Statutory Damages: The Fuel of Copyright-based Censorship

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Imagine every post online came with a bounty of up to $150,000 paid to anyone who finds it violates opaque government rules—all out of the pocket of the platform. Smaller sites could be snuffed out, and big platforms would avoid crippling liability by aggressively blocking, taking down, and penalizing speech that even possibly violates these rules. In turn, users would self-censor, and opportunists would turn accusations into a profitable business.