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FunnyJunk v. the Oatmeal: Copyright Infringement Complaints As Defamation
An anonymous reader writes "Funny as it might sound, FunnyJunk's threat of litigation against The Oatmeal raises a very important issue: the extent to which artists can complain in public about perceived or actual infringement of their works by user-generated content websites. Does it matter if the content creator accused the website of condoning or participating in the infringement?" The short story is this: Numerous Oatmeal comics were posted without permission to FunnyJunk; Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman lambasted FunnyJunk in the form of a blog post. FunnyJunk responded with a suit (or rather the threat of a suit) accusing Inman of willful defamation, unless he ponies up $20,000, which he doesn't plan to do.
I've never been to Funnyjunk before, but after this blew up, I decided I'd test out their claim about how easy it was to take down infringing images.
Naturally, these sites make it wicked easy to upload any image, taking down an obvious one would be just as simple, no? Well, in 5 minutes I found a Cyanide & Happiness comic (explosm.net). I hit the flag button and found "copyright infringement" very simple to find. "Great!" I thought, "So simple to fix this problem." Nope, that takes me to a DMCA page where I have to type in a real name, e-mail address, phone number and supporting information.
Wow.
If it's so easy to upload an image, shouldn't there be a responsibility to make it just as easy to take one down? Of course, there would be a manual review process and some countermeasures to prevent someone from flagging the whole site (which may be mostly original content, that's a separate discussion), but it should be a whole lot easier.
IANAL or anything; but one would think that hasty, trivially-verifiable, scrubbing of that offending content that you oh-so-just-couldn't-keep-up-with-the-burden-of-policing-it-was-all-the-users'-fault right up until you send a '20k or a lawsuit' letter worded in outright extortionate tones seems like a bad strategy.
Given the DMCA safe-harbor provisions(much as team MPAA loaths them), it is entirely possible that the offending links did not subject funnyjunk to liability(since Oatmeal apparently didn't feel like playing DMCA whack-a-mole, so they hadn't necessarily received a takedown notice); but axing them after issuing a legal threat alleging that assertions of copyright infringement were defamatory sure smells like destruction of evidence... And courts tend to take a very dim view of destruction of evidence...
A Dallas photographer found his photo illegally being used on a bunch of websites. He filed the thousand-or-so DMCA notices to ask the photo be removed. Virtually all the websites complied except for ONE owned by Candice Schwanger, who is now suing the photographer.
Why do people like Candice/Funnyjoke think they have the right to sue people they are copying from? It's hilarious. I have the judge pounds these people into the dirt, punishes them of 50,000 dollars, and hands it to the Victim whose photos/comics were infringed upon.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
"Cyanide"|"Happiness Cyanide" returns results with Cyanide and Happiness. "Cyanide and happiness"|"Cyanide happiness" returns nothing.
"Calvin" returns results with Calvin and Hobbes. Anything with "hobbes" in the search returns nothing.
"Side far"|"Far" returns Far Side Comics. |"Far side"|"Farside" returns nothing.
They are lazy.