First Amendment and adult entertainment attorney Lawrence G. Walters has created a new automated copyright enforcement tool for his clients who are looking to keep their online content safer from incessant theft.
"Like other things I create, I try to start by providing only to my clients," Walters told AVNOnline.com about DMCANotice.com, named after the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. "Maybe at some point I'll open up to a larger group."
The idea is simple enough: a client fills out a short electronic form and, using a blend of the E-Sign Act and the Unsworn Declarations Act, the client can generate and serve his own valid DMCA notices which include all required elements contained under federal law, as Walters describes the tool.
The DMCA requires electronic or physical signatures of those authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner(s)' descriptions of the work that one claims was infringed; descriptions of where the material in question is found on a suspected Website; the owner or representative's name, address, telephone, and e-mail address; good-faith statements that the owner or representative believes the disputed posting was unauthorized; and, a legally-binding statement – under penalty of perjury – that the information in the owner or representative's notice, and their declaration of authorization to act on the owner's behalf is accurate.
But nothing in the law prohibits turning that into a quick, electronically-generated notice of infringement under the DMCA.
DMCANotice.com is primarily set to cut down the time and the level of human involvement formerly required to generate DMCA notices, Walters added, with clients now able to complete a simpler form and generate legal infringement notices within minutes, a notice that includes electronic signature as well as the required statements. Those who receive such notice are required immediately to remove or disable the disputed content or risk liability for direct or contributory infringement, he said.
"Primarily, it seemed like [there was] too much wastefulness and reviewing drafts and obtaining verifications from clients," Walters said, when asked what gave him the idea that led to the DMCANotice.com tool. "This type of legal compliance is designed for automation, it seems to me. There are certain magic words that need to be used, serving a valid DMCA notice, and those words can be incorporated in automated form to get it right every time, and the client is in possession of the necessary information to fill in the fields."
So far, Walters said, the clients to whom he's introduced the tool think it's a "tremendous" concept. "It cuts down the document production time to minutes, rather than a day or more," he said, "and minimizes my involvement, and usually gets results in an hour or less. And that's what clients are looking for – results." This is especially true of content posted on foreign Websites, Walters said, which would be harder to track down and stop without such an automated tool.
Walters, of the firm of Weston, Garrou & DeWitt, said he doesn't expect DMCANotice.com to remain the only such tool in cybertown for very long, even if attorneys are often the last to embrace the new. "I'm sure similar tools will probably be created by other lawyers," he said. "The legal services industry is often the last to change and to adopt new technology. I try to reject all those notions and think outside the box. And as soon as I started investigating the options here [with the DMCA], it became obvious that this was one of those places we could use technology for the client's best interest."
Especially, he said, when that best interest includes keeping the client's content from getting splashed all over a free Website without the content producer's permission, "just so some Webmaster can generate a few more page views than his competitor."
