RIAA Still Discontent

The Recording Industry Association of America recently revealed that 20 million takedown requests were sent to Google just in 2012. In addition, a similar number of demands were also sent to infringing portals.

The music industry explained that every day produces more results and there is no end in sight. This is true. However, the industry believes that targets of their notices don’t even pretend to be innovators finding better ways to legally enjoy music. Instead, the RIAA accuses online services of simply creating business which profits from stealing copyrighted content. Despite those 20 million sent notices, the problem the RIAA faces with unauthorized downloading remains immeasurably larger.
One of the RIAA’s VPs pointed at Google, claiming that the company’s actions account for nothing. He compared its efforts with using a bucket to deal with an ocean of unauthorized file-sharing. The RIAA points out that under a controversial interpretation by search engines, takedown notices must be directed at specific links to specific files, so Google does nothing to stop the same files from being reuploaded after being removed once.
However, the search engines have actually no way of knowing whether a certain link on a specific website leads to a legal copy or not. Maybe it is also fair for them to make that same claim at the second notice, but the RIAA is talking about a thousand notices for the same track on the same website. The industry believes that it is simply logical to come to a conclusion that such links are infringing, instead of requiring copyright holders to keep expending time and resources to have the link taken down.
Of course, the RIAA’s statement comes just as the Congress is about to take another look at American copyright legislation and DMCA. The industry claims that the latter was intended to define the way forward for tech firms and content creators alike, but some aspects of the legislation no longer work. DMCA was designed before Google even existed. There was also no iPods, P2P file-sharing and slick portals offering free music downloads. Indeed, Napster, LimeWire and MegaUpload came on the scene after DMCA. This is why the RIAA believes that it’s time to rethink the notice and takedown provisions of the legislation.