A Law of One's Own: The Inefficacy of the DMCA for Non-Consensual Intimate Media

TL;DR

This study evaluates the DMCA's effectiveness in removing non-consensual intimate media online, revealing significant delays and limitations, especially on smaller websites, and calls for new laws for faster, enforceable takedowns.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of DMCA takedown requests for NCIM, highlighting its inefficacy and proposing the need for improved legal frameworks.

Findings

Over 85 million infringing URLs analyzed.

Median removal time from website hosts exceeds 45 days.

Less than 6% URLs removed within 48 hours.

Abstract

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 that for non-commercial requests, while more than half of URLs are deindexed from Google Search within 48 hours, the actual removal of content from website hosts is much slower. The median infringing URL takes more than 45 days to be removed from website hosts, and only 5.39% 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.