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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."
wOOt!!
That excerpt sounds like they're holding AOL responsible for the actions of its users, based on AOL having a bad e-mail address listed. Which sounds insane, so there must be more going on...
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Usenet cannot be explained. You must experience it to understand it.
Warning! Goatse.cx is a mild experience compared to what you face on USENET!
SO I CAN'T BUY HIS BOOKS ANYMORE.
Apparently Slashdot agrees, because the lameness filter insists that I write some more text like this even though it really kind of undermines the message of the comment. That's pretty lame, Rob. The lameness filter is lame. See the irony? Oh, man, that's deep.
c0mmun15t fag0rt!
Harlan is a fucktard.
Nobody cares about the old coot, he hasn't written anything worth buying in about 40 years, and so now he's down to sueing his fans.
I'll bet he and the RIAA see eye to eye.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you