New French AI Copyright Law Would Effectively Tax AI Companies, Enrich Collection Societies

Copyright

from the how-very-french dept

This blog has written a number of times about the reaction of creators to generative AI. Legal academic and copyright expert Andres Guadamuz has spotted what may be the first attempt to draw up a new law to regulate generative AI. It comes from French politicians, who have developed something of a habit of bringing in new laws attempting to control digital technology that they rarely understand but definitely dislike.

There are only four articles in the text of the proposal, which are intended to be added as amendments to existing French laws. Despite being short, the proposal contains some impressively bad ideas. The first of these is found in Article 2, which, as Guadamuz summarises, “assigns ownership of the [AI-generated] work (now protected by copyright) to the authors or assignees of the works that enabled the creation of the said artificial work.” Here’s the huge problem with that idea:

How can one determine the author of the works that facilitated the conception of the AI-generated piece? While it might seem straightforward if AI works are viewed as collages or summaries of existing copyrighted works, this is far from the reality. As of now, I’m unaware of any method to extract specific text from ChatGPT or an image from Midjourney and enumerate all the works that contributed to its creation. That’s not how these models operate.

Since there is no way to find out exactly who the creators are whose work helped generate a new piece of AI material using aggregated statistics, Guadamuz suggests that the French lawmakers might want creators to be paid according to their contribution to the training material that went into creating the generative AI system itself. Using his own writings as an example, he calculates what fraction of any given payout he would receive with this approach. For ChatGPT’s output, Guadamuz estimates he might receive 0.00001% of any payout that was made. To give an example, even if the licensing fee for a some hugely popular work generated using AI were €1,000,000, Guadamuz would only receive 10 cents. Most real-life payouts to creators would be vanishingly small.

Article 3 of the French proposal builds on this ridiculous approach by requiring the names of all the creators who contributed to some AI-generated output to be included in that work. But as Guadamuz has already noted, there’s no way to find out exactly whose works have contributed to an output, leaving the only option to include the names of every single creator whose work is present in the training set – potentially millions of names.

Interestingly, Article 4 seems to recognize the payment problem raised above, and offers a way to deal with it. Guadamuz explains:

As it will be not possible to find the author of an AI work (which remember, has copyright and therefore isn’t in the public domain), the law will place a tax on the company that operates the service. So it’s sort of in the public domain, but it’s taxed, and the tax will be paid by OpenAI, Google, Midjourney, StabilityAI, etc. But also by any open source operator and other AI providers (Huggingface, etc). And the tax will be used to fund the collective societies in France… so unless people are willing to join these societies from abroad, they will get nothing, and these bodies will reap the rewards.

In other words, the net effect of the French proposal seems to be to tax the emerging AI giants (mostly US companies) and pay the money to French collecting societies. Guadumuz goes so far as to say: “in my view, this is the real intention of the legislation”. Anyone who thinks this is a good solution might want to read Chapter 7 of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), which quotes from a report revealing “a long history of corruption, mismanagement, confiscation of funds, and lack of transparency [by collecting societies] that has deprived artists of the revenues they earned”. Trying to fit generative AI into the straitjacket of an outdated copyright system designed for books is clearly unwise; using it as a pretext for funneling yet more money away from creators and towards collecting societies is just ridiculous.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally posted to WalledCulture.

Filed Under: ai, collection societies, copyright, creativity, france, tax

French Publishers Accuse Musk Of Ditching Snippets To Skirt Ridiculous French Copyright/Neighboring Rights Law

Copyright

from the fight-it-you-coward dept

So, yesterday we had the story of how, at Elon’s personal request, exTwitter is moving to get rid of link and snippet text in what had been known as Twitter Cards for news organizations. Musk claims that it’s for “esthetic” reasons, though in our article, we noted the uncanny timing of this decision coming just a few weeks after the French news agency AFP had sued exTwitter in France, claiming that the snippets violate France’s neighboring rights law.

As we discussed both the law and this lawsuit are incredibly stupid. Even if we accept that France has this law, the lawsuit still makes no sense. If AFP doesn’t want snippets to appear on exTwitter IT SHOULD NEVER HAVE SET UP TWITTER CARDS for its site. But it did. So, AFP is suing exTwitter for something that AFP itself setup. It’s incredibly stupid.

