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10 Years Later, Misunderstood DMCA Is the Law That "Saved the Web"
mattOzan writes "On the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [PDF], Wired Magazine posits that the DMCA should be praised for catalyzing the interactive '2.0' Web that we enjoy today. While acknowledging the troublesome 'anti-circumvention' provision of the act, they claim that any harm caused by that is far outweighed by the act's "notice-and-takedown" provision and the safe harbor that this provides to intermediary ISPs. Fritz Attaway, policy adviser for the MPAA weighed in saying 'It's not perfect. But it's better than nothing.'"
The DMCA is an umbrella act of at least five different acts (well, four and a few miscellaneous stuff). The article's praise is for the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, whereas most of the criticism over the past decade is actually aimed at the WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act.
your confused, GPL doesn't mean it has to be free. i can sell my work under the GPL and not provide public access to it at all, i just have to give the source to people who buy it off me that's all. remeber it's distribution that triggers the requirement for providing the source, nothing else.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Nobody prusues it because congress knew the clause was a joke when they made it a part of the law. I can not find one instance where perjury charges have been brought against false and/or purely malicious DMCA take-down notices. The reason being is that the DCMA being a federal law, your local/state DA doesn't care, and good luck getting the feds to ever go after corporate corruption, unless they aren't paying their taxes.
I don't know about angles, but it's fear that gives men wings. -Max Payne
There is - perjury. The problem is that nobody pursues it.
Everyone misunderstands that clause. The penalty is not perjury if you don't own the copyright. The penalty is perjury if you didn't have a "good faith" belief that you own the copyright. So if you send your take-down to something that has a similar name to your movie, you can prove that you had a "good faith" believe that it was your movie, even if it was something else.
THAT is why nobody pursues it. It's almost impossible to prove that the person did committed perjury. They really need to fix that clause because, as it stands, it's completely toothless.
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I think people would be much more interested in the EFF's viewpoint on the whole DMCA anniversary.