Music Publishers Sue Roblox In Full Frontal Assault On The DMCA

from the here's-a-big-one dept

A huge and potentially important copyright lawsuit was filed this week by basically all of the big music publishers against the immensely popular kids' gaming platform Roblox. Although the publishers trade association, the NMPA, put out a press release claiming the lawsuit, it doesn't appear that NMPA is actually a party. The lawsuit is, in many ways, yet another full frontal assault on the DMCA's safe harbors by the legacy music industry. There's a lot in this lawsuit and no single article is going to cover it all, but we'll hit on a few high points.

First, this may seem like a minor point, but I do wonder if it will become important: buried in the massive filing, the publishers mention that Roblox did not have a registered DMCA agent. That seems absolutely shocking, and potentially an astoundingly stupid oversight by Roblox. And there's at least some evidence that it's true. Looking now, Roblox does have a registration, but it looks like it was made on... June 9, the day the lawsuit was filed.

Wow. Now, that may seem embarrassing, but it might actually be more embarrassing for the Copyright Office and raise a significant and important legal question. Because it appears that Roblox did at one time have a DMCA agent registration but, as you may recall, back in 2016, the Copyright Office unilaterally decided to throw out all of those registrations and force everyone to renew (and then to renew again every three years through a convoluted and broken process).

There's an argument to be made that the Copyright Office can't actually do this. The law itself just says you need to provide the Copyright Office with the information, not that it needs to be renewed. The Copyright Office just made up that part. Perhaps we finally have a test case on our hands to see whether or not the Copyright Office fucked up in dumping everyone's registration.

Still, that's a minor point in the larger lawsuit. The publishers throw a lot of theories against the wall, hoping some will stick. It seems like most should be rejected under the DMCA's safe harbors, because it truly is user generated content, even if the lawsuit tries a variety of approaches to get around that. Part of the lawsuit argues contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, more or less pulling the "inducement" theory from the Grokster ruling, which basically says that if you as a company encourage your users to infringe, you could still be liable (this is, notably, nowhere in the actual law -- it's just what the Supreme Court decided).

But to get there, the lawyers for the music publishers seem to want to take a Roblox executive's comments completely out of context, in a somewhat astounding manner. The "proof" that Roblox is encouraging people to infringe is here:

Roblox is well aware that its platform is built and thrives on the availability of copyrighted music. As Jon Vlassopulos, Roblox’s global head of music, publicly stated just last year: “We want developers to have great music to build games. We want the music to be, not production music, but really great [commercial] music.” (Alteration in original). To that end, Roblox actively encourages its users to upload audio files containing copyrighted music and incorporate them into game content on the Roblox platform. Roblox advertises the importance of music in games and makes it easy for users to upload, share, and stream full-length songs.

But... if you read the article that they're using for that Vlassopulos quote, it's not directed at developers and users of their platform. It's targeted at musicians and the music industry. The whole point of the quote is to let musicians and the industry know that Roblox is open to licensing deals. It's pretty obnoxious to try to spin that as encouraging people to infringe when, in context, it sure looks like the exact opposite. I mean, literally the next sentence (which doesn't make it into the lawsuit) is about how they're "testing the waters" by making a deal with a small indie label to make all of its music available on Roblox.

So it seems to be Roblox saying the exact opposite of what the publishers are claiming. That's... kinda fucked up.

The lawsuit also tries to spin the impossible task of trying to moderate as proof that any failures in moderation are deliberate.

There is no question that Roblox has the right and ability to stop or limit the infringement on its platform. But Roblox refuses to do so, so that it can continue to reap huge profits from the availability of unlicensed music. While Roblox touts itself as a platform for “user-generated” content, in reality, it is Roblox—not users—that consciously selects what content appears on its platform. Roblox is highly selective about what content it publishes, employing over a thousand human moderators to extensively pre-screen and review each and every audio file uploaded. Roblox’s intimate review process includes review of every piece of copyrighted music, generally identified by title and artist—to ensure that it meets Roblox’s stringent and detailed content guidelines and community rules. This process ensures that Roblox plays an integral role in monitoring and regulating the online behavior of its young users.

Roblox thus unquestionably exercises substantial influence over its users and the content on its platform, ostensibly in the name of “safety.” Yet Roblox allows a prodigious level of infringing material through its gates, purposely turning a blind eye for the sake of profits. Rather than take responsibility, Roblox absurdly attempts to pass the obligation to its users—many of whom are young children—to represent to Roblox that they own the copyrights to the works they have uploaded.