So stupid that one would hope that Elon Musk and his “hardcore street fighter litigation” team would fight it. When Musk announced this “hardcore” litigation team, he made some promises that he has regularly failed to keep, including that his litigation team “will never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose.”

So, look, the AFP lawsuit is completely unjust. Even if ignoring how stupid France’s neighboring rights law is, AFP shouldn’t get away for suing exTwitter for actions that AFP themselves setup by enabling the Twitter cards.

But, French media publishers are already claiming that this new move to get rid of snippets altogether is the company trying to get out of complying with the law:

Musk’s decision to scrap headlines and texts is “not surprising,” Emmanuel Parody, secretary-general of content providers lobby GESTE, told POLITICO. By doing so, the online platform effectively “removes the last things” that would have ensured it’s covered by the copyright rules.

But… that makes no sense. First off, even with the coincidental timing of the AFP lawsuit and then the removal of snippets, I’m still not convinced Musk would completely ditch all snippets globally, just because of a stupid French law (other countries implementing similar neighboring rights laws are generally basing it on the links themselves, rather than the snippets).

And, if Musk was doing it to avoid the French snippet tax, he should straight up say that, because (like Meta and Google are doing in Canada) it helps let the public know what stupid corrupt laws politicians are passing to create a system to funnel money from successful internet companies to lazy, failed, media publishers.

Also, if it is for that reason, then it goes against Musk’s promise to use his lawyers such that they would “never surrender… an unjust case” because this is the ultimate surrender. Fight the case. Highlight how stupid these neighboring rights laws are in general. But, even better, highlight how particularly stupid the AFP case is because the only reason AFP snippets show on Twitter is because AFP set them up to show.

Filed Under: copyright, elon musk, france, neighboring rights, snippet tax, snippets, twitter cards
Companies: afp, twitter, x

Will Browsers Be Required By Law To Stop You From Visiting Infringing Sites?

Copyright

from the i-can't-open-that-page,-dave dept

Mozilla’s Open Policy & Advocacy blog has news about a worrying proposal from the French government:

In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list.

The post explains why this is an extremely dangerous approach:

A world in which browsers can be forced to incorporate a list of banned websites at the software-level that simply do not open, either in a region or globally, is a worrying prospect that raises serious concerns around freedom of expression. If it successfully passes into law, the precedent this would set would make it much harder for browsers to reject such requests from other governments.

If a capability to block any site on a government blacklist were required by law to be built in to all browsers, then repressive governments would be given an enormously powerful tool. There would be no way around that censorship, short of hacking the browser code. That might be an option for open source coders, but it certainly won’t be for the vast majority of ordinary users. As the Mozilla post points out:

Such a move will overturn decades of established content moderation norms and provide a playbook for authoritarian governments that will easily negate the existence of censorship circumvention tools.

It is even worse than that. If such a capability to block any site were built in to browsers, it’s not just authoritarian governments that would be rubbing their hands with glee: the copyright industry would doubtless push for allegedly infringing sites to be included on the block list too. We know this, because it has already done it in the past, as discussed in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions).

Not many people now remember, but in 2004, BT (British Telecom) caused something of a storm when it created CleanFeed:

British Telecom has taken the unprecedented step of blocking all illegal child pornography websites in a crackdown on abuse online. The decision by Britain’s largest high-speed internet provider will lead to the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy.

Here’s how it worked:

Subscribers to British Telecom’s internet services such as BTYahoo and BTInternet who attempt to access illegal sites will receive an error message as if the page was unavailable. BT will register the number of attempts but will not be able to record details of those accessing the sites.

The key justification for what the Guardian called “the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy” was that it only blocked illegal child sexual abuse material Web sites. It was therefore an extreme situation requiring an exceptional solution. But seven years later, the copyright industry were able to convince a High Court judge to ignore that justification, and to take advantage of CleanFeed to block a site, Newzbin 2, that had nothing to do with child sexual abuse material, and therefore did not require exceptional solutions:

Justice Arnold ruled that BT must use its blocking technology CleanFeed – which is currently used to prevent access to websites featuring child sexual abuse – to block Newzbin 2.

