> We think the 1998 statute struck the right balance and is generally working well, a view shared by nearly all Internet platforms and users.
This might be peripheral to the main point, but I have a hard time believing this. Spurious takedowns have inspired multiple waves of invective on YouTube alone. It's a pretty common opinion (at least in my circles) that the current law unduly encourages copyright owners and their representatives to send vast numbers of notifications with no regard to their accuracy. Furthermore, the lopsided requirements of notification vs. counter-notification ("reasonably sufficient" contact information vs. name, address, and phone number) have been abused in order to dox people [1].
YouTube takedown waves are not examples of the DMCA. YouTube gives rights-holders far more power than the DMCA alone would give.
Which is a shame. If they used the DMCA and you had a video taken down for a spurious reason, you could claim fair-use or no-infringement, and the video could be restored. Then the rights holder would have to sue you personally to get it taken down, and you could potentially fight it.
> some incumbent rightsholders and their advocacy organizations disagree and think the system needs to be completely redone because it is too hard to police copyright infringement online
Compared to what the rightsholders want, I think the current system is a good compromise.
That's a reasonable stance as far as it goes, but in pragmatic terms I worry that now that there's a new round of debate, planting a flag at the status quo risks inviting a new compromise that's more restrictive.
edit: Basically, it means that the other side doesn't risk actually losing anything by picking fights again and again and again, while the Internet Archive's side has to fight just to stand still.
Which is the plan. If people recall, the rights holders have never been happy with the status quo, which is one of the reasons copy right in America has constantly become longer, even though the creators have long since passed.
Copyright feels like its has lost its original intention of ensuring the creator of an idea or property is protected, and has become a way of permanently annexing an idea or IP forever.
And as long as the rights holders have more money, time and resources, there's no real reason they shouldnt stop pushing the enevelope.
> A mandatory filter run on the TV News Archive might catch a famous song used in a political ad or at a campaign rally, and determine that such material must be removed.
Imagine when that becomes a strategy. If always have copyrighted songs playing in the background of speeches you wish future control over, you can just sue to get those speeches removed over copyright in the background, and the removal propagated to filters everywhere.
I like my instant revisionist propaganda with The Beatles playing in the background.
Jim Sterling already uses a variation of this strategy, which he calls the "Copyright Deadlock"[1]. He discovered it is possible to defeat ContentID-based forced monetization of his videos by including multiple songs/footage from different businesses.
Can you? First, "just" has the connotation of "easy". It's possible that archive.org doesn't have the manpower to manually filter music from speeches, or that the technology isn't good enough to do it automatically.
Second, the audio without the music is a derivative work of the audio with the music, which is itself a derivative work of the music. By transitivity, one could argue that the audio without the music is a derivative work of the music.
And whether or not you're right in the abstract, you have to pay a lawyer $500/hour to think about it.
>the audio without the music is a derivative work of the audio with the music, which is itself a derivative work of the music //
Obviously this is technically correct, which is usually the best kind of correct (internet memes can't be wrong).
However, legally whilst the work of 'music+speech' is used to acquire the speech the resulting speech is not artistically related to the preexisting 'music' work. The art is supposed to be the bit that copyright protects.
In practice Fair Use / Fair Dealing should apply quite easily to the whole work, or indeed a processed derivative used for (eg) news reporting. (The rights holder licensed use at a rally they should thus have anticipated Fair Use reproduction for news/history.)
The derailment on that line though would be when the speech is made over music that the speaker didn't get permission to use. Use of arms-length controlled corporations could probably generate such a situation.
Or maybe The Internet Archive could obey the law. Google are similarly guilty of this - their empire is built on intellectual property, yet they only pay distant lip service to others' intellectual property. It would be trivial to implement a system where every rightsholder can register their copyrights and trademarks and subsequently forbid the uploading of content that infringes those. It would be trivial to scan trusted publications for new movie releases and forbid uploading content with the names and pictures they contain unless it's done from the studio's trusted account. But no - today's robber barons Google & Facebook are content to let unprecedented thievery run rampant on their services and gorge themselves on profits, while the rightsholders and content creators lose billions of profit every year. The Internet is the worst thing to have happened to our shared culture.
This might be peripheral to the main point, but I have a hard time believing this. Spurious takedowns have inspired multiple waves of invective on YouTube alone. It's a pretty common opinion (at least in my circles) that the current law unduly encourages copyright owners and their representatives to send vast numbers of notifications with no regard to their accuracy. Furthermore, the lopsided requirements of notification vs. counter-notification ("reasonably sufficient" contact information vs. name, address, and phone number) have been abused in order to dox people [1].
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-group-reveals-personal-...