I’ve been in professional publishing since God was a lad, so I have a particular perspective on copyright and the rules for accessing content on the web.

As you might suspect, the “if I can get your copyrighted material off the web for free that’s okay” attitude that many people have really bugs me. I don’t pretend to be neutral about this. These people are stealing my paycheck.

I recently found a site that was giving away some of the stuff I sell at work. This particular site has a “report abuse” page, so I clicked through and found a lengthy set of requirements they expect you to fulfill before they’ll even consider your complaint.

This one was particularly amusing.

State that the information in the notice is accurate, under penalty of perjury.

So … these bastards steal our content and then they have the gall to require us to submit our request for them to stop “under penalty of perjury.”

There is no practical way for copyright owners to police all this nonsense, or to submit each site’s silly forms, or to file lawsuits, or whatever. Even if you get one site to stop, they’d just set up business under a different name and do it again. Or somebody else would.

What’s necessary is an appropriate market-driven way to punish them, and I know how that could be done. (I’ve posted something like this before, but it’s on my mind today so I’m at it again.)

Somebody with substantial market power on the web — like Google — should set up a copyright registry for legitimate publishers. The publisher would submit its copyrighted material to the registry along with a list of the sites authorized to display it.

If a site violated those terms and displayed copyrighted content without the owners’ permission, (1) it would disappear from the Google search listing, along with any ads that link to that site, (2) the authorized contact at the copyright owner would be notified, and (3) the company that controls that site’s DNS entry would be notified with a recommendation to redirect any traffic to a copyright violation page.

We don’t have to rely on the FCC or some other bloated and inefficient government agency to police these things. There is echnological solution, and I don’t think it would be that difficult.

Google, are you listening?