13 10 min 2 yrs

Dangerous new censorship proposals are on their way. Lobbyists for the music, tech FAANG and publishing industries are pulling out all the stops to impose Censorship Machinery on people via extreme new copyright rules. They want to force websites to build expensive robot programs to spy for copyrighted material. This means they will block content before you post it – before you’ve done anything wrong – and violate your free expression on-line.

Copyright lobbyists even wrote to US President attacking civil society efforts for fairer copyright and calling our desire to protect free expression “dangerous”, so new rules could pass quickly unless we show the Copyright Office just how many citizens oppose such censorship plans.

Directly following victory, recording industry associations wrote to him asking that he demand tech companies create new ways to restrict access online and make sure they get the compensation they feel they deserve. Then some Copyright Alliance wrote to him aggressively pushing protectionist measures that would secure existing monopolies / capitalists and stop new businesses from emerging.

The system they are proposing is officially called “Notice and Staydown”. But we know what it really is: a censorship machine. It would force our favorite websites to create or buy expensive new technologies (AI, ML & similar stuff) to monitor and filter the content we create. It would put a huge technical burden on new websites and businesses to find ways to fulfill these obligations – putting a chill on innovation and strengthen tech imperialism.

The Censorship Machine means every website that allows users to upload content must have automated programs which detect and flag copyrighted content as it is uploaded. Its algorithm would block the person from uploading the content altogether, rather than taking it down after it has been fairly assessed.

Monitoring billions of posts per day can only be done with automated AI systems that will unfairly censor legal speech and expression, depending on who pays more or licks the white collar cross-industry networks. These programs detect and block content, regardless of whether or not it is legitimate or legal. These bots won’t be able to recognize legal exceptions for parody, public interest, and fair use. It will stop you sharing fan fiction, memes, video remixes, gifs, critiques, online reviews, home videos, and all sorts of brilliant, creative things. Even posting a comment on a blog or news story could cause you to run afoul of the censorship machine.

Instead of a Censorship Machine, we need positive rules that respect creators, prioritize free expression, and are shaped democratically. In these turbulent times we simply cannot afford to have powerful mass censorship tools in the hands of lobbyists and government officials.

Sign on to endorse at https://act.openmedia.org/censorshipmachine?src=161177

13 thoughts on “Stop the Website Censorship Machine – Notice, Geo Filtering and Staydown

  1. It’s the thought that counts, so think freedom. Software means that the users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software. Earnings and profiteering comes as non-serious goals.

  2. No Web site with a registration form that is not protected by automated human proof test which displays a sequence of characters in an image, and requests the user to enter the sequence into an input field. Security mechanism based on the Turing Test—one of the oldest concepts in Artificial Intelligence—and it is most often called Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA).

    On the other side, a number of these tests have been broken, that is, automated programs designed by researchers, hackers, and spammers have been able to automatically serve the correct answer.

  3. No Press Freedom for a vocal non-English farm worker in DRC exposing GM food profiteers while popular digital media (alias mafia) are busy wiki cleansing of best sources, realigning online capitalists, full bias towards ruling cronies / brands.. We’re light years away from today’s so-called mainstream media obsessed with privacy theft, rumor, indoctrination, hype, bias / ephemera. The fake media & its proxies tag and troll truth-reporting and transparent channels with various trendy things. Read more

  4. A Green Digital Initiative: Post-pandemic lightning diwali offer: Domain Name starts @ ₹150/- till 31st Dec 2021 – 0 profiteering here!

  5. Freedom Gift for friends and family inside Shrinking Internet of Walled Gardens.. Interpolation is fitting data points to represent the value of a function. Apart from genuine engineering and science applications, they are increasingly used to construct new data points within the range of a discrete data set of known data points or can be used for determining a formula of behavioral function that will pass from the given set of points (idea A, idea B). Exploitation of humanoids is now an extended and fast evolving mutant in this area!

  6. Vigilante cronies and its mafia wings having access to big-data dashboards watching over heat mapped anomalies in masses inside their hi-tech bunkers. These safe cheats are agents of deep state, they’re being abused worldwide for just reasons, so expect much smarter revenge.

  7. Separate penalties for sharing tools used to remove restrictions is especially important. Recently, Goopoly demanded GitHub take down tools used to work around its Widevine DRM. This just underscores that users will be unable to take advantage of even approved exemptions, unless they are able to write their own tools from scratch to get the DRM out of their way. It’s like saying everyone is free to cook what they want in their own kitchen, but buying and selling stoves is illegal.

    DRM has nothing to do with enforcing copyright and piracy laws, and everything to do with control. It lets companies control their users so they can’t repair their own devices. Just what kings & queens had since thousands of years, this gives governments extra-judicial control over their citizens. It lets copyright violators (especially BIG tech brands) control access to the evidence of their violations. It’s time for sufferers to take back control! While this system is unfair to users and activists, gaining back even some control over our computing is important.

    Read more at https://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/help_fight_against_dmca_anticircumvention_rules_december_7th

  8. This includes AI extrapolation of stolen private data on heat map dashboards, sucked and dumped via ML interception of all electronically transmitted information on Internet – banking, mobile apps, social media, photos, videos, texts, emails, audios and other meta shared traffic. Pandemic game of mass-surveillance is starting to thrive now.

    Interpolation is fitting data points to represent the value of a function. Apart from genuine engineering and science applications, they are increasingly used to construct new data points within the range of a discrete data set of known data points or can be used for determining a formula of behavioral function that will pass from the given set of points (idea A, idea B). Exploitation of humanoids for profit of brands and cronies is now an extended and fast evolving variant in this area!

  9. I am the landlord thanks to my forefather’s ruthless greed,
    I am the capitalist with power to suppress labor’s every need.
    I am a proud labor thanks to my ancestor’s selfless sacrifice,
    I am a worker with power to organically shake all evil edifice.

    – Sudhir Panda

  10. Such simple jugaad, are marketed as some grand futuristic strategies to attain “the speed of light” with cutting-edge technology of scale, a better word is shameless development partnering with “growth hacking” ministers & its Gen-X hybrids! Not being human-centrist is the biggest threat to we the people: so-called customer or business are not yet floating in some Nazi deep space.

  11. “Taking adamantly vertical flights for truth despite outrageous conditions is a genetically rare value system among living things.” – #GyanKiBaat

  12. Contrary to malicious diktat of capital markets for profit of its popular hunks, time and its measurement are relative, its possibly -2022 BC for some and +2022 AD for many. At this moment, we’re all alive and breathing here to pray and justify for our existence, ignite your dead neurons and swim the dark cosmos to spot as much light for your fellow beings in reality, NOT just via western digital propaganda pasted on your fancy and smartly enslaved mobile devices..

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