You Think?

Cue the fanfare for the common creator of copyrighted works of music, art, and literature.
The Copyright Office has concluded that Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the Safe Harbor section) is unbalanced.

Over the last twenty years, the scales seem to have become weighted in favor of the tech giants OSPs, and in disfavor of rightsholders. It may come as no surprise that the biggest issues with Safe Harbor arise from a lack of clarity and legal agreement about what the criteria are for when an OSP has "red flag knowledge", and how many times and to what degree an infringer can infringe before he or she qualifies as a "repeat infringer".

This author has been complaining about those issues since 2005!

Legal bloggers Jason P. Bloom, Joseph Lawlor,  Lee F. Johnston,  and Wesley Lewis, representing the law firm Haynes and Boone LLP pen a very nice summary of the Copyright Office's 200 page report and major recommendations.

Original link:
https://www.haynesboone.com/alerts/copyright-office-finds-aspects-of-the-dmca-unbalanced

Lexology link:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=baab0441-e073-4c15-b736-44429fad801f

One can only hope that EBay and Twitter will take note. You think they will?

All the best,
Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday  

PS. This gofundme link has nothing to do with copyright, or big tech. Sharing it anyway.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/demolished-small-business-in-minneapolis-riot

Happy Labor Day

This author wishes all our readers a very pleasant Labor Day weekend.

The best news for those whose copyrights have been repeatedly infringed may be the judgement against Cox Communications.  Thanks to the law firm Dorsey & Whitney for their reporting that ISPs can be held liable if they fail to terminate repeat infringers... or terminate them but allow them to reactivate their accounts or open a new account.
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=d6d80bba-f364-4291-b96f-984af21094c9

Watch out, EBay.

For those who really want to get into the weeds, AWS is now on my radar. They appear to have a lot of users in Singapore who are posting .pdf documents which appear to be lists of links to ebooks that they allege are available for free download. If anyone does download those ebooks, they are most likely infringing copyright.

AWS seems to deactivate links, but from watching them via Blasty (a copyright takedown service) for the last 3 months, they do not appear to be terminating accounts. I will be looking into this a bit more.

Happy Labor Day.

Rowena Cherry