A Law of One's Own: The Inefficacy of the DMCA for Non-Consensual Intimate Media
<|reference_start|>A Law of One's Own: The Inefficacy of the DMCA for Non-Consensual Intimate Media: Non-consensual intimate media (NCIM) presents internet-scale harm to individuals who are depicted. One of the most powerful tools for requesting its removal is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). However, the DMCA was designed to protect copyright holders rather than to address the problem of NCIM. Using a dataset of more than 54,000 DMCA reports and over 85 million infringing URLs spanning over a decade, this paper evaluates the efficacy of the DMCA for NCIM takedown. Results show less than 50% of infringing URLs are removed from website hosts in 60 days, and Google Search takes a median of 11.7 days to deindex infringing content. Across web hosts, only 4% of URLs are removed within the first 48 hours. Additionally, the most frequently reported domains for non-commercial NCIM are smaller websites, not large platforms. We stress the need for new laws that ensure a shorter time to takedown that are enforceable across big and small platforms alike.<|reference_end|>
@article{qiwei2024a,
    title={A Law of One's Own: The Inefficacy of the DMCA for Non-Consensual
  Intimate Media},
    author={Li Qiwei, Shihui Zhang, Samantha Paige Pratt, Andrew Timothy Kasper,
  Eric Gilbert, Sarita Schoenebeck},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.13575},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2409.13575},
    primaryClass={cs.CY}
}