Compare and Contrast Approaches to the DMCA

Mike Masnick at Techdirt published two stories this past week that give an interesting comparison in approaches to handling DMCA takedown notices. First, Google came out with its "how we fighr piracy" report.

As Masnick notes, there's not much new in here. He frames it as Google trying to "appease" Hollywood and notes that the studios have done a shit-poor job at managing how their content ranks in search results. Apparently SEO still stands for Somebody Else Ownsit at the big studios.

Google's proposal to help with this is to include DMCA takedown notices in its rankings - at its crudest form, such a policy would cause sites for which Google gets notices to be lowered in the rankings. Unfortunately, the obvious consequent of this is just to encourage a further barrage of bogus takedown notices. Since the costs are low and the effect significant, Google may be setting up perverse incentives that allow its search results to be distorted by anyone with an active enough legal department.

Compare and contrast with the latest DMCA policies from github, the popular online repository for source code and development projects. Github is creating a policy that encourages discussion and limits effects: it will notify people before takedowns happen, and it will limit blocked material to things that are specifically identified, which is very important in a coding world where people branch, build on top of, and reuse entire source trees. To use a physical analogy, github's policy is like cutting down one or a few trees that specifically need removal, rather than clearcutting whole stands.

The thing that I notice in common between Google's and github's approaches, is that both organizations are working toward more transparency. Each has evolving policies, and each is taking different steps to keep people aware but in general they seem to share the value that knowledge of what's going on is important to all parties. That is something I'd like to see emulated everywhere.