I’m very pro-creator’s rights, but copyright law in the US is amazingly broken. Case in point: due to a single DMCA takedown notice, photographer Carolyn Wright’s entire website vividwildlife.com was just shut down by Go Daddy.

You might recognize Carolyn Wright’s name from her other website: photoattorney.com, i.e., the best resource on the internet for photographers looking to understand copyright law. She’s not only a professional photographer, but a practicing lawyer who specializes in the legal needs of photographers. I’m gonna go ahead and give her the benefit of the doubt here. Details on the takedown are on the site.

Yes, absolutely content creators need legal tools to defend their content. And of course there have been cases of wanna-be photographers who steal the work of others to pad out their website and stock agency portfolios — we need a sane copyright enforcement policy in the US, that’s not in question. But imagine being able to send a single letter to a property owner claiming that you believe one of the businesses they lease space to is infringing on your copyright and expecting them to shut down every one of that business’s storefronts until they’ve proved you wrong, in court if necessary. The DMCA absolutely requires an ISP, who is in effect a digital landlord, to do exactly that. There are smart, sane ways to manage copyright and fair use on the internet: the DMCA’s takedown provisions do not provide them.

Anyway, best of luck to whoever’s behind that DMCA request. I suspect it’s not going to get very far.