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After Celebrity Photo Leaks, 4chan Introduces DMCA Policy
davidshenba writes In the wake of leaked private photos of celebrities, 4chan has added Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown policy to its rules and policies. Under this new policy, the site will remove any notified and verified "infringement." It is not clear how effective this could be, or how 4chan is going to handle the inflow of notifications to restrict the content provided by users.
They've had a good amount of censorship for a while. Especially after they starting providing information on member posting very illegal content. It didn't kill the site then.
Well with the ephemeral nature of 4chan posts, it seems like this is more of a technicality than anything. The big boards are pretty fast, so posts are automatically wiped after a few hours at most. Infringing content will probably be off the site by the time a content owner's lawyers have time to fire off an email. On slower boards, they can be up for days or maybe even months, but I doubt anyone would bother sending a DMCA for something on, for example, the papercraft board.
All in all, it's probably just for moot to cover his ass and claim safe harbor, especially since content usually deletes itself in a few hours. Most of the time, he won't have to even do a thing.
Since one of the "celebrities" was under age when the photos were taken I suspect that the ante with respect to the legal ramifications may be a little higher than just a nasty letter from a lawyer. That sort of thing tends to focus the mind.
FMIQ (as implemented in the imgSeek server) is pretty good at detecting everything but crops, and that was 5-6 years ago when I last played with it. It likely has no problems with them now. This is a reasonably well solved problem.