The Authors Guild, one of the nation's top writer's groups, wants the US Congress to overhaul copyright law and require ISPs to monitor and filter the Internet of pirated materials, including e-books.

The guild, in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee as it mulls changes to copyright law, says the notice-and-takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act favor large corporations like Google over individual writers. The group said that ISPs purge the Internet of infringing content on their own. As the law now stands, ISPs are not legally liable for pirated content, and they get "safe harbor" immunity from infringement allegations as long as they remove infringing content at the owners' request.

According to the letter (PDF) to the committee from Mary Rasenberger, the guild's executive director:

Although Google and other Internet services providers ("ISPs") clearly have the means to keep their sites free of most pirated content, the Section 512 safe harbor rules have been applied to allow these wealthy commercial enterprises to sit quietly and private from pirates who use their platforms to traffic in stolen content. In reverse Robin Hood fashion, the safe harbor rules allow rich companies to become richer at the expense of the poor, robbing creators of hard-earned income and the creative economy of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Rasenberger believes that ISPs have the technology and resources to remove pirated works without being notified that pirated content is on their networks. She continued:

Individual copyright owners do not have the resources to send notices for every instance of infringement online, much less to keep sending the for copies reposted after being taken down. Individuals do not have access to automated systems that track infringing copies and send notices, nor do they have the bargaining power to make the deals with ISPs that larger corporations can. ISPs, on the other hand, do have the ability to monitor piracy. Technology that can identify and filter pirated material is now commonplace. It only makes sense, then, that ISPs should bear the burden of limiting piracy on their sites, especially when they are profiting from the piracy and have the technology to conduct automates searches and takedowns. Placing the burden of identifying pirated content on the individual author, who has no ability to have any real impact on piracy, as the current regime does, makes no sense at all. It is technology that has enabled the pirate marketplace to flourish, and it is technology alone that has the capacity to keep it in check.

The guild, which represents thousands of authors, has been quite active in trying to protect its members' works. Most recently, the guild is urging the Justice Department to investigate Amazon's book-selling practices on antitrust grounds. (Amazon accounts for nearly a third of the nation's print-book sales.)

"Amazon has used its dominance in ways that we believe harm the interests of America’s readers, impoverish the book industry as a whole, damage the careers of (and generate fear among) many authors, and impede the free flow of ideas in our society," the group told the Justice Department in a letter.

The guild had been involved in long-running litigation against Google's university book scanning project. Last year, a federal appeals court said that universities, in conjunction with Google, could scan millions of library books without the authors' permission.