Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Its not effective to establish an effective repeat infringe of policy. It ignores red flags with patterns of infringement by certain users. Youtube often out tos content i. D. As an unrequired benefit to rights holders. It is not an unrequired benefit to rights holders. Its far from perfect, again, still allowing millions of online content to sift through the system. Theres no realistic way that rights holders can unilaterally review trillions of pages necessary to identify infringements and protect their rights and Online Services and platforms can. They are the gatekeepers, not us. Thank you, mr. Henley and mr. Hanson, if i come back for another round i may ask you to talk about the same subject and mr. Henley, i think you were really describing on a broader basis the sheer numbers of people who were experiencing the frustration of feeling like they had been robbed as mr. Preston described in his opening comments. Before i go to Ranking Member coons id like to enter into the record the president of the Artist Rights Society which represents more than 122,000 artist Members Around the world. His letter points out the challenge many small and individual artists face as they attempt to police the internet for infringing content. Without objection, that will be entered into the record. I would also like to enter into the record a letter from the Copyright Alliance which represents the copyright interest which represents 13,000 organizations and more than 1. 8 million creators and the letter states that piracy is one of the greatest threats to welfare and the individual creators and finally, without objection id like to enter into the record a letter from the music workers allowance of independent musicians and deejays calling on congress to act on the 512 report from the United States Copyright Office. Ranking member coons . Thank you, chairman. Thank you to this impressive panel of witnesses. I have a lot of questions, but we dont have a lot of times. Im just going to ask of the entire panel that you would answer a sort of a combination of questions. Based on your testimony across this whole panel, the Current System works well for some and is broken for others. Congress had envisioned rightsholders and online providers working together to standardize voluntary technological measures to combat piracy. Im interested in why that hasnt happened, how you would suggest we combat digital piracy without stifling innovation and free speech and most importantly, if you can propose one immediate change to improve the notice and take down framework, what would it be . I welcome from hearing from each of the members of the panel in order starting with mr. Henley, and if i might say, mr. Henley, as someone whose creative works inspired an awful lot of critical moments in my life. I was hearing the end of the innocence playing in my mind as we were contemplating today and i never thought that life in the fast lane would one day involve looking at each other through digital screens. Mr. Henley . Life is full of surprises. It is. I agree with my colleague who is representing authors. There needs to be a notice and stay down regulation because the notice and takedown process simply has not worked. We need to go to a notice and stay down process. You know, the safe harbor in 512 was never intended to be a get out of jail free card. It was intended to promote coop raegz with the creators and owners of the works they use. So that original arrangement needs to be rebalanced and it would not threaten the internet. In fact, it would enhance the internet, and from creative works and Online Services for the benefit of everybody. Let me just tell you what the streaming rates are just from perspective. Apple pays 0. 0007, youtube pays per stream 0. 00025. And its hard with rates like that especially on top of all of the infringement. Thats all i have to say at the moment. Thank you, mr. Henley. If i might, mr. Burrow . Thank you, senator coons. From my perspective, what is needed here is additional collaboration. Our members have effectively worked with many large content industry groups, many of the large publishers to identify some of these challenges and i will acknowledge, again, as someone who has personally directed programs, focused on enforcing copyrights online, i understand the challenges and i understand the challenges of particularly acute for Small Artists who dont have the ability or currently have an organization that is helping them pool their resources and finding a way to leverage technologies in order to more effectively manage the takedown process and work with some of the websites to the extent that theyre based in the u. S. Or in a jurisdiction that has similar laws than u. S. Laws so that those websites can responsibly take down infringing content, but the lack of collaboration and effective clab ragsz is at the the heart of a lot of the current challenges. The law as it currently stands incentivizes collaboration and has produced a great deal of collaboration between platforms and contentproducing companies and those that represent them. I would respectfully disagree with that. And i respectfully appreciate your comment, mr. Henley. Im speaking from my own personal experience on this one, as well. I have had conversations personally when i was representing a trades association that protected the rights of Large Software companies where i reached out to a foreign jurisdiction that doesnt have u. S. Style rules and we talked about the challenges we were facing and even though the rules did not require them to implement a takedown process. Through working with them we were able to assist our members to effectively police their rights on a site, a collection of sites that were causing huge problems for them. So my suggestion here is that we think very carefully because just shifting the burdens to platforms from rights holders, when were talking about the scale that i will acknowledge, mr. Henley is 100 dead on. Its huge and growing every single day the volume of the material posted online. The overwhelming majority of it happens to be legal and the platforms with all their technology cannot decide and produce reliable, fair, use analysis. They do not know how a particular piece of music is licensed and there are certainly cases where rights holders are not as careful as perhaps umg and mr. Henley