Coincidentally, just last week we published our content moderation case study on Roblox, focused on how it tries to stop "adult" content on the platform. We noted that the company is very aggressive and hands-on with its moderation efforts but (importantly) it still makes mistakes, because every content moderation system at scale will make mistakes.

So just because Roblox is aggressive in its moderation, and even if it says it reviews everything, that doesn't mean that it "refuses" to stop infringement. It just means it doesn't catch it all. Indeed, the company has said in the past that it uses an automated third party monitoring tool to try to catch unauthorized songs (though, notably, this lawsuit is about the publishing rights, not the recording rights, so arguably a monitoring tool might catch some sound recordings while missing other songs that implicate songwriters/publishers -- but that's getting super deep in the weeds).

Indeed, the impossibility of catching everything -- while still encouraging websites to try -- is why we want things like Section 512 of the DMCA or Section 230 of the CDA. If you suddenly make websites liable for any mistakes they let through, then you create a huge problem. And claiming that their aggressive moderation implicates them even more only encourages sites to do less moderation in the long run.

But, the publishers don't care about that. Their end goal is clear: as in the EU, they want to force every website to have to buy a blanket license for music. They basically want to do away with the DMCA altogether, then just sit back and collect payments. They want to change the internet almost entirely from a tool for end users to a cash register for music publishers.

There are some other oddities in the lawsuit. It repeatedly tries to claim that Roblox is liable for direct infringement itself, but that theory seems like a stretch. Even the filings admit that the music is all uploaded by users:

Despite Roblox’s written policies, users regularly upload files containing copyrighted music. The act of “uploading” a file to Roblox involves the user making a copy of the file and distributing it to Roblox, where it is then hosted on Roblox’s servers.

To upload an audio file, a user simply opens the Roblox Studio and clicks on a tab marked “Audio,” which then prompts the user to choose a file on their local hard drive, in either .mp3 or .ogg format to be copied and distributed to Roblox’s servers.

It tries to build out the inducement theory by saying that because Roblox encourages developers to use music in their games, and this is the same as encouraging infringement, but that's nonsense. Nothing in what Roblox says encourages infringement. They're just saying that sound and music can enhance a game. Which is clearly true.

Roblox makes the process of uploading infringing music extremely easy for users. Roblox even published an article designed to encourage developers to add music to their games, which explains: “While building a game, it’s easy to overlook the importance of sounds and music.” (Emphasis added).4 That page gives users step-by-step instructions on how to copy and distribute their music files to the Roblox platform.

So what? That's not telling users to infringe. If anything, it's saying "find some music you're able to add to this legally." You'd think that publishers would be happy about that, as it opens up a new line of business where they could license their music, which is what the Roblox exec was talking about at the beginning. But leave it to the greedy publishers to not want to do the hard work here, and instead try to force a big company into a big payment.

Roblox has already put out a statement saying (not surprisingly) that it's "surprised and disappointed" by the lawsuit. It seems likely that it will mount an aggressive defense, and it could be yet another important case in seeing whether or not the legacy music industry is able to chip away at another important aspect of the DMCA, and to force all websites that host third party content to buy blanket licenses.

“As a platform powered by a community of creators, we are passionate about protecting intellectual property rights – from independent artists and songwriters, to music labels and publishers – and require all Roblox community members to abide by our Community Rules,” said the statement.

“We do not tolerate copyright infringement, which is why we use industry-leading, advanced filtering technology to detect and prohibit unauthorised recordings. We expeditiously respond to any valid Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) request by removing any infringing content and, in accordance with our stringent repeat infringer policy, taking action against anyone violating our rules.”

“We are surprised and disappointed by this lawsuit which represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Roblox platform operates, and will defend Roblox vigorously as we work to achieve a fair resolution,” continued Roblox’s statement.

Of course, this is par for the course for the legacy industry -- especially the publishers as lead by the NMPA's David Israelite. They wait for various internet services to get popular, and then rather than figuring out how that helps them, they sue. It's how they constantly kill the golden goose. They've done it with various internet music services, music games, and more. They're currently trying to do it with Twitch and now Roblox as well. They overvalue the music component, and choke off the long term business prospects for these platforms, many of which have music as an ancillary add-on.

