Proposed Tweak to the DMCA Sounds Like a Terrible Idea

Oh dear, this proposal from the US Copyright Office does not sound good. “We were very concerned to hear that the Copyright Office is strongly considering recommending changing the DMCA to mandate a ‘Notice and Staydown’ regime. This is the language that the Copyright Office uses to talk about censoring the web. The idea is that once a platform gets a notice regarding a specific copyrighted work, like a specific picture, song, book, or film, that platform would then be responsible for making sure that the work never appears on the platform ever again. Other users would have to be prevented, using filtering technology, from ever posting that specific content ever again. It would have to ‘Stay Down.’” Now of course I’m not in favor of violating intellectual property, but I can give you a thousand examples of the DMCA being horribly abused. This is only going to make it […]