and other representatives might be and they make copyright claims that arent in good faith in an attempt to take down fair use copyrights and there is a very delicate balance in the system and there are a lot of factors that contribute to making it better and first and foremost increased dialogue is an important part. There are technological pieces that are in play and have improved greatly over the last several years and the oldfashioned dialogue and working with one another to understand the rapidly changing problems is a really, really important first step. Thank you, mr. Preston, if you might and then mr. Hanson and then ill turn to senator blumenthal for his questions. Thank you, senator. The internet platforms collaborate with only a few of the Largest Companies in the country and in a desolateory way. They do not collaborate with millions of other writers and creators. Many, many, many authors i know of the Authors Guild have tried in many ways to engage with these large internet platforms like google and ebay and so forth. It is an absolutely frustrating experience because these platforms simply are not capable of engaging with small creators and businesses. To answer your second question, really what were asking for is for notice and stay down. It simply means that once an isb has been fairly informed that its pirated content it has to keep that stolen title from being reposted. If you own a pawn shop and the cops come and take away a stolen bracelet and then the next week the same bracelet comes in a week later to be sold you cant just put it up for sale again. So thats all were asking, that once an isp has been informed in a proper and legal way if something is stolen property it stops allowing the sale of it. The other side of this coin is if the same person in a pawn shop brings in multiple stolen items repeatedly, the pawn shop owner has an obligation to stop dealing with that person. So if a website is hosted by an isp or in the example of google if it is responding to search requests and sending people to that website and that website has received thousands and thousands of takedown notices then the isp should stop dealing with that website, and ill give you an example. Theres a notorious piracy website that google was sending people to, just freezing and anyone typing free books or whatever, this website had received according to a study by new york university, over 40,000 takedown notices and still google was indexing that website right at the top of its search page. It wasnt until the authors went and said hey, whats going on here . You have 40,000 takedown notices, this is a notorious website and google demoted that website and lower into the search function. It didnt index it, it just demoted it. All were asking is for isps to make a good faith effort to keep that stolen property from being fenced again and again and again on their platforms. Thank you. Briefly, mr. Hanson, if youve got something to add to that because i know senator blumenthal has waited quite a while to ask impea. Yes. Ill come in briefly as a Service Provider and the takedown notices weve received over the years. Just on average to give you a sense of what we see over the past over this year. Were averaging Something Like 380 takedown notices a month which is not a significant number considering the size of people and the volume of traffic that traverses our network. Weve seen that number decline pretty dramatically over the years and a lot of that, a lot of the takedown requests that used to be based on students uploading popular media to the internet. A Major Driving factor in reducing that number has been not really copyright innovations, but licensing alternatives where content has been made available at reasonable prices through reasonable means where students are able to purchase subscriptions, netflix, hulu, spotify, those sortses of thin and the licensing alternatives through alternative rates and reasonable means is a driver that would have more of an impact in almost anything where there is a sort of authoritative approach to start things rather than providing legitimate means through which consumers can obtain access to content. Thank you. Thank you to the panel and thank you to senator blumenthal for his patience. Thank you. Thank you to the Ranking Member, senator coops and to our chairman, senator tellis for having this very, very important hearing and i will just say right at the outset, this hearing is extraordinarily consequential because it involves a principle and the principle is accountability. The dmca and the Community Decency act, section 230, accord in effect a broad immunity, and both seem to me to be in need to be in some kind of reform. Now i strongly oppose the president s executive order on executive 230. I think it is meant to intimidate and suppress free speech. Its illegal. I have supported narrow and targeted reforms to section 230 that essentially impose accountability for sex trafficking and other abuses where it has a responsibility and narrowly impose legal responsibility that would be imposed by measures to reform it, and so, for example, it is sch a measure to stop one of the more sickening abuses in our society which is child abuse and its not a partisan issue. That measure is supported by a Bipartisan Group of us, and here it seems to me that accountability is also important. Now i heard a reference earlier to oldfashioned collaboration. It seems to me that oldfashioned collaboration is for an oldfashioned process that no longer is appropriate to the present technology and the threats to rights that are in peril by the lack of a accountability and enforcement. My question to the panel is is there anyone on this panel that thinks the status quo is absolutely okay, no need for improvement and should be just let alone . And i hear silence, so we conclude that everybody on this panel thinks that some kind of improvement is warranted. Excuse me, senator blumenthal, my apologies with my mute button. Domestic law needs to change in order to address a problem that is largely overseas. So you just want to leave the system as it is . The dmca . Yes, senator, i think the dmca is work as it intended to. It creates a critical balance against all stakeholders involved and the current incentives in the system exist in a way and are handled in a way that is consistent with what senator leahy and senator hatch presumably had