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RIAA Lawyer Complains DMCA May Need Revamp
the simurgh writes "The DMCA is just not providing the kind of protection against online piracy that Congress intended, RIAA lawyer Jennifer Pariser says. The judge in Universal Music Group's copyright suit against Veoh as well as the judge in EMI vs. MP3tunes.com issued similar findings. The courts have now determined the burden of policing the web for infringing materials is on the content owner and not the service provider. Content companies think it is unfair for them to be required to spend resources on scouring the Web when their pirated work helps service providers make money. What they complain about almost as much is that after they notify a service provider of an infringing song or movie clip and they're removed, new copies appear almost immediately. Basically they are complaining the the DMCA makes them responsible for policing their own content at their expense."
I think they are right. Something like Wikipedia's solution might be the right one, where putting up images, songs, videos requires a statement of where you got them from. Essentially that's answering the big question in a DMCA takedown in advance: I got this from X and believe I have a license to use it because of Y (including I created it).
If we had semi-reasonable rules regarding degree of infringement and looked at things like "intent" then I could see a system like that working. Right now content producers can't enforce copyright effectively. The cost of policing is simply too high. At the same time, the penalties for minor violations or inadvertent violations are too high.
Lower the penalties, create a neutral 3rd party to regulate copyright content and I think everyone could be better off. Of course the obscene length of time for copyright content and the expansive view of derived works doesn't help either. It undermines the legitimacy of copyright.