Online Copyright Piracy Debate Ramps Up Over Proposed Legal Fix

Online copyright piracy has found ways around a law dating to the dawn of the internet age, and now debate is ramping up over a potential legal fix.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was meant to give online service providers an incentive to create technical measures that would protect content creators. In return, the service providers would get safe harbor provisions shielding them from liability from hosting activities that infringe copyrights.

Since then, there’s been wide agreement that the incentives didn’t achieve all that they were meant to. Service providers didn’t create standard technical measures, or STMs, because ...