in mind. It funks vections very effectiv and that collaboration oldfashioned i meant in the sense that its not technological and the importance of that collaboration is that as technological change on the piracy side of the equation which happens very, very rapidly and much more rapidly than any change. Collaboration between rights holders and platforms where those right holders are founding infringement materials allows for a quicker response than might otherwise occur. The dnc does not prohibit that. It encourages that. Let me just say because im about to run out of time. That argument is absolutely belied by the reports that ive heard from independent artists in connecticut that are forced to scour youtube and other platforms searching for infringements. Its not collaborative from their standpoint. It sounds like a fulltime effort on their part and the burden is on them. So rightsholders are effectively charged with monitoring the entire internet for infringements on their copyrights and that burden is especially problematic for independent artists who are more vulnerable to rightsinfringing activities. So i think that the dismissing of these complaints and it may not be in your personal case, but it is in others ignores a very pressing problem that we need to address. Thanks. Senator coops . Thank you very much. Senator blumenthal. If i could, ill ask two or three more specific questions and i understand the chairman is on his way back and we will soon introduce the second panel. You dont want me to introduce the second panel. Okay. If i could, mr. Boroya, i understand the critical importance of fostering innovation in the internet and the ways in which the dramatic growth in the internet has brought benefits to our country and community, but i am also concerned that in some ways some of our most Profitable Companies have found success at the expense of the smallest members of our Creative Community. In your view, given that theres hundred of hours of content uploaded every minute, how can it how can smaller artists possibly be expected to police this content and shouldnt some of our largest and most sophisticated companies shoulder some of the responsibility for the infringing material thats being monetized on their platforms . Thank you for the question, senator coons. Collaboration is essential and pooling of resources is essential and there were letters that were entered into the record today by a number of organizations and mr. Preston represents an organization that represents a large number of independent artisan creators and writers. Pooling of resources to deal with the scale of global piracy is the only effective way to deal with the scale of global piracy. Putting the burden on any one of these platforms and certainly there are large ones with a fair amount of resources and those platforms have all reached out and will continue to reach out to the Creative Community and identify more effect of ways to assist with the challenge and the collaboration is essential both so that platforms understand the challenges that creators are facing, but the pooling of resources on the side of the creator so that they can Leverage Technology and identify software and techniques and use application protocol interfaces to more quickly identify things and send takedown notices and track responses to takedown notices are all things that can help with the scaling prop. Im not traying to suggest that the concerns raised by independent artists are in any way, shape or form, if i were a writer or musician i would be facing those same things, and i know people facing those challenges and until there are resources and sdcale the respone to this Global Challenge it will continue to be a game of whack a mole and thats not something on the platform side wants. Nobody on the platform wants piracy on the platforms and they dont want piracy on the platforms and they dont need that and they have legitimate businesses and the overwhelming majority of content on the platforms has been and remains legal content. Thank you very much. Thank you to the panel. Back to our chairman. I want to again, thank everyone for participating in the first panel. Mr. Henley, all of the witnesses, i think youve given us very important information. I think, mr. Henley mentioned in his opening comment about the dramatic reduction and compensation, a creator or an artist thats likely to receive in the age of digital piracy, and i think we should recognize the risk that that runs of decimating the number of people who are willing to take the time and effort to create something that we all benefit from. Thats why i believe that we have to look at reasonable reforms and i was glad to hear as i went to vote and im sorry i had to step out for a minute that as senator blumenthal also agrees, we have a reason to take a look at things and modernize them. I have to believe in a world of technology that we live in today where many of these same platforms have the technology to virtually anticipate the next song you want to hear or the next thing you want to buy that there is a way for us to come up with something thats sustainable, not disruptive and helpful to our creators and i, for one, continue to work toward a positive end and i appreciate my colleagues who seem to be of the same mind. I want to thank the first panel for being here today and testifying and mr. Henley, thank you for all of the memories youve created and well transition to our next panel which digitally is a little bit easier. I can begin doing the announcements. Abigail re Abigail Reeves is ip counsel supporting stardust as an engine for Economic Growth and she joined from the law firm of Latham Watkins where she worked as an associate for four years following a clerkship on the u. S. Court of appeals for the federal circuit. He is a modern Classical Music and film composer whose recent works include the original orchestral score for the ballet casanova and the score for the documentary film look and see, a portrait of Wendell Barry and whose piece was used as the recurring love theme in the tv show glee. Miss Meredith Rose is a policy counsel at Public Knowledge which works on behalf of the public with open internet and creative works. Her portfolio focuses on copyright, dmca and property reform among other information policy fields. Mr. Jeff sedlick is an editorial and fine art photographer whose clients include