Automatic Filtering: Back to the Future

Image of a Filter
Image From Bühler, Friedrich Adolf, Filtern und Pressen (Leipzig O. Spamer 1912)

The Government of Canada continues to consider fundamental changes to its copyright laws. In its latest proposal, what’s old is new again, as Canada once more considers automatic content filtering online. Internet Archive Canada strongly opposes these proposals, and submitted a formal response to the Government explaining why.

Image of a Filter

Unfortunately, these are not new ideas. For over a decade, website blocking, automatic content filtering, internet bans, and other draconian copyright measures have been urged on governments around the world. With political leaders looking at large technology companies with a new eye, both the United States and the European Union have expressed a new openness to these previously rejected ideas. Now styled as attempts to reign in “big tech,” what is really at stake is the free and open internet, which offers so much to the individual user and makes websites like archive.org possible.

Fortunately, while the Government has outlined a variety of potentially troubling changes to Canada’s Copyright Act, it has also stated that “[s]ignificant changes” to Canada’s copyright law are “not presently being contemplated.” In the circumstances, Internet Archive Canada is simply asking the Government to recognize the tremendous significance of these kinds of proposals and refrain from enacting them at this time. Many others have done the same; indeed, our friends at Open Media asked all Canadians to voice their concerns .

Internet Archive Canada is proud of its history in Canada, and we have often lauded Canada’s bright and positive approach to copyright. We are hopeful that reason will once again prevail in the Canadian copyright debates, and that the Government of Canada will work to ensure good copyright policy and strong libraries in the 21st century and beyond.

11 thoughts on “Automatic Filtering: Back to the Future

  1. Dustin Rodriguez

    One of the things that these ‘automatic filtering’ proposals always seems to skip over is the fact that even if implemented perfectly, and they function exactly as designed… they would break everything. There is no central register of copyrighted works. There is no central database of granted licenses to use copyrighted content. If you don’t have that, then you make it literally impossible for content creators to sell their content. Photographers couldn’t sell their photos. Reporters couldn’t sell their articles. Advertisements and marketing materials would have to be made public domain or not be able to be distributed anywhere. If a filmmaker licensed a film to one streaming service, they would be locked in and that content couldn’t be licensed to a different streaming service even if the agreement is non-exclusive because the filtering can’t know who has a license and who doesn’t, so it has to default to just accepting the first posting as the only legitimate one.

    Governments are neither willing nor capable to build a global digital license management system, and such would be literally the first necessary step to ever do filtering without utterly destroying nearly every industry that produces or consumes copyrighted material.

  2. Alli Mirdad @Bangsu

    All user or any other person genre, creatures or anything in this world must remember.. anything you all wanna used in Internet is never get for free, must paying to Alli Mirdad @Bangsu. You used you pay it and never share anymore.

  3. OldSchoolTech

    So what’s going on with the lawsuit over the digital book lending from last year? Haven’t seen any blog posts about it in a long time. You can’t just sweep it under the rug and expect people to forget about it. Lots of people are archiving stuff but its a waste of time when the book publishers win the case and the site has to shut down.

  4. Tracy Hoggard

    Copyright lawsuits should be maintained appropriately! There are many countries around the word looking for something good for preventing these copyright issues. I have been working with this issue at this flirtymania platform for the benefit of the modern people! I hope we all the people should follow these lawsuits strictly against copyright!

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