Traffic surged a few months ago when I started sharing cracked Mac software. Now the bill is slowly coming due — what goes around comes around. Let me use this as a cautionary tale to explain the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Overview
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, also known in Chinese as the “千禧年数字版权法”, is a United States law born in 1998. It was signed to bring two 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) copyright treaties into US copyright law.
I’d boil its main content down to two points.
First, stronger protection for copyright holders’ interests. As digital technology advances, the threat to copyright is enormous: when a work circulates online, information such as attribution, copyright notices, and source is extremely easy to alter or strip out; digital works are trivially easy to copy and distribute, so harm to the copyright holder breaks through geographic limits — infringement can happen wherever there’s a network.
Second, exemptions for innocent parties. Infringement usually happens over a network, and ISPs providing that network can be exempted from liability for transmitting infringing data; when repairing a computer you may launch copyright-protected software on the customer’s machine; digital libraries and backup archives are exempted from infringement liability.
I Got a Google Copyright Removal Notice
This isn’t the first notice I’ve received, so I’m not nervous. They’re not taking you to court — it’s just a notice telling you the page will be removed from Google. If you disagree you can file a counter-notice. Their infringement detection is quite accurate, though: I’ve never had a page removed by mistake. If you’re maliciously reported or wrongly removed, just file a counter-notice showing you’re the copyright owner or that you hold the relevant authorization or other proof you can use it legally.
Copyright Protection in China
With copyright awareness growing, you can also report infringement to Baidu in China — trademarks, copyrights, patents, all of it. Once a report succeeds, Baidu removes the infringing page. But I rarely seem to run into this; or maybe Baidu quietly removes pages without notifying the webmaster. Either way I’ve never received a removal notice from Baidu — indexing just drops. Most reports against a site come from industry competitors.
There’s also a shady business model that makes money off infringement damages. See my earlier post, Running a Site That Loses Money Instead of Making It: The Lucrative Grey Industry Protected by Internet Courts — Infringement Claims. Images and fonts can both infringe and land you in court.