nike, fedex, sony, at t and mr. Sedlick is a professional at the arts Center College of design in pasadena, california and is the president and ceo of the plus coalition, a group working to simplify and facilitate the communication and management of image rights. Thank you all for joining today. We will start with miss reeves testimony. Chairman, Ranking Member coons, thank you for inviting me to testify on the value of section 512 for startups, Smaller Technology companies and the users and creators who rely on them. I first want to echo the other witnesses and voices around the country, while section 512 is fundamental to startups and their experiences are an essential component of congress conversation on this topic, we recognize that there are far more pressing issues on peoples minds today and we Hope Congress will meaningfully take up a more important conversation about inequality and injustice in this country, and i am heartened by your remarks on this matter earlier in the session. Engine is a nonprofit that bridges the gap between policymakers and startups across the country through research, policy analysis and advocacy. 512 sets up a false dichotomy of copyright stakeholders. Nearly 17 million americans earned a collective 6. 8 billion in 2017 by posting their personal creations on just nine internet platforms. Technology has democratized creativity and these and other small platforms have created entirely new ways for independent creators to reach fans and customers earning far in excess of what those impressive numbers suggest. Recent, ven recent events have highlighted the ecosystem. During the pandemic and as all of us are gathering and sharing news, working, learning, shopping and currently testifying from home, we are more reliant than ever on platforms that would not exist, but for the dmca. Overall, section 512 is working well. In 1998 congress knew that osps would have certainty and they would not be automatically liable for when their users were used for copyright infringement. Today startups need the same certainty. Changing the dmca even in ways that might seem minor would shift the ground underneath todays startups. For example, imposing a duty to monitor based on the reasonableness standard would make litigation even more expensive. It can cost half a Million Dollars just to complete discovery and indeed, the enormous cost of litigation with the video sharing startup into bankruptcy even though the company ultimately won its cases because startups would not be able to prove that their practices are reasonable so that they would have little value. The subcommittee posts three questions for this hearing. First, regarding the notice and takedown framework it is largely working well, with the significant abuse of the system and no meaningful opportunities to curtail that. As the professor previously explained most have very littlen fringement or claims of infringement. For example, tumblr, a multimedia site with half a million blogs in the first half of 2019 received fewer than 5,000 takedown orders and received more than 1,000 of a percent of its users in response. Forcing those osps to host all of the content they host would not catch much, if any additional infringement and would have the extent. Moreover, they lack infringement. Rights holders on the other hand know what their copyrighted works are, and what they want resolved. While section 512 has been successful, imupon proer takedown notices are a very real problem and one astonishing example, a musician posted himself posting a Public Domain by bach and refused to back down when the musician disputed sonys obviously incorrect claim. It is well documented that senders use section 512 to hurt competitors or hurt content they do not right. Users who receive bad faith notices can dispute them and have to wait 10 to 14 days, for an etsy seller, the effects can be devastating. While notice and takedown does the safe harbor eligibility in the testimony. Turning to the thuird question,i am posing an affirmative duty to follow, it would create new costs and risks that startups starting to thin margins would be unable to bear. They monitor many aspects of the infringement monitors startups do not. Existing tools have high error rates, but for many types of content there are no filters and technology cannot address factspecific infringement. Importantly, these filters are also out of reach for most startups. Developing them costs magnitude more than a startup can include and licensing off the shelf filters are equally out of range. To start up, a founder in South Carolina told me that they were handled for online content would be one of the biggest liabilities for his company. He aptly explained that a large shift in policy might not have a Significant Impact on companies that can accommodate change and can result in the negative impact with entrepreneurs in Small Businesses. Thank you again for inviting me to testify today, and we know your review of the dnca will continue to receive throughout the year. Thank you, miss reeves, mr. Mosey . My name is kerry mosey, i am a composer. I want to thank members tillis and coons about a topic that affects my livelihood and the lives of all professional creatives and the dnca. I make my living as a composer and every day i realize how broken the dnca is. People dont know my name. Im just a working composer. My story and experiences wouldnt mean as much today if not for the fact that in these hearings i am allowed to stand shoulder to shoulder with someone like don henley. His name lends credibility to us all and i am so proud they get to make my statements today alongside of his. The opportunity to possibly make a small difference here is very important to me and thats why im here. So before explaining how broken the dmca is, let me give you some context for my remarks. I am one of the very few and very lucky independent artists who has access to youtubes content i. D. System and most of my experience with notice and takedown has been on youtube. Content i. D. Has been a core piece of the licensing business and its a technology i use to reveal thefts of my music on youtube. Honestly, this is why im nervous about speaking out today because i fear retaliation by youtube and google. I am concerned that they might take content i. D. Away from me erasing these concerns publicly. Right now i am seven years into utilizing that Amazing Technology