Exactly the logic used by copyright companies to subvert CleanFeed could be used to co-opt the censorship capabilities of browsers with built-in Web blocking lists. As with CleanFeed, the copyright industry would doubtless argue that since the technology already exists, why not to apply it to tackling copyright infringement too?

That very real threat is another reason to fight this pernicious, misguided French proposal. Because if it is implemented, it will be very hard to stop it becoming yet another technology that the copyright world demands should be bent to its own selfish purposes.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally published to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: blocklist, browsers, cleanfeed, copyright, france, sren, websites

French News Agency Sues ex-Twitter For Not Paying Snippet Tax

Copyright

from the snip-this dept

The lawsuits against Elon Musk’s ex-Twitter continue to pile up, but here’s one where the law itself is ridiculous and unjust. As you’ll recall, the EU Copyright Directive included a link or snippet tax for news (which they call a “neighboring right”) similar to the link taxes we’ve discussed in Australia and Canada. The main difference here was that the “tax” was for including snippets (the short summaries or clips) of news. Of course, since the EU’s was a directive, it was left to the member countries to implement their own version, which has mostly been a mess.

It’s not at all surprising that France rushed out of the gate with its implementation of it, though it’s had mixed results. Given France’s lack of a “fair use” as a concept, it seemed to have no issue with demanding taxes from social media companies for sending traffic to news publishers. Google (the main target of the snippet tax) basically told French publishers that rather than pay, it would simply stop posting snippets from news stories, unless news publishers “opted in” to reenable snippets, effectively creating a system in which news publishers would admit that they needed Google sending them traffic more than they were angry at Google for “stealing” from them.

The French publishers were… less than pleased with this, and after Google was fined €500 million for “failing to negotiate in good faith” (a pretty ridiculous bit of nonsense), the company eventually agreed to pay some pocket change ($76 million over 3 years split between over 150 publications, which was obviously significantly less than the fines they would have racked up otherwise).

Anyway, the law is ridiculous and a sham. And while French regulators were able to force Google (and Meta) to pay up eventually, now Agence France-Presse, more commonly known as AFP, has decided to sue exTwitter directly for failing to negotiate.

AFP has accused X, owned by billionaire tycoon Elon Musk, of a “clear refusal” to engage in discussions on neighboring rights.

AFP said in a statement it had lodged a case with a judge in Paris to force the platform to hand over data that would allow the French news agency to estimate a fair level of compensation.

I’m curious about the details here, because ex-Twitter doesn’t just grab snippets like, say, a Google news does. It is true that if you post a link to an article it can show a “card” but… as far as I know, the news website themselves have to set that up. So, to the extent that there are snippets of news stories from AFP on ex-Twitter, it’s because AFP enabled ex-Twitter’s social cards.

As for Elon’s “clear refusal” to negotiate, I mean, sure? He’s ignoring lots of other obligations that are actually serious, so why wouldn’t he ignore this. Frankly, he should be ignoring this, or fighting back against this nonsense (my guess is that there’s no one left at ex-Twitter who even understands the issue, and that’s why it got ignored).

Either way, going to court over this is pretty silly by AFP (though AFP has a history of filing very silly law suits like this. Back in 2005, they literally sued Google for linking to their stories, despite the lack of any such neighboring right. And, AFP has been a leading advocate for neighboring rights (I mean, it profits from them, so why not?) including that the EU Parliament literally paid off AFP to create pro-Copyright Directive propaganda videos.

So, basically, this whole situation seems like a mess. If ex-Twitter still had a legal and policy strategy, it might have handled this more properly, and prepared a real challenge to the nonsense of France’s laws. Or, done something like blocking news links in France. But, either way, this is a very stupid law being abused by a corrupt, greedy, news organization, filing a very silly lawsuit that, as far as I can tell, is saying that Twitter has to pay AFP for the snippets on link cards that AFP itself enabled.

