In an effort to update and improve the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice and Takedown Act, the Author’s Guild has ask for Congressional assistance. The current Act states that when a book is pirated: “A copyright owner is required to send a notice for each separate instance (i.e., copy) of infringement, specifying the URL,” explains the Guild. “But as soon as a pirated copy is taken down, it is usually put right back up. Needless to say, copyright owners cannot keep up with this senseless game, and individual authors do not begin to have the resources to send a new notice every time a pirated copy is posted or reposted.”
What the Author’s Guild seeks is a “Notice and Stay-Down provision — “once a webhost knows a work is being infringed, it should not continue to receive ‘safe harbor’ immunity from claims of infringement unless it takes reasonable measures to remove all infringing copies of the same work.”
You can read the Author’s Guild letter in it’s entirety here.