to locate uses of my music on youtube and to date it has a total of approximately 110,000 videos that use my music without permission. Let me be clear, these are not cute little kitten videos, these are commercial uses of my music for car companies, hotel chains, fortune 500 companies, Pharma Companies and dozens of International Series that use my music in them as underscore. When i discover these uses i issue dmca takedowns against them. And this is where the broken part of the dmca process revealed itself. After issuing takedowns i would receive false counter notifications from these companies through youtube. In every case the counter notification said that the uploaders use of my music was a fair use under u. S. Copyright law and in 100 of these counter notifications that assertion was false. So how did these takedowns usually play out . Shortly after issuing a takedown i received an email from youtube saying the user has filed a counter notification and i have ten days in which to file a lawsuit against the uploader or else youtube would reinstate that video. If i do not file that lawsuit within that tenday period the uploader and youtube can then continue to display and monetize that video that still has my music in it. I have then lost that battle times 110,000. Im not a corporation with a staff of lawyers who can File Lawsuits for me. Im just a guy. I am a Small Business of one person. Copyright law tells me i have the right of ownership to the music i create, but when i dont have a legal remedy when my work is stolen do i really have that right . This is the situation that composers like me are in. The dmca gives me remedy filing lawsuits that isnt really a remedy. There is no remedy for me. I am a tiny david in a sea of tech goliaths like youtube, google, vimeo and facebook. The dmca safe harbors have worked and because the likelihood that an independent artist like me will be able to sue them is exactly 0 . The mental and emotional toll that it has taken on me having to spend time every single day for seven years now dealing with tens of thousands of individual thefts of my work and trying to resolve them is extreme. Those are hours i could have spent making music and i never know what creativity was lost while policing those thefts. Senators of the ip subcommittee to ask members of my United States senate to fix a broken law, and thats what im asking. Im asking that you revise the dmca to help individuals like me who have been left with no rights or remedies. I understand that todays Panel Includes Tech Companies and Digital Service representatives who assure us that the system is working. I challenge them to consider the maddening, routine experience i have described here and to tell me with a straight face that the system is working. I am just one of hundreds of thousands who go through this every day. Artists of all socioeconomic backgrounds and not just the famous ones. If they want to truly partner in the online space they need to face this reality and dedicate themselves to fixing this problem. Senators, please realize there are many tiny davids like me who need the governments help protectioni protecting their work for holding the goliaths accountable for what they have benefited from impunity. We need practical remedies when our work are infringed. If they wont voluntarily help those like me then congress should force them to. I am here to ask for your help. Please help me. Thank you for letting me tell my story. Thank you. Miss rose . Chairman tillis, Ranking Member coons and members of the committee, thank you for inviting to testify today albeit from an appropriate social distance on this important topic. First i would like to acknowledge protesters on the streets and the smallest fraction of names that must be said, george floyd, breonna taylor, Ahmaud Arberry and divorced from what is going in americas streets. This is not about content versus tech. I am here to speak about how section 512 impacts the more than 229 million american a documents who use the internet as more than just a delivery mechanism for copyrighted content. They use it to pay bills, to work, to socialize and receive health care and theyre missing from the Copyright Office 512 report and theyre missing from the procedures that govern their rights and too often theyre missing from the debate on capitol hill. I am thankful to be here representing them today. Reforming the system requires that we acknowledge the ways in which it breaks down. In particular, i will address three problems for users speech. Bad dmca notices, short comes inial in al go rhythmic enforcement and without due process remove the familys access to broadband. First, we must acknowledge that bad dmca takedown notices are real, that they have a variety of causes and that they happen at an enormous scale. It erases speech from the internet for up to two weeks without meaningful site even when contested. The extraordinary power means it comes with a long and thoroughly documented history of weaponization. One exhaustive study looks as 108 million notices and onethird of them were problematic and 4. 5 million of them were fundamentally flawed. While they range fromm al go rhythmic takedown incomplete or errorfilled notices can make it impossible for platforms to identify the works involved and search and notice bots can and have disrupted broadcasts. Some stakeholders, however, still insist on faster takedowns with fewer safeguards and more potential liability for any platform that intends to filter out malicious notices and asking for greater power and fewer safeguards is akin to guarding a tank and asking for a nuke. Second, we must understand the private enforcement mechanism such as identification that has grown up atop section 512. These private solutions sound good in theory, but the reality of their implementation is messy and full of difficult Design Choices. Because they operate automatically, these algorithms can instantaneously remove speech that can otherwise be political, or news worth pep policymakers must grapple with what users alike have under stood for ages and the balance of those in practice are less by the contours of law than by the aggregate result of technological limitations, financial incentives and design choi choices with no clear right or wrong answers. I want to address the elephant in the room and that is Broadband Access and we should not permit