DMCA Stakeholder Working Group Progress Report: Improving Efficiency of DMCA Notice Sending / Response – September 10, 2014

Meetings  Working Group holds in person meetings alternating between D.C. and Berkeley concurrent with USPTO plenary sessions  Extra in person meeting held July 31 in Berkeley in conjunction with USPTO roundtables  Interim phone meetings to facilitate additional progress  Smaller drafting committee formed after July 31 meeting  Creative/rights owner, OSP and Internet user representatives volunteered to participate  Exchange of drafts and teleconference meeting in August

Approach  Collaborative drafting  Meetings to explore & deepen mutual understanding of operational issues  To facilitate more rapid progress, drafters reserve right for additional member comments rather than seeking approval step by step  Co-chairs consult with respective stakeholder groups & maintain open dialog with each other  Plan to seek public input on a draft to ensure broad range of perspectives are considered in the process

Process so far  Wide-ranging survey of existing approaches to receiving DMCA notices  Discussion of existing webforms by group to reveal operational challenges & reasons motivating particular approaches  Strawman draft of model XML based API and standardized form submissions prepared and discussed  Some OSPs concerned that new API would present operational risks b/c it is untested in real world  Focus shifted to developing descriptive document based on existing practices

Best Practices Document  Goal is to create a descriptive report explaining model practices to promote efficiency in various circumstances including  Where the notice sender sends single or infrequent notices to a site  Where the notice sender sends repeated notices or seeks to batch multiple notices together  Set out mutually agreed good & bad practices & situational practices for both senders & recipients of notices  Show existing webforms that implement good practices  May be challenging to find “perfect” examples, given that purpose of group is to suggest solutions to a real world environment notice senders and recipients find challenging & frustrating  Critiquing existing forms in document presents understandable discomfort for the authors of those forms

Substantive discussions  Consensus points on good/bad/situational practices so far  See discussion draft good practices portion  Points still in need of more discussion  See document to be added points  Flesh out model API as an option for testing  Identify model webforms/ approaches  How to deal with educational info and expanded transparency work which is out of scope but relevant to process