Google’s Private Copyright Rule-Making and Algorithmic Enforcement
Joanne Elizabeth Gray · 2020
Abstract This chapter evaluates Google’s approach to copyright enforcement across its own platforms. Increasingly, Google self-regulates and negotiates with rightsholders to privately devise copyright rules. Google then deploys algorithmic regulatory technologies to enforce those rules. Indeed, over the past decade, Google has developed a range of algorithmic tools it uses to deter copyright infringement, enforce copyrights, and remunerate rightsholders. These activities limit transparency and accountability in digital copyright governance and privilege private interests and values over the public interest. In a digital environment dominated by powerful private actors, the use of algorithmic regulatory systems poses a critical problem for public rights and democratic, accountable systems of governance, now and into the future.