In our amicus brief, we, along with the internet companies who joined us, outlined many other recent examples of misuse of the DMCA that we’ve seen on our respective platforms. Soon after posting, Universal Music (Prince’s record label) sent a DMCA takedown notice to remove the video, claiming it infringed on their copyright in the music playing in the background. Lenz posted a home video of her young child dancing in their family kitchen to a song by the artist Prince.

For example, we recently filed an amicus brief in support of Stephanie Lenz’s lawsuit against Universal Music Group. Recent cases of abuse have been well documented. Regardless of whether you own the copyright, the service provider that hosts the content must take it down or risk being out of compliance with the DMCA. The DMCA’s takedown process provides what can be an easy avenue for censorship: simply send in a DMCA notice claiming copyrights in a piece of content that you don’t agree with. Thankfully, Automattic’s (makers of WordPress) general counsel, Paul Sieminski’s testimony at yesterday’s hearing highlighted this problem in a big way, pointing out that Automattic sees plenty of DMCA takedown abuse.Īt Automattic, we’ve seen an increasing amount of abuse of the DMCA’s takedown process. Rather than “notice and staydown” or even “notice and takedown” it’s time we move to a much more reasonable “notice and notice” system. But, if we’re looking at the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA, we should really be exploring how much damage they do. The idea would be to shred the existing DMCA safe harbors (which give service providers protection from legal liability if they take down content upon notification by the copyright holder that it’s infringing), and make some dangerous requirements that service providers would then have to proactively police their sites to guarantee that no other versions of that content ever show up (even if the other versions may be legal). Fri, Mar 14th 2014 01:36pm - Mike MasnickĮarlier today, we wrote about a push by copyright maximalists for a new censorship regime that they call “notice and staydown” as a sort of replacement for SOPA.

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