Hollywood's Copyright Lobbyists Are Like Exes Who Won't Give Up

[Commentary] Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Tumblr, YouTube, Reddit, WordPress, and Facebook aren’t responsible for the copyright infringement of each of their millions of users, so long as they take down specific posts, videos, or images when notified by copyright holders.

But copyright holders thought that wasn’t good enough. They wanted to take down whole websites, not just particular posts, and without ever going to court.

In 2011, they proposed a bill that would let them do just that. It was called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Now the copyright lobbyists seem to be testing the waters again. Rather than introduce another bill, they are talking about “voluntary” commitments among copyright-holders and payment processors, advertisers, and others. The House Judiciary Committee, the folks in Congress who wrote SOPA, will hold a hearing about the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure, which is one of the cornerstones of digital copyright law -- and which SOPA would have gutted. But that’s not all. The US Patent and Trademark Office has scheduled a “multistakeholder forum” to discuss “improving the operation of the DMCA notice and takedown system”: another chance to build some voluntary consensus. Copyright lobbyists just can’t get over the breakup; like an ex insistently trying to catch up with drinks, they want SOPA back. The clearest public indicator of Hollywood’s intentions, though, came through at one of the last House Judiciary Committee hearings, a few months ago. It was called “The Role of Voluntary Agreements in the US Intellectual Property System.”

[Marvin Ammori is a Future Tense fellow at New America]

[March 10]