provisions of law that allow third party, private actors to terminate a persons Internet Access unilaterally and without a whiff of due process. There are several bills currently before congress to expand Broadband Access, yet some stakeholders insist that they need more power, not less, to force an isp to disconnect its customers based on pure ak is accusations of copyright infringement. They operated over the telephone network, being dropped by your isp meant uninstalling America Online and installing any of the hundreds competitive options that were available. In 2020 isps control the Software Layer and the physical connection into your home and for more than 100 million americans living in home service by only one broadband provider, being disconnected means losing access to the internet in its entirety. The punishment is wildly disproportionate to the accused, not even adjudicated offense. We are at a moment of political, economic and social upheaval. Americans are in the streets, in their homes and all of the time they are online. They are debating and documenting acrossed the ideological divides. The internet is how we bear witness and it is how we see with the hope of understanding those whose experiences, whose struggles are not our own. It is how men americans were first exposed to the tangible reality of Police Brutality and systematic oppression. It has held the work of Community Activist is simplified and how injustice is brought to the eyes of the world. It must keep the needs of 229 million voices and their ability to speak at front of mine. Thank you and i look forward to your questions. Thank you, mr. Sedlick. Chairman tillis and Ranking Member coombs, tough for the opportunity to testify today on section 512. My name is jeffrey sedlick. Ive been a professional photographer for 35 years and the author of thousands of copyrighted photographs. I make a living creating and licensing photographs to appear in all manner of media. The photographs are protected under u. S. Copyright law at least in theory. In reality my photographs receive very little protection because of the rapid infringement of my work that is knowingly permitted by online Service Providers on their platforms and web sites. Instead of using readily available copyright infringement, Service Providers hide in the safe harbor of 512 ignoring illegal activity allowing infringers to infringe, unless and until i submit a takedown notice. I am forced to dedicate my days and nights to notify infringements and making screen shots and collecting hundreds of thousands of infringement urls, combing through obscure website menus that are different on every site to find dmca agent information and drafting and submitting takedown notice to responding to a name and necessary delayed tactics for Service Providers. Once the infringement is taken down it will return often on the same day, providers uniformly fail to effectively implement and enforce repeat infringe policies. Enforcing rights under the dmca is an Impossible Task and not just for me, and for my fellow creators across this nation. Most visual artists operate as microbusinesses often with no employees and like other creators, in order to feed my family i must generate revenue by creating and licensing new works and in an attempt to license new works i am forced to compete with hundreds of thousands of licensed Unpaid Service works on Service Provider platforms and websites. Essentially competing with my own works. If i dont enforce my copyrights my work has no value and my business is not sustainable, but if i dedicate the time and, f t effort, i have no time left to create new works. This is an untenable situation, one that i and innumerable others are forced to confront on a daily basis. Certainly, this is not the effective Ballot System to enact the dmca. The fact that millions of takedown notices issued each day is not a sign of success. It is the sign of an unbalanced system under strain and the verge of failure if not beyond. Ranking member coons first, revise and clarify the knowledge requirements recognizing the Service Providers right and ability to deeming that willful blindness and negligent blindness are the equivalent of actual knowledge. Second, encourage Service Providers to collaborate with creators ands a creators and other stake holder groups available for voluntary use by creators and rights holders. Image Recognition Technology is readily available, scalable, and highly accurate and perfectly suited for the task. In addition, Service Providers should be required to search embedded meta data to identify infringing works and required that upon receipt of a representative list of links to infringing material Service Providers must employ available technologies to identify not only representative examples, but all other existing infringements of a copy righted work. Required that the takedown procedure and requirement, define a repeat infringer as one who receives two or more takedown notices, that they enforce the repeat infringer policy. Recognize embedded meta data as standard technical measures that providers maintain data in all files uploaded to their platforms as a condition of eligibility. They establish and maintain a list of additional standard technical measures. Either wave the advanced registration requirement for filing infringement claims in response to a 512 counter notice period, and the standard copyright registration application processing periods. Prohibit Service Providers for publishing a creators name, street address and email address to stop the Current Practice by Service Provides and shaming creators and threatening their privacy and security and clarify the infringement of the storage has exclusive rights to display, distribute, perform and create derivative works under section 506. They must provide the identity without resorting to file a legal action. Lastly, as a condition of eligibility require Service Providers to allow rightsholders to conduct an Image Recognition search against their databases of uploaded works. In addition, i agree with and recommend the Solutions Proposed in the section 512 report issued by the Copyright Office. I make these suggestions on behalf of the American Photographic artist and the corrective rights licensing and the media photographers and Digital Media licensing association, the photographers association, and the plus coalition and the