Tag: DMCA 2020 Review

DMCA Review II – Looking to foreign jurisdictions, when some answers are already here.

As we batten down the hatches to weather the present storm, streaming entertainment enters the foreground of our new and temporary reality in which we voluntarily circumscribe daily life to the confines of home. This is no time, of course, to fuss about media piracy per se. We have bigger fish to fry, but one must keep busy, and so on the subject of streaming entertainment, the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 10th held its second hearing in what will be a year-long review of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 

This time, the IP Subcommittee turned its attention to foreign jurisdictions and piracy. The thesis question was this:  How do other countries address piracy and what, if anything, can we learn from them?  Naturally, the EU Directive of 2019, especially Article 17, which was designed to incentivize the largest user-supported platforms to enter into license agreements, was discussed in both of the two-panel sessions. But from testimonies as oppositional as Stan McCoy of the Motion Picture Association and former Pirate Party member Julia Reda of the EU Parliament, I think it’s fair to say that all interests are sufficiently dissatisfied with the outcome of that legislation that it may not prove terribly instructive to U.S. lawmakers. 

What I did find compelling in the hearing was summed up during the second panel by Jonathan Yunger, CEO of Millennium Media, who said in Q&A with Senator Coons that, two things he’d ask to see in the U.S. would be site blocking and felony streaming. And if I were placing bets on the recommendations that will ultimately follow this review, I predict that the committee will find these two proposals highly persuasive. Interestingly enough, site blocking does not require a radical revision of the DMCA (if it requires any), and felony streaming does not implicate DMCA revision at all. 

Site Blocking is Effective and Already Intended by DMCA

As highlighted by law Professor Justin Hughes in Panel I, it is clear from the language in Section 512(j) of the DMCA that Congress intended to empower a court to order a service provider, even though it is not a party to a litigation, to cease providing access to infringing material as a form of relief to a plaintiff. Under this section, if a rights holder can prove that a given site is dedicated to infringement, the court is supposed to be able to instruct a Google or a Time Warner to block access to that site or sites. Yet, as Hughes points out, this already extant section of the statute has hardly been used. 

Economics professor Michael Smith testified that we now have a sufficient volume of data which demonstrates that blocking multiple pirate sites has the positive effect of driving consumers to legal platforms.  Additionally, Professor Hughes enumerated several of countries where we can see that site blocking neither disrupts a functioning internet nor chills protected speech. “Given the widespread use of this enforcement tool in other democratic societies,” Hughes stated, “it may be worthwhile for the subcommittee to explore why §512(j) has not been utilized.” 

I imagine the IP Subcommittee will heed this recommendation to review the historic inefficacy of section 512(j). After all, more effective site blocking would actually address myriad piracy problems at the same time with no effect upon the public interest, or in any way meaningfully amending the safe harbor provisions for service providers. For instance, more sophisticated and insidious access to pirated material through set-top boxes called “Kodi boxes” would be mitigated by site blocking because these infringing apps, loaded on these boxes, search for titles of filmed entertainment stored on foreign pirate site servers. Consequently, site blocking should substantially reduce the incentive to get into the illegal streaming game through the “box” model and, therefore, alleviate some of the burden on federal law enforcement to investigate these enterprises.  

Why Has 512(j) (i.e. site blocking) Not Been Used?

I do not claim to know all the answers to that question, but at least part of the answer comes down to the fact that internet industry and “digital rights” activists have fought, in both the blogosphere and the courts, to avoid compliance with even court-ordered injunctions to remove  or block access to content. Most prominently, perhaps, was Google’s defiance of the Canadian Supreme Court, which ordered sites blocked as injunctive relief for plaintiff Equustek whose IP had been stolen by a party marketing counterfeits on the sites at issue.

