Corporations Abusing Copyright Laws Are Ruining the Web for Everyone
Picture this somewhat typical scenario: Before breakfast, you use WordPress to write your morning blog post, which includes a screen shot of a movie you saw last night, along with your thoughts about the film.
Context & Ripple Effects
The argument Wired makes on January 20 is the latest turn in a debate the corpus has tracked for nearly a decade: back in December 2005, Concurring Opinions asked what strongly enforced copyright law would do to the blogosphere, and TechCrunch pushed back against overzealous enforcement in 2007. What changed since then is that the hypothetical became infrastructure — automated DMCA tooling means a single filer can target thousands of sites at once, as Microsoft's mistaken notice that swept in the BBC, TechCrunch, Wikipedia and U.S. government sites showed in October 2012.
The concrete catalyst here is Automattic's November 2013 decision to stop absorbing abusive takedowns and instead sue over two bogus DMCA notices designed to censor its users. The story's reach is unusually broad for an opinion piece: Boing Boing picked it up, alongside commentary from Mike Linksvayer, @internetcases and Jeff John Roberts, signaling that the takedown-abuse question had moved from policy blogs into mainstream tech conversation.
First-order effects
- Ordinary bloggers on hosted platforms face a direct chill on routine practices — posting a movie screenshot in a review is now exposed to a takedown first, appeal later, with the burden on the poster rather than the filer.
- Automattic and other hosts absorb the operating cost of processing notices and counter-notices at scale, which is why WordPress broke precedent and went to court rather than keep eating the abuse.
Second-order effects
- Platform litigation becomes the only working deterrent: with Section 512(f) penalties too weak to punish bogus notices, the burden shifts to hosts like Automattic to make frivolous filings expensive through lawsuits.
- Large rights-holders' automated enforcement pipelines come under scrutiny after incidents like Microsoft's mass misfire, pushing senders toward human review — a cost that could slow legitimate enforcement as collateral damage gets publicized.
Third-order effects
- If bogus-notice costs stay effectively free to filers while platforms pay to fight them, enforcement structurally migrates from courts to private takedown regimes, and the eventual fix likely comes from either legislation tightening 512(f) or platforms building preemptive filtering — both of which concentrate power in large intermediaries.
- The pattern points toward a split web where well-resourced platforms can litigate abuse away while smaller hosts and individual creators simply comply, narrowing who can afford to publish borderline content.
The trend: Copyright enforcement is shifting from courtroom adjudication to automated private takedown systems, leaving platform lawsuits as the last check on abuse.