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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?"
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.
This case might make industry think twice about the DMCA if the copyright work in question were owned by, say, Bertelsmann or another AOL-Time-Warner competitor. But as the suit was brought by some puny individual (no offense, Mr. Ellison, but you're not a mega-media conglomerate) and the Right Side won, this won't change the opinions of Anyone That Matters.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
Further proof that the DMCA is designed to protect corporations rather than copyright holders
Huh? Aren't most copyrights held by corporations?
"if they remove offending content after they are notified"
There lies the problem with this particular provision: to avoid liability, ISPs have to shut down the allegedly offending content before it is determined wether it is illegal or not. When faced with potential liability, somehow I don't think ISPs think twice before simply removing the content before hearing out what their customer has to say. The burden is then on the user to prove that the content does not infringe on any copyright.
Sentence first, judgement later. Guilty until proven innocent, with a twist: if the "judge" (in this case, the ISP) did not immediately condemn the user who in the end did something wrong, they open themselves up to litigation. From a pure justice point of view, this sucks.
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
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?
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!
No, the proper way, and the way it worked pre-DMCA is that the content stays up until it's proved to be infringing (or a court orders it taken down pre-trial). The ISP, assuming the correctness of the common carrier argument, has nothing to do with it at all. The ISP provisions are there so they can control content posted by people anonymously, or out of the country. It's an open argument as to whether or not this power is worth making ISPs reposonsible to content, but it's apparent which way the legislation went.
So, what, I'm not allowed to say anything until it has been deemed acceptable to a copyright holder somewhere? How about I say what I want, then you prove in a court, not just send a nastygram, that it is unacceptable, then and only then does the ISP have to take it down.
Dyolf Knip
The hypocrites are not the /.ers but the courts. MPAA sues 2600 for linking to naughty content and wins. Ellison sues AOL/TW for not only linking to but actually hosting naughty content and the case gets dismissed. The whole ISP non-liability thing has a horrible double standard here.
Dyolf Knip
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?