The definitive publication of the call ‘Iceta Law’ on copyright regulation has been a surprise to locals and strangers: when the attention was still on the already confirmed return of Google News to Spain, the news was released that the law will regulate (and protect) the use of “memes”.
That is why this content so popular on the Internet is finally included in Spanish legislation, although it does not do so directly under the name of meme, but as “pastiche”, a term used by the royal decree law.
How the new law works in Spain
“Pastiche”; It is the term of the new legislative decree. This includes, for the first time, the creation of “memes” (as it is known worldwide) to restrict the application of copyright regulations., for example, at the level of educational or research-oriented use.
First, what is considered a pastiche is defined. Here’s what article 70 looks like:
“The transformation of a disclosed work that consists of taking certain characteristic elements of an artist’s work and combining them in such a way that they give the impression of being an independent creation does not require the authorization of the author or the owner of rights, as long as it does not imply risk of confusion with the original works or performances or infer damage to the original work or its author. This limit will also be applicable to uses other than digital ones. “
As we can see, the definition seeks to establish the limit between what is an innovative creation of a person and what is a copy of the original that could harm the author. That is, content that would be subject to copyright infringement.
Once explained about what is meant by pastiche or meme, we must go to paragraph 8 of article 73 to see how they face the algorithmic censorship that the ‘Iceta Law’ forces to apply to all platforms. The section is defined as follows:
“Cooperation between online content service providers and rights holders will not prevent users from uploading and making available to the public content of works or other benefits that do not infringe such rights or that are made for the purposes of appointment, analysis , comment or critical judgment, review, illustration, parody or pastiche. “
The idea is that these memes are under use that would be considered legitimate, such as a quote or a review. For instance, If a person posts an image of a meme from a series of Netflix, It is understood that this is not an infringement of intellectual property rights, but that you are posting a meme and this constitutes protected use.
The Iceta Law will work when artificial intelligence is able to recognize a meme
Remember that the “Iceta Law” refers to the “Application of effective content recognition techniques”, which essentially consist of algorithms designed to recognize and filter (censor) by comparing them with a database of copyrighted works that are protected.
Article 73.8, as mentioned above, exempts memes from being victims of these algorithms. In the case of memes, it will be easy for the person to be able to differentiate one case from another, but It is not so clear that the algorithms of the platforms are infallible when it comes to differentiating a meme.
In recent years there have been numerous advances in the recognition of memes. There are already own neural models such as Meme Vision and projects such as that of Facebook with ‘Hateful Memes’, to identify those that are potentially harmful to the community.
The identification of memes, or pastiches, is one of the areas that experts in artificial intelligence focus on, but its results are far from what was expected.
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