Normally I'm not given to great sympathy for telco people, but in this case, pity poor Sarah Deutsch. The name may be familiar to you as she is the Verizon general counsel who dug in her heels against the Cartel's jihad and forced them to go back to "John Doe" cases instead of slurping confidential info out of telco records.

Ms. Deutsch was recently in Australia where she delivered a strong warning against a local implementation of a "notice and takedown" provision. This is the sort of thing (established in the US DMCA) where a copyright holder can find a violation and notify the ISP on which the material is hosted. Once notified the ISP needs to remove the material and notify the poster that it has been removed, in case that person wants to contest the removal.

Seems innocuous enough and has been used successfully by aggrieved copyright holders from the Church of Scientology to Harlan Ellison (boy now THERE's a Death Match pairing I'd love to see!). Unfortunately, it has also led to a torrent of, well, legal spam as automated copybots go around generating blizzards of takedown notices. Unfortunately, the bots are not very specific in their targeting, so Verizon spends an insane amount of time dealing with takedown requests most of which are for material that's not on their networks.

Deutsch called these people "bounty hunters" and referred to the US system "a joke." Given the statistics (30,000 notices in January alone, of which only two were Verizon material) I'd be inclined to agree with her.

[Australian IT News]