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Digital
RIAA piracy chief calls for reform of DMCA takedown system
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 23 May 2013
“We are using a bucket to deal with an ocean of illegal downloading”, says the Recording Industry Association Of America’s Executive Vice President of Anti-Piracy in a new blog post to mark the 20 millionth takedown notice the trade body has issued against Google, requesting that it remove from its search engine a link to an unlicensed bit of music content.
While the figures sound impressive, neither the record industry nor the big search engines especially appreciate that much paperwork. The problem, says the RIAA’s Brad Buckles, is the way the takedown system concept, which originates in America’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is being employed.
This is an issue that is occupying more and more minds in the US content industries, with rights owners quietly (or less quietly of late) lobbying political types to revise the DMCA, to increase the obligations of web companies which enjoy protection from copyright infringement claims – even if they host or link to infringing content – by operating a takedown process.
Those web firms, say the rights owners, should be more proactive in ensuring that unlicensed content identified by rights owners is blocked or removed permanently, and wherever it may be stored. At the moment content companies issuing takedown notices generally have to be very specific about the piece of content they object to.
Or in Buckles’ words: “Under a controversial interpretation by search engines, takedown notices must be directed at specific links to specific sound recordings and do nothing to stop the same files from being reposted as fast as they are removed. It is certainly fair for search engines to say that they have no way of knowing whether a particular link on a specific site represents an illegal copy or not. Perhaps it’s fair for them to make that same claim at the second notice. But what about after a thousand notices for the same song on the same site?”
He goes on: “As the Congressional review of the DMCA gets underway, there should be a strong focus on what notice and takedown was supposed to accomplish. The DMCA was intended to define the way forward for technology firms and content creators alike, but some aspects of it no longer work. How could we expect it to? It was passed before Google even existed, or the iPod, or peer-to-peer file-sharing or slick websites offering free mp3 downloads. It was after the DMCA that Napster, and Grokster and LimeWire and Grooveshark and MegaUpload, to name just a few, came on the scene. In particular, it’s time to rethink the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA”.
