Duty of care + Standards _ CU

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.

At the heart of the initiative is a plan for online platforms to “increase the proactive prevention, detection and removal of illegal content inciting hatred, violence and terrorism online.” Significantly, the ideas are presented as “guidelines and principles”. That’s because they are entirely voluntary. Except that the Commission makes it quite clear that if this totally voluntary system is not implemented by companies like Facebook and Google, it will bring in new laws to make them do it on a not-so-voluntary basis. The Commission is quite eager to see swift results from these voluntary efforts, as legislative proposals could already be on the table by May 2018.

But the worst idea, and one that appears multiple times in the latest plans, is the routine and pervasive use of upload filters.

In doing so, they have caused notable collateral damage, especially to fundamental rights.

Recognising the need for co-operation between States and private industry

need to protect legitimate interests

roper balance between the interests of law enforcement and respect for fundamental human rights

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

“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

Beijing Higher People’s Court [北京市高级人民法院], Zhong Qin Wen v. Baidu [中青文v.百度], 2014 Gao Min Zhong Zi No. 2045, [（2014）高民终字第2045号], 2014

On appeal, Beijing Higher People’s Court upheld the previous decision.  This case sets a duty for Internet hosting providers to protect popular works