Galahad arrives in Camelot, alongside his old mentor Naciens. After sitting on the dangerous Perilous Seat, the Grail appears in front of all the knights. Naciens explains what the Holy Grail is and that only one knight would be able to drink from it, before leaving Camelot and leaving Galahad in Lancelot’s care. Immediately, Bors, Gawain, Lancelot and Galahad ask Arthur to be sent to look for the Grail.
With Lancelot away from Camelot, Morgan decides to start acting even if Mordred is doubtful and feels like they have wasted too much time away. Morgan reassures him that she already planted the seed of doubt in Arthur’s mind, and now that Lancelot can’t defend himself, Morgan will see it grow. And it is an easy task for them, with Mordred so close to Guinevere, often playing chess or games with her, and Morgan so close to Arthur.
In the meantime, Galahad got separated from the other knights, looking for the Grail. He finds a powerful sword when a knight suddenly crumbles to dust after finding out that he is called Galahad. Lancelot and Gawain arrive to the Wasteland of Pelles. The old man tells Lancelot that Elaine died in childbirth but he doesn’t know where the child is now. Suddenly, a group of ladies enter the room, bringing a covered cup with them. Gawain doesn’t follow them, as he doesn’t feel worthy, while Lancelot tries to look at the Grail, but is blinded and falls sick. Bors arrives as well, a little later, and he also sees the maiden bringing the Grail. But this time, the women stop in front of a door, welcoming Galahad and Nanciens. Galahad uncovers the Grail without consequences, and drinks from it. Free from the burden of teaching Galahad, Nancien dies, while Galahad heals King Pelles and Lancelot with a simple touch. Declaring that now he has ended his task, Galahad drinks again from the Grail before falling to his knees to the ground, and diying.
Lancelot, Bors and Gawain return to Camelot, but Lancelot is plagued with sadness, wondering what is his purpose. When Guinevere’s servant tells him to attend the queen in her chambers, Lancelot readily agrees even against Bors’ advice. In her chambers, Guinevere confesses to Lancelot that if he had asked for her hand, back all those years, he would have won it. While the two are talking, Agravaine forcefully enters in the room, clearly meaning to accuse Lancelot and Guinevere of adultery and using the fact that they were together as proof.
Arthur, dying at Camlann, finds out Morgan has always worked against him
On Wednesday, the EU will vote on whether to accept two controversial proposals
in the new Copyright Directive; one of these clauses, Article 13, has
the potential to allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to effect mass,
rolling waves of censorship across the Internet.
The way things stand today, companies that let their users
communicate in public (by posting videos, text, images, etc) are
required to respond to claims of copyright infringement by removing
their users’ posts, unless the user steps up to contest the notice.
Sites can choose not to remove work if they think the copyright claims
are bogus, but if they do, they can be sued for copyright infringement
(in the United States at least), alongside their users, with huge
penalties at stake. Given that risk, the companies usually do not take a
stand to defend user speech, and many users are too afraid to stand up
for their own speech because they face bankruptcy if a court disagrees
with their assessment of the law.
This system, embodied in the United States’ Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA) and exported to many countries around the world, is
called “notice and takedown,” and it offers rightsholders the ability
to unilaterally censor the Internet on their say-so, without any
evidence or judicial oversight. This is an extraordinary privilege
without precedent in the world of physical copyright infringement (you
can’t walk into a cinema, point at the screen, declare “I own that,” and
get the movie shut down!).
But rightsholders have never been happy with notice and takedown.
Because works that are taken down can be reposted, sometimes by bots
that automate the process, rightsholders have called notice and takedown
a game of whac-a-mole, where they have to keep circling back to remove the same infringing files over and over.
Rightsholders have long demanded a “notice and staydown” regime. In
this system, rightsholders send online platforms digital copies of their
whole catalogs; the platforms then build “copyright filters” that
compare everything a user wants to post to this database of known
copyrights, and block anything that seems to be a match.
Tech companies have voluntarily built versions of this system. The
most well-known of the bunch is YouTube’s Content ID system, which cost $60,000,000
to build, and which works by filtering the audio tracks of videos to
categorise them. Rightsholders are adamant that Content ID doesn’t work
nearly well enough, missing all kinds of copyrighted works, while
YouTube users report rampant overmatching, in which legitimate works are
censored by spurious copyright claims: NASA gets blocked from posting its own Mars rover footage; classical pianists are blocked from posting their own performances, birdsong results in videos being censored, entire academic conferences lose their presenters’ audio because the hall they rented played music at the lunch-break—you can’t even post silence
without triggering copyright enforcement. Besides that, there is no bot
that can judge whether something that does use copyrighted material is
fair dealing. Fair dealing is protected under the law, but not under
Content ID.
If Content ID is a prototype, it needs to go back to the drawing
board. It overblocks (catching all kinds of legitimate media) and
underblocks (missing stuff that infuriates the big entertainment
companies). It is expensive, balky, and ineffective.
It’s coming soon to an Internet near you.
On Wednesday, the EU will vote on whether the next Copyright Directive
will include “Article 13,” which makes Content-ID-style filters
mandatory for the whole Internet, and not just for the soundtracks of
videos—also for the video portions, for audio, for still images, for
code, even for text. Under Article 13, the services we use to
communicate with one another will have to accept copyright claims from
all comers, and block anything that they believe to be a match.
