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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.
Corporate bullying on the net must be resisted
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And yet... people regularly rip off whole sections of my website and re-present them as their own work with no backlinks (my work is distinctive and shows up in image searches especially). If I had to take them to court I could never afford it as I don't make much money out of it.
So there needs to be some protection - if not quite so draconian.
So, you've already got DMCA-style protection for your website and it's ineffective, and the DMCA is a total policy disaster, but you still want something like the DMCA only less so?
I may not have the solution to your problem (and I sympathize with your problem), but I can authoritatively say that self-help isn't it -- we've had ten years of self-help without any indication that it works.
[...] also talked about “self help” copyright rules and the 3 Strikes premise, which essentially means that any ISP receiving an infringement notice, no matter how spurious, can [...]
Jayarava, DMCA will not work, nor will any other draconian measures. The best thing you can do is (1) realize that there is no practical control of your works once placed into the tubes of the interwebs, (2) come up with a brilliant business model based on reality, rather than trying to shoehorn reality into your business model. Sorry to be so rough, but this is just the way things are.
This is absolutely horrifying. I can see why rich men in power would be all over this, but I can't see why anyone else wouldn't be throwing bricks through windows if this does happen.
And for the record, I've had entire articles plagiarized on the net. Yet, I'd rather deal with plagiarists (though I feel they belong on the lowest level of hell) than with people controlling what I can watch in my home - because when people start controlling you - they'll control the action you can take against those plagiarists as well. And, in some cases, the people in power will *become* the plagiarists.
Honestly, even the idea of the FCC makes me want to vomit.