Google has disclosed some interesting facts in their submission to the New Zealand government regarding take-down-notices.
The Kiwi goverment tried to pass a "one-strike" law: an ISP would be obliged to terminate the Internet connection of a user when a copyright had been violated. I.e. illegal filesharing of content. The most interesting part was that only a notice by a copyrightholder would be enough to start this process of penalizing a customer.
A similar process is well known in the USA: copyright holders can send a take-down-notice to Youtube (for example) when copyrighted material is made public on Youtube without permission. So Google (Youtube's parent) has a lot of experience with the practice of this proposed self-regulation.
In its submission, Google notes that more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.
It would be naive to underestimate the possibilities of abuse or a rule.
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