Filed Under: elon musk, france, link tax, neighboring rights, snippet tax
Companies: afp, twitter, x

French Government Says Citizens Should Be Forced To Sacrifice Freedom For Safety Because Crime

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the looking-back-I-saw-a-second-set-of-digital-footprints dept

With every government in Europe pitching their own version of “acceptable” intrusion, it’s hardly surprising France’s government wants in on the action. Amid calls to criminalize end-to-end encryption, to mandate client-side scanning, and to otherwise interfere directly with content moderation efforts, the French government’s latest move is nothing more than the sort of thing we’ve come to expect as politicians edge closer to returning to the heyday of general warrants and autocracy-adjacent power moves.

Because criminal activity and terrorism remain a thing, the French government has decided it’s time to amp up its domestic surveillance programs. Here’s the latest, as reported by Le Monde, via TechRadar.

French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. 

Oh, really? Would this be a wiretap equivalent or just a standard warrant that compels service providers to permit this sort of access to devices owned by their customers?

These questions can’t be answered. Yet. It appears it would go down the regular warrant path though, given its focus on geolocation, which can often be achieved with other devices (cell site simulators) or the results of normal day-to-day business of cell service providers/app creators/search engine providers (cell tower dumps, data brokers, reverse warrants).

But there’s more to it than just the passive tracking via location data. The proposal makes it clear the police should be allowed to engage in active tracking by remotely accessing targets’ devices.

Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow the geolocation of suspects in crimes punishable by at least five years’ jail. Devices could also be remotely activated to record sound and images of people suspected of terror offenses, as well as delinquency and organized crime.

It’s somewhat refreshing to hear a government openly acknowledge it’s not interested in limiting intrusive surveillance to the “worst of the worst” criminal suspects. Proponents aren’t offering up empty defensive phrases referring to child molesters or terrorists as justifications for greater government intrusion. Instead, they’re openly admitting police will use these powers to go after anyone suspected of engaging in an offense that might be punishable by five years in prison.

Adding this caveat doesn’t really change anything:

During a debate on Wednesday, MPs in President Emmanuel Macron’s camp inserted an amendment limiting the use of remote spying to “when justified by the nature and seriousness of the crime” and “for a strictly proportional duration.” 

None of that means anything. If a law enforcement officer tells a court the intrusion is justified, it will likely be deemed justified. The law would “limit” constant surveillance to six months (presumably open for renewal with a new court order), but six months of always-on surveillance is six months of always-on government eavesdropping, which can hardly be justified by vague wording about “nature and seriousness.”

On the plus side, there’s a carveout for doctors, journalists, lawyers, judges, and (of course) French Parliament members. These people will apparently never be considered acceptable targets for this intrusive surveillance. But I’m sure when push comes to shove in the investigatory arena, French citizens will soon discover it’s only MPs who are truly exempt for this snooping.

Adding to the idiocy of it all is the statement made by Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti. According to the Minister, there’s nothing Orwellian about constant, highly intrusive surveillance. “We’re far away from the totalitarianism of 1984,” claims Dupond-Moretti. How so? Well, because the ends justify the means.

“People’s lives will be saved” by the law, he added.

Thanks. That’s very reassuring. There’s nothing like a government figure nudging a nation towards totalitarianism telling those being forced towards this end of the governance spectrum that their fears are unfounded. And even if their fears are well-founded, fuck it: we’re gonna solve more crimes so it’s all good.

Filed Under: crime, france, geolocation, remote access, surveillance, wiretaps

Clearview Fined Again By French Government For Failing To Pay Fines Already Owed To French Government

Privacy

from the loves-law-enforcement,-breaking-laws,-long-walks-on-the-beach dept

Clearview has been giving web scraping a bad name since its arrival on the scene a couple of years ago. Scraping isn’t necessarily bad. Web scraping can provide data sets that help improve things for people everywhere. But this effort can also be used to do the sort of thing Clearview has been doing: grabbing any and all personal data/photos that aren’t locked down, shoehorning them into a massive database, and selling access (along with its facial recognition AI) to anyone who wants it, from gym owners to billionaires to cops.

