Newly Leaked Documents Expose Stunning Waste And Incompetence At The Copyright Office

from the this-makes-no-sense dept

Previously unreleased documents acquired by Techdirt show, fairly conclusively, that Congress will be making a huge and dangerous mistake if it moves forward with changing how the head of the Copyright Office is appointed. And despite the fact that the RIAA & MPAA are eagerly supporting this change, the people it will hurt the most are content creators. Because the Copyright Office is basically incompetent when it comes to modernizing its technology. That's what was found by a thorough (but not publicly released) Inspector General's report, detailing how the Copyright Office not only threw away $11.6 million on a new computer system that it said would cost $1.1 million, but also lied to both Congress and the Library of Congress about it, pretending everything was going great.

In reality the project was a complete and utter disaster. It was put together by people who seemed to have no clue how to manage a large IT project, and there was basically zero effort to fix that along the way. After literally wasting $11.6 million on nothing, the entire project was scrapped in October of last year.

The timing here is important. October is when Carla Hayden reassigned Maria Pallante, effectively firing her. Pallante had led the Copyright Office since 2011 (soon after the big project began), so she was in charge through the vast majority of this disastrous project. While legacy copyright folks tried to spread evidence-free conspiracy theories about why Hayden fired Pallante, it seems a lot more likely that it was because Pallante had overseen a project that flat out wasted $11.6 million, and during the course of the project the Copyright Office repeatedly lied to the Library of Congress about its status.

But here's the astounding thing. Congress is trying to reward the Copyright Office for this scandal, and give it more power and autonomy despite this absolute disaster. Perhaps because, until now, the Copyright Office has been successful in keeping this whole thing hidden.

As we've mentioned, Congress is effectively trying to move the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress by having the new Register of Copyright (who heads the Office) be appointed by the President and approved by the Senate (i.e., making it a political appointee), rather than be appointed by the Librarian of Congress as has been the case since the creation of the Copyright Office. One of the key arguments in favor of this is that the Copyright Office is woefully behind on technology, and needs to be modernized. Almost exactly two years ago, a fairly scathing report from the GAO came out about the lack of leadership on IT issues from then-Librarian of Congress James Billington. Thankfully, Billington is gone and Carla Hayden is in charge now -- and she actually has a history of modernizing a library. Reports from folks at the Library say that Hayden has moved quickly to establish a real modernization plan for the entire Library, including the Copyright Office, and that those efforts are already starting to move forward.

And that's got to be better than giving the Copyright Office autonomy to modernize itself. As we're releasing here for the very first time publicly, an Inspector's General report looking at various IT projects related to the Library of Congress is absolutely devastating in revealing how incompetent the Copyright Office is at modernizing itself. Specifically, in 2010, the Copyright Office asked for $1.1 million it said it would need to build its Electronic Licensing System (eLi). Just about everything turned out to be a complete disaster and a waste of money. From the executive summary of the report:

[The Copyright Office] did not follow sound [Systems Development Life Cycle -- SDLC] methodologies which resulted in it scrapping the eLi project development after six years and $11.6M in project expenditures. The eLi project began in 2010 with a budget approval of $1.1M, and increased to approximately $2M for full implementation in 2012. Ultimately Copyright spent over $11.6M through 2016 when it decided to terminate the contracts and abandon development activities. During that six-year period, Copyright continued to report in eLCplans (the Library's performance management system) that eLi development was occurring near or on schedule.

Again, this is horrifying. Not only did it waste more than 5x what it had been given budget approval for, and not only did it end up with nothing to show for all this money, it also lied about how the project was going so those in the Library of Congress had no idea that the Copyright Office was basically lighting money on fire. It also appears that because of this, the Copryight Office misrepresented what was happening to Congress in its annual budget requests. From the report:

Copyright executives at that time did not disclose in the Library's performance management system (eLCplans) and annual Congressional Budget Justifications the magnitude of issues and cost overruns related to the project. As a result, Congress and Library executives did not have adequate information to timely act on and address the issues.

Again, forget those conspiracy theories about Pallante getting fired. Lying to your bosses in your annual budget requests about the status of a massive technology project that was way behind and way over budget certainly seems like a fireable offense.

A big part of the problem? What appears to be near-total incompetence by the Copyright Office in putting together and managing the project.

The USCO project management team did not demonstrate effective, proactive project cost management practices. Over the six-year development period, USCO project management expended $11.6 million in vendor costs. The USCo project management team received specific funding for approximately $1.9 million in the first two years of the project. USCO project management did not update project budgets for the subsequent six years of development activity, nor perform an analysis of estimated cost overruns. Subsequent development funding activites ocurred, inconsistent with initial funding requests. As discussed below, the USCO had no management body to evaluate and approve additional funding requests in conjunction with experienced development delays, analyses, and recommended courses of actions. Additionally, the USCO did not have an oversight body with authority to halt project activites based on cost overruns, delviery delays, and/or lack of functionality until appropriate remediation plans or project management structure was in place.

Basically, the ship was almost entirely rudderless when Pallante was in charge. Ask for $1.9 million, spend $11.6 million -- without getting a working system -- and no one seemed to check on any of it.

According to the report, the most basic project management concepts were completely lacking at the Copyright Office. Pages 26 through 28 of the document embedded below should elicit gasps from anyone who's done any kind of project management. I won't detail all of it, but here are just a few highlights:

• No monitoring of the project schedule
• No project budget approval process at all
• No periodic reviews to see if things were on schedule and within budget
• No project management framework at all
• No comprehensive project management plan for the executiion and monitoring of the project.
• No official tracking of scope and schedule changes
• No documentation of departures from planned schedule
• No plan for what staffing was needed for the project
• No analysis of alternatives
• No system requirements baseline
• No system development plan
• No requirements for best practices, customer oversight or acceptance of the vendor
• No technical requirements to ensure user functionality given to the vendor
• No details on deliverables given to the vendor (seriously -- no requirements to hand over the code or any documentation)
• No review criteria
• No defined technical framework
• No security testing

And, again, that's just some of the problems listed in the document. There are more.

Rather than admit any of that, the Copyright Office under Pallante pretended each year that everything was moving ahead without a problem. The report includes the comments that the Copyright Office gave to the Library of Congress each year for its Congressional Budget Justification regarding the system:

If you can't see that, basically every year all the Copyright Office said was "licensing will continue implementing and refining the reengineered processes and system" (or, in the past two years, that "licensing will continue to work toward a fully automated system for receiving and examining Statements of Account"). This despite the fact that the project was way over budget and apparently totally non-functional.

