Last October, the famous British artist Banksy orchestrated a very peculiar performance that will be remembered for a long time. The anonymous artist prepared a painting of one of his works to be auctioned at Sotheby's, with the surprise that inside the frame he had hidden a shredder that destroyed the canvas once the auction was over (it reached 1,04 million pounds).
The event did not take long to appear on the networks, even appearing videos of the moment in which the painting began to self-destruct by magic. Leaving aside whether the action was good or not (the person who bid on the work followed through with their offer after what happened), another rather interesting topic that comes to us today is related to Banksy's YouTube channel.
Removed for copyright infringement
Imagine you record a video with your camera, upload it to YouTube, and it goes viral. But someone with greater influence uses your video, which backfires, resulting in the removal of your original video for copyright infringement . Crazy, right? Well, that's exactly what happened to Banksy. The artist has a rather neglected YouTube channel that he only updates when he has something to say. In the case of the sabotaged auction, it was clear that it would pay off, and it did, as the channel published a recording showing the entire design and creation process of the famous destructive painting.
The video was obviously shared infinitely, and Canal+ France decided to use it for their broadcasts, also uploading it to their channel. And that's where the problem arises, since YouTube's copyright algorithm has given a false positive, believing that Banksy's original video was a copy of the one from Canal Plus France. The result? The video of its creator is no longer available, and when trying to play it, a nice message says “this video contains content from Canal Plus, who has blocked it due to copyright”.
The error has been discovered by a youtuber, who has not been slow to report the case and send a reprimand to Canal Plus, for having such a privilege when it comes to identifying their videos.
What a bloody joke.
Banksy's own original video has been false copyright claimed and blocked by @canalplus@teamyoutube your system is a joke, @canalplus MUST at the very least lose their content ID privilege.Please re-tweet to keep the pressure on to fix this broken system. pic.twitter.com/nWWR6L81gf
— Dave Jones (@eevblog) December 5, 2018
Article 13 and its dangers
Given the video's impact and how easy it is to demonstrate the obvious, a solution may not be too long in coming, even if YouTube's control methods are clearly exposed. But the truly interesting aspect of this case is that it gives us an idea of what Article 13 could mean in practice.
As you will surely have heard, in the EU they have presented a first draft that intends to modify the Copyright Law. Until now, lawsuits for content infringement had to fall on the users who uploaded the content, something obviously quite complicated to control considering the amount of information and users that circulate on the Internet. Due to this chaos, the European Union wants to facilitate the complaints process, so they try to modify the law directly targeting the services that host illegal content.
That said, until now, if someone uploaded content that violated a company's copyright, they had to wait for YouTube to take action, something that usually only happened if the video started generating a significant number of views (attracting attention) or if their crawler found a match. If YouTube (or any other similar service) didn't notice the infringement, the video remained published without issue, awaiting a warning from its true creators. This passivity or lack of responsibility (a heavy workload for YouTube, it must be said) is simply because current law requires them to sue the user who uploaded the content directly, and that's where the problem lies, because, who on earth is PinkyVideos456?
With this panorama, the European Union proposes a new way to put a stop to the problem, and for this it wants to place the ball in the court of content services. If an illegal video is published on YouTube, the problem and the lawsuit is for YouTube, which is the one who must ensure the legality of its users' content.
A not so smart Artificial Intelligence
And that is where the problem lies that we see perfectly in the case of Banksy. YouTube's automatic crawler thought that the artist's video was an illegal copy of Canal Plus France, when it is precisely the opposite. What do you think will happen to ordinary users of the service? How many videos will be wrongly flagged if YouTube has to make sure it doesn't get sued for copyright infringement?
As you have surely seen, the Google service is filling up with videos on this subject. "Article 13". Content creators fear for their own channels, since their creations will be quite limited (you won't even be able to comment on a movie trailer) and, as is to be expected, their visits will drop considerably, and with them their income.
What would the internet be without memes? And without parodies of other videos?