It's silly, short-sighted, and anti-culture. In other words, it's the legacy music industry's usual playbook.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright office, dmca, dmca agent, inducement, publishers, registration, safe harbors
Companies: nmpa, roblox

Three Years Later And The Copyright Office Still Can't Build A Functioning Website For DMCA Agents, But Demands Everyone Re-Register

from the and-pay-up dept

In early 2016, we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous plan by the Copyright Office to -- without any basis in the law -- strip every site of its registered DMCA agent. In case you're not aware, one of the conditions to get the DMCA's Section 512 safe harbors as a platform for user content, is that you need to have a "Designated Agent." As per 512(c)(2), it says:

Designated agent.—The limitations on liability established in this subsection apply to a service provider only if the service provider has designated an agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement described in paragraph (3), by making available through its service, including on its website in a location accessible to the public, and by providing to the Copyright Office, substantially the following information:

(A) the name, address, phone number, and electronic mail address of the agent.

(B) other contact information which the Register of Copyrights may deem appropriate.

The Register of Copyrights shall maintain a current directory of agents available to the public for inspection, including through the Internet, and may require payment of a fee by service providers to cover the costs of maintaining the directory.

Note that this says that Register of Copyrights shall maintain such a list. However, the Copyright Office, decided back around 2016 that there were too many "old" registrations in the database, and decided to literally dump every single registration, despite the law not allowing it to do so. It then instituted a new plan that said -- again, without any legal basis -- that every site not only needed to register, but it would need to re-register every three years or it would lose the safe harbor protections, which could expose sites to massive liability.

In late 2016, this plan went into effect, and I detailed the incredibly bad computer system that the Office had put in place to handle such registrations, starting with the fact that the password requirements literally violate the federal government's own rules for passwords. Back in 2016, NIST told government agencies, among other things, to stop requiring random characters, upper and lower case, etc. and to stop expiring passwords with no reason.

Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

So we were, well, not surprised back in 2016, that the Copyright Office's system ignored that rule not to include composition rules, and highlighted how they stupidly said:

Passwords must have at least 12 characters, with at least one lower case letter, upper case letter, number, and special character "!@#$%^&*()", and must not have any repeated letters, numbers, or special characters.

Not only did this violate NIST's guidelines, but it actually makes passwords significantly less secure by reducing the randomness of passwords, making them less secure.

Anyway, three years have almost passed, and as per the new rules, the Copyright Office is about to kick everyone off again. For no good reason at all. Even better, they sent an email over the Labor Day weekend to alert people that they're at risk of losing their registrations if they don't re-register -- because it's not like people miss random, poorly formatted emails that literally come from "[email protected]" when going through emails coming back from a long weekend. Thankfully, I also saw Eric Goldman's blog post about this, though I'm guessing not everyone who owns a website that needs 512 safe harbors protection reads his blog (unfortunately).

Incredibly, it looks like the Copyright Office has done literally nothing to fix the problems of the system. Indeed, it turns out that things are even worse than before. Not only does the system still require "composition rules" that violate NIST's guidelines, it also expired everyone's passwords (which also violates the guidelines).

It actually proved significantly more difficult than expected to create a new password. Like everyone in the world should, I use a password manager to generate and store my passwords. But because of the Copyright Office's dumb rules, none of the passwords my password manager generated would work. I kept getting error message after error message, just telling me the same dumb, pointless, rules over and over again:

Even though it's literally bad practice to make your own passwords, I even tried to "edit" some of the auto-generated passwords to meet the rules, but it still didn't work, though I'm not sure why. One thing I discovered, while it says you have to use "special character" the list shown in that image is the entire set of allowed special characters. So, passwords using other special characters don't work, even though the Copyright Office's system doesn't bother to explain why it rejected your password. But special characters like "\>{]" and such don't work, even though there's no reason why they shouldn't, and most password generators will (smartly!) include them. Oh yeah, also this one stymied me for a really long time. The " mark is not allowed in a password, even though it sorta looks like it's included in that list. But it's not. It's just a pointless set of "quote marks" around the allowed symbols. This is not an intuitive system. It is not user friendly. It's is dumb, insecure, and violates NIST's rules -- as it did three years ago when I complained about it.

Then you log in... and the information given to you is sorely lacking. First, at the very top, you get a message saying that the entire website may be offline for three whole days... a month ago. What? What the hell are they doing that they need to take a site offline for three whole days? And if they had to do system upgrades for that long, how the hell have they not made anything actually work right? And, most importantly, if that shutdown happened a month ago, why are they still showing the damn warning message?

