My latest Guardian column, “Corporate bullying on the net must be resisted,” describes the way that copyright “self-help” measures that let rightsholders force ISPs to take action against infringement without court oversight are rife with abuse. The UK is one of many countries presently considering a law allowing record and movie companies to take whole households off the Internet if one member is accused — without proof — of breaking copyright three times.
It is the norm for ISPs to remove anything and everything on receipt of a legal notice. A group of Oxford internet researchers tried an experiment with this a few years ago, posting copies of John Stuart Mill’s 1869 On Liberty on a variety of European ISPs’ servers, and then sending notices to the ISPs purporting to come from Mill’s copyright holders (Mill’s copyrights are nonexistent, having returned to the public domain more than a century ago) and demanding that On Liberty be taken down. All but one of the ISPs in the study complied.
And why not? For a free hosting service such as Blogspot or YouTube or Flickr or Scribd, the lifetime profit from a given customer is likely exceeded by the cost of one call to a solicitor asking for advice on a takedown notice. Even paid services operate on such razor-thin margins that they’re unlikely to seek legal advice in the face of most threats.
So, the notice-and-takedown system – a feature of copyright law the world round, thanks to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties that require it – has become an easily abused, cheap, and virtually risk-free way of effecting mass censorship on the flimsiest pretence. Everyone from the Church of Scientology to major fashion companies avail themselves of this convenient system for making critics vanish.
