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Internet Archive: Proposed Changes To DMCA Would Make Us “Censor The Web”

Accepted submission by el_oscuro http://dbinternals.com at 2016-06-08 00:24:31
Digital Liberty

According to Consumerist [consumerist.com],
"The Copyright Office is untertaking a review of the DMCA to figure out what is and isn’t working. One big aspect of that is the “notice and takedown” aspect of the law: when a site receives notice from a copyright holder that they’re hosting infringing content, they’re legally immune from being an infringing party if they pull it down. We see examples of this gone amok fairly regularly, but it’s the way the internet world works right now.

But notice and takedown is prone to abuse. On the one hand, it doesn’t stop media pirates from willfully uploading content they don’t own again, or to other platforms. And on the other hand, it’s an incredibly powerful tool that lets basically anyone request to have basically any content removed wholesale from the internet at any time, potentially without appeal."

"However, the proposal now before the Copyright Office is something even more stringent. It’s called “Notice and Staydown,” and would have the effect that it sounds like: not only would the site receiving the notice have to take the content down, but they would have to assure that the work never appears on the platform ever again — from any user, in any form."

"The DMCA has its problems, but Notice and Staydown would be an absolute disaster,” the Archive post concludes. “Unfortunately, members of the general public were not invited to the Copyright Office proceedings last week. The many thousands of comments submitted by Internet users on this subject were not considered valuable input; rather, one panelist characterized them as a ‘DDoS attack’ on the Copyright Office website, showing how little the people who are seeking to regulate the web actually understand it.”


Original Submission