professional photographers of america. In closing i thank the subcommittee members for your efforts to approve the cope right act for the opportunity to taking my testimony today. Thank you. Thank you and thanks to all of the witnesses for working with us remotely. I think your testimony was very helpful, all of you, but miss reeves and mr. Musy and mr. Sedlick, this is a question id like you all to respond to. When you were talking you were discussing how we could create barriers to entry that could cause either businesses already in place to go out of business or others just not decide to go down this path because of the lack of certainty. I do believe uncertainty was what drove the original dmca and it gave rise to a lot of success stories, but i was also i started at a hightech startup or i was at a hightech Startup Company in the mid80s and it was more in the realm of businesses that you were speaking to, but im also trying to find a way to balance that against the Startup Community of creators. I was thinking when mr. Sedlick and mr. Mosey were speaking that we could have a whole generation of creators that could take a look at the threat of their lifes work, never bearing fruit for themselves or their families and the whole emergence of the internet and the content that were seeing today is largely based on creative works that people want to see and share. So can you see the argument that we have an economic ecosystem on either side of this argument whose concerns are not quite being addressed if youre in the Creator Community and that that just resisting any change seems to only benefit a segment thats done relatively well at the expense of an population, that every day my office gets reports of those that we heard from mr. Preston and mr. Muzdy. You see no path of striking a balance as we move forward as revising and modifying section 512. Thank you for the question, senator tillis. I would like to point to some of the data i put in my report. What we experienced from the companies we work with first of all is that most osps experience extraordinary small amount of infringement. As professor said in one of the earlier hearings he convened an artisanal number. Forcing those platforms that post a lot of original Creative Content to screen all of that Creative Content would be untenable burden and it would mean they couldnt exist and serve those creative communities. But in addition, theyre really exciting new avenues that startups and osps have been able to explore to really support a very robust, creative economy. Patrion in the last seven years for 150,000 creators has paid out 1 billion just in the past 30 days band camp paid artists on its platform 14 million and over the laugh of band camp has paid half a billion to its creators. Etsy has a community of over 2. 5 million active sellers. And i could go on and give individual stories. There are so many ways in which Group Platforms like red bubble and band camp and sound cloud and tumbler, artists previously not been able to find a voice, to find fans and audience are now able to devote themselves to their craft and to find ways to reach their audience and to monetize that. And all that wouldnt have been possible because these platforms couldnt existed but for the dmc. Mr. Mozy and mr. Sedlec, lets say you were a few years younger and you were weighing your options on ways that you were going to provide for yourself and your family and if you knew now if you knew then what you know now about the daily challenges, how would that have affected you on career choices you would have made back then . Senator, i will admit that ive said a few times recently i should have just gone to med school. But i want to be clear about my position that im i was 39 when i was finally able to leave the business side of the music business. Working in rights clearance and Business Affairs and these kind of things. To make a living at being a fulltime composer. When you write, underscore and instrumental music, thats a pretty niche thing. Its not like being a pop star. By the same token, its that kind of music that finds its way into unlicensed uses in videos, and you get commercials use you get commercial entities using your music without permission and then saying, you should be lucky that we picked yours. I would have preferred a license. I wanted to be a composer since i was 7 years old and saw star wars in the theater. And my mom told me that writing the music for the movie is a job that someone has. So im much older than 7 now. Im an optimist. I do think occasionally about going to med school, im in this game for the long haul. Im a composer. I love what i do. And im one of the fortunate few that gets to make a living at it. I try not to complain too much. Before i turn to senator coons, senator, you have anything to add . I do. If i was a young if i was a teen looking at what i was going to be doing, i would select being a photographer but perhaps not a professional photographer. I might have gone to law school and run for the senate and be sitting next to you attempting to fix mistakes in the 512. I am a teacher at the arts inner college of design and have been for 25 years. These are some of the most talented, Young Artists i have ever seen or met. They have slim to none chance at success in the professional world because out of the gate all of their works, as soon as they post them online, will be taken, will be used in competition with their efforts to earn a living and theres little to anything they can do about that at this point until 512 is revised. Dont share that in any of your classroom conversation yet. Hopefully we can come up with some fixes to give them help. That was a fairly forceful conclusion as someone who imagined myself once capable of creativity but instead did go to law school and did end up as a senator, i will take your point to heart. If i might briefly because this has been a two and a half hour hearing at this point, ms. Reaves, just be a little more specific about the challenges with policing copyright infridgement for Startup Company and do you think that industry standardization would actually alleviate that burden . Thank you for the question, senator. So to reiterate for so many of the companies that we work with and small platforms across the country, they just dont see that much infringement. So any mandatory imposition of here is what you have to do and here is how