Slashdot Mirror
Comcast Threatens TorrentFreak For Posting Public Court Document
Despite being part of public court proceedings, Comcast sent a notice of infringement ordering Torrent Freak to stop hosting a letter linking a subscriber to Prenda Law. From the article: "Comcast has sent TorrentFreak a cease and desist letter, claiming copyright over contents of an article which revealed that Prenda Law was involved in operating a pirate honeypot. Failure to comply will result in a lawsuit in which the Internet provider will seek damages, a Comcast representative informs us. In addition, Comcast also alerted our hosting provider, who is now threatening to shut down our server."
Okay, now I've read TFA; the document in question is a court filing and definitely not subject to copyright.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
And yet, I don't believe a single person has been charged for it that I've hear of, even when it seems pretty blatant to the rest of us.
Apparently all you have to do is claim you did it in good faith or there was a clerical error ... presto, you're off the hook.
It's a system written by, and for the benefit of, copyright holders -- and they seem to be presumed innocent unless you can absolutely prove otherwise. Not just that they're stupid or incompetent.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If we're going to have (I wish we did not... they're bad news) DMCA take-down orders, we also need a law WITH TEETH that criminalizes the abuse of same.
I agree that DMCA takedowns need teeth, and harsh penalties for abusing it. However, personal experience tells me we need takedowns of infringing material.
Fifteen years ago I started a Quake gaming site that I stuffed with all kinds of good contents, which included a huge trove of single player cheats, console commands and server commands that I meticulously tested and explained. Those pages may have been the most plagairized works on the internet; folks would take my content, remove my name, put theirs in, and repost.
My web host's IP address was used in one of the examples, and googling it brought up dozens of plagiarized pages. I'd email the sites and politely ask for simply credit and a link to my site. Very few complied and some were pretty damned hostile (most were at .edu domains so it was mostly college kids doing it, although a few were commercial).
Without takedowns there would have been nothing I could do about it. The same would apply to plagiarized GPL code someone posted and claimed credit for.
If someone posts my book on a commercial site I'll be issuing more (noncommercial use, including torrents, will be free). But bullshit like Comcast is pulling should result in someone's incarceration.
Free Martian Whores!
"Update 7pm CET: Comcast’s Senior Director Corporate Communications, Jenni Moyer, responded and said we can disregard the cease and desist as it “was sent in error.” The company further apologized for any confusion it may have caused."
https://torrentfreak.com/comcast-threatens-to-sue-torrentfreak-for-copyright-infringement-130821/
If they do that, then they must not charge the customer any more money. Many ISPs, however, have reacted to customers abandoning them due to invalid takedowns by charging them with the remainder of the contract, and sending that out to debt collectors. These are ISPs that need to be boycotted when they do things like this as a result of invalid takedowns.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No, but explanations and other added value content is. Sounds like people were not just taking facts, but instead duplicating entire pages and just changing the name from the poster to their own. I can actually recall seeing a lot of this type of plagiarism years ago, someone would write a walkthrough or FAQ and it would quickly show up in a number of places with the author's name changed to someone who wanted a little status or traffic.
No, false takedowns are in general not a felony. The DMCA is craftily worded such that the only thing that is perjury is if you misrepresent who hired you to file the takedown request.
I file a takedown claiming to represent Sony asking to take down Sony's material == perjury.
Sony files a takedown (as Sony) asking to take down my work which they don't own: not perjury.
That is how the law is written.
BTW, if you file a counterclaim, then 100% of it is covered under a perjury clause. So much for equality under the law.
He's not claiming copyright on the facts, he's claiming copyright on a particular written description of those facts, and not merely the listing of the codes. This is no different from people being unable to claim copyright on the laws of physics, but they are able to assert copyright over a physics textbook they wrote.
The ISP threat contains the wording "PLEASE NOTIFY US WITHIN 24 HOURS WITH TAKEN ACTIONS". They did NOT say what actions need to be taken, other than to notify them. So notify them of exactly what actions were taken. Say "We have removed each piece of content listed in the referenced complaint. Since there were no items listed in the referenced complaint (see the referenced complaint yourself and you will see there there are none), there were no items removed and we have asked the complainant to provide us with the list. We will provide you with a copy of that list when we receive it. If you receive the list before we do, please send a copy of it to us as quickly as possible so we may act on it. For now, our actions are therefore complete.".
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There's an entire industry now in auto-rippiing help-based discussion forums (particular cars, appliances, anything) and re-wrapping the threads as-is with your own layout wrapper and then using Google promotion tricks to get your page ahead of the real forum. The fake forums have no log in or response capability, but as most older product issues are archive stage anyway, i.e. thread with full solution, no more than a reference page is all that's needed.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.