How Internet copyright law is abused
Cory Doctorow of the EFF uses BoingBoing to highlight to the work of the Chilling Effects Project who have apparently recently produced a report on how Internet copyright law is abused to silence legitimate uses of the Internet.
I’m glad the Chilling Effects group is out there and they do provide some good case studies but unless I miss my guess the statistics provided in Cory’s summary of the report are a little misleading. They found, for example that “Thirty percent of notices demanded takedown for claims that presented an obvious question for a court (a clear fair use argument, complaints about uncopyrightable material, and the like)”. But I assume they are working from a database of notices sent to them by people who are annoyed at receiving such notices - a somewhat biased sample. There may be lots of legitimate takedown notices which they never see. I would like to see the report itself and read more about the methods used to produce it but there aren’t any details on the site yet.
November 23rd, 2005 at 4:16 pm
Actually, the study is available here: http://mylaw.usc.edu/documents/512Rep/
Also, thanks, David for the comment. The data are not perfect (this is a private process, so very hard to get data–one more reason for concern), but they are better than you might expect. This is because Google sends all its notices–good, bad and in-between–to Chilling Effects. The vast majority of the notices we studied are from Google. While this has its own problems (Google is only one company, 2/3 of notices from it are related to search, etc), it is a complete picture of Googles intereaction with DMCA 512. We were careful with the self-reported notices, which I agree are likely to be sent by people who at least _think_ they’re in the right. However, the 30% number was true both for those self-reported notices, and for Google separately (when all self-reported notices were removed).
November 23rd, 2005 at 6:35 pm
A prompt and quite reassuring reply! From reading the report I would say the folks at Chilling Effects have gone a long way to reassure skeptical readers and are gathering quite a good data set - one that is getting better all the time. And one that is telling quite a depressing story about stifling free speech. I would like to have stats on what effect it is actually having - how many of the “dubious” notices are actually complied with rather than contested by Google or other ISPs. Doubtless these stats will be coming in future reports.