Our vigilance is essential. Internet piracy demands that we become the watchmen on the tower. But also essential is the cooperation of the service providers. Our copyright law must continue to provide the right incentives to stimulate that cooperation. Accountability, under appropriate circumstances, for copyright violations committed by network users is one of the legal incentives provided under current law.
Some service providers paint a terrorizing script of their own.
Unless the copyright law is changed to immunize them, so they say, they foresee a flood, not of Internet piracy, but of liability litigation. They assert that the burden of taking steps to prevent and detect online piracy will be crushing, that it will stunt the growth of the Internet and take down with it many of the high-flying cyberspace ventures that the World Wide Web has spawned. This Committee must cast a cool, appraising eye on those predictions. They fly in the face of the experience of the first few years of this Internet revolution. The feared flood of infringement litigation has never materialized.