Tag: Copyright Office

Democracy Disrupted

A couple of posts ago, I reported that the organization Fight for the Future had facilitated enough comments sent to the Copyright Office regarding Section 512 of the DMCA that they “crashed” the servers.  In a follow-up email brimming with pride, the organization said this to those who contributed:

“Wow! In a matter of days you and nearly 100,000 other people told the U.S. Copyright Office about the urgent need for better Fair Use and free speech protections in the DMCA.”

I didn’t receive one of these emails, but my friend David Lowery did. And not because he said anything to the Copyright Office about the “urgent need for better Fair Use and free speech protections,” but because he and his colleagues tested the FFTF web form email blaster and published their findings on The Trichordist blog.  They found that the automated system did not verify email addresses or confirm that IP addresses were within the US; it also allowed multiple comments from the same source and as stated in the post, “we managed to post rapid-fire comments (less than three seconds between comments).”

As indicated in my other post, I really do believe you’d have to search long and hard to find 100,000 citizens who could properly explain the DMCA, let alone fair use doctrine; but to compound this nonsense, some astroturf organization floods a government server with automated messages that may represent anything from bots to foreign citizens to minors to the typically pavlovian American, who just clicks stuff that sounds really serious but that he doesn’t understand.  Democracy in action indeed.

I’ve made this point many times, but it’s one worth making often.  This type of automated “political action,” which in this case is funded by a very large industry, should be among the real digital-age phenomena that scares the hell out of people, regardless of the stated issue du jour.  Forget the DMCA for a moment and imagine it’s the pharmaceutical industry or petroleum or Koch Industries using the same exact tools to rally virtual citizens, sock puppets, non citizens, and literally anyone capable of believing a lie and clicking a mouse to flood the EPA or HHS on some matter that disfavors the public interest in the service of one industry’s bottom line. That’s not even coming close to the reason the first amendment affirms the rights of speech and the petition of government. And, yes, there is a history of obfuscation by big business since long before the internet, but automation seems uniquely suited to fostering the illusion that the people are the ones doing the speaking.

In The Trichordist post, Lowery indicates that if FFTF used the type of automation described above to flood government servers, it might have been illegal but was at least a well-funded monopolization of a system meant to allow all parties to comment on an issue. Hence the “crashing” that this organization is so proud of is tantamount to—you got it—chilling free speech.  One could of course say this about any online petition in theory, but isn’t it interesting that the last time we heard about crashing systems like this was over SOPA?  So, does this really happen because there are so many well-informed citizens who care more about “digital rights” than any number of more pressing issues? Or might it have something to do with the fact that the corporate interests in these cases also happen to be the world’s experts in automation and aggregation?  Maybe not.  Maybe there really are more Americans worried about whether or not some YouTube video is a “fair use” than are concerned with the economy, violent crime, security, real civil rights violations, etc.  And if that’s the case, then  there’s truly nothing left of the Republic worth fighting for, is there?

On the positive side, I suspect a lot of this digital reactivism is wasted and that the internet industry may eventually discover that not everything is a numbers game.  For all the megabytes of outrage, what exactly does anyone think the Copyright Office is supposed to do with most of it? Responsibly vetted petitions have an important role to play in public policy.  But in a moment like this, it is the Register of Copyright’s job to consider the views of various stakeholders; and the comments that should be most influential will come from representatives of all sides who submit fairly long and well-reasoned statements based on actual knowledge of the law.

Ultimately, the Copyright Office recommendations to Congress on Section 512 may be 100 pages worth of analysis based on legal precedent going back to the beginning of the country. So, any petition to this particular office only carries so much weight in the first place; but how much attention does Fight for the Future imagine copyright experts will give to some boilerplate whinging about a doctrine they have grossly misrepresented to the signers of said petition?  And even 100,000 verified signatures would be small potatoes in a age when people will click on just about anything.  It probably wouldn’t be that hard to automate 100,000 “signatures” to lobby the White House to appoint Sponge Bob Square Pants as Ambassador to Fiji, but so what?  (Come to think of it, that petition would probably do quite well.)

