04 Jan Was Your Copyright Infringed Online? Copyright Alliance Survey Needs your Input

The Copyright Office has sent out a request for additional information from stakeholders on DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) safe harbor provisions. The DMCA provides creators and copyright holders a means to request that Internet service providers remove their infringed work from websites, file sharing sites, etc. This request is part of an ongoing study that the Office is conducting. To formulate a clear response on behalf of creators, the Copyright Alliance is conducting a short online survey.

If your work has been infringed online, and you’ve responded with a DMCA take-down notice, please take the survey by February 16.

This Notice of Inquiry is the latest in a series of investigations that the Copyright Office and the House Judiciary Committee have been conducting into the DMCA process. A coalition of visual artists, of which the Guild is a member, submitted public comments to the Copyright Office’s previous Notice of Inquiry on the DMCA process in March of 2016. The Guild also testified at a Copyright Office roundtable discussion on the topic in April 2016. The Guild’s position is that the current DMCA take-down process is failing visual artists, who would be better served by a take down and stay down process, as well as by standardizing the take-down forms used by all ISPs.