These notice-and-takedown provisions can be more effective and efficient for removing infringing material than litigation. Its safe harbors shield service providers from liability for material uploaded by users where the service provider doesn’t have knowledge that the material is infringing, doesn’t receive a direct financial benefit from the infringing activity where the provider has the right and ability to control the activity, and acts expeditiously to disable access to uploaded material when it receives a notification of claimed infringement. The consensus is that the DMCA has generally worked well for copyright holders and service providers. The same should be true of copyright law. This is possible because the technology behind the web continued to progress, rather than being frozen in place. Today’s web allows a myriad of ways for people to engage in communication, commerce, social networking, entertainment, and learning. It would be hard to imagine a world wide web like this today. The technologies that make rich, fully-interactive sites like these possible simply didn’t exist at the time. There was no Google, no YouTube, and no Facebook. The Internet today looks vastly different today than it did in 1998, when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was enacted. So it is vitally important that those works are protected just as much online as they are offline. They teach, entertain, and shed light on the human condition. The introduction of new expressive works, whether in the form of books, music, films, television, or photographs, do much to advance this public good. In the words of James Madison, “The public good fully coincides” with “the claims of individuals” under copyright law. Today, creators face challenges to adapt to digital technologies and the Internet, which allows global communication on an unprecedented scale.īut no matter how rapidly technology advances, we should not lose sight of the fundamental principles of “justice, equity, morality, fitness and sound policy” that the protection of expression is built on. In the past, we’ve seen these challenges with the introduction of new forms of media that allowed the recording of sound, images, and motion pictures broadcasting in the form of radio and television and even advancements in transportation that have made our world smaller and more connected. The history of copyright law presents a common theme of technological advancement bringing challenges to creators.
Peters, “In my judgment, every principle of justice, equity, morality, fitness and sound policy concurs, in protecting the literary labours of men, to the same extent that property acquired by manual labour is protected.” 2 33 US 591 (1834).
Only two years later, Supreme Court Justice Thompson said in his dissent to the seminal opinion in Wheaton v. In 1832, the Supreme Court said “To promote the progress of the useful arts is the interest and policy of every enlightened government.” 1 Grant v. I believe the Stop Online Piracy Act is both necessary and carefully crafted to ensure creators have effective recourse against sites that profit off misappropriation of their work.Įffective copyright protection, on a fundamental level, is a significant governmental interest, and one of the few enumerated powers of the federal government in the Constitution. From the silly to the sublime, to those that educate and those that entertain, these works have advanced our society, our culture, and our economy.Īs a media and cultural consumer, I am excited by the increasingly innovative new ways I can access the news, movies, television shows, music, and other works I love online, and I strongly hope that those who create them can continue to create.
I’m passionate about the framework provided by copyright law because I am passionate about the expressive works that have been created in the US over the past 200 plus years because of this framework.