There are an estimated 5.5 million jobs in the U.S. that directly depend upon the protection of copyrights. Meanwhile, every independent rights holder I have thus far encountered has effectively given up on the DMCA as a tool for protecting creative works online.  That’s a tangible problem, and one that does affect everyone because 5.5 million jobs supports a hell of lot more jobs than that in the overall market.  We could take this reality seriously, or we could keep finding ways to imagine that free speech is under siege and continue to allow the largest companies in the world to manipulate the political process with a little code and a lot of noise.

Copyright Office to Review Safe Harbor in DMCA

(Republishing as the April 1 deadline for comments to the US Copyright Office approaches.)

Remember Bill Clinton?  If you don’t, he’s that guy who was just in New Hampshire campaigning for his wife Hilary, who’s running for president. Anyway, Bill Clinton was president so damn long ago that when he was first sworn into office, most of us didn’t even have email.  I mean in real history terms, the Clinton administration was just yesterday; but in Internet history terms, it was like forever ago. After all, most of the general public (which is to say folks other than university professors and members of the military-industrial complex) all suddenly jumped online during Bill Clinton’s first term in office. You might even say we became collectively and instantly an America Online.  Ah, the 90s. Good times. Or should I say YAHOO!?  I don’t know. Anyway, the Web looked very different. If you don’t believe me, you can Ask Jeeves.

During President Clinton’s second term, in October of 1998, he signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a.k.a. the DMCA, which defines the conditions, responsibilities, and limitations for both ISPs and copyright holders pertaining to various remedies for online copyright infringement.  In order to balance interests and protect free speech online, Section 512 of the DMCA provides the conditions by which ISPs are granted safe harbor, shielding them from liability that might stem from copyright infringements perpetrated by users of their sites or services.  Section 512 also specifies the conditions an ISP must meet in order to maintain safe harbor protection, and among these is the establishment and maintenance of processes for removing infringing material and for canceling the accounts or denying access to repeat infringers.  The former would generally apply to platforms that host User Generated Content (UGC) while the latter would typically apply to an access provider like TimeWarner, Cox, et al.  But as I say, the Web looked very different when the DMCA was written.

As the capabilities and platforms have expanded—for instance from effectively no video in 1998 to YouTube’s stated 300 hours of high-quality video being uploaded to its platform every minute in 2014—it was inevitable that the incidences of repeat infringement and repeat infringers would expand in kind.  And they did. Rights holders presently send out hundreds of millions of DMCA takedown notices each year—just to YouTube alone—and only a small fraction of these (fewer  than 1%*) are either sent in error or are intentionally abusing the takedown system for purposes such as stifling criticism or other forms of non-copyright-related complaints.  Additionally, most wrongful takedowns are remedied by the counter-notice procedure provided for in the DMCA, which restores content that has been removed; and any further action from either party requires legal procedures outside the DMCA, including litigation, which is not all that common relative to the volume of content we’re talking about.

Meanwhile, the safe harbor provisions in Section 512 of DMCA were never intended to provide a blanket shield for ISPs while they profit incidentally from the high volume of infringements committed by users; but that’s more or less what’s been happening.  If at any given moment, there are 100 million infringing videos on YouTube, each generating only one view per video before they are removed by the notice-and takedown-procedure, that’s 100 million ad impressions generated while YouTube complies with the DMCA.  YouTube gets the ad revenue while infringing videos go up and down in a constant ebb and flow, and the safe harbor provisions shield the platform from any liability—or even responsibility—to further mitigate mass infringement.  Safe harbors were not intended to provide an incentive for allowing (if not fostering) mass infringement by users, which is why the Copyright Office announced on December 31 that it will begin a review of Section 512 of the DMCA on the premise that the provisions may well be antiquated relative to the realities of the contemporary Web.  In announcing the review and call for comments, the Copyright Office states:

“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. The growth of the internet has highlighted issues concerning section 512 that appear ripe for study.… Among other issues, the Office will consider the costs and burdens of the notice-and-takedown process on large- and small-scale copyright owners, online service providers, and the general public. The Office will also review how successfully section 512 addresses online infringement and protects against improper takedown notices.”