The report also includes the Copyright Office's internal reporting to the Library, in which it needed to give a status report in one of three color codings: green if the project was on-track, amber if it was behind target but adjustments could result in accomplishing the plan on time, and red if it would not meet the annual target. Given what we know now, these should have been red every year. Instead... in 2011, 2013, and 2015 the Copyright Office reported "green." In 2012 it reported "amber." In 2010, 2014, and 2016 the Copyright Office didn't even bother to report on this project status at all.

The most amazing thing here is that Pallante wasn't fired years ago for this complete disaster of a project.

But the more important question right now is why would Congress be looking to give the Copyright Office more autonomy when it's quite clear that the Office has absolutely no competency when it comes to modernizing its system, and there has been a six-year pattern of throwing away money without a properly managed plan and a longstanding practice of lying about it to Congress itself?

Last week, despite all of this, nearly the entire House Judiciary Committee voted to let this happen, and all I can ask is what were they thinking? Why is Congress -- and Reps. Bob Goodlatte and John Conyers in particular -- rewarding this behavior?

At the request of the Library of Congress' Inspector General's Office, we have made a few small redactions to parts of the report that were not related to this story above.

Filed Under: carla hayden, congress, copyright office, library of congress, maria pallante, modernization

Congress Leaks Draft Bill To Move Copyright Office Out Of The Library Of Congress

from the this-is-a-BAD-idea dept

Update: The bill has now officially been introduced.

Well, we all knew this was coming, but Rep. Bob Goodlatte has been passing around a draft of a bill to move the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress. Specifically, it would make the head of the Copyright Office, the Copyright Register, a Presidentially appointed position, with 10-year terms, and who could only be removed by the President.

This is a bad and dangerous idea. It's one that's designed to give Hollywood and the recording industry even more power and control over an already deeply captured agency. As it stands now, having the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress provides at least some basic recognition of the actual intent of copyright law, as established by the Constitution to Promote the progress of science. That is, as we've pointed out for a long, long time, the intent of copyright is to benefit the public. The mechanism is to provide temporary monopolies to creators as an incentive, before handing the works over to the public. Yet, the Copyright Office eschews that view, insisting that the role of the Copyright Office is to expand those monopoly rights, and to speak out for the interests of major copyright holders (rarely the creators themselves).

Either way, by making this a Presidential appointment, the MPAA and RIAA know that it will give them significantly greater say over who leads the office. Right now they can (and do!) lobby the Librarian of Congress on who should be chosen, but the Librarian gets to choose. One hopes that the Librarian would take into account the larger view of copyright law, and who it's actually supposed to benefit -- and we're hoping that the current Librarian will do so (if given the chance). But making it a Presidential appointment will mean heavy lobbying by industry, and much less likelihood that the public interest is considered.

The usual think tankers and industry folks will tell you -- incorrectly -- that the Copyright Office is only in the Library due to "an accident of history." But that's not the case. The role of both overlap dramatically -- collecting, organizing and cataloging new creative works. Almost everyone agrees that the Copyright Office needs to be modernized, and that the previous Librarian failed (miserably) to do so. But because we had a bad librarian in the past is no reason to remove the Copyright Office entirely from the Library and disconnect it completely to its constitutional moorings designed around getting more creative works to the public.

Make sure to let your Congressional Representative know not to support this bill -- especially if they're members of the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Goodlatte has said that he'd only propose copyright reform bills that have widespread consensus. This is not such a bill.

Filed Under: bob goodlatte, congress, copyright, copyright office, john conyers, library of congress

The Internet Is Silencing Artists, According To An Artist On The Internet

from the criticizing-safe-harbors-from-within dept

We recently submitted our comments to the Copyright Office's ongoing study on DMCA safe harbors, but perhaps we should have been a bit more creative. At least that seems to be the plan of the Content Creators Coalition, which has made its submission in the form of a video starring producer T Bone Burnett doing his best Werner-Herzog-without-the-accent impression. It's... quite something. (Amusingly it's also hosted on Vimeo, a site which — like all sites hosting user content — relies heavily on DMCA safe harbors for its existence, and indeed prevailed in a major legal battle over that very thing last year.)

Probably the word most prominent in my mind after watching that is dramatic, with optional prefixes such as melo- and over-. It starts out like this:

In its early days, the Internet was hailed a panacea. A global community — unshackled from corporate, military, or government control ready to equalize and connect the world. One of its early false prophets named it a "Culture of the Mind" that "all may enter without privilege or prejudice". But that's not what we got.

Remember, this isn't a trailer for season three of Mr. Robot — it's a submission to the Copyright Office. There's a bit of a problem with that quote, too, but we'll get to that in a moment. T Bone drones on:

Instead of opening up minds, it has closed them down — becoming a restrictive, abusive place where women, people of color, and anyone marked different are shunned, attacked, and shouted down. 2016 laid bare how cyberspace hasn’t rationalized dialog. It's become a megaphone for propaganda and fake news where it’s easier to demagogue and divide than ever. Dreams of a stronger democracy have given way to foreign hackers and corporate manipulation — a shriveled politics indistinguishable from reality TV.

While some of those problems are certainly real, they are a lot more complicated and far from the primary characteristic of the internet as a whole — but more importantly, what does this have to do with musicians and the DMCA, exactly? (By the way, demagogue is not a verb.)

And for artists and creators, instead of amplifying our voices to lead the fight for change, it undermines and silences us. The Internet — with all its promise and beauty — threatens to destroy what it was supposed to save. We can’t let that happen.

This proceeding is focused on the legal safe harbors in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – the law that was supposed to balance the Internet’s openness with creators’ ability to earn a living wage from their work. Those safe harbors have failed.

Wow, smooth transition. If I'm reading that correctly, he's saying that artists could have cured or at least mitigated all of society's woes if only they weren't being "silenced" by the internet. The idea that the internet is silencing anyone, much less artists, is frankly just silly — unless of course you're talking about the people who are directly and unambiguously censored by abuse of the DMCA. The safe harbors have failed, by having a very low bar to get content removed and failing to have any meaningful way of preventing or punishing abuse. And yet even despite this, the internet offers the biggest, most powerful and most accessible platform for artists in history.

