The SMART Copyright Act is a thinly veiled proxy war over mandatory filtering of copyrighted works. . . mandatory filters are error-prone in ways that hurt consumers, and they raise entry barriers in ways that reduce competition.
More generally, the SMART Copyright Act would give the Copyright Office a truly extraordinary power–the ability to force thousands of businesses to adopt, at their expense, technology they don’t want and may not need, and the mandated technologies could reshape how the Internet works.
Wouldn’t It Be Great if Internet Services Had to License phone number library Technologies Selected by Hollywood? (Comments on the Very Dumb “SMART Copyright Act”), from Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog on March
This bill and its supporters do not represent the public’s interest in fair copyright policy and a robust and accessible public domain. That is a shame, because much good could be done if policymakers would put the public’s interest first. For example, the Copyright Office—which holds records of every copyright ever registered, including all those works which have passed into the public domain—could help catalogue the public domain and prevent it from being swept up by today’s already-overzealous automated filtering technologies (an idea inspired by this white paper from Paul Keller and Felix Reda). Instead, the public domain continues to be treated as acceptable collateral damage in the quest to impose ever-greater restrictions on free expression online.
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