The shoppers on Düsseldorf’s smart Königsallee street did not expect to witness the anger of the internet on Saturday afternoon. But around lunchtime on March 23, several thousand protesters followed a beaten-up white truck past the gleaming storefronts of Cartier and Giorgio Armani, waving placards decrying online censorship and shouting “Wir sind keine Bots” – we are not bots.
This was online rage boiled over into real life protest. For two years, internet communities have debated European copyright reform, whose opponents have been dismissed as bots by German conservative MEP Sven Schulze. Protesters were there to prove they were real, in the first Europe-wide street demonstrations against internet regulation – voicing their opposition to specific sections of a new law, which the European Parliament could vote into legislation on March 26.
Protesters have been caught up in a debate between advocates of the bill – mostly established newspapers and the music industry, including musicians like Blondie – and its tech giant opponents, such as Alphabet subsidiaries Google and YouTube. As fierce lobbying gripped Brussels, an offshoot of the debate sprung up in the form of the #SaveYourInternet protest movement that has gathered over five million signatures of support on change.org.
YouTube already has a system to identify copyright violations, but this new law aims to make that more robust. A well-known flashpoint in the debate is Article 17 of the law (formerly known as Article 13), which would make internet platforms legally responsible for copyright uploaded to their sites. YouTube says the requirements would cause platforms to over-block content “to limit legal risk”. That statement has panicked protesters that memes, GIFs, and satire, which tread a fine line in terms of copyright, could be stifled as a result.
Germany has been at the nucleus of the debate. Both the law’s lead negotiator, MEP Axel Voss, and its most vocal opponent, the Pirate Party’s MEP Julia Reda, are German. While opposition protests took place across Europe, Germany saw more than any other country: the organisers reported demonstrations in 45 cities and towns across the country, with 40,000 protesters in Munich alone, according to police. Wikipedia.de was turned off in protest on March 21st ,and Article 17 has been a point of discussion among the vibrant German-speaking YouTube community.
Dusseldorf’s demonstrators might look like part of the same subculture – ponytails are rife in the mostly male crowd and among the spattering of women, there is a lot of blue-dyed hair – but their banners point to how this issue has united disparate corners of the internet. Placards feature Spongebob and the distracted boyfriend meme. There are V for Vendetta Anonymous masks; hi-vis yellow vests (a nod to France’s gilet jaunes movement); a Pepe the frog banner sign (a far-right hallmark); as well as a “subscribe to PewDiePie” reference (the internet in-joke infamously mentioned during the New Zealand mosque attack).
Advocates of the copyright reform have tried to label protesters as “blind puppets of Google” amid growing awareness that tech companies have recently learned how to mobilise their user base in regulatory battles – when Transport for London refused to renew Uber’s license, within one day the company had gathered a quarter of a million petition signatures from its passengers, clamouring against TfL’s decision.
But the #SaveYourInternet movement agrees that artists and musicians should be compensated fairly for their work. “I don’t know many people who are against copyright at all. But the public discussion is about the question of what copyright do we want to have?,” says Markus Beckedahl, a journalist and founder of the website Netzpolitik who attended the Berlin protest. For Article 17 opponents, it is the methods, not the motivation, that’s the problem.
Experts agree the only way platforms could police huge amounts of content for copyright infringements would be to use an upload filter – a tool using Artificial Intelligence to scan uploads for copyright infringements and automatically block anything that might violate EU rules. But experts also agree that copyright is basically too complicated for current incarnations of AI to judge.
“Even if an algorithm correctly identifies a piece of content its use may nevertheless be legal due to certain exceptions and limitations in copyright law,” says Leonhard Dobusch, an expert on digital communities at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.
While the draft law makes exception for “quotation, criticism, review [...] caricature, parody or pastiche”, including memes and gifs, whether or not these upload filters can tell the difference between memes and copyright violations is the crux of the argument.
“Misplaced confidence in filtering technologies to make nuanced distinctions between copyright violations and legitimate uses of protected material would escalate the risk of error and censorship,” said David Kaye, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, in a statement.
On Julia Reda’s website, the German MEP, describes the types of pop-ups warnings, European users might see if the law is passed: “Chance of copyright infringement detected”, “Please wait while we compare your holiday snapshots with all stock photos ever made”.
Back in Dusseldorf, software developer Böerge Zuber, is in the crowd: “I’ve been working in technology for 20 years and I can tell you, [upload filters] can’t tell the difference between copyright violations and memes or satire.”
Zuber and his wife Saskia are worried the internet they grew up with will not be the same for their children – Murphy, eight, and Connor, ten. “The internet started without boundaries, but legislation is changing that. I think my kids should have the possibility to use it freely,” he says.
Jonas Seemann, chairman of the Dusseldorf branch of a satirical political party, Die PARTEI, worries that upload filters will censor the parody videos he likes to watch on YouTube - such as the Screen Junkies’ channel “honest trailers” series that heavily uses copyright content to poke fun at films like Avengers: Infinity War.
Seemann believes German MEP Voss has been throwing around buzzwords like “machine learning”, without fully understanding them. Distrust of older legislators trying to impose rules on online spaces they don’t use or fully comprehend also runs through this debate. Voss did not respond to a request for comment.
For Germans, Article 17 is not just emblematic of out-of-touch politicians or a meme-free future: the movement likens the upload filter to more sinister moments in the country’s past. People living under the east German GDR regime were subject to widespread censorship, as were citizens under the Nazi Party. “We have a lot of censorship in our history,” says Die PARTEI’s Seemann.
Sebastian Alscher, federal chairman of Germany’s Pirate Party, adds over the phone: “If you implement an upload filter, you start building an infrastructure that could be misused for censorship. People on the street are worried about how it will be used in the future.”
But despite the country’s sensitivity to censorship, Germany has become a frontrunner in European internet regulation. In January 2018, Germany passed Europe’s strictest content regulation in its NetzDG law, which requires internet platforms to remove “obviously illegal” hate speech or face up to £44 million in fines.
“For a while, Germans have been suffering from filtering,” says Niva Elkin-Koren, who sits on the Advisory Council for the Institute for Internet and Society at Berlin’s Humboldt University. She points to the NetzDG law – under which satirical Tweets were deleted – but also to a disagreement between Germany’s state copyright organisation GEMA and YouTube, which meant that music videos available across the border in Austria could not be played in Germany.
While companies like YouTube make it seem as if over-blocking would be their only option, Elkin-Koren – who works full time as a professor of law at Israel’s University of Haifa – believes an effective system is not beyond technology’s grasp. “The problem is: there is not enough investment in defining legitimate use and using algorithmic tools to identify legitimate use,” she says. “There are many ways in which the legislator can incentivize the development of these tools. If they introduce into the law a legal requirement to consider any free speech limitation or exemption before the removal, then the market would have incentive to invest.”
A spokesperson for YouTube declined to comment on this point.
The European Union has been a vocal advocate for greater internet regulation so, for Brussels, Saturday’s protests will reveal a worrying level of resistance to some of the bloc’s first steps in wider reform. The #SaveYourInternet movement also shows a new level of engagement in European policy-making – one that complicates the bloc’s digital aims. For Marcel Bauer, of left-wing politically party Die Linke: “Many young people are discovering that EU policies influence their lives directly”.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
