Is The DMCA Working? Call for Comments From U.S. Copyright Office
Announced December 30, 2015, the United States Copyright Office is undertaking a public study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the safe harbor provisions contained in section 512 of title 17, United States Code - the DMCA Safe Harbor Provision.
“While Congress understood that it would be essential to address online infringement as the internet continued to grow, it may have been difficult to anticipate the online world as we now know it, where each day users upload hundreds of millions of photos, videos and other items, and service providers receive over a million notices of alleged infringement.”
Section 512 was added to the U.S. Copyright Act in 1998 to help foster growth of the Internet and provide protection to internet service providers for copyright infringement liability when certain procedures were followed.
Currently, Google receives close to 20,000 DMCA takedown requests per week. In light of a Sept. 2015 holding in Lenz v Universal, Google and other service providers must now consider a fair use analysis before taking down content once a DMCA takedown notice is received.
What do you think, is the DMCA working? Should the burden be on the content owner to send the takedown notice? Should the burden be on the Internet Service Provider to analyze fair use? Should the burden be on the content user to get a license or determine fair use?
Leave your thoughts in the comments section below and file comments with the Copyright Office.
