 Hello and welcome to the EFF at Home Creators Town Hall on copyright. We held one of these last year and it was so successful. We are having it again where for the first 30 minutes a panel of experts will update you on the state of copyright in 2022 and the second half will be devoted to answering your questions on today's panel. In addition to me, I just realized I didn't introduce myself, I'm Katherine Trennicosta, the Associate Director of Policy and Activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And on our panel we have Betsy Rosenblatt, the legal chair for the Organization for Transformative Works, which runs the Archive of Our Own, the award-winning Archive of Our Own. And we have Kara Gagliano, staff attorney here at EFF. Hello. It's been a very busy year already in the world of copyright. So I'm going to start with a question for both of you about what is going on in the copyright office. The copyright office is in the middle of holding proceedings on what they call standard technical measures. Betsy, can you tell us what those are and what those proceedings aim to do? Maybe. I can tell you what they say they are and what they and we might hope that they would do. So the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which I'm sure many viewers have heard of, has a piece in it that says that online service providers should comply with standard technical measures for protecting copyright. And the idea behind standard technical measures is that if all of the consensus of technologists agree that there's a particular way to protect copyright against Internet piracy, that it would be a good idea for online service providers to allow that to work. The problem is there's no such thing. The technology does not allow this to happen. And so since the DMCA was passed many years ago, this provision about standard technical measures has been on the books, but it's just been waiting for standard technical measures to come into existence should they ever do so, which let's face it, they probably won't. The copyright office has started looking into the question of whether such things exist. And they've held a big plenary session asking stakeholders, including online service providers like the Archive of our Own, whether there are any technical measures that would help prevent piracy on a large scale. And the answer we've given the copyright office is really no. So that's what's... But in fact, to the extent there are technical measures, they are A, not standard and B, really bad at preventing copyright infringement. They're both bad at preventing copyright infringement and bad at identifying and allowing pure uses. Yeah, I think it's important to sort of underline that the law sort of requires this to be a consensus among all of the various stakeholders that this thing works and that we all want it. The problem is that they don't exist. And so the copyright office had its big plenary, which is a thing that most people, anyone could really participate in. They are supposed to be moving on to more quote unquote industry specific meetings. And our argument has been that if you are going to claim to be doing something that affects the online creative industry, it is not just Hollywood and Google who have to be in those meetings, right? That's right. And the archive of our Own is an online service provider under the definitions of the law. But we're very different in almost every way from say Verizon, which is also an online service provider. And we're very different from say YouTube, which has some things in common with the AO3 and lots of things not in common with the AO3, including for example, depth of resources. And so just having the horizons of the world and the YouTubes of the world in that room is useless and almost as useless as just having movie studios and record companies in the room. But either way with the movie studios and record companies have a louder voice right now than online service providers. And a much louder voice than users who are completely out of the conversation entirely. I think there were over 600 submissions to that copyright office plenary, most of which were from users saying we think this is a really bad idea for technical or self-expression reasons. And when I say most, I mean almost all. But they really haven't been included in the conversation beyond that initial flood of responses. Yeah. And it is concerning for all of us the idea that there are vastly more in terms of humans that are independent creators than there are movie studios or major platforms. And the major platforms have spent millions of dollars to build their own filters, whereas something like A03 for both resource reasons and also policy reasons doesn't have a content ID-like system, right? Not only do we not have such a system nor want one, but it would be impossible to make one. We rely on a policy of what we call maximum inclusivity. We want to include a wide a different range of material as our creators have to offer. We also have terms of service that are very important to us. We want to make sure that illegal material that is to say, for example, child sexual abuse material is not available on the A03. And we don't want pirated material available on the A03. And in fact, those things are very seldom posted. But when they are, we rely on user reports to tell us. And then we look at them. And a human being looks at them, volunteer human being looks at them and says, oh yeah, this is a problem and takes it down. But that's our filtering system is a human being who's volunteering their time. And if we want a future where we are not dependent on Google, it can't be that a $100 million system is required. That's how much, by the way, content ID cost Google to create. $100 million that it doesn't work. So that's what's going on in the copyright office. Obviously both OTW and EFF have are engaged in this process and