YouTube faces new DMCA enemy: Katy Perry and Deadmau5’s artist supergroup

April 1, 2016

Katy Perry is one of the most in-demand artists on YouTube.

The US star’s Vevo channel boasts 7.2bn views and 18.3m subscribers – putting it only behind Justin Bieber, Rihanna and Taylor Swift in terms of global popularity.

Yet Perry has added her signature to hundreds demanding a reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) in the US.

Other stars who have signed the petition, addressed to the US Copyright Office, include Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, DeadMau5, Garth Brooks, Jon Bon Jovi, Lionel Richie, Steven Tyler, T Bone Burnett, Pete Townshend and Elvis Costello.

It reads: “The Music Community’s list of frustrations with the DMCA is long. A broken ‘notice-and-takedown’ system. Toothless repeat infringer policies. Active services mischaracterized as passive intermediaries. Incentives for services to embrace willful blindness instead of preventing known and widespread infringement…

“A vibrant and healthy future for the music ecosyStem depends on DCMA reform.”
Artist DMcA PEtition

“DMCA reform is essential to bring about balance. A vibrant and healthy future for the music ecosystem depends on it. Throughout these comments, we note various issues that should be addressed.”

The petition continues: “The DMCA was supposed to provide balance between service providers and content owners, but instead it provides harmful ‘safe havens’ under which many platforms either pay nothing or pay less than market value for music.”

Although not solely targeted at YouTube, the Google-owned video giant – the biggest and fastest-growing music streaming service on the planet – is very much in the crosshairs here.

The artist-signed petition joins similar efforts from managers and songwriters – a full list of which you can read below – plus music industry players such as the RIAA, SESAC, ASCAP and BMI.

The DMCA was first introduced in 1998 in order to allow nascent digital services to thrive while simultaneously protecting creators’ rights.

Its “safe harbor” provisions required online services to implement policies to stop repeat copyright infringers and “expeditiously” respond to requests to “take down” pirated works.

“The current notice-and-takedown system was designed in an era characterized by hissing 56k dial-up connections.”
Managers’ Dmca Petition

Yet the music business argues that, with rights-holders forecast to send more than a billion takedown requests to Google alone this year, the DMCA safe harbors have ‘placed an impossible and one-sided burden’ on music creators.

As the managers’ petition argues: “The current notice-and-takedown system was designed in an era of Internet connectivity characterized by screeching and hissing 56k dial-up connections. This was a time when downloading or uploading a song took minutes or hours, there were less than 2.5 million websites, and ‘user-generated content’ meant postings on all-text bulletin boards.

“In that context, a system that required music creators to police the entire Internet and give individualized notice to service providers of each link to unlicensed music might have had at least some logic to it.

“But it makes no sense at all in an Internet ecosystem with gigabit connectivity and nearly a billion websites. No one can police that vastness – and anyone who tries to do so finds the universe online is growing faster than our ability to inspect it for illegal copies of our clients’ work.”

It adds: “We stand ready to work with Congress, the Copyright Office, and other stakeholders to develop practical solutions to these issues and enact comprehensive DMCA reform.”

Three separate petitions have been put together by artists/songwriters, managers and ‘creators’.

Read them all, and see the household names who have signed them, below: