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At a conference held June 18 at Stanford University Law School
– The 9thAnnual Stanford Ecommerce Best Practices
Conference - it was reported that copyright holders are
increasingly using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's
("DMCA") notice and takedown procedures to address
copyright infringement on websites. The DMCA, which was signed into law in 1998,
increases penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet and
extends the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of
providers of online services ("ISPs") for copyright
infringement by their users. The so-called "safe harbor
provision" of the DMCA protects ISPs for transmitting
information that may infringe a copyright if the ISP removes the
infringing materials from the users' websites after it receives
proper notice of the infringement. The notice – referred
to as a "takedown notice" – is sent by a
copyright owner or its proxy to the ISP hosting the website on
which the infringing material appears. There is no need for the
copyrighted work to be protected by a U.S. copyright registration
in order take to take advantage of the DMCA provisions. As long as
the takedown notice contains the information required under the
DMCA and is sent to the designated ISP agent, the ISP, after
receiving the notice, should remove the infringing material.
The growing trend appears to be that copyright owners are not
just seeking to take down the deep link to infringing material on a
website, but, rather, are seeking to take down entire websites.
Thus, the DMCA is providing a very effective means to address the
problem of online copyright infringement without the need to resort
at the outset to expensive and time-consuming litigation. As noted
by one Stanford law professor, there still remains a persistent
issue in the area of online copyright infringement, namely, how
copyright owners should deal with infringing activity at high
level. Congress attempted to address this issue through the Stop
Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, both of which
failed earlier this year. Thus, the issue remains whether
copyright owners should go after search engines or venture capital
companies funding the search engines or the websites that
facilitate them in the act of copyright infringement.
Some statistics reported at the Conference, which were current
within the 30 days prior to June 18th:
Google was asked to remove 1,825, 442 URLs for copyright
violations
NBC Universal requested 225, 316 URLs be taken down
British Recorded Music Industry Ltd. requested 153, 778 URLs be
taken down
RIAA member companies EMI Music North America, Sony Music
Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and
associated record labels requested 80, 810 URLs be removed
Elegant Angel, an adult entertainment provider represented by
Takedown Piracy LLC, submitted 19 requests to take down 67, 886
URLs
The URLs most frequently cited for takedown are torrent
file sharing sites. Torrent file sharing networks distribute large
media files to private users. Torrents download small portions of
files for many different web sources at the same time. Torrent
downloading is very easy to use and other than a few torrent search
providers, torrents themselves have no user fees.
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