keeping track of it and are prepared to object if anything comes of it that does not take into account the actual wider base of people who depend on the internet. The other thing that is going on in the world is that Senator Tom Tillis has written and introduced a draft of a bill called the quote unquote smart copyright act, smart being an acronym that I can't quite remember. He's the same person who last year had his draft bill of the digital copyright act, which was terrible in separate and horrible ways from this one, which is the smart copyright act. Kara and Betsy, can you sort of outline what it is and why we're so concerned about it? I'll start with Kara. Sure. So what the smart copyright act, which we really don't like having to call it that, so we prefer to call it the filter mandate bill, would essentially impose a different, kind of slightly different take on the standard technical measures process, but make it, I would say, even worse, requiring something called designated technical measures. And the reason they would be called designated rather than standard is that there would not actually have to be any kind of industry consensus. They would not have to be independently developed. It would be up to the copyright office to do a study and decide, like, we think this should be standard, like it's not, but we think everyone should have to use this, which is really not within the copyright office's expertise. And from what we hear, they actually are not very happy with this proposal because they're like, we don't want to do this, like this, the STM stuff is already hard enough. The other thing that would make the designated technical measures, we think even worse is that they are not tied to how to get immunity for a platform, right? So the DMCA provides ways for platforms to get immunity from copyright claims that are based on material uploaded by users. So when you have immunity or a safe harbor, you might hear it called, that basically means that the legislation says, if you do XYZ, you won't get in trouble for this other thing. The filter mandate bill, not calling it the smart act, the filter mandate bill would not be linked to that existing safe harbor, existing immunity. Instead, it would actually be a new requirement, a true mandate and say, if you don't do XYZ, if you don't use these filtering systems that the copyright office decides in however much wisdom it may have that you have to use, then you will get punished. It doesn't even matter if there's infringement going on. It's just use these or there's a penalty. So we often say with the DMCA safe harbor, there is somewhat of an illusion of choice. Like technically, you're not required to implement the things that are required to get the safe harbor. You won't be penalized outright if you don't unless there is some infringement on your platform. But practically speaking, for most platforms, they can't afford to take the risk. But there is at least some flexibility for them where they might be able to say, well, this might not exactly fit the safe harbor parameters, but we feel confident enough that there really is no infringement here that we're going to be flexible on this. The filter mandate bill would not allow for that kind of common sense flexibility, because the platform would know if we don't do this, no matter how reasonable it is for us to not, we're going to be penalized. I'm just going to remind everyone if you put questions in the chat at any time, we have lovely moderators collecting them, and we will answer them in the second half. I do want to answer one that we got real quickly. And by me, I mean Betsy, which is someone asked what AO3 is. So the archive of our own is one of the largest fan work and specifically focused on fan fiction archives. The organization for transformative works is an advocacy group for fans and fan work. So people who make fan art, fan fiction, fan music, fan games, all sorts of wonderful fan things about the things they love. The AO3 specifically hosts fan fiction and provides a way for fans to find each other through that fan fiction. To add to what Kara said, one of the sort of challenges of this is that there's a no win situation, because if this is tied to that safe harbor, that's bad too. And in fact, one of the things that we've been talking to the Copyright Office about in the previous proceeding is that the tying filter mandates to the safe harbor could deprive online service providers like the AO3 of a safe harbor, even if there's no infringement that they're sort of looking toward. And that the failure to sort of adopt technical measures that you can't afford, or that don't make sense based on what you host, isn't something that the safe harbor should hinge on. On the other hand, as Kara points out, being punished for not following a technical measure when it's not even tethered to anything at all makes also no sense. So the problem with filter mandates is that filter mandates don't make sense. Yeah, and I think another thing to point out about Smart Copyright, or the filter mandate bill, which I'm not going to call Smart Copyright, is there has been some question about, you know, there's an illusion of choice with the DMCA. There's also been some question about whether or not ISPs are covered in the same way because of internet access concerns. But the way that the filter mandate bill is written, every layer of your internet access could be required to have a filter of a different kind. And once you layer filters on top of each other, if you've ever done that, very little comes out the end of that. And so that's the other reason this bill is so concerning. If your ISP is, it has to have a filter. And also if your ISP has a filter that requires them to have some knowledge about what you're doing online, which is a, we don't necessarily want to encourage ISPs to collect more information on their users than they