From there, you are shown a weird chart with a lot of useless information -- but it is not at all clear how you re-register. There is no indication that you need to re-register. There is just your "service provider name," "registration number," "status," "last updated" and the ever useless "Action" box.

It turns out, to re-register, you have to click that little pencil, which the tooltip tells me is to "Edit." But I'm not "editing" anything. I just want to renew so I still am protected by the DMCA's safe harbors. It then makes me review everything multiple times, before telling me I need to pay $6, and sending me to a sketchy looking payment site (which I get is not run by the Copyright Office itself, but still).

I was almost afraid to give it my credit card.

Either way, eventually it "worked," but in the most fucked up of ways. The website itself is then not exactly clear if this renewal adds on to my existing -- meaning do I get three more years from the date of my original three year registration in 2016 (which would be December 1), or if it simply starts the clock anew, as of the date I paid. It sure looks like they just started a new three year clock yesterday -- meaning they cheated me out of 3 months of coverage because I dared to renew promptly. So by being good and renewing in their stupid system nearly 3 months before I need to, they just chop off 3 months of the "service" they're providing me? How the fuck is that allowed? If you look at my original listing -- even though I'd paid up for 3 full years, they now show it as "inactive" and list the new one as "active."

And that's kinda fucked up. The current listing says "Active" for "September 3, 2019 to Present" which almost certainly means this one will expire September 3, 2022, even though it should go until December 1, 2022.

All of this is a complete mess. It's entirely unnecessary, and as Eric Goldman notes in his piece, when the Copyright Office rolled this out it "promised a smooth renewal process." This was anything but smooth -- and it's likely that plenty of sites may miss the fact that they have to do this, or get caught up in trying to get the damn system to work. While, thankfully, this hasn't impacted any sites directly that I'm aware of, it's only a matter of time until a site that thought it had a successful DMCA agent finds out it no longer does because the Copyright Office decided to change the entire process, and apparently can't build a freaking website that works or is even up to basic federal website standards.

And, sure, $6 is cheap, but it's still pretty messed up that the Copyright Office simply lopped off three months of service they owed me because their own system is too poorly implemented to know to add on another three years at the end of my existing "subscription." It seems like something that shouldn't happen -- and one hopes that someone at the Copyright Office or the Library of Congress figures their shit out before September of 2022. But I have my doubts.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright office, dmca, dmca agent, library of congress

Every Website Needs To Re-register With The Copyright Office, Who Can't Build A Functioning System

from the are-you-serious? dept

As we mentioned last month, the Copyright Office -- despite being warned this was a bad idea -- has decided to implement a brand new system for websites to register DMCA agents, and has done so in a way that will undoubtedly fuck over many websites. It's already ridiculous enough that in order to be fully protected under the DMCA's safe harbor rules (that say you're not liable if someone posts infringing material to your website), you need to register a designated "DMCA agent" with the Copyright Office. The idea behind this is that by registering an agent, copyright holders will be able to look up who to send a takedown notice to. And, sure, that makes sense, but remember that this is the same Copyright Office that supports not requiring copyright holders to register their works, meaning that there may not be any legitimate way to contact copyright holders back.

The reason for the new system is that the old system was just ridiculous -- on that everyone can agree. You had to fill out a paper form, sign it, and send it in. The Copyright Office has been way behind on digitizing everything, so moving to a web based system is a good thing. Also, the old system required payment of over $100, while the new one is just $6. That's all good. The problem is twofold: first, the Copyright Office has said that it is throwing out all the old registrations, and if you want to retain your safe harbors, you need to re-register. There's a grace period through the end of next year, but plenty of sites who don't follow the Copyright Office's every move are going to miss this, and will no longer have an officially registered agent with the Copyright Office (it's possible that, should this issue go to court, a platform could reasonably argue that it still did meet the statutory requirements in the original registration, but why force site owners through that hoop in the first place). The second problem, is that this new system will toss out records every three years, so if you forget to renew, you once again can lose your legal safe harbors. This puts tons of websites at serious risk, removing key protections and opening them up to lawsuits from copyright trolls.

