Harlan Ellison vs. AOL Judgment Reversed

Robotech_Master writes "An appeals court has issued a decision reversing the summary judgment of a lower court that AOL qualified as a "safe harbor" under the DMCA. At issue is the fact that Ellison sent his notification of copyright violation to an email address at AOL, which AOL never received because the abuse submission address had been changed." The complete decision is available here as a PDF file; read below for an excerpt.

"AOL changed its contact e-mail address from "copyright@aol.com" to "aolcopyright@aol.com" in the fall of 1999, but waited until April 2000 to register the change with the U.S. Copyright Office. Moreover, AOL failed to configure the old e-mail address so that it would either forward messages to the new address or return new messages to their senders. In the meantime, complaints such as Ellison's went unheeded, and complainants were not notified that their messages had not been delivered. Furthermore, there is evidence in the record suggesting that a phone call from AOL subscriber John J. Miller to AOL should have put AOL on notice of the infringing activity on the particular USENET group at issue in this case, "alt.binaries.e-book." Miller contacted AOL to report the existence of unauthorized copies of works by various authors. Because there is evidence indicating that AOL changed its e-mail address in an unreasonable manner and that AOL should have been on notice of infringing activity we conclude that a reasonable trier of fact could find that AOL had reason to know of potentially infringing activity occurring within its USENET network."

Comments

Slashlaw

[KU_Fletch]

Slashlaw: The Finest in IANAL Speculation

Solution for AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I would use that high-speed technology to send The American Choppers kid (you know the geeky one) back in time to kill Harlan Ellison. But in an ironic twist he will fall in love with him and instead be forced to let him die in a freak truck accident.

Re:Wow

[NoSuchGuy]

Do you think AOL is an ISP?

Get real!

They are a CD-Company, always sending out these so called AOL-CDs.

Re:Harlan Ellison is a nut case.

[An Onerous Coward]

I'm not familiar with this author. Can somebody tell me where I can download some of his works?