This measure will will censor the Internet and it won’t even help artists to get paid.
Let’s consider how a filter like this would have to work. First of
all, it would have to accept bulk submissions. Disney and Universal (not
to mention scientific publishers, stock art companies, real-estate
brokers, etc) will not pay an army of data-entry clerks to manually
enter their vast catalogues of copyrighted works, one at a time, into
dozens or hundreds of platforms’ filters. For these filters to have a
hope of achieving their stated purpose, they will have to accept
thousands of entries at once—far more than any human moderator could
review.
But even if the platforms could hire, say, 20 percent of the European
workforce to do nothing but review copyright database entries, this
would not be acceptable to rightsholders. Not because those workers
could not be trained to accurately determine what was, and was not, a
legitimate claim—but because the time it would take for them to review
these claims would be absolutely unacceptable to rightsholders.
It’s an article of faith among rightsholders that the majority of
sales take place immediately after a work is released, and that
therefore infringing copies are most damaging when they’re available at
the same time as a new work is released (they’re even more worried about
pre-release leaks).
If Disney has a new blockbuster that’s leaked onto the Internet the
day it hits cinemas, they want to pull those copies down in seconds, not
after precious days have trickled past while a human moderator plods
through a queue of copyright claims from all over the Internet.
Combine these three facts:
1. Anyone can add anything to the blacklist of “copyrighted works” that can’t be published by Internet users;
2. The blacklists have to accept thousands of works at once; and
3. New entries to the blacklist have to go into effect instantaneously.
It doesn’t take a technical expert to see how ripe for abuse this
system is. Bad actors could use armies to bots to block millions of
works at a go (for example, jerks could use bots to bombard the
databases with claims of ownership over the collected works of
Shakespeare, adding them to the blacklists faster than they could
possibly be removed by human moderators, making it impossible to quote
Shakespeare online).
These entities couldn’t use Content ID to censor the whole Internet:
instead, they had to manually file takedowns and chase their critics
around the Internet. Content ID only works for YouTube — plus it only
allows “trusted rightsholders” to add works wholesale to the notice and
staydown database, so petty censors are stuck committing retail
copyfraud.
But under Article 13, everyone gets to play wholesale censor, and every
service has to obey their demands: just sign up for a “rightsholder”
account on a platform and start telling it what may and may not be
posted. Article 13 has no teeth for stopping this from happening: and in
any event, if you get kicked off the service, you can just pop up under
a new identity and start again.
Some rightsholder lobbyists have admitted that there is potential for
abuse here, they insist that it will all be worth it, because it will
“get artists paid.” Unfortunately, this is also not true.
For all that these filters are prone to overblocking and ripe for
abuse, they are actually not very effective against someone who actually
wants to defeat them.
Let’s look at the most difficult-to-crack content filters in the
world: the censoring filters used by the Chinese government to suppress
“politically sensitive” materials. These filters have a much easier job
than the ones European companies will have to implement: they only
filter a comparatively small number of items, and they are built with
effectively unlimited budgets, subsidized by the government of one of
the world’s largest economies, which is also home to tens of millions of
skilled technical people, and anyone seeking to subvert these
censorship systems is subject to relentless surveillance and risks long
imprisonment and even torture for their trouble.
Those Chinese censorship systems are really, really easy to break,
as researchers from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab
demonstrated in a detailed research report released a few weeks ago.
People who want to break the filters and infringe copyright
will face little difficulty. The many people who want to stay on the
right side of the copyright —but find themselves inadvertently on the
wrong side of the filters—will find themselves in insurmountable
trouble, begging for appeal from a tech giant whose help systems all
dead-end in brick walls. And any attempt to tighten the filters to catch
these infringers, will of course, make it more likely that they will
block non-infringing content.
A system that allows both censors and infringers to run rampant while
stopping legitimate discourse is bad enough, but it gets worse for
artists.
Content ID cost $60,000,000 and does a tiny fraction of what the
Article 13 filters must do. When operating an online platform in the EU
requires a few hundred million in copyright filtering technology, the
competitive landscape gets a lot more bare. Certainly, none of the
smaller EU competitors to the US tech giants can afford this.
On the other hand, US tech giants can afford this (indeed, have pioneered copyright filters as a solution, even as groups like EFF protested it),
and while their first preference is definitely to escape regulation
altogether, paying a few hundred million to freeze out all possible
competition is a pretty good deal for them.
The big entertainment companies may be happy with a deal that sells a
perpetual Internet Domination License to US tech giants for a bit of
money thrown their way, but that will not translate into gains for
artists. The fewer competitors there are for the publication, promotion,
distribution and sale of creative works, the smaller the share will be
that goes to creators.
We can do better: if the problem is monopolistic platforms (and indeed, monopolistic distributors), tackling that directly as a matter of EU competition law
would stop those companies from abusing their market power to squeeze
creators. Copyright filters are the opposite of antitrust, though: it
will make the biggest companies much bigger, to the great detriment of
all the “little guys” in the entertainment industry and in the market
for online platforms for speech.
Arthurian Legends 