(Also at this point, let's revisit that quote from an internet "false prophet". The line is actually a "civilization of the mind" and it comes from EFF founder John Perry Barlow's famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. You'd think T Bone could have gotten the quote right, but you also have to wonder if he knows that Barlow is an artist himself who used to write lyrics for the Grateful Dead.)

The problems are familiar — they are well described in the record of these proceedings from the broken Sisyphus climb of "notice and takedown" to the gunpoint negotiations and pittance wages forced upon creators by the Google monopoly. The Big Tech ITOPIANS can track us across dozens of networks, devices, and profiles to bombard us with micro targeted ads, but they can’t even identify unauthorized copies of our work and keep them off their own servers and systems. Or they won’t.

Ah, Sisyphus — he who evaded his timely death and was sentenced to eternal fruitless toil. Not a bad metaphor for media gatekeepers and the DMCA, actually. Perhaps T Bone can imagine Sisyphus happy. Or maybe instead of wasting all this time pushing boulders up hills, the industry could have embraced digital distribution from the start and helped new platforms emerge instead of hindering them. As for detecting infringing works, ad tracking is just as flawed as any other "if they can do that, why not this" comparison on that front: the issue is not the technological ability to sort content, but the fuzzy definitions of what's legal and what isn't — especially since, despite T Bone's conflation of the two, "unauthorized" does not automatically mean "infringing". Besides, a mistargeted ad just gets ignored; a mistargeted copyright filter shuts down free expression.

(And by the way, I didn't capitalize "ITOPIANS" like that — that's how it was transcribed in the Coalition's press release. Apparently someone thought it was really, really clever and wanted to make sure you didn't miss it.)

The problem here isn’t technology – creators welcome the digital revolution and its power to connect, amplify, and inspire. A modern recording studio looks more like a cockpit than a honky tonk, and that’s just fine. The problem is business models — designed to scrape away value rather than fuel new creation, focused on taking rather than making. To restore technology’s place as the rightful partner of tomorrow’s creators, we need change.

Oh I see: he wants artists to enjoy all of the huge advantages created by digital technology, both in terms of distributing and creating their music, but not have to adapt to any of the new challenges created by the same technology. Sure, that sounds fair. He's right that the biggest challenge is business models, but to that I say: physician heal thyself.

The safe harbors must be restored — so only responsible actors earn their protection, not those who actively profit from the abuse and exploitation of creators' work.

People don't have to "earn" critical free speech protections by proving they aren't abusing them. That's exactly the opposite of how it works. But I'm impressed by the creativity and gall it took to describe dismantling safe harbors as restoring them.

The false prophets of the internet may have imagined an egalitarian open source creative wonderland – but what we got was a digital playground for a handful of mega corporations and web moguls living fat off the artistic, cultural, and economic value everyone else creates online. And if our democracy becomes stunted and diverse Americans are shut out, I guess these new Galtian Lords would say, "That’s business."

But artists and creators will never bow to that. We will never accept an Internet that turns its back on the vitality, optimism, and hope from which it was born. We will never allow our democracy to become a mere series of pseudo-events designed to manipulate people into spending money.

This, and the line that follows it, is the last quote I'm going to pick on, because it's where T Bone's bizarre attempt to treat art and democracy as more than related but practically synonyms finally coalesces. Because in the next line he commits to this blunt conflation whole-hog and coins a new term (emphasis mine):

Everyone with a stake in the Internet’s success and the health of our creative democracy must work together to make this right.

Well, coined it in this strange context anyway — though in fact "creative democracy" is originally the title of a 1939 essay that ended with a passionate assertion that "the task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute". Now you can twist words and concepts all day to pretend that the internet somehow stifles artists, but be honest: is there anything in the world that has pushed us closer to that democratic goal than the internet, and the communication and content platforms that rely so heavily on safe harbors to exist?

Maybe T Bone and the Content Creators Coalition think differently, but in that case they should at least take this little dramatic exercise off of Vimeo.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright office, dmca, dmca 512, free speech, safe harbors, t bone burnett

Google Report: 99.95 Percent Of DMCA Takedown Notices Are Bot-Generated Bullshit Buckshot

from the overplaying-their-hand dept

Google, being the search giant that it is, has been banging the drum for some time about the silly way the DMCA has been abused by those that wield it like a cudgel. Here at Techdirt, we too have described the many ways that the well-intentioned DMCA and the way its implemented by service providers has deviated from its intended purpose. Still, the vast majority of our stories discuss deliberate attempts by human beings to silence critics and competition using the takedown process. Google, on the other hand, has been far more focused on statistics for DMCA takedown notices that show wanton disregard for what it was supposed to be used for entirely. That makes sense of course, as the abuse of the takedown process is a burden on the search company. In that first link, for instance, Google noted that more than half the takedown notices it was receiving in 2009 were mere attempts by one business targeting a competitor, while over a third of the notices contained nothing in the way of a valid copyright dispute.

But if those numbers were striking in 2009, Google's latest comment to the Copyright Office (see our own comment here) on what's happening in the DMCA 512 notice-and-takedown world shows some stats for takedown notices received through its Trusted Copyright Removal Program... and makes the whole ordeal look completely silly.

A significant portion of the recent increases in DMCA submission volumes for Google Search stem from notices that appear to be duplicative, unnecessary, or mistaken. As we explained at the San Francisco Roundtable, a substantial number of takedown requests submitted to Google are for URLs that have never been in our search index, and therefore could never have appeared in our search results. For example, in January 2017, the most prolific submitter submitted notices that Google honored for 16,457,433 URLs. But on further inspection, 16,450,129 (99.97%) of those URLs were not in our search index in the first place. Nor is this problem limited to one submitter: in total, 99.95% of all URLs processed from our Trusted Copyright Removal Program in January 2017 were not in our index.

Now, because Google is Google, the company doesn't generally have a great deal of sympathy hoisted upon it by the public, never mind by copyright protectionists. But, come on, this is simply nuts. When the number of claims coming through the system that don't even pertain to listed results by Google can be logically rounded up to 100%, that's putting a burden on a company for no valid reason whatsoever. Even if you hate Google, or distrust it, it should be plain as day that it's unfair for it to have to wade through all this muck just to appease the entertainment industries.

And, it's important to note that this isn't all of the notices received, but just those coming through the Trusted Copyright Removal system -- meaning that these are organizations that supposedly are supposed to have at least some credibility not to be submitting totally bogus notices. But, apparently, they don't actually give a damn.

The problem, as you may have already guessed, is that most of these claims are being generated through automated systems designed to shotgun-blast DMCA notices with reckless abandon.

These numbers of simply staggering with only a tiny number of millions of requests reflecting actual pages in the search index. Rather, 99.95% of the processed URLs from Google’s trusted submitter program are machine-generated URLs that do not involve actual pages in the search index. Given that data, Google notes that claims that the large number of requests correlates to infringing content on the Internet is incorrect:

Nor is the large number of takedown requests to Google a good proxy even for the volume of infringing material available on the Internet. Many of these submissions appear to be generated by merely scrambling the words in a search query and appending that to a URL, so that each query makes a different URL that nonetheless leads to the same page of results.

The claim by the entertainment industry that one can see what a problem piracy is by looking at the sheer volume of DMCA notices sent to search engines shall hereby be declared dead, having been buried by the industry's fellow takedown-notice-filers. That claim never made much sense, but these stats sever any link between takedown notice numbers and actual piracy completely. And there needs to be a remedy for this, whether its punishment upon the abusers or rules for how notices can be filed. Because these numbers are ridiculous.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, copyright office, dmca, dmca 512, false takedowns, free speech, notice and takedown, takedowns
Companies: google

Last Chance To Tell The Librarian Of Congress What's Important For A New Register Of Copyrights

from the go-for-it dept

The (still) new Librarian of Congress created a bit of a fuss last year in effectively forcing the existing Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante, (the head of the US Copyright Office) out of a job. Pallante has since (of course) found a new gig heading up an industry trade group, the Association of American Publishers, with a fairly long history of being against the public, against the internet, against the blind and against fair use.

The removing of Pallante kciked off a bunch of ridiculous conspiracy theories that made little sense and had almost no basis in reality. It's pretty clear that Pallante was removed from her job because she had actively, and publicly, reached out to Congress to ask that she no longer have to report to Hayden. That seems like fairly basic insubordination and a fairly standard reason why a boss might fire you.

Either way, the fuss over Pallante losing her job resulted in Hayden promising to listen to all stakeholders about who should replace Pallante. To that end, she launched an online survey asking people what they'd like to see in a new Copyright Office boss. Frankly, this... feels kind of gimmicky and silly. Hayden got the job she got because she actually understands a lot of these issues. Yes, she should absolutely be listening to the public and weighing lots of thoughts, but an online survey... just feels like the wrong mechanism. And, of course, such things are prone to ballot stuffing (from all sides). If you look around, it's not hard to find some fairly crazy and "not-quite-in-touch-with-reality" groups and individuals who are telling people just how to stuff the ballot box, including some nonsense that completely misrepresents the role.

So I'm not going to tell anyone how they should fill out the survey, but I would suggest that people think carefully about what role the head of the Copyright Office should play. Should it be a job where the focus is on protecting the interests of a few gatekeepers who have spent years sucking up the copyrights of actual creators while claiming to represent artists? Or should it be someone who is focused on the actual job of the Copyright Office, such as modernizing the role of the copyright office, making it easier to research who holds copyrights on what works, and who is actually focused on the core principles of copyright law -- that it promote the progress of science -- as laid out in the Constitution?

The online survey closes tomorrow, Tuedsay January 31st (possibly today by the time you're reading this), so please get your thoughts in sooner rather than later.

Filed Under: carla hayden, copyright, copyright office, maria pallante, register of copyright

It Begins: Congress Proposes First Stages Of Copyright Reform, And It's Not Good

from the of-course-it's-not-good dept

The House Judiciary Committee has been "exploring" various copyright reform proposals for a few years now, asking for feedback, holding a "listening tour" and more. Through it all, it seemed pretty clear that the Judiciary Committee is (reasonably) fearful of getting SOPA'd again, and thus was trying to figure out some less controversial proposals it could push forward first to see how they worked. Two, in particular, have been brought up multiple times: moving the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress... and creating a "small claims court" for copyright infringement. And it appears that's what the Judiciary Committee is now moving forward on, even though both are pretty bad ideas.

Of course, showing how fearful they are of a SOPAlanche, Reps. Bob Goodlatte and John Conyers are kicking this off with a bland and detail-free one pager tossing out both suggestions, along with a similarly weird and bland YouTube video explaining the proposal, with unnecessary background music (what is that about?): Note the very careful "these policy proposals are not meant to be the final word on reform in these areas." That's code for "okay, okay, we're testing the waters here, are people going to freak out about this...."

Anyway, the proposals in question are not horrible, but they're certainly not good either. Most of the attention will be focused on the Copyright Office stuff, but it's the small claims court proposal that is potentially much more nefarious and a much bigger deal. There are almost no details here, but this is what the proposal says:

The Copyright Office should host a small claims system consistent with the report on the issue released by the Copyright Office. The small claims system should handle low value infringement cases as well as bad faith Section 512 notices. The Register should be given the authority to promulgate regulations to ensure that the system works efficiently.

As we've seen, already copyright is often used as a way to stifle free expression. Mere threats of lawsuits, along with DMCA takedown letters, have become a very effective way to create chilling effects against content someone doesn't like. Adding in the ability to more easily sue and take people to court -- even if the eventual judgment may be for lower dollar amounts -- is tremendously problematic. If anything, it will just become an incredible tool for copyright trolls. It will legitimize their business model, which is to get a large volume of settlements that are in the hundreds or low thousands of dollars anyway. Obviously, the fact that this court might also handle "bad faith Section 512 notices" (i.e., DMCA takedowns) is designed to appease people who are concerned about the chilling effects here, but it's not clear that will help very much.

Also, somewhat bizarre is that earlier in the document (which we'll get to), they say that the Copyright Office should remain in the legislative branch. Which would then make this small claims court a part of the legislative branch. And that just seems... weird. I guess that's why they refer to it as a small claims "system" rather than a small claims "court."

The issue that's going to get more attention, however, is the attempt to pull the Copyright Office away from the Librarian of Congress' control. This has been something that the Copyright Office itself (and Hollywood and its friends) have been agitating for for some time. The proposal here looks like (again) the Judiciary Committee wants to thread the needle of not technically moving it out of the Library of Congress (the proposal doesn't say one way or the other), but basically giving the Copyright Office full autonomy from the Library, and making the head of the Copyright Office subject to Congressional appointment, rather than at the will of the Librarian of Congress:

The Register of Copyrights and Copyright Office Structure

The Copyright Office should remain part of the Legislative Branch where it can provide independent and timely advice to Congress on copyright law and policy. Furthermore, the Copyright Office should have autonomy over its budget and technology needs.

Currently, the Register is not subject to the same nomination and consent process as other senior government officials. To ensure that the American people have an opportunity to provide input into the selection of future Registers of Copyright through their elected officials, the next Register and all that follow should be subject to a nomination and consent process with a 10-year term limit, subject to potential re-nomination. The Copyright Office should also add several positions to advise the Register including a Chief Economist, Chief Technologist, and a Deputy Register.

Copyright Office Advisory Committees

As copyright creation and distribution rapidly changes due to technological advances, the Copyright Office needs to have quicker information regarding marketplace changes as it develops policies and provides guidance to federal agencies. Other federal agencies have standing advisory committees that enable a more efficient knowledge transfer from the private sector to federal agencies. This model should be duplicated at the Copyright Office.

The Copyright Office of the future should have a combination of permanent and ad-hoc advisory committees to advise the Register on critical issues. Members of these committees should reflect a wide range of views and interests. Permanent advisory committees should be created that focus on issues that include but are not limited to the registration and recordation system, public outreach efforts, access for the visually impaired, and issues related to libraries, museums, and archives. To ensure that a diverse set of voices is represented, committee membership should be term limited and the ability of individuals to serve on more than one committee should be limited.

The advisory committee plan again seems like it's trying to appease all sides, but one wonders how it will work in practice. As we've seen with the USTR, the advisory committees have become basically captured by industry lobbyists (despite rules against lobbyists being on those committees), and the end result is that the USTR tends to take instruction from a small group of large, entrenched interests, rather than the public. It seems likely that the same thing would happen here. A Chief Economist is also a loaded position. There are plenty of economists who would look at the actual public benefit to different copyright proposals, but too many economists are likely to just focus on the topline monetary impact on legacy industries, painting a skewed portrait and continuing the false notion that the point of the Copyright Office is to create more and more copyrights, rather than create a plan that actually "promotes the progress of science" as the Constitution requires.

Since the Judiciary Committee insists that this is just them putting out some ideas for comment, it's going to be important that we let them know the many, many pitfalls of these suggestions -- and let them recognize that if these plans are, as seems likely, weighted just to benefit a legacy industry that has a history of fighting innovation -- that will not be acceptable to the public.

Filed Under: bob goodlatte, copyright, copyright office, copyright reform, house judiciary committee, john conyers, library of congress, small claims court

Every Website Needs To Re-register With The Copyright Office, Who Can't Build A Functioning System

from the are-you-serious? dept

As we mentioned last month, the Copyright Office -- despite being warned this was a bad idea -- has decided to implement a brand new system for websites to register DMCA agents, and has done so in a way that will undoubtedly fuck over many websites. It's already ridiculous enough that in order to be fully protected under the DMCA's safe harbor rules (that say you're not liable if someone posts infringing material to your website), you need to register a designated "DMCA agent" with the Copyright Office. The idea behind this is that by registering an agent, copyright holders will be able to look up who to send a takedown notice to. And, sure, that makes sense, but remember that this is the same Copyright Office that supports not requiring copyright holders to register their works, meaning that there may not be any legitimate way to contact copyright holders back.

The reason for the new system is that the old system was just ridiculous -- on that everyone can agree. You had to fill out a paper form, sign it, and send it in. The Copyright Office has been way behind on digitizing everything, so moving to a web based system is a good thing. Also, the old system required payment of over $100, while the new one is just $6. That's all good. The problem is twofold: first, the Copyright Office has said that it is throwing out all the old registrations, and if you want to retain your safe harbors, you need to re-register. There's a grace period through the end of next year, but plenty of sites who don't follow the Copyright Office's every move are going to miss this, and will no longer have an officially registered agent with the Copyright Office (it's possible that, should this issue go to court, a platform could reasonably argue that it still did meet the statutory requirements in the original registration, but why force site owners through that hoop in the first place). The second problem, is that this new system will toss out records every three years, so if you forget to renew, you once again can lose your legal safe harbors. This puts tons of websites at serious risk, removing key protections and opening them up to lawsuits from copyright trolls.

Either way, the Copyright Office opened the doors on the new system yesterday, and so I went ahead and re-registered Techdirt. And, let's just say, the Copyright Office has a reputation for being technically clueless, and boy, does it live up to that reputation with its new system -- though, to be fair, as the Copyright Office's General Counsel reminded me on Twitter, it's actually the Library of Congress that built the system. First off, to register a new agent, you need to first register with the Copyright Office's system. As Eric Goldman points out, the system is not designed for individuals or sole proprietorships, even though those people should be able to get DMCA safe harbor protections as well. Specifically, to register, it requires an organization name and a "second contact" name and information. I'm not sure what individuals should do, other than maybe make something up -- though, before you even get started, the system pops up a warning suggesting that you may face criminal charges under the CFAA if you do anything wrong (while it means if you try to hack the system, the wording may confuse many people not familiar with the law). Nice touch.

Oh, and then there's the password system. Like many people, I use a password manager, which also will generate strong passwords for you. I went through the process of filling out my info, and generated a strong password... and I got back an error message. It seems that the Copyright Office has taken what used to be considered best practices, and then took it to an insane extreme: First of all, the US government, in the form of NIST, recently released new guidelines for password policies for any US government websites. And the Copyright Office ignores them, because whoever designed the new DMCA system seems to not give a shit and not be even remotely aware of good security practices these days. Here's what the new rules say:

No composition rules. What this means is, no more rules that force you to use particular characters or combinations, like those daunting conditions on some password reset pages that say, “Your password must contain one lowercase letter, one uppercase letter, one number, four symbols but not &%#@_, and the surname of at least one astronaut.”

Let people choose freely, and encourage longer phrases instead of hard-to-remember passwords or illusory complexity such as pA55w+rd.

So, yeah, nice job Copyright Office for ignoring what you're supposed to do. Second, even if those rules did make sense, by lumping together all of them, and then adding the absolutely ridiculous and bad security practice of saying "must not have any repeated letters, numbers, or special characters," you actually reduce randomness and make passwords less secure. This is just bad security.