Or to highlight just how entrenched the industry’s misguided sense of responsibility is in this regard, the subcommittee could review the defense and supporting amici in Hassell v. Bird, in which Yelp! argued that by complying with an injunction to remove material, which had been judged unlawful by a court, this would “harm due process.” This was a profoundly absurd claim to come from a “no-fault” third party responding to a court order to cease facilitating harm to a plaintiff. Due process does not a apply to an unnamed, no-fault party—except apparently within the twisted strands of logic peculiar to website operators, who have historically assumed that it is their right to host, link to, and even monetize anything that ends up on their platforms. 

Site operators and their supporters, like the EFF, PublicKnowledge, and, at times, the ACLU, have endeavored to tie both courts and public perception into knots over one of the most basic forms of justice—injunctive relief by unnamed third parties—and it seems that correcting this error (i.e. making Section 512(j) mean what it says) would be short work for legislators. 

Felony Streaming is Controversial for No Good Reason

As I say, I was also struck by Mr. Yunger asking for felony streaming as a solution to piracy, which does not in fact require revision to the DMCA, but rather a change to the criminal code. As discussed in this post about the indictments against the operators of Jetflicks, streaming a “public performance” of a copyrighted work is still a misdemeanor, despite the fact that it is exactly how large-scale piracy is achieved today. In fact, nothing in the old bootlegging model, which is a felony, could come close to illegally streaming a movie or TV show to tens of millions of consumers, occasionally even preempting the official release of the project.

“Under this system, criminal streaming piracy, no matter the dollar amount it involves or the number of works affected, is de facto treated as a lesser crime than the illegal downloading or reproduction of the exact same content.” –Register of Copyrights, July 2019–

Some fairly outlandish fear-mongering has been employed in opposition to felony streaming proposals over the years. By “over-criminalizing” unlicensed streaming, the critics say, good-faith site operators could wind up in jail due to error or the unlawful conduct of their users.  But this scare tactic is contradicted by a few important realities, not the least of which is that we do not generally see good-faith site operators charged with misdemeanors either. 

To be charged with criminal copyright infringement, a defendant must truly be engaged in copyright infringement as a business enterprise. Nothing about elevating enterprise-scale, unlicensed streaming to a felony would change the burden of proof for filing criminal charges; it merely puts teeth in the law as a deterrent against launching in this kind of operation. Further, elevating illicit streaming to a felony does not alter the liability protections for good-faith service providers. 

The same principles would still apply to the “safe harbor” provision established for good-faith providers whose users upload infringing material.  Having said that, however, the incentive narrative needs to change to apropos Mr. Yunger’s testimony that his company’s films, in one accounting, had been viewed over 110 million times on YouTube. So clearly good faith alone is not getting the job done. 

Meanwhile, as CreativeFuture reported in a recent blog post, a new operation called Plex appears to combine the “Kodi box” piracy streaming model with a Napster-like twist such that users can “share” libraries they store on Plex servers—particularly if those libraries comprise bootleg files. If Plex is intentionally facilitating large-scale infringement through streaming from its servers,* its defense against an infringement charge would presumably seek to hide behind the technicality that its users are “directing” the uploading of files to the server space under user control. Hence, by more robustly criminalizing the act of streaming public performances, this would seemingly close a DMCA loophole without actually revising the DMCA. 

With regard to considering both felony streaming and a review of 512(j), the IP Subcommittee should assess the amount of disinformation and flawed legal arguments that have been deployed on these topics by various parties in the internet industry. For the better part of the last two decades these companies have consistently behaved as though the original intent of DMCA was always that they should do exactly they want—even in defiance of court orders. The members of the committee know very well that nothing could be further from the truth. 

DMCA Review Begins. Watch the Red Flag.

Early last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first in what will be a year-long series of hearings (roughly one per month) to review the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Almost as old as the publicly-available internet itself, the 1998 DMCA expressed the best efforts of Congress to predict how the digital market might evolve and to, therefore, strike a balance between the interests of internet service providers (ISPs) and copyright owners.

