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43 Colum. J.L. & Arts 455 (2019-2020)
Meet Your New Overlords: How Digital Platforms Develop and Sustain Technofeudalism

handle is hein.journals/cjla43 and id is 463 raw text is: Meet Your New Overlords: How Digital Platforms Develop and Sustain Technofeudalism Katrina Geddes* TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................455 I. Defining User-Generated Content.. .................................456 II. The Illegitimate Suppression of User-Generated Content ...................458 III. Algorithmic Governance and the European Union's New Copyright Directive.............. .................... .....469 IV. Digital Labor and Technofeudalism ................. ......476 V. Looking to the Future .........................................480 VI. Conclusion .................................. ......485 INTRODUCTION Much has been written about the free speech quasi-jurisprudence being developed by social media platforms through content moderation policies unconstrained by constitutional limits.' This Article focuses on a specific subset of that content moderation-namely, the takedown of user-generated content in the name of copyright enforcement. This Article argues that the unlimited power of online platforms to regulate access to user-generated content through antipiracy algorithms leads to three perverse outcomes. First, the removal of lawful content falsely flagged as infringing results in the suppression of legitimate speech and a reduction in the diversity of online discourse. Second, the erosion of lawful exceptions and limitations to copyright protection through algorithmic adjudication alters the fundamental social contract established by copyright legislation, displaces decades of carefully developed fair use jurisprudence, and transfers adjudicatory power from courts to corporations. Third, the monetization of user-generated content not by users, but by copyright owners (following the flagging of content as infringing), is * Doctoral Candidate, New York University School of Law, LL.B., LL.M., MPP. 1. See, e.g., Jonathan Peters, The Sovereigns of Cyberspace and State Action: The First Amendment's Application-or Lack Thereof-to Third-Party Platforms, 32 BERKELEY TECH. L.J. 989, 1026 (2017). 0 2020 Katrina Geddes. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction, provided the original author and source are credited. 455

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