infoJustice

LIFTING BARRIERS TO COVID-19 RESEARCH – WILL THE WTO ACT?

[Teresa Hackett] EIFL supports the proposal at the WTO by South Africa and India, backed by more than 100 countries, to temporarily waive IP rights on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments... From a copyright and research perspective, there are three key components for the prevention, containment and treatment of COVID-19. First, researchers must be allowed to do the research. Second, researchers (and people) must be allowed to read the research. Third, libraries (and archives) must be allowed to save the research for future use. But these activities are not universally permitted. The proposed TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights ) waiver would help ensure that scientists and researchers, no matter where they are, can undertake work on COVID-19 without legal barriers or roadblocks.

YouTube Copyright Transparency Report: Overblocking is real

[Paul Keller] ... On Monday YouTube published the first edition of its Copyright Transparency Report. The report that covers copyright enforcement actions on the platform for the period from January to June of this year provides much needed insights into how YouTube’s various copyright management systems function... So what can we learn from this first copyright transparency report? The overall take-away is that automated content removal is a big numbers game. In total YouTube processed 729.3 million copyright actions in the first half of 2021 of which the vast majority (99%) were processed via Content ID (as opposed to other tools, such as Copyright Match Tool and the Webform). And while YouTube claims that ContentID is much more accurate and less prone to abuse than its other systems ContentID has still received 3.7 million disputes from uploaders claiming that the actions (these can be blocks/removals but also demonetisation actions) taken against them are unjustified.