Jennifer M. Urban and Laura Quilter, Efficient Process or “Chilling Effects”: Takedown Notices Under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The study found that a substantial number of takedown notices were flawed:
- Thirty percent of notices demanded takedown for claims that presented an obvious question for a court (a clear fair use argument, complaints about uncopyrightable material, and the like);
- Notices to traditional ISP’s included a substantial number of demands to remove files from peer-to-peer networks (which are not actually covered under the takedown statute, and which an OSP can only honor by terminating the target’s Internet access entirely); and
- One out of 11 included significant statutory flaws that render the notice unusable (for example, failing to adequately identify infringing material). Update: C.E. Petit takes a closer look, noting that this summary “completely ignores the problem of overlapping data,” and that the study itself may suffer “dataset bias.” Scrivener’s Error: More Statistics