Over the intervening twenty-two years, much—MUCH—has been written, debated, shouted, flung, wailed, opined, and scorned about the DMCA, specifically Titles I and II of the five-title statute.  If we ask the tech-centric/copyright-skeptics, they are likely to say that Title I (§1201) is a disaster and that Title II (§512) is working just fine; while the creator/copyright proponent will tell us exactly the opposite. I cannot condense the number of issues raised in this first hearing alone into a single post—especially when §1201 and §512 address very different legal regimes—and it is far too early in the review process to respond to any specific proposals being made. 

What I will reiterate in this post is that the greatest concern to creators of every size is the conditional liability shield (“safe harbor”) provided to web platforms by §512.  It is the foundation of the oft-described “whack-a-mole” problem whereby the independent author attempts to remove infringing uses of her works one-by-one, only to have them reappear on the same platform(s) faster than she can prepare new notices.  (And “whack-a-mole” can be just as big a problem for a small business like an apparel maker as it is for a traditional artist like a musician.)  

In response to this futile battle with online infringement, authors often give up enforcement via the DMCA takedown process (resigned to donating even more revenue to billion-dollar corporations) while they ask as a community why the major platforms in particular cannot do a better job of preventing protected works from being chronically re-uploaded without license.  This second question is where we step into a BIG policy kerfuffle with regard to §512, and I imagine it is a topic about which we are going to hear a lot of ideas and a lot of noise.  

This week’s hearing hosted two panels of witnesses, the first of which provided an overview as to how the DMCA came to be; while the second panel, comprising IP academics, provided some insight as to where the DMCA debate may be heading.  In the interest of keeping this post containable, I will focus on the testimonies of Professor Sandra Aistars of the George Mason School of Law and Professor Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School, and the subject of “red flag” knowledge under the DMCA.  

What is “Red Flag” Knowledge?

Unfortunately, you will get different answers depending on whom you ask, including a court split on the matter if you ask either the Second or the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  But in everyday life, “red flag” knowledge is a reasonable, common-sense inference that one can draw from a modest amount of empirical evidence and experience.  If you enter the house to find trash strewn across the floor and a chagrined puppy in the corner, you will not need training in forensic science to have “red flag” knowledge that either the dog has committed a misdemeanor, or he has been artfully framed by the cat.  

That roughly describes the degree of analysis Congress intended ISPs to perform when encountering evidence of copyright infringement on their platforms.  As Professor Aistars noted, “Although Congress did not obligate service providers to actively seek out infringements, it did require them to act expeditiously to remove infringing materials once they have knowledge or awareness of infringing activity on their networks.” (See companion Appendix describing basic ISP Conditions.)

For example, let us imagine that the users of a web platform we’ll call Vimeo are making videos using some famous music we’ll call Beatles songs.  Any ordinary observer can reasonably assume that these users probably did not license these sound recordings; yet in the case Capitol Records v. Vimeo, the Second Circuit held, on the issue of “red flag” knowledge, that the platform’s operators would have needed either legal or music-industry expertise in order to discover infringement.

Keeping in mind that voluntary removal of material based on “red flag” knowledge of infringement is a condition of an ISP’s “safe harbor,” decisions like Vimeo do more than erase this part of the statute—they exacerbate a culture of infringement through court-sanctioned willful blindness.  And as Aistars added in her testimony, “Pointedly, this occurred in a case where discovery had revealed emails from managers to employees winkingly encouraging infringement.”  Thus, Aistars is among those who would advocate clarifying the meaning of “red flag” to restore the intent of §512.

The Vimeo emails Aistars mentions are typical of the shoulder shrugs and middle fingers creators are used to receiving from many platform operators, and application of the DMCA to date has unquestionably fostered cultural attitudes anathema to the kind of cooperation between ISPs and rightsholders Congress specifically intended to promote two decades ago.  Further, unintended endorsement of this culture among site operators may be exacerbating a persistent misunderstanding among individual and commercial users that the internet is a realm of automatic immunity.  As I have described in several posts, this misconception can cause unnecessary trouble for both creators and users of protected works.

