Article 13 of the EU's new directive on copyright is under sustained criticism from media experts and campaigners, warning of a risk of unintended censorship with no working exceptions for satire or small businesses, which could lead to a filtering of legal content and a further monopolization of the internet. Although the initiative has strong support from publishers like the Axel Springer Group and copyright agencies like the German GEMA service, media rights experts from the Science Media Center Germany have issued a warning about the consequences of the legislation on freedom of speech and in particular satire.
Under the proposed legislation, almost all companies which host user-generated content, which includes most platforms that host pictures, could be liable to prevent copyrighted content being uploaded to their websites. Although installing filters is not mandated by the new law, according to Thomas Matzner, media professor at the University of Paderborn, the only feasible way for companies to enforce this would be to install expensive filters which recognize and block copyrighted content.
Many small initiatives and start-ups will suffer because they will not be able to cope with the effort they have to make under Article The supposed exception for small firms only applies for the first three years. Tobias Keber, media rights professor at Stuttgart's Media University HDM compared it to Facebook's nudity detection algorithm, which has been continually improved, but still has difficulty addressing nudity properly in an artistic context. He noted that the issue is not just about photos or illustrations.
That an algorithm in this respect can recognize all conceivable forms and contexts in criticism, satire or quotation is absolutely out of the question. This requires the assessment of people, and that is a good thing. The video was an original piece of video journalism, so these filters are a threat to freedom of expression. Researchers from the Science Media Center Germany argue, however, that the law would have the unintended effect of blocking satirical content including memes, because there is no foreseeable way that digital filters could recognize the difference between copyright material and satire, and would therefore block them as forbidden material.
Dreyer warns that "current methods of machine learning can only take such factors into account to a very limited extent. When automatic upload filters are used, quotes and parodies are inevitably blocked. Legislators claim that only for-profit companies will be affected, but Reda pointed out that in cases of a copyright infringement both the company and the user would be liable to pay damages. What does this mean? If a fan posted an unlicensed song or remix to a public Facebook group, this could be a copyright infringement.
