New technologies and the scale of copyright infringement: Should size matter to liability?

Abstract

Should there be an inverse relationship between a firm’s exposure to liability for copyright infringement and the scale of its activities? In the context of Internet Service Provider (ISP) liability, copyright policy-makers have answered this question affirmatively. In the United States, for instance, the Online Liability Limitation Act (Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 (DMCA)) provides a statutory safe harbour that limits the exposure of ISPs to secondary copyright liability for the infringements of their subscribers. Accordingly, an ISP will not be liable ‘by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or ..