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We often talk about the “online environment.” This metaphorical language makes it seem like the online space looks similar to our offline world. For example, the term “information pollution,” coined by Claire Wardle, is increasingly being used to discuss disinformation online.  

It is even harder to prove direct connections between online platforms and offline harms. This is partly because platforms are not transparent.

Finally, this analogy reminds us that both problems are dispiritingly hard to solve. Two scholars, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner, have suggested that our online information problems are ecosystemic, similar to the climate crisis.

Representatives from the creative industries, leading UK search engines, and the IPO developed a Voluntary Code of Practice dedicated to the removal of links to infringing content from the first page of search results.

Signatories of the Voluntary Code of Practice are: Google Bing BPI Motion Picture Association

Beyond the potential negative economic aspects, several speakers at the Copycamp conference rang the alarm bells over the potential fallout of round-the-clock obligatory monitoring and filtering of user content on the net. Diego Naranjo from the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) reported: “I heard one of the EU member state representatives say, ‘Why do we use this (filtering system) only for copyright?’,” he said. The idea of bringing down the unauthorised publication of copyrighted material by algorithm was “a very powerful tool in the hands of government,” he warned.

In contrast to the dark picture presented by many activists on copyright, multi-purpose filtering machines and the end of ownership in the time of the internet of things, chances for reform are presented for various areas of rights protection.

EU copyright reform itself is a chance, argued Raegan MacDonalds from the Mozilla Foundation, calling it “the opportunity of a generation to bring copyright in line with the digital age, and we want to do that.” Yet the task, like in earlier copyright legislative processes, is to once more expose what she described as later dismantled myths of big rights holders, that any attempt to harmonise exceptions would kill their industry.

avoidance of regulation that the Silicon Valley platforms

It hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for the “Don’t Be Evil” company.

The Supreme Court had upheld a lower court ruling requiring Google to delist from its global search results references to a rogue Canadian company that is the subject of an injunction in British Columbia (B.C) f

ey are shockingly expensive – YouTube’s ContentID had cost Google $60 million as of several years ago – so only incumbents can afford them. Start-ups forced to build them won’t be able to afford it, or will build lousy ones with high error rates. Filters address symptoms and leave underlying problems to fester – like, in the case of radical Islamist material, the brutal conflict in Syria, global refugee crisis, and marginalization of Muslim immigrants to the US and Europe. All these problems make filters incredibly hard to justify without some great demonstrated upside – but no one has demonstrated such a thing.

The DMCA moves literally billions of disputes about online speech out of courts and into the hands of private parties.

That allocative choice was reasonable in 1998, and it remains reasonable in 2016.

“Institutional standards should not contain elements pushed in by lobbies, since they are detrimental to public interests. Of course lobbies have financial and political means to ignore or distort standards in their products, but they want more. T

Accordingly, UPC was instructed to do everything that could possibly and reasonably be expected of it to block kino.to. Whether all reasonable measures were taken was to be reviewed only in a subsequent “enforcement process”

he Court identified a three-way conflict between:  a) copyright and related rights; b) the intermediary’s right to conduct a business; and c) the freedom of information of internet users. It repeated its Promusicae conclusion that where several fundamental rights are at stake, a fair balance must be struck between the requirements of all. The Court found that the injunctive order under consideration struck the right balance.

intermediaries must be careful not to infringe users’ freedom of information