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DMCA Hurts Copyright Holders, Too
adam613 writes: "Further proof that the DMCA is designed to protect corporations rather than copyright holders: ZDNet is reporting that an author who published e-books that an AOL user posted on Usenet can not hold AOL legally responsible. While AOL is an ISP and ISPs can not feasibly censor their users, AOL is also a content provider, just like Napster. In the end, the copyright holder who the DMCA is supposed to protect got screwed. Things could start to get interesting here...any lawyers ready to make judges start scratching their heads?"
If this doesn't prove that the DMCA should be repealed, I don't know what will.
I'll be interesting to find out what happens now. Alot of the big corporations pushed for this a while back...some of em will still want it in place.
If it remains, we know for a fact that the DOJ has been bought and paid for.
If it is repealed, I fear it is only the beginning of the fight, because, in this case there WILL be a DMCA2.
Just because its the little guy we can turn around and say that everyone has to be liable because his work got out. In this case AOL was simply providing a medium, and are no more reponcible than any other ISP should be.
God I wish I can gotten more sleep so I could have made this argument intelligently.
Just because AOL is a content provider, doesn't mean they shouldn't be protected when they act as an ISP.
Yes, the DMCA sucks huge amounts of ass. Yes, the DMCA was designed to protect big content providers and not copyright holders. Yes, AOL is a big (evil?) corporation.
BUT, one of the few sane aspects of the DMCA is that it doesn't hold ISPs liable if they remove infringing material. This allows ISPs to react to claims in a reasonable manner (note, that doesn't guarantee they will, it only enables them to). If ISPs could be held liable for everything their users did, how long before AOL and others began enforcing even more draconian restrictions preempting their users' behaviors...
The DMCA sucks, is evil, etc... But this provision isn't the reason.
While I do not agree with term limitations for congressional office this is what you get when you have career politicians in office unchallenged for all many years. If your congress person doesn't understand the subject he/she is voting on then get rid of him/her. All people including the readers of Slashdot need to stop voting someone into office because they believe in a single issue.
It seems to me from short skimming through the article that AOL acted in its ISP role here, nothing with its content-provider role. And I think it's very just that ISPs cannot be held responsible if they remove offending content after they are notified.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
I hate DMCA as much as anybody, but protecting common carriers when one of their users infringes, is a good thing. Slashdot shouldn't ever be liable for something that its users post, especially if they delete it (like what happened with the cultist trade secret).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
so microsoft posts some windows 3.1 code as an AC, then sues slashdot out of existance. Is that what we want?
ISPs have almost always been protected from contributory copyright infringement suits. Even before this one aspect of the DMCA gave a "safe harbor" to ISPs, some courts looked like they would do the same thing (e.g. the Netcom case).
This provision of the DMCA is good because it protects the people who provide the pipes from copyright suits. Other provisions of the DMCA such as the anti-circumvention provisions (see the DeCSS case) and overbearing notice-and-take-down rules (closely related to the ISP safe harbor) are what people should worry about, not the whole DMCA.
Why should this guy benefit from a law that he didn't pay for?
If he wanted laws to protect him, he should have purchased a congressman, just as our friends at Disney, AOLTW, etc did.
Benefiting from laws you didn't pay for is STEALING!
Further proof that the DMCA is designed to protect corporations rather than copyright holders
Huh? Aren't most copyrights held by corporations?
They will only mod to -1. Here it is from the proverbial horse's mouth -- when I wrote in about a threatening post which included a guy's home address, this is all that Taco wrote back:
From: "Rob \"CmdrTaco\" Malda"
Date: Mon Oct 08, 2001 08:18:20 US/Central
To: Paul `Order in Chaos` Cantrell
Subject: Re: Abusive and possibly dangerous post
We don't remove comments. It sucks, but people did this to my girlfriend for
awhile too. She had to get an answering machine and screen her calls.
And it's a reasonable policy if they stick to it -- they won't touch comments, they're not responsible, and there's no liability. They just modded the abusive post down (I presume it was the editors) to -1 ("offtopic", interestingly, and not "troll").
Can you confirm that Slashdot really broke their own policy for the Scientologists? Or is this just hearsay?
So a user posted some copyrighted material and the ISP refused to remove it at the request of the copyright holder, and youre ready to scream bloody murder over it. Am I still reading Slashdot? Last time I was here, everyone was getting their wads in a bunch over ISPs taking down users content at the request of copyright holders.
FUCKING HYPOCRITES.
Liberty in your lifetime
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
AOL wasn't granted dismissal based on 17 USC 512(c), which is the part with all the notification and counternotification. That's the nasty private-gag-order provision of the DMCA which many (including myself) object to.
