Reflection Question#1– What is Christina Aguilera and the other musicians asking theU.S. government to do and explain why?
Reflection Question #2– Describe your opinion on this issue and mention if you agree ordisagree with the musicians as to what they are asking?
Reflection Question #3– Give your opinion on --- “Whose job is it to police copyrightinfringement?”
“The musicindustry is begging the US government to change its copyright laws”By Jamieson Cox on April 1, 2016
Christina Aguilera, Katy Perry, deadmau5, and dozens of othermusicians are asking the US government to revamp the DigitalMillennium Copyright act (DMCA), the piece of law that governsaccess to copyrighted work on the internet. Musicians, managers,and "creators" from across the industry co-signed petitions sent tothe US Copyright Office arguing that tech companies — think YouTubeand Tumblr, sites with vast reserves of content that infringes onsome copyright — have "grown and generated huge profits" on thebacks of material that's illegally hosted.
"The growth andsupport of technology companies should not be at the expense ofartists and songwriters," reads the letter signed by Aguilera,Perry, and their peers. "The tech companies who benefit from theDMCA today were not the intended protectorate when it was signedinto law two decades ago."
Whose job is it topolice copyright infringement?
This is a complicated issue, but you can boil it down to one keyquestion: whose job is it to police the appearance of copyrightedmaterial where it doesn't belong? When the DMCA was created in1998, it was much easier for artists and labels to handle isolatedincidents of copyright infringement using the act's"notice-and-takedown" system. (It's self-explanatory: the copyrightowner files a notice of infringement, it's processed, and theoffending post is taken down.)
It's a lot harder to police the internet c. 2016. It's flooded withnew, potentially infringing material every second, and the industrythe notice-and-takedown system isn't responsive enough to helpmusicians' work retain its value. It's also noting that sites likeYouTube have thrived on the "copyright black market," earningmillions of clicks and views from content sitting in the grey areabetween posting and takedown. The sites counter by arguing they'vegiven the labels the tools they need (like YouTube's Content IDsystem) to make DMCA takedowns faster and more effective.
It's unclear exactly what impact the industry's coordinatedresponse will have on the status of the DMCA. Bloomberg notes thatthe US Copyright Office doesn't have the power to directly changethe DMCA; it can recommend a set of changes to a subcommitteetasked with reviewing contemporary copyright law, but that's aboutit. If you take the industry's word for it, that change needs tohappen fast, because the status quo is endangering the future ofmusic. "The existing laws — and their interpretation by judges —threaten the continued viability of songwriters and recordingartists to survive from the creation of music," reads themusicians' letter. "The next generation of creators may be silencedif the economics don't justify a career in the music industry."
