Tag: Joshua Lamel

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Copyright Legislation

Senate IP Subcommittee Considers the Role of Private Agreements and Existing Technology in Curbing Online Piracy

The following post comes from Liz Velander, a recent graduate of Scalia Law and a Research Assistant at CPIP.

U.S. Capitol buildingBy Liz Velander

In mid-December, the Senate Intellectual Property Subcommittee, led by its Chairman, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), held a hearing entitled “The Role of Private Agreements and Existing Technology in Curbing Online Piracy.” The hearing came ahead of Sen. Tillis’s release of his first discussion draft of legislation to reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In his opening remarks, Sen. Tillis stated that reforming the DMCA is one of his top priorities in the 117th Congress, but it may take his entire second term to get a DMCA reform bill across the finish line. The purpose of the hearing was to identify voluntary steps that copyright owners and tech companies can take now to curb online infringement.

The hearing consisted of two panels. Panel I included: Ruth Vitale, CEO, CreativeFuture; Probir Mehta, Head of Global Intellectual Property and Trade Policy, Facebook, Inc.; Mitch Glazier, Chairman and CEO, Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); and Joshua Lamel, Executive Director, Re:Create. Panel II included: Katherine Oyama, Global Director of Business Public Policy, YouTube; Keith Kupferschmid, CEO, Copyright Alliance; Noah Becker, President and Co-Founder, AdRev; and Dean Marks, Executive Director and Legal Counsel, Coalition for Online Accountability.

Sen. Tillis began the hearing by voicing his opinion on the matter, informed by a year-long series of hearings and months of feedback from creators, user groups, and technology companies. “There is absolutely more big tech can and should do to stop online piracy,” Sen. Tillis said. “Unfortunately, it seems that some in big tech aren’t serious about stopping online piracy, and I don’t know why that is. Maybe it isn’t a priority—or maybe some companies are actually profiting off the piracy on their site. It is clear as day to me that many multi-national, multi-billion-dollar companies simply aren’t using all the tools they have to stop theft from small creators. And that’s wrong.”

Mitch Glazier, Chairman and CEO of RIAA, stated that the problem is that big tech companies aren’t properly incentivized to take steps in combatting online piracy. Keith Kupferschmid, CEO of the Copyright Alliance, explained that Section 512 of the DMCA has been so misinterpreted by the courts that most service providers know that they have little risk of liability and need only do the absolute minimum required under the DMCA to avoid liability.

Mr. Glazier said that one of the most important things Congress can do is to provide the right incentives to encourage voluntary private agreements. He explained that there are two types of private agreements. First, there are individual agreements entered into by copyright owners and technology providers. These can be nimble and evolve with technology. Second, there are standards developed in the marketplace that eventually achieve broad enough consensus and use that they become required. In Mr. Glazier’s view, that is what the DMCA contemplated—a multi-stakeholder standard technical measure (STM) process where there was enough consensus and use that it would be unfair for outliers to compete without using them. Mr. Glazier said that a voluntary system only works if there exist the right incentives, which the DMCA does not currently provide.

The panelists disagreed as to whether Congress needs to reform the DMCA in order to incentivize voluntary agreements. The panelists representing big tech companies asserted that the process is working as the DMCA intended, pointing to the policies and procedures of their platforms and existing content protection technology. Probir Mehta, Head of Global IP and Trade Policy at Facebook, touted Facebook’s content management tool, Rights Manager. Katherine Oyama, Global Director of Business Public Policy at YouTube, pointed to Youtube’s Copyright Management Tools, which include a webform, Content ID, and Copyright Match. These panelists emphasized the significant amount of work their companies undertook to create these technologies, which they view as going above and beyond the requirements of the DMCA.

Members of the IP Subcommittee were very interested to hear how these tools work in practice. Ruth Vitale, CEO of CreativeFuture, testified that most individual creators are not given access to YouTube’s Content ID, nor are they given an explanation for why they are denied. Ms. Oyama stated that while Content ID has eligibility requirements, YouTube built an entirely new tool for smaller creators, Copyright Match, which runs on Content ID itself. She claimed that Content ID is such a powerful tool that, if used improperly, will erroneously take down content that is noninfringing.