Either way, the Copyright Office opened the doors on the new system yesterday, and so I went ahead and re-registered Techdirt. And, let's just say, the Copyright Office has a reputation for being technically clueless, and boy, does it live up to that reputation with its new system -- though, to be fair, as the Copyright Office's General Counsel reminded me on Twitter, it's actually the Library of Congress that built the system. First off, to register a new agent, you need to first register with the Copyright Office's system. As Eric Goldman points out, the system is not designed for individuals or sole proprietorships, even though those people should be able to get DMCA safe harbor protections as well. Specifically, to register, it requires an organization name and a "second contact" name and information. I'm not sure what individuals should do, other than maybe make something up -- though, before you even get started, the system pops up a warning suggesting that you may face criminal charges under the CFAA if you do anything wrong (while it means if you try to hack the system, the wording may confuse many people not familiar with the law). Nice touch.

Oh, and then there's the password system. Like many people, I use a password manager, which also will generate strong passwords for you. I went through the process of filling out my info, and generated a strong password... and I got back an error message. It seems that the Copyright Office has taken what used to be considered best practices, and then took it to an insane extreme: First of all, the US government, in the form of NIST, recently released new guidelines for password policies for any US government websites. And the Copyright Office ignores them, because whoever designed the new DMCA system seems to not give a shit and not be even remotely aware of good security practices these days. Here's what the new rules say:

No composition rules. What this means is, no more rules that force you to use particular characters or combinations, like those daunting conditions on some password reset pages that say, “Your password must contain one lowercase letter, one uppercase letter, one number, four symbols but not &%#@_, and the surname of at least one astronaut.”

Let people choose freely, and encourage longer phrases instead of hard-to-remember passwords or illusory complexity such as pA55w+rd.

So, yeah, nice job Copyright Office for ignoring what you're supposed to do. Second, even if those rules did make sense, by lumping together all of them, and then adding the absolutely ridiculous and bad security practice of saying "must not have any repeated letters, numbers, or special characters," you actually reduce randomness and make passwords less secure. This is just bad security.

To deal with this rule, I generated a much longer password, and then manually went through and removed any repeated letters, numbers or special characters, and made sure that all of the other rules were met. They were. I hit submit. The system rejected it, and gave me the exact same error message. I tried again. Same problem. I kept trying things for about 20 minutes until I figured out what the problem was. You see above, where it says "and special character "!@#$%^&*()""? Well, in my first attempt at a password I had two special characters: ? and >. I incorrectly assumed that when they say "special character" they mean any special character on the keyboard, and not just those limited to the ones above the number line on your keyboard. Once I realized that might be the issue, I still had a problem. And that's because my new password had " as a special character. I incorrectly assumed that was okay because it's in that list above, right? Except, no, it's not. It's just put around those symbols for no reason at all except to fool people. It would be nice if the error message actually told you that you could only use those characters and that the " wasn't included. Would have saved me a lot of time.

Once I finally finished that, the system sent me a confirmation/validation email (good), which I used to confirm my email and log into the system... only to discover that everything I had just done... was not actually registering a DMCA agent. It was just to register your account to use the Copyright Office's DMCA system. So I had to then go and fill out another form to register our DMCA agent (and I won't even get into the fact that once you've activated your account, the message telling you to "click here" to login to designate an agent makes it so that it's not at all where to actually click -- great design guys!).

Finally, once I'm all registered, and despite the fact that I'm very clearly registered in the United States, the system says I'm in Canada. Because, apparently, the genius IT staff thinks that the "CA", which everywhere else means California, means Canada in their own system. Because whatever, nothing matters. So, yes, I eventually paid my $6 and got registered, but lots of people won't and lots of sites are now going to expose themselves to bogus lawsuits. And for those who do get through this process, you may end up in Canada. So anyway, off we go to this new era, in which websites are much more at risk of losing their safe harbor protections, and to make it more fun, the system you need to use to register yourself is buggy as hell with a bunch of bad design practices. It's almost as if they want websites to lose their safe harbors. Considering that the key role of the Copyright Office is to register stuff (the boss of the office is literally called "The Register"), it seems fairly ridiculous that they make it so difficult to register DMCA agents, and then force renewal every three years (while at the same time insisting that any renewal requirement for copyright holders would go against the natural order of things and bring famine and pestilence upon the land).

