A pragmatic look at copyright’s overreach

“Copyright today is a public choice fiasco” (p 17) Imagine the ordeal of a British college student extradited to the US on alleged charges of criminal copyright infringement. Such was the ignominy that Richard O’Dwyer was subjected to in the US, even though it was unlikely that he could have been convicted under British laws.1 He was indicted for operating a link website that was neither hosted nor operated from the US. Even though the charges against O’Dwyer were eventually dropped, the very act of trying him thousands of miles away from home even before he could have been convicted of any crime was arguably grossly unjust. The treatment meted out to O'Dwyer unleashed US copyright law's draconianism to the world at large. Even as recently as 2015, a supposedly innocent act of affection by a mother got her embroiled in an infringement controversy due to the strict boundaries of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In Lenz v Universal Music Corp,2 a doting mother's act of uploading a 29 second dance video of her children to YouTube led the copyright owner to serve her with a DMCA takedown notice even though subsequently the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit held that the copyright holders were obliged to consider ‘fair use’ before asking online service providers to remove content.