I appeared on CBC Radio's national flagship news programme As It Happens last night, talking about the EU's Article 13 proposal to use AI algorithms to spy on and judge everything posted online for potential copyright infringements.



As I pointed out in the interview, the EU proposal creates a permanent advantage for the giant US internet companies, who'll be able to use their money and clout to comply with these rules, while leaving everyone else (Europeans, Canadians and the rest of the world) without the services that Europeans might found, with better policies on privacy, speech, cyberbullying and all the other issues you might not agree with US giants on.

An unintended consequence might be something like joining a European dating service, some future equivalent of Tinder, and having your Tinder profile taken down because you're wearing a band T-shirt that has a copyrighted photo on it. The malicious consequences would be something like in the run-up to a debate over, say, Greece leaving the European Union or a new Catalan independence referendum, someone might maliciously upload Wikipedia articles or other key news articles to WordPress or other large blogging platforms so that you couldn't write about them. Every time you try to quote those articles, it would show up as having been copyrighted and not something that you're allowed to quote from.

How Canadians could get caught up in the EU's proposed copyright law [As It Happens/CBC]