Facial recognition algorithms have always been sketchy. But Clearview is so sketchy even other opportunists in the same field refuse to associate themselves with this upstart. Plenty of governments have also distanced themselves from Clearview, most in the form of enforcement actions.

The company that loves to pitch its wares to law enforcement doesn’t seem to have much respect for the laws these agencies enforce. It has been forced to withdraw from Illinois due to its violation of that state’s privacy laws. It is facing legal action elsewhere for its nonconsensual collection and distribution of people’s information.

Outside of the US, it’s faring even worse. It has been forcibly ejected from Australia. It has been fined $9.4 million by the UK for violating that country’s privacy laws. It has been fined by the Italian government for the same thing, adding another bunch of Euros to its tab ($21 million American).

Those aren’t its only European losses. In December 2021, French regulators determined Clearview had violated that country’s privacy laws. Roughly six months later, the government arrived at a dollar amount: the maximum amount allowed by the GDPR, €20,000,000.

Clearview continues to maintain that, as an American company, it’s not subject to any other country’s laws. So be it, but that’s not reducing the amount owed to these countries — countries the company would undoubtedly like to do business with at some point in the future.

The facial recognition company’s refusal to settle its outstanding worldwide debts has only put it more deeply in debt, as Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch:

In a press release today, the CNIL said Clearview has failed to complied with the order it issued last October — when it imposed the maximum possible size of penalty it could (€20 million) for three types of breaches of the GDPR.

Never mind compound interest. The daily fees incurred by Clearview’s refusal to settle up puts that to shame.

At the time the CNIL committee responsible for issuing sanctions gave Clearview a two month deadline to comply with the order — with the threat of further fines if it did not do so (at a cost of per overdue day).

And that brings us to the updated total, which now has another several million Euro added to it.

“On 13 April 2023, the restricted committee considered that the company had not complied with the order and consequently imposed an overdue penalty payment of €5,200,000 on Clearview AI.”

It may turn out the French government is powerless to extract this from the US-based company. But perhaps it might be wise for Clearview to at least discuss the issue with French regulators or perhaps ask a local court whether or not this fine is enforceable outside of the country, which might at least allow it to prevent adding another €100,000/day to its accounts (possibly) payable balance.

Then again, Clearview has rarely been interested in interacting with government agencies that don’t condone its actions, preferring to spend time with those who see its tech as something worth exploiting, even if the tech’s purveyor continues to engage in questionable activities and even more questionable sales pitches. Until a court (either stateside or overseas) makes a declaration about Clearview’s financial and legal culpability, it’s safe to say the company will continue to violate laws until a greater power shuts it down.

Filed Under: cnil, data protection, facial recognition, fines, france, privacy
Companies: clearview

French Court Smacks Remote Learning Software Company For Pervasive Surveillance Of Students In Their Own Homes

Privacy

from the in-school-we-learn-how-to-be-spied-on dept

A worldwide pandemic trapped students in their own homes to stop the spread of the coronavirus. They didn’t ask for this. Neither did educators. But educators made the worst of it in far too many cases.

Aptitude tests and other essentials for continued funding (and bragging rights) were now out of their control. Any student sitting at home had access to a wealth of knowledge to buttress what they may have actually retained from remote instruction.

Leveling the playing field was the goal. In practice, that meant turning the most sacrosanct of private places — students’ homes and bedrooms — into heavily surveilled spaces… all in the interest of preventing cheating.

Laptop cameras monitored rooms and students’ movements during testing. Internet connections often contributed more to passing grades than students’ knowledge as educators (and their preferred tech partners) viewed inconsistent or dropped connections as indicators of attempted cheating. Malware deliberately installed by schools monitored internet usage before, during, and after tests.

A bedroom is not a classroom, even if that’s where the educating is taking place temporarily due to pandemic restrictions. But that’s how it was perceived and a bunch of opportunistic spyware purveyors rushed to fill the perceived “fairness” void with surveillance software that even the most inveterate stalker might consider too invasive.

Proctorio was on the forefront of this education-adjacent bedroom surveillance. It was particularly enthusiastic about stripping students of their privacy. When it was criticized for going too far, it went further, issuing legal threats and bogus DMCA takedown notices to its detractors.