Ranking Member Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) wanted to know what the panelists viewed as the path forward. Mr. Kupferschmid said that while voluntary agreements have a role, they cannot address everything. He emphasized that legislative action is appropriate in this circumstance because service providers are not being cooperative. Noah Becker, President and Co-Founder of AdRev, a digital rights management and media technology company, agreed with Mr. Kupferschmid. He explained his business’ revenue-sharing proposition is a better fit for copyright owners that do not want to use YouTube’s monetization tools. In addition to legislation, he explained that there should be some sort of support for the concept of a list of approved vendors, like AdRev, to be able to access copyright APIs on massive platforms. He urged that this would reduce the large cost and technology burden of accessing APIs, making takedowns more affordable for creators.

Sen. Tillis closed the hearing by stating that the parties need to engage with one another in order to avoid a potential legislative overreach. He said that the hearing showed that tech companies must do more to combat online piracy. Sen. Tillis stressed that they have the tools and resources but must find ways to get greater engagement and create voluntary paths to prevent Congress from paving less voluntary ones.

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Copyright Internet Uncategorized

Attacking the Notice-and-Staydown Straw Man

Ever since the U.S. Copyright Office announced its study of the DMCA last December, the notice-and-staydown issue has become a particularly hot topic. Critics of notice-and-staydown have turned up the volume, repeating the same vague assertions about freedom, censorship, innovation, and creativity that routinely pop up whenever someone proposes practical solutions to curb online infringement. Worse still, many critics don’t even take the time to look at what proponents of notice-and-staydown are suggesting, choosing instead to knock down an extremist straw man that doesn’t reflect anyone’s view of how the internet should function. A closer look at what proponents of notice-and-staydown are actually proposing reveals that the two sides aren’t nearly as far apart as critics would have us believe. This is particularly true when it comes to the issue of how well notice-and-staydown would accommodate fair use.

For example, Joshua Lamel’s recent piece at The Huffington Post claims that “innovation and creativity are still under attack” by the “entertainment industry’s intense and well-financed lobbying campaign” pushing for notice-and-staydown. Lamel argues that the “content filtering proposed by advocates of a ‘notice and staydown’ system . . . would severely limit new and emerging forms of creativity.” And his parade of horribles is rather dramatic: “Parents can forget posting videos of their kids dancing to music and candidates would not be able to post campaign speeches because of the music that plays in the background. Remix culture and fan fiction would likely disappear from our creative discourse.” Scary stuff, if true. But Lamel fails to cite a single source showing that artists, creators, and other proponents of notice-and-staydown are asking for anything close to this.

Similarly, Elliot Harmon of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that “a few powerful lobbyists” are pushing for notice-and-staydown such that “once a takedown notice goes uncontested, the platform should have to filter and block any future uploads of the same allegedly infringing content.” Harmon also assumes the worst: “Under the filter-everything approach, legitimate uses of works wouldn’t get the reasonable consideration they deserve,” and “computers would still not be able to consider a work’s fair use status.” Like Lamel, Harmon claims that “certain powerful content owners seek to brush aside the importance of fair use,” but he doesn’t actually mention what these supposed evildoers have to say about notice-and-staydown.

Harmon’s suggestion that the reliance on uncontested takedown notices gives inadequate consideration to fair use is particularly strange as it directly contradicts the position taken by the EFF. Back in October of 2007, copyright owners (including CBS and Fox) and service providers (including Myspace and Veoh) promulgated a list of Principles for User Generated Content Services. These Principles recommend that service providers should use fingerprinting technology to enact notice-and-staydown, with the general caveat that fair use should be accommodated. Two weeks later, the EFF published its own list of Fair Use Principles for User Generated Video Content suggesting in detail how notice-and-staydown should respect fair use.