already have. They consistently would like more data on us, and we don't want to give them the cover of law for that. I think a lot of online creators might think, well, what's wrong with trying to filter out infringing material? But the answer is, you can't do that without also filtering out the stuff that as an online creator, you want to put out there. Yeah, I think what often happens is the argument is made that like, well, if it reduces piracy by 2%, isn't that good? Isn't that a 2% reduction in piracy? But if it's accompanied by a 10% reduction in legal free expression, that's not a trade-off worth making. It's not even a trade-off worth making if it's 1% of free expression, which you have a right to. And if it comes at the expense of privacy and cybersecurity, it's probably not worth it for that reason either. Just so that you all know, like we did for the Digital Copyright Act, we have a letter up on act.eff.org that internet creators, which most people actually are at this point. We all write and share things online. You can sign it and we will be delivering it to the Senate on April 25th, which is the day they get back from their recess, because they have already received letters of support from the major content organizations like the Motion Picture Association, the RIAA, the classics. And we want to make sure that they get a countervailing opinion that is from real individual people and a much larger, and to proportionally shows them that it is a larger group of people than those few multi-billion dollar companies. So I would say that the concern also really isn't that this thing will stand up on its own. It has so many problems that everyone understands. But as we learned in late 2020, early 2021, there has been a nasty habit on the part of Congress to put these copyright bills into giant legislation that's like 6,000 pages long, and everyone just wants to vote for it because it's must pass, it's like funds the government, and they get through. So that's what happened with case act, which creates the tribunal system to sort of force people to pay out. And that's what happened with the felony streaming bill, which was particularly concerning because no text had ever been released to the public of it before it was put into the must pass legislation. It hadn't had any hearings on it. No one really knew what it was until it was passed. And that's a process we want to make sure is not repeated with the filter mandate bill. I'm going to move on slightly away from copyright, but not too far away because it's still filters, and it's still a filter mandate, which is a bill called ShopSafe, which currently lives, like we were just talking about, currently lives inside this giant trade package. It's only in the House version and not in the Senate version. So we are urging Congress to pass this when they meet to figure out which version goes through that ShopSafe is not included. Kara, you want to describe the joys that are in this ShopSafe? Oh, I would love to. And just to start to give some context to what Catherine was saying about this, it being kind of tucked into this massive bill to try to get it to pass often without it even being read by the people who are voting on it. In the America Compete Act, this trade bill where it has been inserted into the House building, ShopSafe starts on page 1672 of the legislation. So if you make it that far, great. You might figure out the problems with ShopSafe. If you don't, well, hope you know what you're voting on. So ShopSafe takes the magic of filters and takes it to the trademark arena. Apparently, some legislators saw how terribly copyright filters work and thought, let's require that, but have them filter for trademarks, which not only are subject to many fair uses, expressive uses protected by the First Amendment, also often just like basic words that you can use for a lot of different reasons. So as you can imagine, extra hard to filter for and so extra susceptible to the kind of issues that we see with over filtering in the copyright context. And you already see this in the kind of filters that brands use to send automated takedowns, much like they do with copyright. We have written about an example where Volkswagen sent takedowns to Etsy for all these different products involving beetles. It was red bubble. Okay, red bubble. So all these different insect related items were getting taken down because they used the word beetle or bug. So you can see the problem here. And ShopSafe would, again, this is another one where the supporters of the bill will try to say, no, it doesn't mandate filters, but it essentially does without getting into the nitty gritty of the language, say for our purposes. It essentially requires trademark filters to avoid liability. And once again, even though the legislators keep claiming it's a safe harbor, like the DMCA, it is not. It is not a safe harbor. It is not formatted in the way I explained a safe harbor work saying, if you do X, Y, and Z, don't worry, you won't get in trouble. You will be safe from infringement liability. It says, you have to do X, Y, and Z, or you will be liable by any counterfeiting for any counterfeiting on your platform. That's not safe harbor. It's just a law. And just to piggyback on that, it's not just sort of mistakes about individual words like beetle and bug. It's also self-expressive things like fan products where if somebody wants to make a thing that says, I love Star Wars or I love Harry Potter, those things could be taken down, although they have no trademark impact and they're certainly not counterfeits. Yeah. Another example, if anyone has noticed my favorite relevant shirt for this town hall, making both a copyright fair use and a trademark expressive use purchase from an independent creator at an art show, this is not infringing under either copyright or trademark. But if there were any mention of the fact