The Need for DMCA Transparency

A recent post on the “Second Life, First Person” blog, Kit Merideth discusses an issue report she filed with Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, requesting that they be transparent in their DMCA activities.

The proposal calls for Linen Lab to periodically publish, among other things:

  • The number of notices filed
  • The average delay in action on a DMCA notice
  • The number of takedowns executed
  • The number of counter-notices filed
  • The number of takedown notices that resulted in a putback

But while the idea is especially good for Linden Lab, whose DMCA policies have been under pointed fire in recent months, it is an idea that can easily be expanded to all Web hosts.

It is an proposal that those both in favor and against the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA will likely agree on and something that could bring a great deal more understanding the entire process of dealing with copyright infringement on the Web.

The Importance of Transparency

One of the major problems with the current notice and takedown regime is that a copyright holder can send in a DMCA notice and track the response to it but no idea where that notice fits into the larger picture.

How many notices does a host receive? How long, on average, does it take them to reply? How many do they discard for being incomplete? How many counter-notices do they receive? These are all questions that are typically closely-guarded secrets for Web service providers.

Many fear, rightly or wrongly, that providing this information could result in legal difficulties should a DMCA dispute go into the courtroom.

However, this has made understanding the full impact of the notice and takedown system almost impossible. With few hard facts, we are left largely with just anecdotal evidence of DMCA abuses and successes. Unfortunately, this evidence is completely useless when trying to understand the larger picture and obtain information upon which future policy may be written.

Even I, having personally sent hundreds of DMCA notices to many dozens of hosts, have only a tiny fraction of the DMCA picture. My experience is colored sharply the types of cases I have handled, all of which have been plagiarism-related, and the hosts I have worked with.

Despite the years I’ve spent working with the DMCA and hosts on copyright matters, my information is, at best, an educated guess. Sadly, that’s all anyone who does not work for a Web host can provide as we can not see what takes place behind the scenes.

It is a frustrating problem and, sadly, the attempts to address it have largely failed.

Past Attempts

The Chilling Effects database is probably the best-known attempt to provide DMCA transparency.

The idea was to provide a site that hosts and search engines could submit DMCA notices to and have them published publicly (minus personal information). This would, theoretically, allow researchers to access the database and draw conclusions about how the DMCA was being used.

The idea, initially, received a great deal of support and key Internet players, most prominently Google, promised to send all of their DMCA notices to the database.

However, the database has fallen into hard times. Few new letters are published, the most recent on March 5 of this year, and most of the ones that are published are controversial ones such as the Air Force DMCA notice and the recent moves by the NFL.

Google, in their auto-reply to submitted DMCA notices, still says the following:

“Please note that a copy of each legal notice we receive is sent to a third-party partner for publication and annotation. As such, your letter (with your personal information removed) will be forwarded to Chilling Effects for publication.”

But despite that, none of my notices in the past few years have appeared in the database. In fact, only one notice from me appears at all and it is from 2005.

Chilling Effects was used for one study back in late 2005. The report, authored by Jennifer Urban of the USC Gould School of Law, found that nearly 1/3 of all DMCA notices were improper in at least one way. However, as I pointed out in my original article, the use of Chilling Effects may have biased the findings due to the nature of the service.

Unfortunately, the full study has not been released as of this writing and is listed as being “forthcoming” on Urban’s faculty page.

Outside of Chilling Effects and anecdotal accounts from hosts, such as Dreamhost’s recent blog entry on the topic, there has been very little in the way of hard data about how hosts respond to DMCA notices.

A Proposal

Clearly there is a need for hard data in this area and the only people that can provide it are the hosts and search engines. Therefore, there is a need for a broad push to improve transparency in the DMCA process.

However, that being said, a database of actual notices, such as Chilling Effects, is likely not the way to go. Such a database would either be incomplete or too large to be practical.

However, even if we had nothing more than numbers and general information about policies, it would provide us a much better understanding about the DMCA process than what we have now. To that end, Merideth’s proposal is fairly sound.

The idea of encouraging hosts to provide regular updates as to their DMCA actions makes sense. It not only helps copyright holders understand how the the host responds to notices, but it helps users of the site know what to expect should a copyright issue arise.

However, I would make the following changes to Merideth’s proposal to make it more applicable to practical for hosts:

  1. Make the Report Quarterly: Monthly may or may not be practical for Linden, but most Web hosts would be doing good to create just a quarterly report. That should be fine in most cases.
  2. Eliminate Information That Isn’t Necessary: Initially at least, we should focus on the core information. That would include the number of notices received, the number discarded, the number that resulted in a takedown, the average time between receipt and takedown and the number of counter-notices received. If hosts are comfortable providing more information, that would be great, but since most are not under the level of scrutiny Linden Lab is under, it makes sense to request less.
  3. Add Policy Information: Right now, what happens after a DMCA notice is filed is something of a mystery. From talking with hosts I know how some handle it, but there is precious little information about how a notice goes from a submission to a takedown. This might make a natural addition to all Web host’s copyright pages and would be largely static unless there was a change in procedure.

In addition to those changes, I would also suggest that hosts provide a random sample of the DMCA notices they received to an online database similar to Chilling Effects. It would not be necessary to send every single one, just a statistically significant percentage. Hosts could, possibly, send every twentieth or hundredth notice to the database depending on how many they receive.

The bottom line though is that any information we can get that goes beyond the anecdotes and horror stories we have to work with will be a drastic improvement over the current situation.

Conclusions

In the end, it is unlikely that hosts will release this kind of information voluntarily and even less likely that any kind of legislation will require them to do so.

Though those of us who are interested in copyright law, both for and against the notice and takedown provisions, would greatly appreciate transparency from the hosts, these types of statistics are considered closely-guarded secrets and will almost certainly remain that way.

In addition to legal issues that may arise from releasing such information, especially if a host is slow or unresponsive to DMCA notices, many fear that it will color customer perceptions if it is known just how many notices they receive and act upon.

Sadly, it is an area where practical business decisions may overshadow the need for good information and good policy. Few hosts are going to spend time and money to publish information many would consider unsavory, no matter how important it might be.

Still, it would be nice to see hosts take initiative in this area and do something to help others understand just how the DMCA is used. If a host wants to criticize the current law, then giving the public and the government the information to make sound decisions is the first step to fixing the problem.

Without that, then there is pretty much no hope of the law ever changing.

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