I’ve posted a draft of my forthcoming article Civil Procedures for a World of Shared and User-Generated Content to SSRN. It’ll appear in print in the University of Louisville Law Review. Here’s the abstract:
Scholars often focus on the substance of copyrights as opposed to the procedures used to enforce them. Yet copyright enforcement procedures are at the root of significant overreach and deserve greater attention in academic literature. This Article explores three types of private enforcement procedures: direct enforcement (cease-and-desist practice); indirect enforcement (DMCA takedowns); and automated enforcement (YouTube’s Content ID filtering program). Such procedures can produce a “substance-procedure-substance” feedback loop that causes significant de facto overextensions of copyrights, particularly against those creating and sharing User-Generated Content (“UGC”). To avoid this feedback, the Article proposes descriptive and normative frameworks aimed towards the creation of better procedures. Looking to the source of procedures, the relevant actors, and the functions of enforcement (the descriptive framework), the Article suggests principles of transparency, participation, and “balanced accuracy” (the normative framework) that might lead to private enforcement procedures that accommodate the reasonable cost and efficiency needs of copyright owners without trampling on UGC.
You can find the abstract and download the article here.