Copyright Alert System Data Will Become Educational Resource, Group Official Says

The CCI will be collecting, aggregating and making public data about how the system is working, Lesser said. “We will be looking both at the delivery of the alerts themselves, as well as the appeals process,” she said. The arbitration process -- which is facilitated through the American Arbitration Association and will cost users $35, to be refunded if the appeal is successful -- will be “very seamless, very quick,” she said. Subscribers will fill out a form explaining why they think the notice was sent in error -- reasons range from a misidentified Internet account to an unauthorized user on a subscriber’s wireless network -- and be able to provide any needed supporting documents, such as a letter from a copyright holder authorizing distribution. “It’s intended to … be a streamlined digital process that works within a few weeks,” she said: Subscribers who successfully appeal will be treated as if they had received no notices.

"We do not want to send a single notice that isn’t a valid notice,” said MPAA Senior Vice President Marianne Grant during a presentation on how the identification and notification systems will work. The system will scan peer-to-peer networks for infringing content, download the first instances it sees of infringing work, manually verify that the work is infringing and mark the file’s hash value in a database to more quickly identify infringing copies of that work in the future, she said. Additionally, the system will engage with the computer sharing the infringing content to ensure that it belongs to one of the participating ISPs’ subscribers. There will be megabytes-sized files of “evidence supporting every case,” she said. Snippets of copyrighted works in other works “are not the things that we would be sending notices on in this program,” though they may be monitored in other copyright enforcement projects, Grant said.

CCI is “finalizing who will be our secondary auditor” of MarkMonitor, the software CAS uses to identify infringing content, Lesser told us. “We are hopeful that having a secondary auditor take a look at it will help increase people’s appreciation for the process and belief that it’s a fair process,” she said.

CCI is planning on becoming more of an educational resource in the future, Lesser said. The group is working with the Internet Keep Safe Coalition to develop a primary and secondary education curriculum on fair use, she continued. “We have to find a way to begin to talk to them when they're five years old. … We want to be able to reach the next generation of people who are going to be thinking about creativity."

Verizon will only send one notice per week, Senior Vice President Thomas Dailey told the audience. The mitigation measures will be reduced speed for two days on the fifth notice and reduced speed for three days on sixth notice “to get people’s attention,” he continued. “We want to make sure that someone responsible for the account … will get the notice that something is going on.” AT&T subscribers who receive the fifth or sixth notice will be redirected to an online educational portal about copyright, said Brent Olson, vice president-public policy. “We are not making decisions for them. We are giving them information,” he continued: Once the subscriber has visited the portal, “the browser redirect will cease and their Internet service will work as normal.” Many people are confused about copyright, especially young Internet users, Olson said. “They don’t see the difference between a legal website and an illegal website."

CCI needs to be transparent about the successes and shortcomings of CAS, said Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge president and a member of the CCI advisory board. “I can almost assure you that there will be some false positives” in identifying infringing content, she said. “That’s the nature of any system of this type.” In the months leading up to last month’s launch, “the transparency was not where it was supposed to be,” she continued. Sohn suggested putting the recording of Grant’s publication on the CCI website. As its educational efforts expand, CCI should include information about lawful uses of copyrighted materials, she continued. “I would hope … that when we get into that broader education phase, that obviously fair use and lawful uses are a very robust and vigorous part of that education” if “the CCI has pretentions to be more than just operating this Copyright Alert System,” she said.

CAS is “a very different step than” the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act, said Jerry Berman, chairman of the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee and CCI advisory board member. “There are only two things that can get in the way of that: bad solutions and bad behavior,” both of which have been prevalent in online piracy policy discussions, he continued. CAS “is, at least, the basis” for a constructive dialogue among all the stakeholders, he said. “We really have to find a middle ground and a way to protect the openness of the Internet, but also intellectual property.”