The tech industry is eroding copyright law. Here's how to stop it; Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2017

Jonathan Taplin, Los Angeles Times; The tech industry is eroding copyright law. Here's how to stop it

"The only way to get Internet companies to honor the widely accepted understanding of fair use is to make it law. Although the current legal definition makes one thing crystal clear — you cannot use a work in its entirety and still claim fair use — it leaves many aspects of the doctrine open to interpretation. The Registrar of Copyrights should codify a 30-second time limit for audio and video clips and require that content be used in a transformative or interpretive way.

With concrete guidelines in place, regulation would have to be built in. For instance, when a user asserts fair use for a work that YouTube identifies as being blocked by the copyright holder, the clip would have to be sent to a human screener for evaluation. If it is longer than 30 seconds or does not appear in a transformative work, the clip would remain blocked. YouTube already has this process in place for screening pornography, ISIS videos and the like.

The ambiguous definition of fair use allows for its continued abuse, and this abuse has become a gateway for the further eroding of copyright law. By now it is well understood that the rise of tech monopolies such as YouTube and Google has hastened the decline of publishing industries. If we don’t move to safeguard copyright law now, there will be no new content to remix."

T Bone Burnett Delivers Scathing Message to Copyright Office, Urging Reform: 'Our Culture Is At Stake'; Billboard, February 21, 2017

Dan Rys, Billboard; 

T Bone Burnett Delivers Scathing Message to Copyright Office, Urging Reform: 'Our Culture Is At Stake'

"T Bone Burnett today submitted a five minute video to the U.S. Copyright Office that issued a scathing critique of current copyright laws, taking aim at "mega corporations and web moguls" that "are enriching themselves off the artistic, cultural and economic value everyone else creates," and urging Congress to fix a copyright system that he says threatens the ability of artists and creators to make a living.

At issue is section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) signed in 1998, which includes the "safe harbor" provisions that protect digital service providers such as YouTube from copyright infringement litigation by outlining a system to deal with illegal copyrighted material uploaded to its platform. Burnett, who serves on the advisory board of the Content Creators Coalition (c3) and submitted the video on behalf of the organization, says the current safe harbors provision has failed, allowing the internet to become a "digital black hole.""

[Excerpt from transcript of T Bone Burnett remarks]

The false prophets of the internet may have imagined an egalitarian, open source, creative wonderland, but what we got instead was an exploitative digital black hole that benefits a handful of mega corporations and web moguls. They are enriching themselves off the artistic, cultural and economic value everyone else creates."

Digital Rights Groups: DMCA Reform Should Target Takedown Abuse, Errors; Intellectual Property Watch, 4/3/16

William New, Intellectual Property Watch; Digital Rights Groups: DMCA Reform Should Target Takedown Abuse, Errors:

"EFF’s written comments were filed as part of a series of studies on the effectiveness of the DMCA, begun by the Copyright Office this year. This round of public comments focuses on Section 512, which provides a notice-and-takedown process for addressing online copyright infringement, as well as “safe harbors” for Internet services that comply.

“One of the central questions of the study is whether the safe harbors are working as intended, and the answer is largely yes,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “The safe harbors were supposed to give rightsholders streamlined tools to police infringement, and give service providers clear rules so they could avoid liability for the potentially infringing acts of their users. Without those safe harbors, the Internet as we know it simply wouldn’t exist, and our ability to create, innovate, and share ideas would suffer.”

As EFF also notes in its comments, however, the notice-and-takedown process is often abused. A recent report found that the notice-and-takedown system is riddled with errors, misuse, and overreach, leaving much legal and legitimate content offline. EFF’s comments describe numerous examples of bad takedowns, including many that seemed based on automated content filters employed by the major online content sharing services."