CDT and the R Street Institute filed comments in response to the Copyright Office’s Notice of Inquiry regarding Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 512 protects the conduits, websites, cloud storage providers, and search engines from statutory damages and other liability for copyright infringement based on works posted by users so long as service providers comply with certain requirements. CDT very much hopes that the Office does not lose sight of the importance of that flexibility and balance as it evaluates the many proposals for change it will receive.
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Yesterday, the Department of Commerce released its “White Paper on Remixes, First Sale, and Statutory Damages.” The paper is the culmination of more than five years of work by the Department’s Internet Policy Task Force. Among its many recommendations, the paper plots a course for significant progress on calibrating statutory damages for copyright infringement.
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In a plenary session, the European Parliament voted yesterday to adopt a report on “the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.” In a previous post, we applauded the report’s recognition of the importance of balanced copyright while lamenting over some the elements of the draft report that failed to make their way into the text adopted by Parliament’s legal affairs committee (JURI). Even with deletions and alterations, the report highlights the need for minimum baseline of copyright limitations and exceptions across the Union. The text of the report remains largely unchanged since its adoption by JURI, but a few late amendments made important improvements to the report.
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The European Commission, Council, and Parliament have all identified the creation of a “digital single market” (DSM) for Europe as one of their shared top priorities. A refreshingly distinct view of a unitary copyright system for Europe arrived last week when the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) voted to adopt a report on “the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.”
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