What was briefly considered acceptable by one set of government employees has been rejected by other government employees. In September 2022, an Ohio state court ruled that scans of students’ rooms during remote learning violated the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches.

Respondus was the test proctoring spyware on the receiving end of that decision. Another competitor in the incredibly invasive field has been hit with an adverse judicial decision, this one originating in France. Karen Cullo delivers the details via the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

In a preliminary victory in the continuing fight against privacy-invasive software that “watches” students taking tests remotely, a French administrative court outside Paris suspended a university’s use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which monitors students through facial recognition and algorithmic analysis.

TestWe software, much like Proctorio, Examsoft, and other proctoring apps we’ve called out for intrusive monitoring of exam takers, constantly tracks students’ eye movements and their surroundings using video and sound analysis. The court in Montreuil, France, ruled that such “permanent surveillance of bodies and sounds” is unreasonable and excessive for the purpose preventing cheating.

Yeah, that’s a problem. Government entities can get away with some rights violations as long as they have a “compelling” (in the legal sense of the word) reason for doing so. Preventing students from cheating on tests ain’t it, though. Cheating on classwork has always been a thing. Just because it may now happen in kids’ own bedrooms doesn’t mean the government’s intrusion is justified.

But the legal battle isn’t over yet. This ruling basically says the case can proceed because the court believes the plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged governmental abuse of their rights. More evidence will be needed to ensure a final opinion — one that will hopefully side with students and their privacy. Just because an unforeseen event made things more difficult for schools doesn’t mean they’re allowed to force things to return to something approaching “normal” by any means necessary.

Filed Under: anti-cheat software, france, privacy, remote learning, schools, surveillance
Companies: testwe

Our New Report Explores How Existing Internet Regulations Around The Globe Have Fared. Short Answer? Not Well

Policy

from the were-they-really-unintended,-though? dept

Read our new report on
The Unintended Consequences Of Internet Regulation »

Over the last decade or so, there’s been a growing chorus of people insisting (misleadingly) that the internet is a “wild west” that needs regulation. The reasons stated for this apparently necessary regulation change over time, but the underlying discussion tends to be the same: bad stuff is happening online and it needs to stop. Sometimes, the discussion is more focused on how internet companies are somehow “experimenting” with our lives and our data.

We’ve seen plenty of new internet regulations pop up and — oddly to me, at least — no one seems to comment on how these regulations themselves seem to be experimenting on the way innovation works and our ability to communicate with others around the world.

For all the talk of how tech companies need to “take responsibility” for the consequences of their actions, we see little to no effort to see if lawmakers and regulators should “take responsibility” for the consequences of the new and often experimental laws they’ve put in place.

Today, we’re excited to launch a new report: The Unintended Consequences of Internet Regulations, written by me, and released in partnership between the CCIA Research Center and our own Copia Institute.

This report is something of a follow up to our 2019 report, Don’t Shoot the Message Board, which looked at the impact on investment (generally negative) in various countries and regions that removed liability protections from websites. A few years have passed since that report, and a number of countries around the world have pushed out new laws, or had court cases that changed intermediary liability, and we decided to take a look at how things have played out.

The short answer: not well.

As we looked around the globe, first at the predictions lawmakers made about how these laws would play out, then at how they actually worked in practice, we found that policymakers greatly miscalculated their expectations for how these laws would work. They were often redundant or confusing, and did little to achieve what was promised.

Instead, there were tremendous negative consequences in a number of different areas, starting with investment in innovation, which was shown to decline (sometimes dramatically) in many cases. We saw evidence of this with laws like Germany’s NetzDG, which appeared to actually drive some areas of investment out of Germany and into nearby countries like the UK and France. Unfortunately, just recently, we saw France pass a law similar to NetzDG, and the UK is moving in that direction as well, perhaps not realizing how it may impact innovation and competition.

The research, and included case studies, show how these laws are doing real harm to innovation and competition in the market. It appears that many of these laws serve to lock in incumbents and burden smaller companies. The patchwork of laws also makes it difficult for new entrants to build up global services.

