On December 22, 2020, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), then chair of
the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property,
released a discussion draft of the Digital Copyright Act of 2021 (DCA) that
would make sweeping changes to multiple areas of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DMCA). Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), current chair of
the Subcommittee, continues to work with Ranking Member Tillis but
has not announced any plans for action on the DCA. Summarized below
are key revisions being suggested by the DCA to the
notice-and-takedown system.
Notice and Staydown. The most significant
revision would be to replace the existing notice-and-takedown
system with a notice-and-staydown system. Under the DCA, an online
service provider (OSP) that receives a notification of claimed
infringement must ensure that any “complete or near complete
copy of a copyrighted work” targeted by a notification,
whether uploaded by the same user or different users, is removed
from
