'Notice And Staydown' The Latest Fad In Copyright Enforcement

[Mike]

Among governments, bad digital policy ideas have a habit of spreading. For example, after France pioneered the "three strikes" approach, it was picked up by a number of other countries, but it is now finally dying a long-overdue death -- except in Australia, which evidently missed the memo that this approach demonstrably doesn't work. Now the latest fashion seems to be "notice and staydown", which Mike wrote about a couple of months back. After largely abandoning "three strikes", France may be signing up for this latest hot trend, as TorrentFreak reports:

French anti-piracy agency HADOPI handed the government a long-awaited report on the development of "operational tools" for dealing with online piracy. Several key areas are outlined, including the creation of a new type of takedown notice designed not only to take content offline, but keep it offline for up to six months.

Here are some details:

These notices would oblige a host to "stop and prevent, for a specified period, the reappearance of content that has been identified as constituting an infringement of copyright or related rights on the site."

It's suggested that these kinds of orders could be valid for up to six months but at least initially would only be directed at sites hosting actual files, not links to files such as in the case of BitTorrent indexes.

Although the "staydown" would be for up to six months, rather than forever, as proposed in the US, it's easy to predict future demands from the copyright industry to extend that limit when it doesn't have the desired results, and to include BitTorrent indexes as well. And there's no way smaller companies and startups could cope with the huge task of monitoring uploads for things that have to "staydown". All-in-all, then, this seems destined to join "three strikes" in the digital dustbin of history, along with all the other failed enforcement approaches. The question is: what will be the next bad idea governments adopt?
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Originally Published: Thu, 15 May 2014 15:53:00 GMT
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