Filed Under: copyright office, dmca, dmca 512, dmca agent, library of congress, nist, passwords, safe harbors

Copyright Office Pushing Dangerous And Ridiculous Plan To Strip Websites Of DMCA Safe Harbors

from the don't-let-this-happen dept

Back at the end of May the Copyright Office put out a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) concerning some changes to the DMCA agent registration process. As we've noted for years, technically to be covered by the important DMCA safe harbors you first have to register with the Copyright Office (and we've repeatedly recommended that you do so, if you have any kind of site, even a personal one, where people may post potentially infringing material). Not registering won't automatically make you liable, but it can make the legal process a lot more problematic for you if someone posts infringing material on your website. Most people who commented on this new NPRM were pleasantly surprised to see that the key part of the proposal was reducing the fee for registering an agent from $105 (or more) down to just $6. The Copyright Office says it can do this thanks to the much easier efficiency of electronic filing. That's great.

But hidden in the details is something not great at all. First spotted by the ever eagle-eyed Eric Goldman, part of this proposal was actually reviving a very bad proposal from 2011 to also force sites to renew their DMCA agent every 3 years. This is dumb for so many reasons -- and Eric, along with the EFF, told the Copyright Office this back when the proposal first came out -- and... the Copyright Office never responded (though it still says it's coming...). And here's the really nasty bit: the Copyright Office insists that any comments being made over this NPRM can only be about the change in the fee, and not the serial renewals, even though it also notes (in a footnote, of course) that this new lower fee is dependent on it becoming a recurring fee thanks to the renewals.

On top of that, it seems clear that those of us who have already paid lots of money to register will still have our registrations thrown out, and we'll have to start paying recurring fees. That seems doubly ridiculous. We've already paid quite a lot, and I don't see how the Copyright Office should be able to throw out our existing agent claim, nor why we should suddenly have to remember to go back and renew our registration every three years. Remember, this is the same Copyright Office that seems to have no interest at all in making copyright holders renew their registrations, as such a thing would be too burdensome.

Given all that, Eric, again with the EFF, and a bunch of others (including us at Techdirt!) filed comments with the Copyright Office on Friday, complaining about this new rule, which will almost certainly burden many legitimate sites, causing them to lose their DMCA safe harbors simply by failing to re-register an agent in a timely manner.

We believe that once a service provider has made a valid designation, the designation should remain effective in the Copyright Office indefinitely, for at least three reasons: (1) 17 U.S.C. §512(c)1 already has too many conditions; (2) §512’s formalities already inhibit small service providers from enjoying the safe harbor; and (3) §512 already deprives service providers of protection if they do not accurately maintain their designations. For these reasons, we oppose any proposal to disqualify a service provider from the safe harbor for failing to maintain its agent registration with the Copyright Office, whether because the service provider failed to pay the appropriate renewal fee, failed to re-register an existing valid registration, or failed to take any other future action after a valid registration has been made.

If the hidden consequence of the Copyright Office’s proposed lower agent registration fees is a higher risk that an unsuspecting provider will lose §512’s safe harbor protections because it failed to renew, then the real cost of the new system is far too high. Therefore, we request that the Copyright Office offer a cost-effective option letting providers make only a single one-time registration to remain permanently effective.

The letter goes on to point out that in order to qualify for the DMCA's safe harbors, a site already needs to satisfy 12 different conditions, which is already too burdensome. And this renewal process would make it even worse, if only because a site that simply forgets to register may face massive liability:

The new condition would have significant consequences: an otherwise-protected service provider could, if found liable for copyright infringement under the substantive liability standards, be exposed to a massive—and potentially business-ending—damage award that could reach millions (or even billions) of dollars for forgetting to renew or maintain the agent designation on time.

The letter also reminds the Copyright Office about its own views on why re-registration "formalities" is a bad idea for copyright registrations:

“[T]he renewal provision of the current law is a highly technical and rigid formality, and it often results in the unfair and unintended loss of copyright protection.”

The same concerns exist here, including the concern for conditions not present in other national systems.

More generally, the history of the Copyright Act clearly demonstrates that if Congress wanted to put an agent renewal condition into the law, it knew how to do so. The Copyright Office’s authority to make regulations for receiving DMCA agents’ designations does not include authority to add additional conditions to §512(c) itself, and the Copyright Office has not identified any legislative grant that provides it with such authority.

Frankly, it's ridiculous that you need to register with the Copyright Office to receive the safe harbors in the first place, but if that's the case, there's simply no reason that they should suddenly add in this demand to re-register every few years.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright office, dmca, dmca 512, dmca agent, renewals, safe harbors