According to RIAA President Cary Sherman, the DMCA doesn’t work for the content industry because it doesn’t make service providers responsible for policing copyright infringement.
In statements made as part of a panel discussion at an event hosted by the Technology Policy Institute, Sherman said, “the DMCA isn’t working for content people at all.”
He went on to explain, “You basically cannot monitor all the infringements on the internet,” later adding, “everybody has to do something about piracy.”
This line of reasoning is nothing new for the RIAA, but it remains as flawed as ever. It requires that you accept a number of assumptions which simply don’t hold up to any real scrutiny.
The most obvious is that there’s any way to stop piracy. It’s easy to say somebody has to do it, but there’s no evidence anyone actually can.
According to the Sherman the solution is for everyone from ISPs on up to do get involved. But this creates some significant legal problems.
How does an ISP monitor the content of on their network without violating federal wiretapping law?
And that’s without considering that figuring out whether fair use is involved requires human intervention, which would automatically disqualify the provider from DMCA safe harbor protection.
So if ISPs can’t find infringement what about services like RapidShare? Sure they could use a filtering system like YouTube has implemented, but what’s to stop people from switching to a new service with no such arrangement in place?
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Result for: content industry
According to a new report, the content industry is ramping up its efforts to control piracy on college campuses and the RIAA is at the head of the effort.
Judging by the report however, it seems the new tactics are not all that sophisticated. The RIAA will give a list of files to keep on the look for, then hired mercenary Media Sentry searches for infringing materials on common P2P apps such as Limewire. Media Sentry usually uses the same clients as the users it is looking to bust, using the client’s built-in facilities to note IP addresses and browse their shared folders.
Earlier this month, a few notable universities reported that they had received a 10-fold increase in DMCA copyright notices. RIAA president Cary Sherman noted that this was true, citing a “phenomenal jump” in Media Sentry’s “computing efficiency”.
“It’s the same procedures, the same standards, the same list of copyrighted works that we’re using,” said Sherman. “The Internet is a huge place, and there are millions of people connected to it … The amount of resources you put into sending out requests for specific files makes a difference; the more requests you make, the more you’re going to find.”
“We don’t think there’s any more infringement going on,” Sherman added. “We just think there’s more detection of infringement.”
This increase in “computing efficiency” is thanks to new automated scripts. Media Sentry searches for the songs on the RIAA’s list using the script which then jots down “each entry’s IP address and confirms the authenticity of the file in question.” The script will then move onto those users shared folders searching for more infringing music.
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