A 1998 FEDERAL LAW meant to combat digital piracy is increasingly being used to challenge free speech online

Censorship vs. Copyright Laws

A 1998 FEDERAL LAW meant to combat digital piracy is increasingly being used to challenge free speech online.

Free-speech advocates worry that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act effectively gives powerful copyright holders the

ability to push parodies, criticisms and unpopular viewpoints to the fringes or off the internet.

In one recent case, the search engine Google removed links to a Norwegian site that criticizes the Church of Scientology

International after the organization complained of copyright violations.

By law, Internet services like Google have no obligation to actively monitor and police their networks for copyright violations.

But they must promptly take down any items upon notice from a copyright holder - or lose immunity protection from copyright

lawsuits.

After the dispute became public, Google restored a link to the criticism site's home page but not inner links where

criticisms and excerpts appear. Concerns remain that others may get the idea that they, too, could use the law to silence critics.

Already, rival search engine Ask Jeeves saw a jump in removal requests "from virtually zero to getting a few" in recent weeks.
It is a challenge to maintain credibility when you can not engage in censorship, but must also comply" with the law.

Even if silencing critics is not the intent, free- speech proponents believe that censorship happens because of the pressure

service providers receive to remove materials and links. In a scramble over liability, companies remove such material before

having it determined as "fair use" by a court of law. And because requests are growing, these removals tend to become

permanent because it takes knowledge, time and money to fight against this kind of censorship.

People who are engaging in what you might describe as parody and fair use need to be willing to defend their rights, and that's expensive. Private individuals are usually not always willing to do that.

Most of the complaints about the 1998 copyright law have instead been over a separate section that makes it a crime to defeat

copy-protection mechanisms. That provision has prompted free-speech concerns as well, with researchers

saying they can't publicize flaws in encryption programs.

Movie studios have cited the immunity clause when targeting service providers whose customers trade movies over file-sharing networks, while publishers have stopped books scanned and posted online. News organizations have gone

after their articles posted on other Web sites.

The copyright holder may never intend to follow through with a lawsuit, but many pressure service providers anyhow.

Why wouldn't they? It doesn't cost you to try.