that it says, just do it in the title or description with a trademark filter and knowing Nike, there is a very, very good chance that it would never make it online. Other example, just another quick thing as a way to think about this is if you even think of the word Apple, that's susceptible to both the beetle kind of problems and issues where you might have really good reasons to use it, like if say you make fan stickers that are like for Apple computers, like how people will cover the Apple logo on the back with different stickers, you should be allowed to mention that it is for Mac computers or Apple computers, but that would very likely end up getting you filtered out, even though there is absolutely nothing infringing about that. Plugs that fit into Apple computers and you just want to say this is compatible with Apple computers. Yeah, I like to think of it too is like everyone sort of knows that there's this weird madness that comes over people in the early part of every year where they think they can't say the word Superbowl because NFL is so intent on sending cease and desist and protecting the trademark where obviously you can call it the Superbowl, like that's its name as long as you are not in any way implying that you own the Superbowl or people would think you own the Superbowl, but if you take that example and apply it out, it would make speaking online very difficult. So that is shop safe. So the goal there is to keep it out of the trade package, the final trade package that gets passed. I'm going to do a little recap of things because we've covered a lot of ground in the half hour. So the first thing we talked about is the copyright office standard technical measure proceedings that is related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is the thing that if you have a takedown notice, that is what that is. And what they're doing there is trying to figure out if there is an industry consensus that some form of technical measure is a standard that everyone should have to accommodate. That is impossible. That doesn't exist. We say it doesn't exist. The only way the copyright office could get people to agree that it exists is if it excludes 90% of the people it would affect, probably more. The second thing we talked about is the filter mandate bill, which is a bill that was introduced in the Senate by Tom Tillis. That bill would create a whole new proceeding that would create a process by which the copyright office could create designated technical measures. It has fewer requirements than the standard technical measures, which is why they're doing it, because if nothing comes from that, they want to make sure they have a backup so that there's a way for filters to be required. That has been introduced, and we want to make sure that people understand that it deserves fair hearing and that people can object to it and that it's not non-controversial and shouldn't be slipped into other things. If you are a creator, you can go to act.eff.org and put your name to the petition. We got over 900 signatures last year. I would like an even thousand for this one. I would like more than that, but my achievable goal is a thousand. The third thing we have talked about is shop safe, which would require filters for trademark, which as bad as filters are at telling if one thing is a copy of another for copyright, filters trying to figure out if a use of a word is trademark infringement or not are even worse. That is the three things we have talked about. Pretty much all of them require filters in some form or another. Think about Content ID not just being used by YouTube. As bad as Content ID is, if there is a problem with it, Google could fix it if they wanted to. If it's a standard technical measure, they could not fix it because it would be required by law. Now, I'm going to move to our Q&A. The first one we have is, are there any requirements for proof of ownership of copyrighted material? Example registration before it gets into the filter. Kara, I'm going to ask you about shop safe first, about requirements that it be listed and what that would even mean in the trademark context. Yeah. I think shop safe would not have any requirement like that. In fact, some of the dispute is over whether the trademark owners should even have to do anything. They are of the opinion and shop safe basically takes the position that platforms are supposed to be policing trademark use without even being told to do it by the trademark owners. They're supposed to know everyone's trademarks of which there are at least millions. The other thing is that to have trademark rights, you do not have to have a registered trademark. Having a registration gives you some extra protections and can make things easier to prove, but you can have what's called common law rights where it just develops through your use of the trademark. So Betsy filters and requiring some sort of proof of ownership? No. Yeah. The short answer is no. And in fact, it would again, it would be technically impossible because for similar reasons, you don't need to register a copyright to own a copyright. And there are a lot of ways to use copyrighted material that might sort of evoke the copyrighted material or incorporate aspects of the copyrighted material that don't require owning that the underlying copyright in a thing. So when you post something to YouTube, you have to say, you have to check a box saying it's not infringing, but you don't have to check a box saying you own copyright in it because you shouldn't have to. There are lots of reasons why you shouldn't have to own copyright in something in order to post it on the internet the same way that you shouldn't have to own a trademark in something to talk about that trademark. So there are no such requirements and there shouldn't be as a practical matter. I will say just as another example is the way that Content ID works, and