The Road of Cooperation: Assessing the Evolving Interaction between Copyright Owners and ISPs From ISP Legislation to the Graduated Response

Abstract

Stepping into digital age, the digital technology with internet communication breed a new intermediary which significantly reshape the distribution of copyrighted works.Copyright owners seeks for other strategy in order to control the online piracy. They refer to copyright legislation as solution. Both US and EU respectively enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and E-Commerce Directive which provides provisions to immune ISP’s liability in online copyright infringement so long as ISP complies with the requirement under the provisions. The graduated response system establishes the cooperation between copyright owners and ISPs. By transferring partial burden of enforcement to ISPs, copyright owners save substantial enforcement costs and increase the stakeholder in online copyright enforcement. To ISPs, the economic benefits and additional incentives encourage them to join the system and promote the cooperation. As a prospective enforcement strategy, various jurisdictions have adopted or begin to introduce the system to their countries. Simply put, the graduated response system requires an ISP to issue a notice to the subscriber when the subscriber is found to engage in online piracy. If the subscriber ignores the first notice, the subsequent notices will be sent and further actions would imposed on the subscriber. The focal point lies in that ISP should actively monitor the activities of their subscribers. According to the design, ISP under graduated responses system bear partial duty and costs of online copyright enforcement. Therefore, this system is welcomed and supported by copyright owners. On the other hand, ISPs also obtain benefits through the employment of this system by cooperating with copyright owners. Under the circumstances, both parties forge the aligning incentives under the system.