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-foundatio…
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(a)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>.