Speaking in Australia during a recent visit to examine and advise on the implications of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the United States and Australia for internet service providers (ISPs), vice president and general counsel of Verizon, Sarah Deutsch warned that the FTA is likely to create copyright 'bounty hunters' in Australia.
According to an Australian IT News report, Ms Deutsch suggested that:
"The Digital Millenium Copyright Act that is now being force-fed to you has been twisted and distorted in extraordinary ways."
She continued:
"Originally the concept was quite simple and workable: if you hosted content, you had an obligation to take down infringing material, but if you were simply a conduit, you were absolutely exempt."
"That worked well until the rise of peer-to-peer sharing. Frankly, US copyright owners have tried to twist the DMCA to fix a new business problem, and now we find the whole deal is unravelling."
The ISP boss went on to explained that following the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) crackdown on peer-to-peer file sharing, copyright owners in the US have begun to broaden their search for infringers, hiring "bounty hunters" to conduct automated searches of the internet, and to flood ISPs with takedown notices on discovery of copyright infringing material.
"The problem, though, is that the materials are not on the ISP's system or network - they are on the user's hard drive. Automated P2P notices ask ISPs not only to take the material down, but effectively terminate the subscriber. It's a very egregious remedy," Australian IT News quoted Ms Deutsch as observing.
She also bemoaned that fact that although copyright owners do not need to demonstrate due diligence before sending out takedown notices, ISPs are legally obliged to check each complaint, leading to a massively increased workload.
"Over the past 12 months, one US ISP received more than 90,000 automated notices. In the three months since January it received 30,000 - and only two of these actually related to materials that were on its network," she concluded.
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