you want to do is going to impose a burden on those companies. Because theres just not that much infringement on the platform is a burden that wont catch much additional infringement. And so your second question in terms of standardization, my goal in a paper attached to my written remarks the limitations of filtering technology, while there have been efforts to auto mate and use algorithms to try detect infringements those are imperfect. They have high plus positive rates but very importantly a lot of tools just do not exist. For example, for images printed on physical products. For a platform that hosts multiple media work there would be a need to filter and screen for all different types of content, many of those tools just dont exist. Especially startups are coming up with new ideas, they would have to create tools to screen for whatever the next idea is. Thank you. Ms. Rose, ive heard complaints about abusive takedown notices and counternotices, but litigation is a very costly and time consuming way to resolve these disputes. Should we be exploring an alternative dispute resolution process for those sorts of situations . Thank you for the question. I believe that that is an entirely fair avenue. I think the question would be around the sort of inevitable Design Choices of what that venue would look like. Our concern of the section 512 study is they tied that to a particular piece of legislation, which is much broader and more complex than simply resolving dmca notices and counternotices. So it depends entirely on the execution, but i think in theory theres a lot of merit to the idea. Thank you. Thank you to the panel. Thank you to the chairman. I appreciate your persistent, enthusiastic engagement in exploring dmca and look forward in finding a way to move forward together. Thank you, senator. Thank you for being a part of what i believe is one of the more extensive efforts for any legislation thats moved through this congress to get voices on both sides heard. Thanks again to all the witnesses who participated today in the hearing and especially for senator blumenthal and Ranking Member koons able to come here in person. I thought it was an enlightening discussion and its given me a lot to think about and my staff have been taking copious notes. We reserve the right to reach out to you and ms. Rose follow up on your opinion of the case act and whether that can serve as a basis for anything going forward. I think that weve heard today, though, i really do believe it reenforces what i said at the beginning of the hearing. As we redesign the notice and takedown system, we have to do so in a way that acknowledges the realities of the scale that weve experienced today, which are order of magnitude beyond what the dmca possibly anticipated. We have to find a path forward that allows copyright owners to have it quickly taken down and for that material to stay down where its clearly in violation. But we also have to make sure any new notice and state owned system doesnt unduly burden businesses or individual consumers because we want the innovation and creativity that comes from that. Im not sure what it looks like at the moment. But thats something im going to be working on with my colleague and Ranking Member senator coons and move forward to our reformed discussion draft. Thank you all for participating in the hearing. Please stay healthy and pray for those going through difficult times these days. This hearing is adjourned. Tonight on the communicators, federal trade commissioner rebecca slaughter is interviewed by leah nylen antitrust reporter. What advice do you have for parents who may have concerns about their kids privacy online in this new world of Online Learning . We talk a lot. And we should talk a lot about Digital Divide issues in terms of who has Broadband Access and kids who have to sit in parking lots of libraries and stores in order to get online for school. But im also worried about the ways in which the Digital Divide exacerbates privacy gaps. Where better off children from wealthier backgrounds can pay for privacy protective services or more access to things and lower income kids have to pay with their privacy. Federal trade commissioner rebecca slaughter tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on the communicators on cspan2. Weeknights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. Tonight, a look back at the 1960 president ial elections with the Nixon Kennedy debates. The firstever televised president ial debates. Barbara perry at the Miller Center talks about how the debates came to be. The issues, the candidates and how the debates created public expectations for later president ial campaigns. Watch tonight beginning at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Enjoy American History tv this week and every weekend on cspan3. The first president ial debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President joe biden is tuesday night at 9 00 p. M. Eastern from cleveland. Watch live on cspan. Biden is recklessly campaigning against this vaccine. Hes campaigned its really reckless. And all it is for political reasons. Its political reasons. Biden, his whole deal is catastrophic shutdown. Again, in his own words, recorded by bob woodward, the president knew back in february that this was an extremely dangerous communicable bz. Think about it. How many people, how many empty chairs around those dinner tables because of his negligence and selfishness . Watch the first president ial debate live from cleveland tuesday night on cspan. Stream live or on demand at cspan. Org debates or listen live on the cspan radio app. Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham announced the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett will begin monday october 12th with opening statements. Then on tuesday, the 13th, the nominee begins taking questions from committee members. Chairman graham says he expects the hearing will take three or four days. You can watch live coverage everyday of Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hear at cspan, online at cspan. Org or listen live on our free radio app. Chad wolf has been acting Homeland Security secretary since november of last year. President trump nominated him to officially fill the seat and last week the senate Homeland Security Committee Held a confirmation hearing
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