All News

Industry & Advocacy News

Guild Weighs In on Internet Piracy Law

As the United States Copyright Office continues its policy study of the laws governing Internet piracy, this week the Authors Guild submitted a second set of comments arguing that those laws need to be reset to curb online infringement of authors’ works.

The additional comments requested by the Copyright Office gave stakeholders the chance to respond to issues raised in the initial set of comments submitted in April 2016 and a series of public roundtables held in New York and California in May of that year.

In both the initial round of comments and the public roundtables, Internet service providers and their representatives pointed to the growth of the Internet economy in the years since the 1998 passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as evidence that the law is working as intended. But, as our comments maintain, the growth of the tech sector has come at the cost of the creative community, a result that Congress expressly sought to avoid with the DMCA. Congress intended the DMCA to encourage ISPs to cooperate with copyright owners to combat online infringement, and in that respect, it has failed.

Read our full comments below.

 

[embeddoc url=”https://www.authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2017/02/Authors-Guild_Section-512-Additional-Comments.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]