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Usenet.com May Find Safe Harbor From RIAA lawsuit
Daneal writes "Ars Technica has some interesting analysis of the RIAA's lawsuit against Usenet.com. There's reason to believe that Usenet.com — and most other Usenet providers — could qualify for protection under the DMCA's Safe Harbor provision. 'The DMCA's Safe Harbor provision provides protection for ISPs from copyright infringement lawsuits as long as they take down offending material once they are served with a notice of infringement. "Whether the Safe Harbor applies is the central legal question that is going to be raised," EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann told Ars. An RIAA spokesperson tells Ars that the group has issued "many" takedown notices to Usenet.com, but von Lohmann says that the volume of takedown notices isn't what counts. "The DMCA's Safe Harbor makes it very clear," von Lohmann said. "The number of notices doesn't matter as long as you take the infringing content down."'"
I thought that they refused to take down the content in the last article about this?
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
They wanna take down USENET?
And they're gonna target a single NNTP provider to do it?
OMFG, USENET was P2P before P2P was invented. It's so distributed, diffuse, and attributionless that it's practically untouchable.
Who keeps picking out windmills for RIAA to tilt at? Their legal attack strategist needs to put down the crack pipe and step away from his desk.
Seriously...
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
To be honest, I don't know how Usenet.com can not qualify for DMCA protection, since it's exactly the type of service that the Safe Harbor exception is supposed to protect. The only thing that seems like it could harm Usenet.com is their advertising, which does veer a little into "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" territory. However, damning a company because it says it respects users' privacy, without actually advocating any type of criminal activity, seems like pretty terrible precedent, and I can only hope (although at this point I have little faith) that a judge will see it similarly.
I think the mention in the Ars article about Safe Harbor being related to "transitory network communications" is irrelevant here. Transitory network communications is covered under 512(a) of the OCILLA (which is part of the DMCA); the portion that I would expect Usenet.com to seek protection under is 512(c), "Information Residing on Systems or Networks at Direction of Users".
You can read the relevant section here, but the significant portion, IMO, is:
The major things they're going to have to avoid are that they "had actual knowledge" that the material was infringing (which might be tough -- I mean, anybody who opens up alt.binaries.movies can probably tell pretty quickly that it's full of bootlegs) and that they didn't receive a "financial benefit directly attributable" to the infringing activity. I think that second one is actually a little easier (for Usenet.com) than the former. And, of course, they have to successfully argue/explain that they don't really have the power to remove articles from Usenet, because of the nature of the network -- it would probably help their case if they started at least deleting articles from their spool/store when they receive a complaint.
I suspect that this may lead to a shakedown in the Usenet provider world, if Usenet.com loses. At the very least, the big providers might have to do more in order to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability (deleting some of the more obviously movie and/or warez related groups, perhaps), or move their servers out of the U.S.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The issue is that Usenet.com blatantly (from a common-sense point of view, whether it's legally meaningful I have no idea) markets themselves as a way to illegally obtain copyrighted content. As someone put it yesterday, if the phone companies ran commercials advertising "Telephones -- the best way to plan your terrorist activities!" that would cut into their ability to claim common carrier status as a defense. Same thing for Safe Harbor.
Incidentally, didn't we have a story a few months ago complaining that the MPAA and RIAA weren't suing usenet providers, and how that proved some conspiracy theory? If that faction is relieved at this new development, I haven't seen them mention it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yes, those ads are part of the problem, because it hurts their Safe Harbor defense (see my post which quotes the section of the DMCA, further down in the thread). But only insofar as they might show that Usenet.com was benefiting directly from illegal content. And I'm not sure they do that, because the ads aren't that blatant. They basically just suggest that they have a rigorous privacy policy, etc. It's not totally damning.
Where I think they get into trouble is that, in order to claim Safe Harbor, they basically need to be able to claim "hey, somebody put that up onto our system, we didn't know it was infringing, we didn't even know it was there!" And it's a bit tough to do that with Usenet, seeing as how it's about 99% binaries and anyone who's ever opened up the alt.binaries.* hierarchy can tell that it's got a lot of bootlegs and warez in it.
It would be a little comical to see a whole bunch of seasoned network engineers and other greybeards try to claim that they had no idea there was copyrighted material on Usenet. ("Warez? On my Usenet?") But that's sort of the position they have to put themselves in, in order to get a successful 512(c) defense.
They also have to show that in the past they've complied with DMCA takedown orders against content that a copyright holder has pointed out as being infringing, which it seems like they weren't doing. That may also be a problem, although maybe they can argue that they didn't have the capability to delete articles (after all, if they took them out of their store, would they just have come in on a feed from another site that they peer with?). It might be difficult to get a judge to swallow that, though.
I think they're in trouble, but I'm not sure exactly how much trouble just yet.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
http://www.usenet.com/articles/free_download.htm Humm. Yeah, that's a lot more blatant than they were making it out to be in the Ars article. In fact, what the hell, guys? I know it has a copyright date of 2005 on it, but even if that had been written in 1995 it still would have been a little much.
To wit: (in case they take the page down, which I sure would if I were them)The hell with it: They're pretty fucked.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The first US telephone exchange opened in 1978. AT&T and the regional Bell companies were privately financed from day one and evolved into regulated public utilities.
The common carrier rule can be traced back to the days when Western Union was in its prime and censoring telegrams it found inconvenient.
With the the exception of civil engineering projects like the Panama Canal, federal spending on infrastructure begins with the New Deal of the 1930s.
It would be a little comical to see a whole bunch of seasoned network engineers and other greybeards try to claim that they had no idea there was copyrighted material on Usenet. ("Warez? On my Usenet?") But that's sort of the position they have to put themselves in, in order to get a successful 512(c) defense.
Why is that a barrier to a successful 512(c) defense? If the host, Usenet.com in this case, services all take down notices in a reasonable and timely fashion and makes reasonable efforts to accommodate copyright holders (the court decides what is and is not reasonable) then have they not fulfilled their obligation under the law? How would they know if there was a copy of Eric Clapton's greatest hits on their network? Sure they could search for it if they wanted to but are they required to have automated agents searching all of the time for everything that might be copyrighted? Is that reasonable or even feasible? Certainly not, it is the responsibility of the copyright holder to locate infringement and take the legally required step of sending a take down notice. As long as there is a reasonable system in place to service requests from copyright holders, then the content host has fulfilled its obligations and should be able to take refuge in the safe harbor.
Of course, that assumes the party issuing the takedown notice knew to cite the offending articles by Message-ID. The canceled messages will not re-propagate to the server. The poster, anywhere else in the world, could still repost under a new Message-ID (automatically generated for every posting). The cancel messages can even contain the takedown notice in each message body, which would be readable in the newsgroup named "control" and/or in "control.cancel" if it is present.
They wouldn't necessarily even have to cryptographically sign the cancels since they are local, though it might be wise to prevent fellow users of the same server wildly canceling other articles.
These organizations could technically send out their own cancel messages with unrestricted distribution, though I'm not familiar with the current state of the art in preventing forged cancels. If spammers have truly lost interest in Usenet, it may have come to the point where cancel messages are generally ignored.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?