To deal with this rule, I generated a much longer password, and then manually went through and removed any repeated letters, numbers or special characters, and made sure that all of the other rules were met. They were. I hit submit. The system rejected it, and gave me the exact same error message. I tried again. Same problem. I kept trying things for about 20 minutes until I figured out what the problem was. You see above, where it says "and special character "!@#$%^&*()""? Well, in my first attempt at a password I had two special characters: ? and >. I incorrectly assumed that when they say "special character" they mean any special character on the keyboard, and not just those limited to the ones above the number line on your keyboard. Once I realized that might be the issue, I still had a problem. And that's because my new password had " as a special character. I incorrectly assumed that was okay because it's in that list above, right? Except, no, it's not. It's just put around those symbols for no reason at all except to fool people. It would be nice if the error message actually told you that you could only use those characters and that the " wasn't included. Would have saved me a lot of time.

Once I finally finished that, the system sent me a confirmation/validation email (good), which I used to confirm my email and log into the system... only to discover that everything I had just done... was not actually registering a DMCA agent. It was just to register your account to use the Copyright Office's DMCA system. So I had to then go and fill out another form to register our DMCA agent (and I won't even get into the fact that once you've activated your account, the message telling you to "click here" to login to designate an agent makes it so that it's not at all where to actually click -- great design guys!).

Finally, once I'm all registered, and despite the fact that I'm very clearly registered in the United States, the system says I'm in Canada. Because, apparently, the genius IT staff thinks that the "CA", which everywhere else means California, means Canada in their own system. Because whatever, nothing matters. So, yes, I eventually paid my $6 and got registered, but lots of people won't and lots of sites are now going to expose themselves to bogus lawsuits. And for those who do get through this process, you may end up in Canada. So anyway, off we go to this new era, in which websites are much more at risk of losing their safe harbor protections, and to make it more fun, the system you need to use to register yourself is buggy as hell with a bunch of bad design practices. It's almost as if they want websites to lose their safe harbors. Considering that the key role of the Copyright Office is to register stuff (the boss of the office is literally called "The Register"), it seems fairly ridiculous that they make it so difficult to register DMCA agents, and then force renewal every three years (while at the same time insisting that any renewal requirement for copyright holders would go against the natural order of things and bring famine and pestilence upon the land).

Filed Under: copyright office, dmca, dmca 512, dmca agent, library of congress, nist, passwords, safe harbors

Wall Street Journal Error Filled Editorial Buys Into Ridiculous Copyright Office Conspiracy Theory

from the that's-just-wrong dept

I thought we were done with this. After cooler heads prevailed, and people realized that the giant conspiracy theory over "Google's" supposed string pulling to get the Register of Copyright fired, actual reporters stepped in and discovered it wasn't true. The reasons behind the firing were much more mundane (and for what it's worth, one of our commenters has a credible explanation for how one longtime anti-Google propagandist was the key force in spreading the claim in the first place).

But, the Wall Street Journal (owned by News Corp -- a company run by someone obsessed with made up stories about Google) has decided to try to put some legitimacy to the rumors by posting a ridiculous editorial fanning the already debunked conspiracy theory flames... but doing so in a hilariously uneducated fashion. Why, it's almost as if they just decided "let's bash Google" and didn't have even the slightest underlying knowledge of the facts to make their case. It starts right up top: Notice a problem there? Yeah, the WSJ editorial board doesn't seem to know the difference between copyrights and patents. And yet it thinks it knows what's going on. Okay, but you say that this is just in the subhead, and headline writers get this wrong all the time. Sure, but that doesn't explain all the other fundamental errors in the editorial itself.

Most Americans think of Google as a search engine doing unalloyed social good, but the company also wants to make money and wield political influence along the way. So you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to notice that an abrupt change of leadership at the U.S. Copyright Office is good news for Google, which aims to pay less for profiting from the property of others.

Actually, yes, you kind of do have to be a conspiracy theorist, because everyone who has any actual knowledge of what's gone on has said it's not even close to true. And furthermore, Google does not "aim to pay less for profiting from the property of others." Whatever legitimate complaints plenty of people may have about Google, it's focus is not on profiting off of others' content, but in "making the world's information accessible." But, of course, to a company like News Corp that has failed to adapt to the internet, and which has directly branded Google as "the enemy" it's no surprise that it would misrepresent what Google does and what it wants. But that doesn't mean it gets to make up facts. Though it tries.

There is some circumstantial evidence that Google’s lobbying influence was brought to bear in removing Ms. Pallante, though both Google and Ms. Pallante declined to talk to us. Google’s business model is essentially making money off other people’s content, and the company’s strategy has been to infringe on copyrighted material like books and fight it out later in court. The copyright office administers laws that protect owners.

So, uh, once again we see the WSJ get basic factual things wrong here. "Infringe on copyrighted material like books and fight it out later in court." An honest publication would point out that Google easily won its lawsuit at both the district and appeals court level, with both saying that Google's actions were fair use and thus not infringement. For the WSJ to flat out lie and claim that Google was infringing is ridiculous. And suggests either a failure to understand the basics of copyright law, or a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts to slam Google.

And, once again, the claim that it's Google's business model to "make money off other people's content" is not true. It's not Google's business models. Google's business model is to capture people's attention by providing a search engine that gets people to reveal their preferences -- and then Google shoves ads that may be responsive to those preferences in front of them. Whatever you think of that business model, it's not what the WSJ says.

Hell, if Google's business model was really predicated off of making money on other people's content, shouldn't News Corp be beating the pants off them, since it has its own content first?

For example, Ms. Pallante’s office opposed a Justice Department interpretation of licensing that would have undercut collaborations. As it happens, that change was reportedly pushed by a former outside counsel for Google who had moved over to Justice. Ms. Pallante’s view won in court.

This is a part of the propaganda myth that's made the rounds on a few sites. It ignores the fact that the fractional licensing debate was a big complex issue with many, many people arguing that the DOJ's interpretation of the consent decree was correct. Yes, one of the people at the DOJ had a very loose connection in the distant past to Google, but the idea that the DOJ was making decisions for Google is made up out of thin air. Also wrong is the idea that "Ms. Pallante's view won in court." The challenges to the DOJ's interpretation have just started. A judge has effectively put a hold on the interpretation for now, but it's far from litigated.

Again, it's as if the WSJ just got its talking points off of anti-Google conspiracy theory sites and ran with it, without bothering to check with anyone who actually understands the facts.