With regard to access providers, the recent BMG v COX case offers insight into the conditions a provider must meet in order to maintain its safe harbor protection, and it also reveals the kind of shenanigans rights holders have been putting up with for years. Cox was successfully sued by BMG for contributory infringement based primarily on the fact that the plaintiff was able to demonstrate very clearly that the defendant did not have a reasonable procedure in place for canceling the accounts of repeat infringers as is mandated by Section 512 of the DMCA.  As I mentioned when I was a guest on the new podcast series Steal This Show, presented by TorrentFreak, pre-trial court documents indicate that Cox had what can best be described as a “13 strikes and you get a really strong warning” procedure for repeat infringers.  And perhaps even more damning, emails entered into evidence suggested that the access provider was effectively resetting the dial on repeat infringers to make them look like first-time offenders.  Naturally, there are more details, but suffice to say, neither the judge nor the jury found these processes to be adequate or reasonable procedures and, thus, Cox’s safe harbor defense was of no avail.

Still, at least some of the reporting and spin on that case will portray its outcome as an “expansion” of DMCA’s power to “stifle,” and it is worth noting that Judge O’Grady rejected amicus briefs from both the EFF and Public Knowledge, stated thus:

ORDER, having reviewed the proposed brief, the Court discerns no potential benefit to be gained from receiving the brief. This is not a situation where defendants lack competent representation. Nor have Public Knowledge and EFF persuaded the Court that they have a sufficiently special interest in the outcome of this litigation to warrant consideration of their viewpoint. Accordingly, the motion 405 for leave to file an amicus curiae brief is DENIED.

Given the amount of virtual ink and PR capital the Internet industry and its network of “activists” have devoted to excoriating the takedown provisions in DMCA, the general public—and even some reporters—can be forgiven for thinking that DMCA is synonymous with chronic and unrestricted removal of content without due process. In fact, it seems that even the reporting that wants to be objective (including the aforementioned TorrentFreak) can fall into the understandable but flawed habit of lumping all things DMCA together as though the law is little more than carte blanche for major rights holders to willfully bulldoze expression from the web.  In reality, of course, the DMCA is a more complex framework of remedies, counter-remedies, and defined boundaries for all parties. In fact, if you go looking for cases of DMCA takedown abuse, you’re far more likely to find smaller rights holders, foreign organizations, or non-copyright-industry parties (e.g. Ashley Madison) committing improper takedowns through DMCA.  Meanwhile, the usual “villains” in the public narrative—the major film studios and music labels, who send out the majority of notices to platforms like YouTube—generally know what they’re doing, which is why the incidence of error in their procedures is extremely low.

But as the Copyright Office proceeds with its review of Section 512 and various interests respond to the call for comments, it’s likely we’re going to see the Internet industry—and the EFF, Public Knowledge, et al—try to portray safe harbor provisions as sacrosanct. (After all, there’s a lot of free money at stake, and who doesn’t like free money?) And these entities can be expected to follow their well-worn playbook of presenting the unalienability of safe harbors as vital to the functioning of the Internet and free speech and the rights of man and the very air that we breathe, and so on.  And to be clear, nobody (me included) would advocate revoking safe harbors. These provisions are an important component of digital-age law and are predicated in part on protecting free speech.  I’m just saying to watch out for the hyperbole when it comes.  The Copyright Office is reviewing Section 512 to potentially recommend tweaking it to fulfill its intent, not to abandon its intent altogether.

In a way, the most frustrating aspect of DMCA for rights holders is that it is reminiscent of another Clinton legacy—that unfortunate absurdist theater called “It depends on what the definition of is is.”  Likewise, the proverbial game of Whack-a-Mole—as everyone describes counter-infringement procedures—is really a game of semantics that ISPs have been playing for more than a decade.  What is an infringement?  Who is a repeat infringer? What is a reasonably implemented policy?  And so on. But then, that’s law—a best attempt to use language to create salubrious policy.  And since Section 512 seems to unintentionally leak mass infringement like a sieve, it’s probably time for a rewrite.

*This estimate is based both on counter-notice data from MPAA takedown requests as well as anecdotal information stated in October 2015 amicus brief seeking new ruling in Rossi v MPAA.