Hollywood Helps China Set Up National Surveillance And Censorship System To Tackle Copyright Infringement

The Copyright Society of China has just launched a new site, called the 12426 Copyright Monitoring Center, whose job is to scan the entire Chinese Internet for evidence of copyright infringement. As a post on the EFF site explains, its scope is incredibly wide:

This frightening panopticon is said to be able to monitor video, music and images found on "mainstream audio and video sites and graphic portals, small and medium vertical websites, community platforms, cloud and P2P sites, SmartTV, external set-top boxes, aggregation apps, and so on."

Quite how it manages to monitor SmartTVs and external set-top boxes in people's homes is not clear, but the fact that it even claims to be searching them is pretty worrying, since it may be true.

When it finds content that matches material submitted to it by a copyright holder, the Center provides them with a streamlined notification and takedown machine, from the issuance of warning notices through to the provision of mediation services.

Complementary to that "streamlined" search and takedown system, the Center's technology provider offers a preemptive platform filtering solution:

The Content Filtering System automatically matches, retrieves, de-emphasizes, and automatically alerts or filters content related to copyrighted content or content in violation, by means of content matching technology; thereby it reduces the labor costs and the potential risk of content infringement. It can be applied to cloud disks and all kind of platforms including music, video, pictures, literature and other media contents.

Of course, such automatic filtering systems can't encompass all the subtleties of copyright law, and inevitably take a very crude approach that generally amounts to "when in doubt, block". Once in place, they can also easily be extended, for example to "content in violation", as here. The Chinese system comes from the company First Brave, which claims to be the "world's leading copyright monitoring and distribution service provider". That's probably just the usual hyperbole at the moment, but it's not impossible that it could become true as a result of moves in the EU.

There the main copyright legislation is being updated, supposedly to make it fit for the digital world. And yet, alongside the ridiculous snippet tax, which would create a new ancillary copyright for newspaper publishers (as if they needed any more monopolies), there is an even more dangerous proposal to require major online platforms to filter all user uploads before posting them. That's very similar to the Chinese content filtering system -- good news for First Brave -- and would be just as toxic to freedom of expression and privacy.

The Chinese upload filtering system on its own would be bad enough, but coupled with a similar requirement in the EU, it would pose a real threat in the US too. The copyright industry would doubtless claim that since it is being done everywhere else, there is no reason why Internet platforms should not roll out the same system in the US.

The head of the MPAA, Chris Dodd, used exactly this argument back in 2011 to call for online censorship in the name of reducing copyright infringement. It's noteworthy that two of the six major Hollywood studios that make up the MPAA, 21st Century Fox and Warner Bros., are listed at the bottom of the 12426 Copyright Monitoring Center's home page as partners in the new venture. Once the service has been up and running for a while, we can expect breathless reports from the MPAA on how well the surveillance and censorship system is working in China, along with yet more demands that something similar be set up in the US.

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