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Comment by fg6hr | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how collecting or distributing files with music is a grave crime and corporations can take down anything they don't like with a half-assed DMCA request, with no repercussions for "mistakes", but a person's face image doesn't belong to that person and the same corporations can safely collect and distribute these images for profit.

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YouTube takes this one step further to the ridiculous extreme that if you are live streaming a DJ set, it censors your stream in realtime whenever it detects a copyrighted song, i.e. a good 1/3 of your stream. It doesn't need a DMCA request, it does it willingly.

YouTube is so horrible now for content creation, I don't understand how content creators are able to post anything anymore without it being smashed by the copyright automation.

Related Tom Scott video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU

tl;dr ContentID is a workaround for a broken copyright system. It's not perfect, but it's better for everyone than falling back to the default of copyright through court.

Unfortunately, the EU adopted law which will force all social media to do something like what YouTube does.

It goes even further than corporations being able to request things from being taken down. Kim Dotcom's house was raided by the FBI in New Zealand over this. He isn't even an American!

>Kim Dotcom's house was raided by the FBI [...]

Source? The US asked for his extradition and the NZ authorities raided his home, as far as I know.

raided at the request of the FBI (which was at the request of the MPAA) might be more accurate.

Actually, in Europe it is illegal to collect personally identifiable information of people without their consent. GDPR and all that.

I am surprised they haven't been fined out of existence yet.

Probably because nobody in the EU currently has this company on their screens. Or because those who are critical of this company and its practices have not yet reported it to the relevant authorities.

In Germany not only the GDPR regulation but also the so-called "right to the own picture" applies here.This means that no one may use/sell pictures of a person without explicit consent. Therefore, photographers must also have an explicit release of the person for the respective context of use.

There has been recent activity (article in german).

The article claims you could ask for deletion of your data without uploading your ID.

https://www.golem.de/news/gesichtserkennung-datenschuetzer-r...

Clearwater did not obtain consent, so the data shouldn't be there in the first place. Each and every data protection Behörde here in Germany should be investigating this.

Well I would advise everybody to file a complaint to their local DPA. Even if you can oppose the processing, they rely on legitimate interest (doubtful their balancing act is acceptable) and they acquired the data in a legal way, they failed to inform the user of a second-hand data collection[1].

So If they have data on you, that is older than a month, and did not contacted you to inform you of it, you can file a complaint!

[1]https://github.com/LINCnil/Guide-RGPD-du-developpeur/blob/ma... (In French sorry)

Google and Facebook are still around, so the GDPR is an absolute joke of a law that nobody cares to enforce.

You might be surprised: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

Search for how many of those enforcements came from Ireland. Now look up what country's GDPR authority Google and Facebook and most American companies are choosing to be subject to. It's not a coincidence that the place that hosts all US company's remote headquarters isn't participating in GDPR enforcement.

Ireland tried to give a great deal to Apple. The EU didn't take it very well [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if the EU will investigate Irish GDPR enforcement.

edit: also France did fine Google just fine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_illegal_State_aid_case_agai...

Just a correction - consent isnt the only legal basis. Thought it was important to correct you here so others reading the comment wouldn't get the impression that no consent = illegal

> but a person's face image doesn't belong to that person and the same corporations can safely collect and distribute these images for profit.

The irony is that companies like Facebook, Twitter, etc are really bothered when another business scrapes profiles to mine data uploaded to those sites.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that one of these companies gets sued by them for "stealing" content they host and violating the licenses for user content they grant themselves via their ToS.

It's because you haven't shown a dollar value of damages.

> but a person's face image doesn't belong to that person

I'd need to prove it, they'd skillfully dodge the request, I'd have to hire expensive lawyers (500/hr) and make a more formal request that's harder to dodge, they'd say the data is distributed across the globe in multiple jurisdictions in a very complex form, I'd have to hire an entire law company that works with international cases (1M/month?), they'd drag their feet and mud the discovery requests as much as possible and at the end of the day it'll be about who runs out of money first and who has better connections. The copyright law is made to resolve disputes between big companies.

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