Filters, Fair Use & Feedback: User-Generated Content Principles and the DMCA

摘要

As industry powers shift the policing burden from copyright owners to UGC sites, the adoption of wholly automated filtering technology threatens to restrict fair use in the UGC medium. Such restrictions are regretful because they will decrease public opinion of filtering technology, which can be a powerful tool that decreases the costs of policing infringing activity. And if implemented in the proper way, copyright filters could help improve fair-use doctrine by providing constructive feedback.268 Yet when identification technology is adopted without fair-use safeguards, public opinion will sour just as it did with DRM. Unfortunately, this will reinforce the discourse pitting individual users against copyright owners instead of encouraging constructive dialogue on balancing the important tasks of accommodating fair use and preventing copyright infringement.