Perhaps even more concerning is the impact of these laws on speech and expression. Remember, the internet is effectively speech, and the efforts by regulators to limit how the internet works had the clear impact of limiting speech as well. While some may consider this collateral damage, it is worth calling out not just how these laws are suppressing speech in various countries that espouse freedom, but how they’ve also become the model for authoritarian countries to suppress speech, while claiming that they’re just passing internet regulations like the rest of the world.

The report details multiple examples of countries using nearly identical laws for the express purpose of suppressing those the government doesn’t like.

One other fascinating finding came out of a surprising bit of data when we looked at India, which has been removing intermediary liability protections at a rapid rate. Unlike elsewhere that we looked in the report, we noticed that there was actually an increase in investment in internet companies following those legal changes. That went against what we’d seen elsewhere, but looking more closely at the details revealed an explanation for this unexpected result: after India passed regulations to harm sites like Twitter, a flood of investment went into a local Twitter-like clone that was friendly with the Modi government.

In other words, this bit of “internet regulation” actually was used as a form of protectionism, to boost a local competitor and harm a global service.

As we note at the end of our executive summary:

As this report shows, the end result of all these regulatory changes does not appear to be an “improved” internet where there is greater “responsibility” by large internet companies, but one in which there is less competition, less innovation, and more ability by governments to abuse their power over these companies to damage speech and privacy interests. That also means an internet that is less in the public’s interest and benefit. As governments around the world rush forward with major new internet regulations, which could have even more sweeping impact than the laws discussed in this report, it is imperative that policymakers do more to understand the impact of these laws on a variety of different areas, and take care in rushing to implement new and unproven policies.

This is not to say that the internet should be “lawless” (contrary to the claims you hear from some, it never was). But so many new policies are being pushed on the internet at rapid speed with little concern for the actual consequences of these laws.

We hope that this paper will help highlight how policymakers should be more careful in rushing to regulate, while also be more open to looking back at the impact of their own policymaking. You can read the entire report and our summary info sheet (pdf links) below or in the Copia Institute Library.

Filed Under: australia, china, competition, fosta, france, free speech, germany, india, innovation, investment, it rules 2021, netzdg, pakistan, policy, reports, uk, unintended consequences, unintended consequences of internet regulations

French Legislators Think Hosting 2024 Olympics Justifies Massive Domestic Surveillance Expansion

Privacy

from the once-it-goes-up,-who-knows-when-it-comes-down dept

Massive sports events tend to make everyone crazy. The NFL has turned the Super Bowl into The Game That Must Not Be Named (without express written [and paid] permission) by unapproved advertisers and promoters. The Olympic Committee has abused pretty much every available IP law to ensure the Olympic brand remains known as… a massive abuser of intellectual property laws.

Countries hosting these events tend to go a bit insane themselves. At least in terms of the Super Bowl, it’s always the same country and (given the country’s size) the insanity tends to remain very localized.

The same can’t be said about the Olympics. It’s an international event, which means countries hosting the Games are also hosting players, officials, reps, coaches, and entourages coming from countries the host may not currently be on good terms with.

Yes, there have been incidents of terrorism at Olympic Games. And, yes, the next host of the Summer Games — Paris, France — has had a few recent, high-profile, non-Olympic-related terrorist attacks on its soil. But events that remain anomalous are no excuse for extended, extensive domestic surveillance. And, yet, that’s apparently what legislators want, as Laura Kayali reports for Politico.

A controversial video surveillance system cleared a legislative hurdle Wednesday to be used during the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics amid opposition from left-leaning French politicians and digital rights NGOs, who argue it infringes upon privacy standards.

[…]

The plan pitched by the French government includes experimental large-scale, real-time camera systems supported by an algorithm to spot suspicious behavior, including unsupervised luggage and alarming crowd movements like stampedes.  

There’s nothing like seeing the term “experimental” being used in conjunction with “large-scale” and “real-time.” This is the least ideal combination. It’s legislators saying they’re not sure if the system will work properly but, nonetheless, it’s going to be everywhere all the time.