The conspiracy theories continue, trying to tie an offshoot Public Knowledge tweet into some sort of proof:

Something else happened in September: Ms. Pallante got a new boss when Ms. Hayden was sworn in as Librarian of Congress, a presidential appointment. Ms. Hayden formerly ran the American Library Association, which takes a permissive view of copyright law and accepts money from, you guessed it, Google. A month later Ms. Pallante was pushed out. The trade press had barely noticed the news when Public Knowledge tweeted: “Big news @CopyrightOffice today.”

Um. This is ridiculous. First of all, the ALA is a widely respected organization, not one driven by Google. And Hayden was President of the ALA in 2003 and 2004 when Google had zero lobbying presence and almost certainly no direct connection to the ALA. More than two years after Hayden was no longer at the ALA the NY Times was reporting on how Google was finally taking its first baby steps (awkwardly) into the world of DC politics. The claim that her Presidency of the ALA means she's connected to Google is tripe.

As for the Public Knowledge tweet -- the very first reporting on the Pallante news included the claim that Hayden had called various trade groups (focusing on the pro-copyright ones) to let them know of her decision before the news broke. Hell, even I heard about it before the news broke from a friend in DC (who's not at Google and never worked for Google) who sent me a text message with the news about an hour before the news officially broke, and well before Public Knowledge's tweet. That's not evidence of a Google connection. That's evidence that the news of change at the Copyright Office quickly spread among the various folks working on copyright issues.

The plot here is familiar. In 2012 Google’s deputy general counsel and head of patents, Michelle Lee, was selected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to run its Silicon Valley branch—and less than two years later President Obama nominated her to lead the U.S. office. This tilt of power was remarkable: Apple’s Steve Jobs had vowed earlier to go “thermonuclear” over disputes with Google’s Android. In a strange coincidence, many such disputes were soon settled.

No, it's not. Yes, Michelle Lee used to work at Google. And yes, she went to the USPTO. And since there I think she's been much better than her predecessor, but it's not like she's jumped on the anti-patent bandwagon or anything. The fact that Google's patent disputes settled (which, uh, isn't actually true) has nothing to do with Lee, who would have no power to get involved in litigation between two private companies over patents.

That's not how it works. And if the WSJ editorial board spoke to any human being who actually understood how the system worked, they'd know that.

... anyone tempted to write off the Pallante dispute as bureaucratic squabbling should remember: The company’s goal is to defenestrate laws that protect property. The guarantee to own what you create is the reason entrepreneurs take the risks that power the economy—a reason guys like Larry Page and Sergey Brin start Google.

This is ridiculous. I've had plenty of conversations with policy and legal folks at Google working on intellectual property issues. And I'm much, much, much more open to the idea that we should drastically scale back those laws than anything anyone at Google has ever supported. The people I've spoken to at Google about these issues are mainly focused on making sure that copyright law doesn't get in the way of an open internet, mainly because that harms Google's search products, and not because of some innate desire to to "defenestrate laws that protect property."

Sure, this kind of conspiracy theory may make sense for silly News Corp.-owned conspiracy peddling sites, but the WSJ is supposed to be about at least moderately competent journalism, right?

Filed Under: carla hayden, conspiracy theory, copyright office, library of congress, maria pallante
Companies: google, news corp., wall street journal

Conspiracy Theories Run Amok Over Copyright Office Executive Changes

from the nothing-doing-here dept

Last week, we wrote about the big news in the copyright realm, where the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, removed the Register of Copyrights (the head of the Copyright Office), Maria Pallante, from her job. Technically, Hayden reassigned Pallante to a new job in the Library of Congress, but Pallante rejected that offer and resigned. While we -- and some others -- pointed out that this was a good opportunity to reshape the Copyright Office away from being a taxpayer-funded lobbying organization for Hollywood, some folks who support ever more draconian copyright immediately jumped on all sorts of conspiracy theories about how this was really Google somehow firing Pallante, including one site that directly had that as a headline.

To anyone who actually had knowledge of what was going on, this made no sense. Hayden is not connected to Google in any way. This is just out and out tinfoil hat conspiracy theory territory from people who see "Google" behind any policy they dislike. It seemed rather obvious that, like just about any new CEO of an organization, Hayden was clearing out some senior staff for a variety of reasons. And there was a pretty obvious big reason why Hayden would like to reassign Pallante: she has been directly and publicly advocating for Congress to move the Copyright Office outside of the Library of Congress. If you came in to run an organization and one of your direct reports was going over your head to try to transfer an entire division somewhere else, it's likely you'd fire that person too. It's kind of a management 101 thing.

Over the past week, in talking to a few people at the Library of Congress, or close to it, this is the basic story that came out. Hayden didn't feel comfortable with Pallante publicly advocating against the Library of Congress, and used her role as the boss to remove her from that position. Others seem to be discovering the same thing. A report at Publisher's Weekly notes that the conspiracy theories are bunk:

But multiple observers familiar with both the Copyright office and the library’s operations told PW that Pallante’s ouster was not necessarily rooted in any specific disagreements over copyright policy. Rather, it most likely was a matter of Hayden “getting the Library’s house in order.” Pallante, the sources noted, has strongly urged lawmakers to remove the Copyright Office from under the purview of the Library of Congress and make it an independent agency, with the register becoming a Senate-confirmable presidential appointee.

“If Congress wants to remove the Copyright Office, it can do so,” explained one source, who did not want to be identified. “But, for now, it is part of the Library of Congress.” The source added that Hayden couldn’t be expected to lead the Copyright Office forward with a subordinate pushing Congress for the agency's independence at the same time. At press time, LoC officials had not yet commented

Another close observer, who also did not want to be identified, agreed and said there was no shadowy Silicon Valley plot to remove Pallante and “jam in” a more tech industry-friendly Register, as some reports have suggested.

From what I can tell, the "tech" industry was just as surprised about this as anyone else. Even the Authors Guild, which initially rang the alarm bells is now slowly, calming down and realizing that it may have overreacted. In an update, it notes that Hayden doesn't appear to have been taking orders from the tech industry. She also told them that she believes that the Library of Congress shouldn't be taking a major role in policy making:

When we asked Dr. Hayden whether she intended to respect the traditional role of the Copyright Office setting policy without interference from the Library, she very clearly stated that she does not intend to weigh in on copyright law or policy. She said that policy and legislative efforts are the domain of Congress, not the Library. Her job, she explained, requires her to ensure that the Copyright Office has the technology and resources for the proper operations of the registration and recordation systems. She was sympathetic with our desire to see the Copyright Office receive the funding necessary to create a robust registration and recordation system that meets 21st-century needs.

