Law Commons^™

Convergence And Conflation In Online Copyright, Christopher A. Cotropia, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is showing its age. Enacted in 1998, the DMCA succeeded in its initial goal of bringing clarity to wildly inconsistent judicial standards for online copyright infringement. But as time has passed, the Act has been overtaken—not by developments in technology, but by developments in copyright’s case law. Those cases are no longer as divergent as they were in the last millennium. Instead, over time the judicial standards and the statutory standards have converged, to the point where the differences between them are few.

At first glance, this convergence seems unproblematic. After all, uniformity was the …

Higher Education And The Dmca, James Gibson, Christopher A. Cotropia

Law Faculty Publications

The nearly twenty-year history of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor provisions has been marked by criticism from content owners, online service providers, and end users. Content owners complain about the cost of monitoring online content and sending takedown notices. Online service providers complain about the cost of receiving and processing the notices. And end users complain about their legitimate use of copyrighted works being subject to DMCA takedown. Colleges and universities have been at the forefront of this controversy; as providers of online services to their students, they have been a focus of both Congress and copyright owners. …

Commentary To The U.S. Copyright Office Regarding The Section 512 Study: Higher Education And The Dmca Safe Harbors, Christopher A. Cotropia, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

The nearly twenty-year history of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor provisions has been marked by criticism from content owners, online service providers, and end users. Content owners complain about the cost of monitoring online content and sending take-down notices. Online service providers complain about the cost of receiving and processing the notices. And end users complain about their legitimate use of copyrighted works being subject to DMCA take-down. Colleges and universities have been at the forefront of this controversy; as providers of online services to their students, they have been a focus of both Congress and copyright owners. …

Danger In The Dmca Safe Harbors: The Need To Narrow What Constitutes Red Flag Knowledge, Hank Fisher

Law Student Publications

This comment considers recent cases interpreting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") and urges Congress to expand the protection of service providers through the DMCA safe harbors. The comment proceeds in six parts. Part I explains contributory and vicarious liability, the applicable sections of the DMCA to this comment, and the fair use doctrine. Part II provides a brief overview of video-sharing websites. It further observes the impact that video-sharing websites have had on digital media, focusing on the impact on the music industry. Part III looks at the recent cases interpreting the DMCA's red flag exception to safe harbor …

Notice And Takedown, Here And Abroad, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been around for more than a dozen years now. Some of its provisions were just weird, such as the one that established sui generis protection for boat hull designs. Others have had a skeptical reception in the courts, like the anti-circumvention provisions that forbid certain forms of hacking through technological protections for copyrighted works.

But one DMCA provision that has proved popular in both the copyright community and the courts is the notice-and-takedown procedure codified at 17 U.S.C. § 512(c). When a copyright owner finds that some Internet user has illegally posted its copyrighted …

The Dmca And Repeat Infringers, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

The recent agreement between big media companies and big Internet service providers (ISPs) concerning online copyright infringement has the law and technology world abuzz. ISPs like Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable have agreed to implement a system under which subscribers who repeatedly and illegally download copyrighted content will have their Internet access impeded and maybe even terminated.

This is big news, and it will probably receive more attention in this IP Viewpoints series. But the purpose of this column is to put this agreement in context, because much of what the companies have agreed to do appears to be …

The Case For (Considering) Regulation Of Technology, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

Given a choice, which would you prefer: A world in which it is easier to encrypt information than to decrypt it? A world in which decryption is easier than encryption? A world in which the two stand in a cost/benefit equipoise?

When the question is put like that, the answer seems to depend on how we weigh certain core values. For example, if we prefer privacy over order, we might prefer the first world. If we value order more than privacy, perhaps the second world is more to our liking.

As it happens, we live in the first world. Modern …