Even more worrying is the fact that the only limits placed on it (so far) scale back the length of the pervasive, experimental surveillance to four months after the Olympic Games end.

The National Assembly’s law committee approved the system, but also voted to limit the temporary program’s duration until December 24, 2024, instead of June 2025. 

That’s right. The initial legislative pitch would have allowed the surveillance state to kick in before the Games began and run for nearly a year after the Games end date, which is August 11, 2024. In a remarkable show of restraint, the government has voluntarily limited its surveillance program to only 18 weeks past the Olympic finale.

The proposal is seeing a lot of opposition, which is a hopeful sign. It’s not just the “left-leaners” and digital rights activists (although both have been active in their opposition). It’s also regular people with legal expertise who have noted the proposal would violate the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, which places plenty of limits on AI-enabled surveillance programs.

And there’s been some giveth and taking awayeth: legislators have voted to ensure the public is informed of where cameras are located, but they’ve also voted to give local intelligence agencies a much bigger pool of data and images to train the “experimental” AI.

Look, everyone wants a terrorism-free Olympics. But legislators shouldn’t be so willing to shove the populace into the Surveillance State Wicker Man any time something out of the ordinary might be happening. It rarely prevents bad things from happening. But 100% of the time, those being sacrificed get burned.

Filed Under: france, olympics, surveillance

Even After Its Own Data Protection Agency Said There’s No Safe Way To Do Age Verification, France Wants To Do Age Verification For The Internet

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the verify-this dept

It’s become the in thing to do everywhere, these days: try to institute age verification for the internet. There’s been an ongoing, unsubstantiated, moral panic that the internet is somehow “dangerous” for children, even as most of the evidence suggests… it’s actually mostly good for kids and the evidence has supported that for years.

And, for whatever reason, the terrified, panicked, political class has decided that the answer to all of this must be to… age verify everyone on the internet, and put the burden on websites to keep out “kids.” Of course, as we’ve explained, age verification is a terrible idea that does not make anyone safer, and can actually serve to make kids a lot less safe. This has also been known for years, and that’s even in its weaker form, such as in the US were COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) seems to have a side effect of teaching kids that lying is good, because it means that’s how they can get onto services where they can communicate with grandma.

Of course, defenders of these new laws will say, but this is different, because now we’re talking about actual age verification, rather than what we have today, which is more of a “self-certification” situation. Except, age verification technology is terrible, a massive privacy nightmare, and not proven to work particularly well. We’ve discussed how the largest age verification provider is… Pornhub’s parent company. But also how other age verification providers reached out to me to tell me not to worry about age verification technology, because all they’d need to do is to scan everyone’s face to visit websites (and not just images, they’d have to do video to make sure you weren’t just holding up a photo).

At a time when people are (much more reasonably!) concerned about privacy, demanding that every website scan everyone’s faces and store that information does not seem like a move in the right direction.

But, don’t take my word for it. Why not take the word of the French data protection agency, CNIL, perhaps the most strict data protection agency in the EU (to a fault, I’d say). Even they said that there is no possible way to do age verification that is reliable, and that every possible solution violates user privacy rights.

Given that, it’s kinda shocking to see that France is going to move ahead with its own age verification plans for the internet.

On Wednesday, French MPs adopted legislation requiring social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Snap to block access to minors under 15 — unless they have authorization from their parents — or face fines of up to 1 percent of their annual global turnover. Technical solutions to verify users’ ages would need to be rubber-stamped by the audiovisual and privacy regulators — Arcom and CNIL — and Arcom would be empowered to sue non-compliant companies.

This is an extension of an earlier law that required adult content websites to verify ages. But for years, those sites have (correctly) pointed out that there is literally no way to comply with the law. Rather than fix that, French officials simply expanded the law to social media companies.

I look forward to the day a few decades from now when we can look back on this nonsense moral panic and laugh, the same way we now laugh at earlier moral panics, including those about how chess, novels, the waltz, radio, television, pinball, comic books, jazz, rock n’ roll, movies, dungeons and dragons, and much much more were polluting the minds of children and had to be stopped…

Filed Under: age verification, cnil, france, privacy, social media