Copyright and Politics Don't Mix

[Commentary] Throughout this election season, Americans have used the extraordinary capacity of digital technologies to capture and respond to arguments with which they disagree. YouTube has become the channel of choice for following who is saying what, from the presidential campaign to races for city council. But this explosion in citizen-generated political speech has been met with a troubling response: the increasing use of copyright laws as tools for censorship. Copyright law has become a political weapon because of a statute passed a decade ago: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law tells carriers like YouTube that unless they quickly remove material posted by users that is alleged to infringe copyright, they themselves could be liable for the infringement. Understandably, YouTube and others have become quite vigilant in removing allegedly infringing content. Indeed, the Web site has gone beyond the requirements of the law and has begun to shut down the accounts of people alleged to have violated copyright just three times. The digital copyright act gives the alleged infringer an opportunity to demand that the content be restored. But in the height of a political campaign, even a few hours of downtime can be the difference between effective and ineffective. The law thus creates a perfect mechanism to censor political speech during the only time it could matter. Recognizing this, campaigns and their allies are beginning to exploit this weapon. The answer to this problem is not to abolish or ignore copyright. Instead, the law should be revised, bringing focus to the contexts in which its important economic incentives are needed, and removing it from contexts where it isn't. (Lawrence Lessig is a law professor at Stanford)