- Transparency about the level to which companies infringe.
- Accountability for mass infringement and repeat violations.
- Rigid enforcement against companies who exist almost exclusively to provide access to illegal material.
There are two companies that need to be addressed:
You have companies whose businesses are primarily built on copyright infringing content that their users upload under DMCA. Often small companies pop up who use this method until they're big enough to be noticed, and then they go back and negotiate retro-active deals. This creates an unfair advantage for them over companies who choose to operate completely within the law. These companies' only responsibility is to take the material down when they get caught, with no steeper penalty for repeat offenses or for building a business around this turnaround time. Grooveshark is an example of an American company that falls into this category.
If you could see the number of takedown requests and repeat violations companies receive (I propose they be issued and resolved through a centralized database), it would be clear which companies exist almost exclusively to provide access to copyrighted material, or who do not place high enough priority on preventing copyright infringement. I believe they need to be held accountable without placing the burden of pursuing civil penalties on the backs of individual or small company rights holders for whom a lawsuit is not equitable. There should be severe penalties for companies whose infractions far outweigh the legitimate value they provide. Those penalties should not require a class action lawsuit or the war chest of some large company.
Then there are companies who are just outright havens for illegal material, whether hosting it themselves or making user-shared content easy to find and access. Most of these companies are offshore, or they are only providing links and information without providing the content itself, both of which makes it hard to pursue civil penalty. I think there should be a clearly defined and transparent method for measuring the degree to which sites provide little value beyond access to illegal material, and those sites should be held accountable. There has to be actionable recourse and, unfortunately, you can only pursue civil penalties from companies who are domestic (or in a participating country) or who actually profit from their actions. In the case of sites who are not domestic or who do not generate meaningful financial gain for their illegal behavior, your only real option is to shut them down in one way or another. If the criteria for a site being eligible for this type of action is clear, and the infraction history is transparent, I have a hard time justifying not taking action against them. That being said, I do understand that we live in a world where rules are abused and I don't understand everything I need to about how such rules would be enforced. But I don't think the the fact that it's difficult and not foolproof are good enough reasons not to pursue a better system.
The DMCA has put the burden of policing copyright on the shoulders of rights holders and that's fine, but penalizing companies who commit massive infringement should not be the job of a bunch of small artists and independent companies. Then there are companies for whom the option of legal recourse is not an option, and those people should be handled in the strictest way possible without putting too much power in the hands of arbitrary organizations.