The EFF’s Fair Use Principles include the following:

The use of “filtering” technology should not be used to automatically remove, prevent the uploading of, or block access to content unless the filtering mechanism is able to verify that the content has previously been removed pursuant to an undisputed DMCA takedown notice or that there are “three strikes” against it:

1. the video track matches the video track of a copyrighted work submitted by a content owner;
2. the audio track matches the audio track of that same copyrighted work; and
3. nearly the entirety (e.g., 90% or more) of the challenged content is comprised of a single copyrighted work (i.e., a “ratio test”).

If filtering technologies are not reliably able to establish these “three strikes,” further human review by the content owner should be required before content is taken down or blocked.

Though not explicitly endorsing notice-and-staydown, the EFF thinks it’s entirely consistent with fair use so long as (1) the content at issue has already been subject to one uncontested takedown notice, or (2) the content at issue is at least a 90% match to a copyrighted work. And the funny thing is that supporters of notice-and-staydown today are actually advocating for what the EFF recognized to be reasonable over eight years ago.

While Harmon never explicitly identifies the “powerful lobbyists” he accuses of wanting to trample on fair use, he does link to the Copyright Office’s recently-announced study of the DMCA and suggest that they can be found there. Reading through that announcement, I can only find three citations (in footnote 36) to people advocating for notice-and-staydown: (1) Professor Sean O’Connor of the University of Washington School of Law (and Senior Scholar at CPIP), (2) Paul Doda, Global Litigation Counsel at Elsevier, and (3) Maria Schneider, composer/conductor/producer. These three cites all point to testimonies given at the Section 512 of Title 17 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee in March of 2014, and they show that Harmon is attacking a straw man. In fact, all three of these advocates for notice-and-staydown seek a system that is entirely consistent with the EFF’s own Fair Use Principles.

Sean O’Connor seeks notice-and-staydown only for “reposted works,” that is, “ones that have already been taken down on notice” and that are “simply the original work reposted repeatedly by unauthorized persons.” His proposal only applies to works that “do not even purport to be transformative or non-infringing,” and he specifically excludes “mash-ups, remixes, covers, etc.” This not only comports with the EFF’s recommendations, it goes beyond them. Where the EFF would require either a previously uncontested notice or at least a 90% match, O’Connor thinks there should be both an uncontested notice and a 100% match.

The same is true for Paul Doda of Elsevier, who testifies that fingerprinting technology is “an appropriate and effective method to ensure that only copies that are complete or a substantially complete copy of a copyrighted work are prevented or removed by sites.” Doda explicitly notes that filtering is not suitable for “works that might require more detailed infringement analysis or ‘Fair Use’ analysis,” and he praises YouTube’s Content ID system “that can readily distinguish between complete copies of works and partial copies or clips.” Doda’s vision of notice-and-staydown is also more protective of fair use than the EFF’s Fair Use Principles. While the EFF suggests that a previously uncontested notice is sufficient, Doda instead only suggests that there be a substantial match.

Unlike O’Connor and Doda, Maria Schneider is not a lawyer. She’s instead a working musician, and her testimony reflects her own frustrations with the whack-a-mole problem under the DMCA’s current notice-and-takedown regime. As a solution, Schneider proposes that creators “should be able to prevent unauthorized uploading before infringement occurs,” and she points to YouTube’s Content ID as evidence that “it’s technically possible for companies to block unauthorized works.” While she doesn’t explicitly propose that there be a substantial match before content is filtered, Schneider gives the example of her “most recent album” being available “on numerous file sharing websites.” In other words, she’s concerned about verbatim copies of her works that aren’t possibly fair use, and nothing Schneider recommends contradicts the EFF’s own suggestions for accommodating fair use.

Lamel and Harmon paint a picture of powerful industry lobbyist boogeymen seeking an onerous system of notice-and-staydown that fails to adequately account for fair use, but neither produces any evidence to support their claims. Responses to the Copyright Office’s DMCA study are due on March 21st, and it will be interesting to see whether any of these supposed boogeymen really show up. There’s little doubt, though, that critics will continue attacking the notice-and-staydown straw man. And it’s really a shame, because advocates of notice-and-staydown are quite conscious of the importance of protecting fair use. This is easy to see, but first you have to look at what they’re really saying.