t Normalize Copyright As A Tool For Censorship
from the bad-ideas dept
Yes, yes, copyright is a tool for censorship. Contrary to the claims of copyright system supporters that copyright can’t be used for censorship, the reality is that is basically the only thing that copyright is good for. I mean, at this point, you are either not paying attention, or are just outright lying if you claim that copyright isn’t regularly used to silence people. I could go on linking to examples, but you get the point.
That said, it’s one thing to recognize that copyright is a tool for censorship and another altogether to normalize and embrace that fact.
Over the last few months, we’ve had a few stories about cops blasting copyright-covered music in an effort to block people filming them from being able to upload the videos online. The steps to getting here are not hard to figure out. The legacy copyright industry spent a couple decades screaming about copyright infringement online, and demanding that internet services wave a magic wand and stop it. And, eventually, a variety of automated copyright filters sprung up to try to get Hollywood to just stop whining all the time.
Of course, filters can’t understand context or fair use, so in practice, these filters block all sorts of important content just because they have ancillary copyright-covered music playing the background. From there, cops figured that this was “this one weird trick” that would get them out of being held accountable for their own misdeeds.
When cops are doing it, it’s clearly problematic, because as multiple courts have noted, you have a constitutional right to film police. So the use by police to try to get these videos taken down are a nefariously clever attempt to using copyright law to stifle the public’s rights.
But that doesn’t mean it’s okay when private citizens do it. Even if in pursuit of a good cause. Just as it’s not right when people abuse the DMCA to take down content being used for harassment and abuse, it’s not right to try to use copyright to block people from being able to film you.
David Hogg is a prominent activist on gun control issues. Whether or not you agree with his positions, no one can deny that he’s been incredibly successful in drawing attention to the causes he supports. And, with that, of course, comes a tremendous level of harassment from those who are opposed to his policy ideas. And, that, in part, is coming because he’s had such an impact with his activism.
That said, over the weekend, he gleefully talked about how he was using this same “one weird copyright trick” to stop opposing activists from being able to do anything with the video they were trying to take of him.
If you can’t see the images of the tweets, here’s what he said:
Today in DC- I had a Republican come up with a video camera trying to harass me. I immediately started playing under the Sea from the Little mermaid. He said “why are you playing that music you know it’s copyrighted so I can’t use this video right?” I said “yeah that’s the point”
I love copyright law
Thank you to Disney’s copyright lawyers!
While this is nowhere near as problematic as public officials doing this to prevent the exercise of rights, it’s still problematic. It’s normalizing, and even cheering on, the abuse of copyright law for the purpose of stifling speech.
I tweeted something about this and received some pushback, so I wanted to respond to a few points people raised about this:
Is this really copyright abuse or just taking advantage of others already abusing the system?
It’s a bit of both. To me, any use of copyright law to deliberately stifle speech is an abuse of copyright law. That the copyright system is so broken as to make this easy to do is also a criticism of the system and previous abuses, but it doesn’t excuse those jumping in to support and normalized this activity.
Yeah, but he gets so much abuse, so it’s okay.
Yes, he, like many prominent outspoken people, gets an unfair level of abuse. But that’s no excuse to abuse some other law to try to silence people. Once again, it normalizes the activity and makes sure more and more people will abuse copyright law in this same way. And that’s not good. If you think he receives an unfair level of abuse and harassment, focus on ways to deal with that that don’t involve encouraging further abuse of other laws.
Well maybe this will help demonstrate the problems of copyright law, and get them fixed.
Which seems more likely? Congress fixing broken copyright law? Or Congress and lots of others getting excited about new ways to exploit this “feature” of copyright law to their own benefit. It’s the latter and no one seriously thinks the former is going to happen.
Copyright law is used for censorship all the time. It’s good at that. That doesn’t mean we should embrace it or support it. And it definitely does not mean we should be normalizing that kind of abuse.
Filed Under: activism, copyright, copyright as censorship, copyright filters, david hogg, playing music, upload filters
Comments on “Please Don’t Normalize Copyright As A Tool For Censorship”
Maybe the people playing music in public to stop people from recording them need to get hit with settlement demands for publicly performing said music. I would think that would stop this rather quickly.
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Maybe the people playing music in public to stop people from recording them need to get hit with settlement demands for publicly performing said music. I would think that would stop this rather quickly.
Re:
^This.
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There’s just one problem with that: what if some unusually bright spark in an LEA has the idea of getting a mechanical licence so that its officers’ playing the music isn’t cppyright infringement, but the recording of them and posting of the resulting vids on YouTube remains so?
Re: Re:
👍
Re: Rightsholders against censorship
But that’s exactly why people pick Disney music to play this trick. This is not a song whose author might have a soul; Disney probably owns all rights of any sorts.
Disney loves censorship. Why would they come out against censorship? What if a legal case comes out of it? However small, there is a chance that it would result into some kind of limitations for upload filters, which is the opposite of what Disney wants.
Hey Disney, someone has just admitted giving a public performance, presumably without a license.
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^This.
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Someone alert ASCAP! Someone’s publicly performing copyrighted material without a license!
… I can only dream.
I know!!
Public broadcast of Copyright goods?
What is that? $20K, or 200K?
Ask yourself, 'Would I be fine with my worst enemy using this?'
Even if you agree that the law was abused ‘correctly’ this time around if this becomes the accepted norm it’s not will it be used by someone you don’t like to prevent a recording that could be very important but how soon, because if you don’t think that politicians and other powerful figures won’t be all over a guaranteed way to prevent people from recording what they’re saying/doing you really haven’t been paying attention.