this is a voluntary one, so think about if it were required, the way that Content ID works is rights holders that Google deems to be large enough and important enough to be a part of Content ID. They just say like, upload everything you own and we'll check it and so they do that, but what can happen is the things they own could contain public domain music, for example, that anyone could use, but it will ping as a match and they can or it can be things they've licensed. We've also heard from musicians who licensed their music to one of a large rights holder and then they can't put it up online because it's in the database, it is in part of something that is owned by someone else. So while there could or couldn't be such a requirement, it would be difficult and at the end of the day they're not that useful in terms of sort of beating back these problems. Are there any proposed sanctions for people or entities who make frivolous or commercially harmful copyright claims, 512F? Kar, you want to go first? Sure, yeah. So there is an existing provision for this under the DMCA. It is the number of the provision is 512F, which is by Catherine just saying that. And it basically says that if your material gets taken down because someone makes a copyright claim in bad faith, you can sue them for damages and make them pay your attorney's fees. The thing is this really rarely gets used, especially A, it is expensive and time consuming and difficult to file a lawsuit. And also at least in, I mean, there have been barely any judicial opinions interpreting this, but at least in the Ninth Circuit, the court has said to establish that it was a bad faith claim, you have to actually show subjective, not just objective bad faith, which means you don't just have to show that you did not infringe and it wouldn't be reasonable to think that you did, you have to show that the person who submitted it actually knew that it was not infringing. So basically, stupidity is a defense or more nicely ignorance of the law is a defense. If you say like, well, I thought fair use means it's only fair use if you acknowledge that I'm the owner, which isn't true at all. But if they really believed that and they can convince the court that they really believed that, then the court would likely say, well, no subjective bad faith. So you don't win. You have to pay all your own fees for this litigation. Too bad. And with these, these filter mandates is that they don't even get to that stage, because in the takedown system, there was a punishment for engaging in bad faith takedown potentially, although as Kara points out, it's a pretty remote potential. But it at least exists. There's something to stop people from engaging in bad faith takedowns under this safe harbor rules. But at the filter level, the bad faith claims happen before things even make it up onto the internet. And so there's really no opportunity to challenge these sorts of filtering restrictions on and they're not it's being done by an algorithm or a computing program. It's not being done by a person. So there's no person to challenge on what they did. And there's no this filter doesn't work because they think they are wrong, that this filter doesn't work will stop it from being come a standard technical measure or designated technical measure. But that that does that requires a level of knowledge that the copyright office just doesn't really have or even listen to when it is brought up to them. So that that is fun. I would point out one more thing about 512f, which is the one of the most recent high profile 512f suits was YouTube, bringing it against a copyright troll who was filing false takedowns and then extorting people. And the reason YouTube did that was because they were harmed because they had to deal with these bad faith takedowns. And for their users and because YouTube has the the ability to file a lawsuit of that type and like do that whereas a regular user really doesn't. So reshop safe. Does the filter apply even if you indicate the contact is a registered trademark of XYZ company? I don't know if I necessarily understand this question. I think I understand like would you be protected from the filter if you kind of acknowledge who owns the trademark? I can't really answer that question definitively because it's the bill doesn't kind of dictate the contours of how the filter should work. I think it is extremely unlikely that anyone would build into their filter something like that especially because that actually does not a lot of people think like well all I have to do is you know give a citation credit the owner. It's not actually true makes very little difference in the infringement analysis. The kind of ultimate question for trademark infringement is are consumers likely to be confused about the relationship between the product and the trademark owner? And here so you might say well if you acknowledge it's not your trademark then maybe people are less likely to be confused but that's actually like a pretty minimal factor in how courts consider it. Betsy I have a couple of questions that feel right in your wheelhouse because people want to know about fan works the relationship they have with copyright law are they allowed? Are they not? What can people do if they find themselves targeted by takedowns for their fan works? This is this feels right in your wheelhouse. So yeah so the answer is fan works are allowed based on a pretty nuanced and fact specific analysis which means not every fan work is allowed but the law of fair use under copyright says that when a work transforms the underlying work which it might do by parody or criticism or commentary and it doesn't compete with the underlying work then it's not copyright infringement it's not like infringement but it's just not infringement and a commerciality is another factor that's considered so non-commercial fan works are less likely