Responses to Fixing “Red Flag” 

Anticipating the likelihood that, if there is to be any revision to §512 at all, “red flag” will be a major point of debate, Professor Tushnet warned against what she and others see as throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.  “If there is one message I would ask the members of the Committee to take away today,” she stated in her opening testimony, “it is that most beneficiaries of §512 are not Google or Facebook.”  Tushnet cautions that if we were to amend §512 solely as a response to the challenges creators face on very large, commercial platforms like YouTube, we risk simultaneously putting compliant, smaller platforms out of operation and facilitating even greater monopolization by the largest entities.

As a statistical matter, Tushnet is making a “few bad apples” argument, except for the fact that some of the baddest apples in the bunch happen to be the most powerful, wealthiest internet companies in the world.  So, even if we take her premise and data at face value (i.e. that millions of compliant sites rely on §512 to exist), this does not recommend ignoring the catalog of evidence that application of the DMCA has promoted willful blindness among the operators of major ISPs.  Simply put, if twenty-million sites operate without harm while one site does harm to twenty-million creators, we still have a problem if the law shields that one site from liability.  So, the status quo cannot be the final answer.  

As a practical consideration, Tushnet’s argument is based on the assumption that a more clearly defined restoration of the intent of “red flag” knowledge can only be implemented by technological measures, which only the largest ISPs can afford.  Hence, her argument that this will result in entrenching, for instance, YouTube’s monopoly position, notably glossing over the fact that there are other forces entrenching online monopolies.  While this technology-investment argument is worthy of discussion, the aforementioned Vimeo case is just one example in which the principle of “red flag” knowledge was obliterated in a purely human paradigm (i.e. human managers choosing not to see what was right in front of them).

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc? (or not all good things come from §512.)

As Tushnet testified, her own Organization for Transformative Works site hosts over “four-million works” yielding 1.2 billion page views per month, while the site receives takedown notices at a rate of less than one per month, most of which are invalid.  Assuming these data are correct, the site to which she refers seems barely relevant as an example. It is a large fanfic platform with what appears to be a vast amount of material—mainly short works of written text—that is highly unlikely to infringe.  No sound recordings.  No photographs.  No film clips.  At most, some fanfic writer could maybe—and I mean maybe—run afoul of a derivative works right. 

From a cursory review of OTW, it is not at all evident that adopting a clearer, statutory definition of “red flag” (in order to hold the majors accountable) would force a site like this one to invest in prohibitively expensive technology in order to remain complaint.  If the platform is indeed receiving takedown notices at a rate of less than one valid notice per month, this is most likely evidence that the site hosts little to no infringing material—and that when notices are received, human review is sufficient to the task.  Further, the fact that the site hosts “fandoms” for a long list of works owned by major motion picture studios indicates that infringement must be very low to near zero if it has not invited the attention of an industry with the resources to send notices in volume.  

As is often the case, defenders of the status quo (the same is true for Section 230 of the CDA) will say “look at all the benefits this law has yielded” and then point to examples that, under scrutiny, do not necessarily rely on the liability shield so substantially as may be asserted.  In this vein, Tushnet’s testimony includes several references to all manner of good news about the creative industries—more movies, TV, music, etc. than ever before—but it would be a logical stretch to assert that, for instance, Billie Eilish’s YouTube-to-Grammy-Awards success story owes much at all to §512—let alone the collapse of the “red flag” principle. 

As Chairman Tillis noted, “this is a very wonky subject,” and that last description of mine was very wonky indeed; but DMCA review will be a devil-in-the-details story to watch.  Despite the hyperbole that will inevitably seep onto social media about these hearings, it is neither practical nor desirable for rightsholders to seek obliteration of the safe harbor altogether—that is not the goal.  But at the same time, it cannot be acceptable that a statute designed to mitigate copyright infringement and incentivize cooperation has served to reward infringement and position ISPs and rightsholders at permanent loggerheads.  

*This case is further complicated by a conflict between state and federal law over the use of sound recordings made prior to 1972, but that’s a whole other bowl of noodles. 

Photo source by Robertobinetti70