In my book Trademarks and Social Media, Towards Algorithmic Justice, I describe the progress made in filtering technology which is another reason to advocate strict liability for online service providers. The possibilities of filtering are illustrated in today’s article by Rowan Callick. In The Australian he features Chu Yong’s Super Image Market which is not only a Hong Kong-based platform from where photographers can sell their pictures, but includes a system that can also use filter pirated pictures in China and beyond.

Callick wrote: “His system can search the net, daily — ­including the sites of ­retail platforms and other companies and organisations — for any copies of about 10,000 of the three million images that have so far been placed on the SIM platform. The SIM server can compare a client’s image with 50 million other photos in a 10th of a second. But China’s Great Firewall slows internet traffic, doubling the time a search takes inside China.”

See Callick’s article Intellectual property breaches trigger another China boom (7 October 2016).