The Internet Archive Pushes Back on "Notice and Staydown" in Recent Comments to the Copyright Office

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 4:48 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Internet Archive Pushes Back on "Notice and
Staydown" in Recent Comments to the Copyright Office
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


The Internet Archive Pushes Back on “Notice and Staydown” in Recent
Comments to the Copyright Office
By Lila Bailey
Feb 23 2017
<
http://blog.archive.org/2017/02/23/the-internet-archive-pushes-back-on-notice-and-staydown-in-recent-comments-to-the-copyright-office/
>

The US Copyright Office sought comments in its ongoing study of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 512 safe harbor study. They are
generally looking to find out how well the notice and takedown system is
working for everyone—Internet platforms and users, as well as creators and
copyright holders. We think the 1998 statute struck the right balance and
is generally working well, a view shared by nearly all Internet platforms
and users. However, some incumbent rightsholders and their advocacy
organizations disagree and think the system needs to be completely redone
because it is too hard to police copyright infringement online. These
complaints fail to account for the exceeding high statutory damages
rightsholders can claim and other mechanisms in copyright law that favor
certain categories of rightsholders over new media creators and consumers.

One dangerous idea that rightsholders continue to push for is a “notice and
staydown” system. This sounds like a minor edit to notice and takedown, but
in reality it would amount to mandatory filtering of the Internet for the
purpose of policing copyright. Last summer we noted many of the general
reasons why this idea is both dangerous and impractical. In our most recent
comments, we focus more specifically on the direct threat such a system
would pose to the Internet Archive and our various projects such as the
Wayback Machine and the TV News Archive:

For one thing, the Internet Archive preserves the state of any given web
page as it existed on a particular date via the Wayback Machine. Being
forced to automatically remove material from the Wayback Machine would
irreparably harm the historical record. This would be harmful for
journalists who use the Wayback Machine to report on important stories of
which there would be no evidence without the Archive. It would be harmful
for attorneys and litigants who regularly use the Wayback Machine as
evidence in legal proceedings. The very knowledge that a filter was running
on the Wayback Machine would undermine its credibility as an accurate
snapshot of the Internet at a given point in time. Therefore, filtering is
a direct threat to our mission.

The Internet Archive also hosts the Political TV Ad Archive and the TV News
Archive. As with the Wayback Machine, the very point of these archives is
to preserve the historical record and ensure that politicians can be held
accountable for their statements in ads or in TV appearances. A mandatory
filter run on the TV News Archive might catch a famous song used in a
political ad or at a campaign rally, and determine that such material must
be removed. However, this would distort the historical record. This puts
the Internet Archive in the untenable position of having to choose between
protecting the historical record for future generations, and protecting its
own legal interests.

[snip]

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