So Many Reasons To Donate To The Electronic Frontier Foundation

[morgandawn]

The brief also urges the Court to clarify that the sender of a takedown notice is required make reasonable determinations about the law.  In other words, if a copyright holder is going to claim someone violates copyright law, it should first have some idea of what qualifies as a violation. Too often, we have seen copyright owners send takedown notices informed by only the vaguest notion of what actually qualifies as infringement. As we explain:

A law that grants a private actor the power to do what even a court cannot—cause the prior restraint of speech based on a purely ex parte review—alters not only the traditional contours of copyright protection but of our fundamental free speech doctrines. Such a law can only be tolerated, if at all, if the exercise of that power is tied to an obligation to understand what the law is, and to make reasonable assertions based on that understanding.

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