"Imagine every post online came with a bounty of up to $150,000 paid to anyone who finds it violates opaque government rules-all out of the pocket of the platform. Smaller sites could be snuffed out, and big platforms would avoid crippling liability by aggressively blocking, taking down, and penalizing speech that even violates these rules. In turn, users would self-censor, and opportunists would turn accusations into a profitable business."
"Copyright includes "statutory damages," which means letting a jury decide how big of a penalty the defendant will have to pay-anywhere from $200 to $150,000 per work-without the jury necessarily seeing any evidence of actual financial losses or illicit profits. In fact, the law gives judges and juries almost no guidelines on how to set damages. This is a huge problem for online speech."
U.S. copyright law allows statutory damages from $200 to $150,000 per work, decided by juries without proof of actual losses or profits. Judges and juries receive almost no guidance on setting damages, producing unpredictable awards. Online expression depends on reusing others' posts, memes, news images, and quotations for parody, journalism, research, and art. Platforms and individual users face risk of severe penalties that can destroy small sites and drive larger platforms to over-block and penalize speech. The combination of high per-work penalties and vague standards incentivizes opportunistic claims and causes users to self-censor. Reform of statutory damages is necessary to protect creativity and innovation online.
Read at Electronic Frontier Foundation
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