If you’ve ever sent a friend a video clip of your favorite show only to discover that “this video has been taken down due to a claim by MegaMedia Corp.”, you can thank the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law that treats backing up your DVDs to your hard drive like you’re worse than a kid-toucher. But it turns out that the very people who got this law enacted, namely the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), now really, really hate it.
Why? Because stupid judges went out and decided it was the music industry’s job to enforce its copyrights, not your ISP’s.
At root is the “red-flag” provision, the idea that ISPs must not have any knowledge of direct infringement. The courts have pointed out that ISPs don’t have a magic all-seeing eye and aren’t in the business of looking at absolutely everything going on in their network at any given moment. The RIAA feels that it’s mean of the courts to make them pay to do what they were founded to do in the first place because the ISPs make money on it.
Also, they’re really frustrated that as soon as they take down a file, another one pops up. So their solution is to go to Congress and get them to write another idiotic law.
In short, in case you were wondering, no, the music industry still does not understand the Internet.