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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.
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"?
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.
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.