Archive submitted comments to the Copyright
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 5:44 am
Unfortunately, Section 512 has been under attack for some time. In addition to various legislative proposals, the United States Copyright Office has repeatedly been asked to conduct work on Section 512 that could threaten the safe harbor status of libraries and nonprofits and the communities of their patrons and users. In 2016, for instance, Internet Office’s first large Section 512 study, as outlined in a blog post entitled “Save our Safe Harbor“—there, we noted the special importance of the DMCA to “libraries and other nonprofit organizations” which rely in substantial part on volunteer communities and which “are unlikely to be able to bring to bear the sorts of resources [available to] larger commercial entities.”
Then again in 2020, as the Copyright Office kept working towards Section 512 reform, the Internet Archive (in collaboration with the New York University Technology Law & Policy Clinic) urged the phone number library Copyright Office to consider how changes to the DMCA could have “disproportionately negative impacts on public service non–profits such as the Internet Archive and our patrons.”
This year, the Copyright Office is continuing with ever more work streams on DMCA reform. And while the conversation remains dominated by the commercial interests of some of the world’s largest corporations, Internet Archive has again submitted comments seeking to correct this imbalance. Most recently, in a May 27, 2022 comment on the Copyright Office’s study of Section 512(i) Standard Technical Measures, we emphasized that—notwithstanding industry attempts to use Section 512(i) to impose burdensome technical mandates which could threaten all but the largest commercial intermediaries—nothing in the law “admits of a standard technical measure which would impose substantial burdens and costs on libraries [and] non-profits.
Then again in 2020, as the Copyright Office kept working towards Section 512 reform, the Internet Archive (in collaboration with the New York University Technology Law & Policy Clinic) urged the phone number library Copyright Office to consider how changes to the DMCA could have “disproportionately negative impacts on public service non–profits such as the Internet Archive and our patrons.”
This year, the Copyright Office is continuing with ever more work streams on DMCA reform. And while the conversation remains dominated by the commercial interests of some of the world’s largest corporations, Internet Archive has again submitted comments seeking to correct this imbalance. Most recently, in a May 27, 2022 comment on the Copyright Office’s study of Section 512(i) Standard Technical Measures, we emphasized that—notwithstanding industry attempts to use Section 512(i) to impose burdensome technical mandates which could threaten all but the largest commercial intermediaries—nothing in the law “admits of a standard technical measure which would impose substantial burdens and costs on libraries [and] non-profits.