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Harlan Ellison Can Sue AOL Under DMCA
mbstone writes "The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that sci-fi author Harlan Ellison can go ahead with his DMCA lawsuit against AOL. Seems somebody posted some Ellison stories to Usenet, AOL made 'em available, Ellison complained, and AOL blew him off."
This is ridiculous, the document reads "Stephen Robertson posted copies of some of Ellison's copyrighted short stories on a peer-to-peer file sharing network, the USENET.
Since when is USENET a P2P Filesharing network? Ok, you can find a lot of stuff in it, but it's NOt peer2peer and file-sharing , it's client/server and message-posting! It's a totally different thing.
My Stack Overflow user
If an author can sue every single ISP for damages, everywhere, we enter a nasty realm of "okay time to shut anything that might be infringing down."
What ISP can afford to filter every newsgroup manually? What ISP can sit there and act on anything but complaints?
An author deserves protection, but the person responsible for posting it is the one liable--not the ISPs who provide the avenue by which an author's works are distributed.
What's the matter, Harlan? Not enough money lining your pockets from your successful writing/consulting/speaking career?
Bah.
Are you sure about that?
In accordance with the DMCA, Ellison's lawyer sent AOL an email with notification of infringement. AOL ignored the email.
Actually, Ellison was kinder to AOL than the RIAA has been to file sharers. This is the same thing, only it wasn't music, it was literature.
The judge ruled that the lower court was wrong to issue summary judgement that infringement did not occur, even though the facts were accepted by both parties that the copyrighted material was posted.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
The larger issue is that each Usenet group is carried, in its majority (not necessarily whole) by hundreds, possibly thousands of companies across the globe. Tens of thousands of messages pass through thousands of groups daily. Any server carrying a large percentage of groups with a standard policy for deletion should be treated as a common carrier. The case here should revolve around whether notice was served and responded too.
Otherwise, all Usenet would be vulnerable to this kind of attack, and companies might begin to shut down a valuable means for information exchange on the presumption of the guilt of its users. It isn't like this is a single company who can fight using the "substantial noninfringing uses" argument.
Of course, this doesn't exclude the fact that he contacted 2 of the hundreds or thousands of companies with news feeds. What about the rest? Did he not know how the system worked? He should be taking out potential losses on the hide of the person who posted the material.
"I Have No Morals Yet I Must Sue"?
I know he wants to protect his property but why not write material people such as myself would pay for (I don't download copyrighted music or books) rather than steal
There is no theft involved in duplication of files. It does not meet the definition of theft. Copyright infringement is something different.
Did I steal your car if I created an exact duplicate of it, and drove away (in the duplicate) leaving your car sitting, still untouched, in the driveway? Of course not.
In related news, every McDonald's in the country has a photo of Harlan posted, with instructions NEVER to serve him hot coffee.
You could infer that he plans on suing every NNTP server operator on "the web" (you mean the 'net, right?) if he has asked every single NNTP server operator, individually, to remove the files from their servers, and every single one of them has refused.
It strikes me as a reasonable request and I think Ellison is within his rights to go to court over it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
No, Vonnegut had absolutely positively nothing to do with the Sunscreen essay. Look it up for yourself.
Doesn't that strike any of you as odd? He's effectively using a draconian law that devalues the importance of the human need to share thoughts and ideas, but at the same time it would be a hypocracy for such thoughts not to be shared with others.
Of course being around 70 years of age, he's probably just getting old and cranky now...
I could *maybe* see some validity to the suit if the original poster had used AOL to post the stories *and* Ellison had sent something more substantial than an email to AOL (say, maybe a cease and desist letter) *and* AOL *then* blew him off, before bringing suit.
But it seems to me he first acted against the user's ISP to get him bounced and the source articles taken down, then looked around for the deepest pockets he could find so he could get some money.
So, be careful of gloating about AOL - as much as people love to hate them, it sounds to me like they are an innocent party to this fiasco, and if they go down the rest of the net's ISPs could go with them.
P.S. - it doesn't seem to me that AOL "blew him off" - as far as I can tell AOL never got the email.
Looking at it, it does look like he still has to clear several hurdles. So this isn't a sure thing. You can read about Harlan Ellison's general efforts to deal with protecting author's copyrights here.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I hope he wins. Anything to limit the availability of Harlan Ellison's crapulous prose will be a boon to humanity.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I saw him speak at MIT with Neil Gaiman and Peter David a few years back. Gaiman was delightful, and David didn't make much of an impression on me one way or the other, but Ellison had me squirming in my seat. The man is rude and self-centered, and once each speaker's alloted time was up, he monopolized the stage and shouted down questions from the audience he didn't agree with. He cut David off in the middle of an anecdote because they were running over and "I want to read my story!" Which he did. All of it. Long past the time the program was scheduled to end. Gaiman and David left to go sign autographs, and I left to go sit in the lobby.
Maybe if he rescued crippled orphans from war zones for a living, I'd put up with that kind of behavior, but the guy's just a writer.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
and sent it to a publisher he was having a dispute with. Neil Gaiman has a highly amusing anecdote about how the mailroom boy who delivered the box to the publisher got fired (that's not the funny part). The mailroom boy met Neil Gaiman years after this and told him what happened, and Neil had heard Harlan Ellison tell about how he took a handgun out to his garden in his bathrobe to shoot the gopher, but nobody would believe him until Neil told the rest.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon