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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.
When I saw this I had to make sure it wasn't April 1st and that the article wasn't from The Onion.
I thought the whole purpose of 4chan was that "anything goes".
If they start censoring it then all the people that are there will just move somewhere else that is not restricted.
Image board like 4chan don't permanent host data. On the quick moving boards, images are gone before someone even could type up a DMCA request. Maybe they'll prevent that picture being posted again. I wonder how their members are going to react to new censorship.
All your base are belong to DMCA
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
You do know that all 4chan threads auto-expire, usually within an hour or two, sometimes a day or two if carefully bumped, right? DMCA basically says remove THAT item. Sure, bro, just a minute... oh look it's gone now!
A recent change allowed threads on some boards (well, I only know /a/ does) to auto-archive on expire, which lets a thread hang around un-indexed for another two days or so. This is great when you have to go somewhere for a few hours, just leave the thread up and you can catch the rest of it when you get back. But eventually even those threads vanish into the primordial ooze like a zero-point energy of social media.
There are also external sites which archive threads, but that's not 4chan's problem with regards to the DMCA.
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many people think 4chan is a place where 'anything goes.' thats not the case. the /b board is where the most shocking content submission and conversation happens, and its arguably been the one 4chans owner moot (christopher poole) has had the most trouble handling in the past. Poole determined rather early on that he was willing to sacrifice 4chans freedom of speech so long as someone was willing to foot the bill for his posh new york condo and hipster pedigree. He used to at least make a passing attempt at participation by dredging up old 4chan memes like 'crescent fresh' but lately its mostly mods and ops in his name that enforce the christmas hat overlays and such. Its nothing new though, 4chan has had a DMCA policy for nearly a decade and will gladly redact link content and ban users for posting torrents.
poole has always done the DMCA shimmy because while leaks like this draw traffic, they also have the ability to draw him into protracted litigation and harm his advertising revenue stream. hes worried about celebrities in this case growing a pair and sending him to court personally, or attacking his advertisers.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Kappa Beta Phi has announced that it has a under-aged drinking policy, which it expects it's members to respect.
The NSA has a policy against eavesdropping on phone calls, which it pinky promises it will observe.
And finally, Slashdot is instituting a "No Trolls" policy, which First Post, Natalie Portman Naked and Petrified.
This probably won't work, because either:
1) The influx of content will overwhelm 4Chan's very few mods.
2) Trolls will flag every single image and overwhelm 4Chan's very few mods.
3) 4Chan's very few mods will not care.
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