Of course, what's not entirely clear from that statement is if it means that the Copyright Office should also go back to its more traditional role of focusing on registering copyrights and similarly not weighing in on copyright law or policy. If she says that's not the role for the Library of Congess, then doesn't that also apply to the Copyright Office since it is a part of the Library?

Either way, I know it's popular for some people to assume any conspiracy theory around "Google" must be true (and, just you watch, someone in the comments here will now try to rope this post and me into that conspiracy), but this one comes up empty once you actually look at the details. It won't stop the conspiracy theorists, but they can spin their wheels with their tinfoil hats, whiteboards and theories about sea creatures.

Filed Under: carla hayden, copyright, copyright office, insubordination, library of congress, maria pallante

Copyright Office Fucks Over Thousands Of Sites With Plans To Remove Their DMCA Safe Harbors

from the so-dumb dept

If you run any kind of website it's super important that you file with the Copyright Office to officially register a DMCA agent. This is a key part of the DMCA. If you want to make use of the DMCA's safe harbors -- which create a clear safe harbor for websites to avoid liability of infringing material posted by users -- then you have to first register with the Copyright Office. Larger corporate sites already know this, but many, many smaller sites do not. This is why for years we've posted messages reminding anyone who has a blog to just go and register with the Copyright Office to get basic DMCA protections (especially after a copyright troll went after some smaller blogs who had not done so).

A few months back, we noted, with alarm, that the Copyright Office was considering a plan to revamp how it handled DMCA registrations, which had some good -- mainly making the registration process cheaper -- but a really horrific idea of requiring sites to re-register every three years or lose their safe harbor protections. Despite many people warning the Copyright Office how this would be a disaster, on Monday the Office announced it was going ahead with the plan anyway, not even acknowledging that thousands of sites are likely to get fucked over by this move:

The United States Copyright Office has completed development of a new electronic system to designate and search for agents to receive notifications of claimed infringement, as required under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Accordingly, the Office is publishing a final rule in the Federal Register tomorrow to implement that system, replacing an interim rule that the Office had adopted after the DMCA’s enactment. A prepublication version of the rule is available for public inspection here. The rule is effective on December 1, 2016, the date that the new online registration system and directory will be launched. In the meantime, users can begin to acquaint themselves with the new system by watching the video tutorials available here. Any service provider that has previously designated an agent with the Office will have until December 31, 2017, to submit a new designation electronically through the new online registration system.

Got that? Even if you followed the law and registered before, if you don't re-register (and pay another fee), then you will be kicked off the list of registered DMCA agents, meaning that you will lose your DMCA safe harbors. Basically, the Copyright Office is announcing that it is kicking EVERY SINGLE site that registered for DMCA safe harbor protection OFF THE SAFE HARBOR LIST.. That's horrendous. You have until the end of 2017, but really, how many sites (especially smaller sites or one person blogs) who don't follow copyright law are going to realize they need to do this? This is a recipe for disaster, and is basically the Copyright Office giving a giant middle finger to the DMCA's safe harbors for the sites that need them the most: smaller blogs and forum sites.

The Copyright Office's stated reason for doing this is nonsensical. It complains about outdated information in its database:

Since the DMCA’s enactment in 1998, online service providers have designated agents with the Copyright Office via paper filings, and the Office has made scanned copies of these filings available to the public by posting them on the Office’s website. Although the DMCA requires service providers to update their designations with the Office as information changes, an examination of a large sample of existing designations found that 22 percent were for defunct service providers, while approximately 65 percent of nondefunct service providers’ designations had inaccurate information (when compared to the information provided by service providers on their own websites).

The correct way to deal with this is to create a campaign to encourage sites to update their info -- not to kick everyone off. This is the goddamn Copyright Office, whose whole job is about "registering" information about people. Does the Copyright Office threaten to dump someone's copyright if a copyright holder's information is out of date? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. But it's now going to do that to any website that doesn't remember to constantly re-register a DMCA agent. This is a recipe for disaster, and for no good reason at all. And the idea that false or outdated info is a problem doesn't make much sense either. If a site has incorrect info, then they risk missing DMCA takedown notifications, meaning that they already face problems in not keeping their info up to date. The "solution" is not to make life worse for lots of other sites.

The final rule insists that this is no big deal because outdated info is "functionally equivalent to not designating an agent." However, as Eric Goldman points out, that's a total non sequitur. While it's true that those with outdated info may not have an official registration any more, that's no excuse for kicking off all those sites that do have valid registration. Those sites are fucked, for no reason other than the Copyright Office decided it has the right and power to just dump the entire list as of December 1.

As Goldman notes in his write-up of this clusterfuck, there's a simple solution here that the Copyright Office could have done, but didn't:

And when the Copyright Office disingenuously says the renewal requirement “should in many cases actually assist service providers in retaining their safe harbor, rather than serving to deprive them of it,” it mockably conflates its ability to communicate helpful information to registrants with draconian substantive policy effects. Here’s an alternative: send out the reminder notices but don’t make the consequences of non-renewal COMPLETE FORFEITURE OF THE DMCA SAFE HARBORS. Similarly, the analogies to other recurring obligations, like business licenses, ignore (1) the frequently less draconian consequences of non-compliance, and (2) the reality that many of these recurring obligations are nevertheless frequently mismanaged by both big and small companies.

Goldman also notes another horrifying part of the plan. The Copyright Office -- ostensibly to "help" those sites who forget to renew their DMCA agent - will list those sites on a public website of "lapsed" safe harbor registrants. Except, it's likely that instead of "helping" those sites, it will actually just be presenting a target list for copyright trolls to go searching for any infringing material on any site with a lapsed safe harbor registration.

There are questions about what can be done here. It's possible with new management coming to the Copyright Office that it may reverse this move, but that seems unlikely. It's quite likely, however, that there will be some lawsuit over this, especially as the Copyright Office is single-handedly removing protections for a whole bunch of sites. Another option is that Congress could get involved, but that would likely create an even bigger mess (Congress touching copyright law -- especially anything to do with the DMCA's safe harbors -- is not likely to end well).

This just seems like yet another example (in a ridiculously long list) of how screwed up the Copyright Office is these days.

Filed Under: 512 safe harbors, copyright, copyright office, dmca, dmca 512, dmca registration, safe harbor