page78
56
cory doctorow
Take the U.S.’s 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which
has equivalents in every European state that has implemented
the 2001 European Union Copyright Directive. The DMCA allows
anyone to have any document on the Internet removed, simply
by contacting its publisher and asserting that the work infringes
his copyright.
The potential for abuse is obvious, and the abuse has been
widespread: from the Church of Scientology to companies that
don’t like what reporters write about them, DMCA takedown no-
tices have fast become the favorite weapon in the cowardly bully’s
arsenal.
But takedown notices are just the start. While they can help
silence critics and suppress timely information, they’re not ac-
tually very effective at stopping widespread copyright infringe-
ment. Viacom sent over 100,000 takedown notices to YouTube
last February, but seconds after it was all removed, new users
uploaded it again.
Even these takedown notices were sloppily constructed: they
included videos of friends eating at barbecue restaurants and
videos of independent bands performing their own work. As a
Recording Industry Association of America spokesman quipped,
“When you go trawling with a net, you catch a few dolphins.”
Viacom and others want hosting companies and online ser-
vice providers to preemptively evaluate all the material that their
users put online, holding it to ensure that it doesn’t infringe
copyright before they release it.
This
notion
is
impractical
in
the
extreme,
for
at
least
two
reasons. First, an exhaustive list of copyrighted works would be
unimaginably huge, as every single creative work is copyrighted
from
the
instant
that
it
is
created
and
“fixed
in
a
tangible
medium.”
Content 2nd gal final.indd 56
7/4/08 9:56:42 AM