Europe's Copyright Reforms Are More Than (Just) A Boring Policy Change
Earlier this month, British pianist James Rhodes received a notification from Facebook. A short video he had recorded and uploaded of himself playing a passage of Bach's Partita No. 1 had been flagged by Facebook's copyright identification system as belonging to Sony Music, resulting in 47 of the video's 71 seconds being muted.
"Stop being a**holes," Rhodes tweeted in response.
Of course, Bach has been dead for some time now — 268 years, but who's counting — and his compositions have been public property longer than any of us have been alive.
Recordings of those compositions, however, do not belong to the public, and Facebook had confused Rhodes' performance with one owned by Sony. (Speaking to NPR, Rhodes confessed a hope that his recording was confused with one from a notable player, at the very least.) If you consider what is asked of big tech's copyright-protection efforts, the mix-up wasn't entirely unreasonable. Facebook's identification system exists to prevent copyrighted material from being
