Hi folks,

Earlier this week, the Wikimedia Foundation filed a submission https://policy.wikimedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/wikimedia-foundation-e28093-section-512-additional-comments.pdf in response to the US Copyright Office in response to their request for additional comments https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-11-08/pdf/2016-26904.pdf on section 512 of the DMCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act. 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 https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/04/06/save-safe-harbors-open-web/ and in-person discussions https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/06/16/copyright-law/. 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: https://policy.wikimedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/wikimedia-foundation...

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

- Internet Archive https://blog.archive.org/2017/02/23/the-internet-archive-pushes-back-on-notice-and-staydown-in-recent-comments-to-the-copyright-office/ - Techdirt/Copia https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170222/11214836767/why-dmcas-notice-takedown-already-has-first-amendment-problems-riaa-mpaa-want-to-make-that-worse.shtml - Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/eff-copyright-office-safe-harbors-work

Best,

Charles M. Roslof Legal Counsel Wikimedia Foundation croslof@wikimedia.org (415) 839-6885

NOTICE: This message might have confidential or legally privileged information in it. If you have received this message by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer.