| The topic of this dissertation was to determine if the use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), enacted in 1998 by US Senate, is correlated to the section 512 takedown processes of the DMCA based on the public visibility of a darknet. The purpose of this ex post facto quantitative non-experimental study was to determine how the use of the DMCA extended into the darknet for section 512 takedown purposes (Giannoumis, 2014). Previous research on this subject had focused on the regular publicly visible Internet, including YouTube and Blogger, social media sites, as well as immediately visible Bittorrent sites where there is the technological need for a publicly visible series of links to data (Erickson et al., 2014; Mueller, Kuehn, & Santoso, 2012; Urban, Karaganis, & Schofield, 2016). Per the quantitative non-experimental ex post facto methodology, the data was acquired from the Lumen database to address the research questions. Was there a correlation between the DMCA and darknet visibility, as applied to the process of DMCA takedown notices, and the sharing of copyrighted information on a darknet. The data came from the Lumen database of DMCA notices and was analyzed using a t-test. |
