Almost from the day the Digital Millennium Copyright Act came into effect, copyright owners have sought to limit the so-called safe harbor protections against infringement liability the law grants to online service providers that host user-uploaded content.
But a series of lawsuits aimed at setting strict limits on the safe harbors, starting at least as early as Perfect 10’s 2002 litigation against CCBill and stretching through the Veoh cases and Viacom’s long-running battle with YouTube, largely failed in that regard and arguably made things worse for rights owners. The result was a series of court rulings reinforcing the strict and precise requirements of the notice-and-takedown system the law spells out for getting infringing content removed from online platforms.
Legislative efforts to limit or weaken the safe harbors fared no better, culminating in the spectacular crash-and-burn in 2012 of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, which largely scared Congress off similar attempts ever since. Read More »