Hi folks,

Earlier this week, the Wikimedia Foundation filed a submission in response to the US Copyright Office in response to their request for additional comments on section 512 of the DMCA. That's the provision of law that protects online platforms like us from liability for copyright infringement in user-uploaded content (creating "safe harbors"). It also creates the notice-and-takedown system that copyright owners can use to request that we remove material from the projects.

This is the second round of comments on section 512; we also participated in the first round with written comments and in-person discussions. In the first round, we focused on talking about how the section 512 safe harbors have worked well to allow the growth of the Wikimedia projects (and online platforms generally), and how it would be bad to require online platforms, and Wikimedia in particular, to implement technology that would detect copyright infringement and automatically remove material. Rightsholders have been advocating for such a requirement in the form of "notice-and-staydown"—in our comments, we call it "mandatory filtering".

In these second round comments, in addition to reiterating some of our points from the first round, we encouraged the Copyright Office to take into account the interests of the general public and individual creators who rely on online platforms to distribute their works, and to base any recommendations they make about changes to the law on reliable research:

I'm planning to post about our comments in more detail on the Wikimedia blog soon. In the meantime, you may want to check out the blogposts and comments from these other organizations:

Best,