Last October the famous British artist Banksy he orchestrated a very peculiar performance that will be remembered for a long time. The artist without identity prepared a painting of one of his works to be auctioned at Sotheby's auction house, with the surprise that inside the frame he had hidden a shredder that was in charge of destroying the canvas once the auction ended. completed (remember that 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 that you record a video with your camera, upload it to YouTube and it goes viral. But there is someone with greater power of influence who uses your video, something that turns against you, resulting in the withdrawal of your video (the original) by copyright infringement. What a madness, isn't it? Well, that's just what happened to Banksy. The artist has a rather neglected YouTube channel that he updates exclusively when she has something to say. In the case of the sabotaged auction, it was clear that it was going to pay off, and it did, since the channel published a recording showing the entire process of designing and creating 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 5th 2018
Article 13 and its dangers
Considering the impact that the video had and how easy it is to prove the obvious, it may not take long for the solution to appear, even if YouTube's control methods are quite evident. But what is truly interesting about the matter is that this case helps us to get an idea of what the Article 13 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 being said, until now, if someone uploaded content that infringed a company's copyright, you had to wait until YouTube picked up the case, which usually only happened if the video started to get a lot of views (get attention) or if your tracker found any matches. In case YouTube (or any other similar service) didn't notice the infringement, the video was still published without problems, waiting for a wake-up call from its real creators. This passivity or lack of responsibility (a heavy workload for YouTube, it must be said) is simply due to the fact that the current law requires the user who uploaded the content to be sued directly, and that is where the problem lies, because, who the hell is it 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?