Rather, they were also claiming protection under 17 USC 512(a), "transitory digital network communications", and it is on that provision they obtained summary judgement. This doesn't include ANY takedown provision, and if this decision is affirmed by higher courts, it effectively exempts Usenet providers from liability for posts not made by their own customers.
IMO, this is a good thing, and Harlan Ellison can change his "KICK" campaign to "KICK ME". Note that he's also suing AOL for merely developing Gnutella!
Many of you are forgetting the MOST important factor here. This is Harlan Ellison they are trying to screw out of money. He believes in getting paid for everything he writes, no matter how minor or trivial. Perhaps a small historical anectdote may put this in better presepective.
Once, a long time ago, a publisher ran late in paying Mr. Ellison his royalties. Mr. Ellison was forced to write a dunning letter to the publisher for non-payment. This of course angered Harlan even more because he was forced to write without pay. He eventually got paid the arrears but he didn't give up. Instead, he sold the rights to the dunning letter to one of those publishers that sold books of model business letters (think pre-computer Word Templates).
Now, some company has tried to screw him out of money for his writings. Do not make the mistake of underestimating his willingness to go all out until he has gotten every last penny Harlan thinks is owed. Mere judges won't prevent him from finding out a way.
AOL has no idea just how small a victory they won. I pity them.
Because of that, it makes it impossible for Usenet to be policed by online service providers for either copyrighted or illegal content - and even in the event of copyrighted content, a number of copyrighted posts are in Usenet because the owners want them there. The sheer size of Usenet and the inability to distinguish between legitimate posts and intellectual property theft is thus an impossible task.
The DMCA TITLE II in this matter DOES indeed protect both the OSP (including ISP, which is a subset of OSP) AND the copyright holder. The OSP is required to take down the material after sufficient notification has been given (within a reasonable time period), while the copyright holder can sue the original poster for damages.
The copyright owner CAN sue the OSP for contributory damges - IF - the OSP does not honor the (if valid) takedown request.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. With millions of posts a day, in 80,000+ groups coming from 15,000+ servers, I dont see any other reasonable method, so in this aspect at least, I think the DMCA is adequate to the task.
So, how is the copyright holder getting screwed by this? Because AOL-TW is a big bad company that should be sued without valid reason? I dont think so. Find valid reasons to slam AOL - dont try to rewrite good sections of the law just so you can use it against them.
Oh, but wait! How can the poor copyright owner catch the original poster? Gee, that's an easy one, but most people dont understand enough about the Internet to know that yet... here's some enlightenment (and now Verizon will hate me even more - though not as much as most of the world hates them I am sure)... It's called a circuit trace. Not a traceroute... All you need to know is what IP address the post originated from, and what time, contact the ISP, have them contact their NOC or Verizon to pull the telephone company circuit logs that they will pretend they know nothing about. Those logs are of the Telephone switching network activity that maps the "digital" data for Internet communication (and related TCPIP traffic) over the telco network to a physical telco circuit mounted to the person's house or apartment. When I worked for AOL's backbone provider (they dont own their network - nor does MSN - the same big company does), we'd acquire physical addresses of serious abusers in about 5 minutes through this method - but then again, the company I worked for had more dialup numbers than the next 5 ISP's combined - so Verizon was more than happy to work with them.
If it's a cable modem, the cable companies maintain similar logs which allow similar traces.
In some cases, if the poster is attempting to hide their address (spoofing, etc) that is a little more difficult, but since the telco has to know where to send the packets regardless of the IP address spoofing, they still have logs of where everything came from. Even though they claim otherwise.
If it's non-US, then yes, the copyright holder is SOL... but that's still not a reason to take it out on AOL.
Robert
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The DMCA is only meant to protect LARGE content providers, like AOLTimeWarnerCnnTurnerNetscape and Disney. It is not intended to help small content providers, although it does provide some help to small ISPs. If I published my own work encrypted using the constitution of the united states, I couldn't ban the constitution as a circumvention device. If AOL used the constitution to encrypt something, they would be able to ban the constitution... although to a certain extent they already have.
If Google can be held liable under the DMCA for it's content, then so can AOL.
Operation Clambake didn't file a counter-notification letter because it didn't want to subject itself to a rent-a-court of Co$'s choosing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Don't count out Harlan Ellison. He's a bulldog when he thinks he's right. Reported he once showed up for a check which wasn't ready. Since this was already a late payment, he carried a typewriter out of the office and pawned it to cover his check.
AOL has no idea what they're dealing with.