Cute, but it won't work
Just means disney gets to run ads on youtube. And that Facebook won’t play it in South Africa or Sierra Leon. The video is still usable. Just can’t be monetized, and that’s totally fine.
If this is how they want to believe the system works, let them. They’ll look even more foolish than they did before
Re:
Just because this case resulted in monetization claims doesn’t excuse the attempt to abuse copyright law to censor someone. And what about cases where said footage is desired to be monetized by the uploader? What if it’s a YouTuber who relies on ad revenue for a living, and some jerk starts playing copyrighted music so he can’t use the filmed interaction with said jerk? The fact that he can’t post it for monetization could incentivize him to not use the footage at all. You might call it a choice on his part, but it’s still self-censorship. It’s a distinction without a difference!
Re: Upload filters consequences
The trick does work. The main objective is often to stop Facebook live streaming; I understand that happens quite quickly. You might use the video later, but it won’t get nearly as much engagement. The value of filming for these harassers lies in the social media engagement.
(As a corollary, this particular usage of copyright for censorship is probably rather harmless for a wide class of purposes for video recording, such as “storing evidence”. Assuming you have a hard disk at home where to store it before it gets taken down on Google Drive or whatever as well.)
As for YouTube, not all rightsholders opt for monetisation. Some opt for complete removal. Whoever wants to play this trick only needs to go look for very popular songs on YouTube and find one which, unusually, has (nearly) no covers, no alternative videos and so on. That will be a good indicator that the rightsholder is particularly aggressive at removing that song.
Allegedly, the trick doesn’t work (yet) for some of the social media used by neo-nazis, in particular Gettr. Or so I was told by someone who claimed to have tried using the trick.
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The value of filming for these harassers lies in the social media engagement.
If simply recording with a camera whilst engaging with people is harassment, no wonder there’s never much interesting on TV.
Copyright has always been censorship
The publishing industry has been fully internationally cartelized since the 19th century and has always very aggressively used its power to determine what gets into the discourse, what gets transmitted to the next generation, and what doesn’t.
Today “social media” has circumvented all of the traditional means of gatekeeping, but that only means that new ones must, and will, be invented.
automated stripping out of copyrighted background?
IIRC, there is technology to filter Internet uploads against thousands of copyrighted songs. Could we design a user-interactive program to strip (copyrighted) music from the background of a recording, leaving it lawsuit-proof and filter-proof for uploading?
I specify “interactive” because a couple of tries might be needed until the program correctly understands what it is expected to remove
Re:
There was an SF story which I read way back when, about some genius who had worked out how to silence TV ads, and was getting rich selling his invention. Which predictably led to an arms race between him and the TV advertising industry. I’ve forgotten who wrote the story, I’ve even forgotten the story’s title, but I remember that detail.
So it’s definitely a possibility.
Re: Possibly but not trivial
I was thinking this too, but it might be hard to do well enough to keep the lawyers at bay. Identifying and syncing with the song is probably fairly trivial, but any relative movement between the source of music and the microphone would have a dynamic effect on the gain and phase of what you’d have to apply to subtract out the song. Then if you’re sufficiently successful at it the subjects might claim that you’ve processed the sound so much that your reproduction is no longer a recording of what they actually said, which could have been something different.
It might be possible to build a multi-mic setup with digital recording from which you could extract a very finely focused beam of just the speaker. Modern laptops can have those kinds of setups, but this isn’t likely to be possible with a regular phone camera.
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So you keep the original for replay in court.
.
Just wait until people realize what you can edit the music out. You can also post the recording anonymously so you still get the information out and the copyright lawyers can’t find who posted the video but they have a video of who gave the public performance as well.
Quite the contrary. This is extremely problematic! This shows that public officials have normalise the abuse to such an extent that the public is now using it.
Not censorship
When the police blast music, it does not prevent someone from using the recording. They can still mute the sound and add a voiceover if they want. They can create a transcription of anything said, and provide the full video for backup off social media. It can still be used in court.
There are also ways of filtering out the highs and lows of the music and leaving mostly speech, possibly preventing algorithms from identifying it.
This is the price one has to pay to use some other entity’s property to distribute opinions. For hundreds of years, newspapers have had the right to not publish every single letter that came their editors way. I’m sure there were cries of censorship, but most informed people understood.
Free speech does not give someone the right to be heard. It only prevents the government from blocking platforms they don’t own.
Where you see censorship, I see an opportunity for some bright person to create a service that strips music from videos.
For a small fee of course…
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If you understood censorship as well as you imagine, you wouldn’t be saying the government preventing speech from being made isn’t censorship.
Of course Copyright is a form of censorship?!? It’s a suppression of certain pubic communication. What do you call gameplay videos and meme videos and videos containing background copyrighted music being pulled down in name of Copyright but censorship?? I thought its evident but I guess not.
Anyways, if you know your history you should know it was created as a tool of censorship since days of Queen Anne and before Queen Anne when the copy restrictions were not called Copyright and it has been used since in this way. When ever did it stopped to be used in its original purpose as a tool of censorship since the days of Queen Anne?
To me, as previously explained to me ELI5, Copyright’s purpose, is to censor in the name of the “starving artists” (and now corporate copyright holders) to purportedly encourage the productivity of the said “starving artists”. Though I dont understand how 75 years after death of the “starving artist” correlate with productivity of the living. And I think anyone that think paying one to sit one’s laurels helps with productivity is a fool or drank too much of the Copyright Cult’s Kool-Aid…
Wikipedia defines censorship as suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. Copyright fits the bill. It’s fair nore than enough to call copyright, a form of censorship. In fact, I dont think it is fair to not to call copyright censorship. Anyways, no matter you choose to call it, in many cases, it certainly involves abridgment of speech that apparently ignore the First Amendment…