I’ve taken this headline directly from a Hyperorg post on penalties that come from the DMCA. This post talks about penalties for both infringers – meaning those who post material that is in violation of copyright and have a cease and desist against them but fail to comply – and those who post a cease and desist against material that is not in violation of the DMCA – like Viacom who posted a DMCA take down against 150,000 pieces on YouTube where there were many which did not violate the DMCA because they were parody or didn’t even have copyrighted material and only had text in the title that was confusing.
The post was interesting because it points out 2 very important things:
Carla could therefore sue Viacom, but since the damage done to her by having her video unavailable for a couple of days is negligible, it’s not worth it to her.
But the damage done to free speech by giving over-lawyered corporations license to take down free expressions of ideas without even viewing them is considerable.
… and …
Statutory damages for copyright infringement range up to $150,000 per copyrighted work. The statute gives three ranges, $750-30,000 for ordinary infringement; up to $150,000 for willful infringement, and down to $200 for “innocent” infringement where the work was unmarked with copyright notice and the person had no reason to know his activity infringed. [source]
This of course shows the inequity in the DMCA law and how it favors the corporation and not the average citizen. This is, as I’ve said before, very disappointing because the average citizen is the true participant in the democracy of this country and therefor the true employer of each member of congress. Of course given how much money is given to each member of congress by the corporations, they don’t see it that way and don’t react that way. Again disappointing and disheartening.
This won’t change until citizens and voters realize the power they have and vote these members of congress out of office when they put into effect bad legislation like this.