to be infringing than commercial fan works but every case in history that's found a fair use to exist has been about a commercial work so clearly commercial works can be fair use and can be allowed. So there's this nuanced case by case specific analysis that so often in the law the answer is maybe it depends and that's true with fan works but fan works that have any sort of aspect of criticism or commentary or transformation of the underlying work are likely to not infringe. So what happens if your fan work is targeted for a takedown you can do what's called counter notifying and say my work is a fair use and therefore shouldn't be taken down there are pros and cons to counter notifying the pros are it gets your work put back up the cons are you have to give your real name and that can open you up to a federal lawsuit but this is part of why the safe harbor process is effective there's a takedown part of it there's a counter notice part of it there's a punishing people for bad faith part of it and the filters just like short circuit all of that so we like the DMCA notice and takedown system is a perfect but it works partly because it has this counter notification part of it. I'm going to add in here and then Cara I will let you I will just say that if this happens and you want to counter notice but you're afraid if you email info at EFF.org we can hopefully either talk to you ourselves or find you a lawyer at low or no cost that'll sort of help you figure out what to do Cara. Yeah and actually on on that note if you specifically are concerned about revealing your real name if you do go through an attorney it's not super clear in the statute but our interpretation and what I think is a reasonable interpretation that that platforms generally agree with is that you can have like a lawyer or an agent submit the counter notice on your behalf using their name and say you know to be contacted you're to be contacted through them. Yeah your name and like the legal office is addressed rather than someone's like yeah home which is the concern especially when people not be doxxed through takedowns. That's what I was about to say there have been cases where people use this process not because they want to take something down or or whatever but because they want to get the information about someone that they have some problem with so if you if you do that there is a way to to go around that and I want to make sure people know that because it's often a concern. Um and we have something slightly related to the fan work question which is would you speak of these issues with regard to derivative works especially derived works that are not in any way recognizable or hardly recognizable in respect to the original. So those works are I think in some ways the ones were were worried about in terms of filters the less recognizable something is as a derivative of an underlying work those the less likely it's going to be captured in a filter if the serial numbers have been filed off well enough a filter might not get um but uh so many of the most sort of important and valuable expressions political expressions personal expressions are our expressions that use a work in a in an identifiable way specifically because that brings understanding and value to the new expression um as a priority as a criticism that sort of thing and um those are explicitly allowed by the law but would get caught in filters. Yeah and I would also point out that like we live in a world of means now the internet this was always the case like it's not new to the internet people have spoken in quotations and so on like frankly my dear I don't give a damn is for me moving far predates the internet but we live in a world of means where you and the way we have always expressed ourselves and the way culture has always worked is something has a cultural meaning and you use it to reinforce what you're saying or you twist it to make a comment about the original and that's how human culture evolves and it is therefore important that it be allowed which sort of um which sort of uh feeds into a question that we have about will things ever go out of copyright it keeps getting extended will the extensions ever stop and I will say first of all I would like to shout out the genius on archive of our own when the great gaps be was taken or released into the public domain this year uploaded it to archive of our own but replaced gaps be with gritty just my favorite use of a public domain work to be clear the archive of our own didn't do that a user did that which was awesome um but I think the short answer is uh copyright does eventually expire it just expires at a time that is so distant from now that it seems like forever um and Disney's worked very hard to make that length as long as possible we don't have any reason to think that they're gonna keep doing that if they if they did they probably would have had to start making noises about it already but um and no one knows for sure yeah um I I always like to point out that if you read the constitution the purpose of copyright is to incentivize creation not lock it down it's to incentivize creation by giving um the people who make things a period of time by which they can make money by the exclusive use of it it is not till last 90 years after someone is no longer around or a court or give it to a corporation forever and ever and ever that's not what copyright is supposed to do um and I don't care what the supreme court says I don't think it's a limited time just because it lists years that is not limited that is long um so yeah I think um we have a colleague who always quotes the axiom no one does to Disney what Disney did to the brother's grim which I think is is fair um so yeah so that is I think almost all of the questions um oh no here's one sorry I missed this one uh how do podcast producers and online storytellers protect themselves with all of these things and what can they do I can speak to that a little bit um I think there are there are a few different considerations for uh for podcasters um and the like um and one of the key ones is that when you're podcasting you're almost certainly not just sending something out into the world from your living room directly you're going through some portal right some right through iTunes or Stitcher or some other it's some way of getting your podcast out into the world and uh so these legal proposals affect you but the part that I think is of greater concern is that they affect the platforms that you use to get your podcast out into the world and the incentives created by these laws are uh to limit what people can say first and ask questions later because the penalties for not doing that limiting are very severe when we look at this filter mandate law for example the numbers are very high or they can bankrupt a small business very quickly um and so the the concern is that podcasters will lose their platforms uh that they would be broadcasting through um and so how can podcasters protect themselves um well this is where I I put in a pitch for contact your legislature later send it back over to Catherine um I would say yeah this was the thing that that I actually wanted to point out is the this system does not incentivize creating filters that not that they could but that arm better at it because the legal risk is so high and you know Cara and Betsy are both lawyers everyone in my life is a lawyer I am not um but and and lawyers and companies are risk averse especially if you don't have a lot of cash on hand at which point it becomes a good idea to be over inclusive in in the filter you choose because the penalty for getting sued by Disney versus a frustrated user if you're making a risk analysis not to pick on Disney although I love to pick on Disney um if you're if you're doing a risk analysis you are far more concerned about a billion dollar company that can send lawyers after you and you and you can be forced to pay statutory damages far in excess of what you have on hand versus a user saying your filter is a problem can't you let my thing up um and I think another thing to point out the reason that I also hate these and I do a lot is you know speech can be like timeliness is important when it comes to speech if you are commenting on something because it is an issue going on right now your voice needs to be out there right now not after weeks of going through some system with a filter um and in the similar way like this is why we see police officers there's just this week another story of police officers playing music so that any filmed uh interaction with them will get caught by a filter this time it was they were blasting Disney and they happened to be outside a local council member's home when they did it and so he came out and said stop but they they say if they always do that they are exploiting the flaw in the copyright filter system you can't put your thing up on YouTube if it is Disney music on the background um my personal favorite part of that was that the officer then said to the council member uh yeah it was a mistake so sorry sir which it's not a mistake the mistake was doing it outside a council member's home not knowing that you clearly knew what you were doing especially I mean picked Disney right famous copyright troll um so and and the story that I read said that the members members of the community who didn't want to be identified because of you know police reprisal I'll say that this is something that's been going on for a while in their neighborhood if they just happen to be in front of a council member's house this time um and like if you are filming police for example you need that to be up and seen sooner rather than later um or if you are saying don't support this work it's a problem or you're just reviewing it because like I used to be a reviewer like your time is valuable if a three hour movie is bad and someone is telling you why the three hour movie is bad before you go and pay your money at a movie theater they should be able to get you that information while it is still in theaters if a filter can keep something like that down for two weeks that can increase the bottom line and that is not what copyright is for it is not to prevent people from criticizing your work so uh that is that is my little spiel I I hate filters a lot I'm going to plug one more time if you go to act.eff.org right now you can sign our petition you can also take part in many of our other actions if you click on see all our actions you can see our shop safe action for example um you can also do a a copyright filter mandate action separate from the creator's letter that we will be bundling with letters from various segments of the population to explain the many different ways in which the filter mandate bill is a problem. I want to thank our panelists Betsy Rosenblatt and Cara Gangliano so much for joining me especially on sort of short notice but I think it was important in a valuable um conversation if you want to see this again later it will be up on all of the EFF uh websites and channels and if you want to support the work we do uh go to EFF.org slash donate um we as as our executive director says we work for tips um same for OTW I am sure um and I think our fundraising drive is is starting very soon complete like totally genuinely completely coincidentally but I I think that's happening so if you want to support um the OTW uh head over to transformativeworks.org or a03.org um so that is uh all of those things keep your eyes peeled EFF.org will also be we will be writing um as these processes go along about the status of things and what we think is going on so you can also stay informed that way uh again thank you to our panelists thank you to everyone who joined us and thank you for all of the really great questions