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After Celebrity Photo Leaks, 4chan Introduces DMCA Policy

Posted by timothy on from the they'll-get-right-on-that dept.

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.

10 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. April's Fools Early? by The-Forge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When I saw this I had to make sure it wasn't April 1st and that the article wasn't from The Onion.

  2. Doesn't this pretty much kill 4chan? by Wycliffe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Doesn't this pretty much kill 4chan? by Himmy32 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Doesn't this pretty much kill 4chan? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      It would be like /. getting rid of Taco, making it impossible to follow comment threads, and selling out to slashvertisers. I mean, could you even IMAGINE that??

    3. Re:Doesn't this pretty much kill 4chan? by rioki · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The funny thing with this is that, since the half life of most posts is something around one or two hours, the system will remove any offending post before the DMCA can be processed. I expect that 99% of all DMCA requests can be forwarded to /dev/null. So yea...

      s/4chan/ebaumsworld/

    4. Re:Doesn't this pretty much kill 4chan? by fermion · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Like Usenet, it really isn't anything goes. Stuff that most people don't like is pushed off to alternative locations, there, bug not where anyone has to deal with it. What would kill 4chan, because evidently it runs with no significant budget or profit, would be a single lawsuit. By creating a belated DCMA policy, the site is protecting itself from such an event. Look at it this way. If Arthur Anderson had created a policy stating the conditions and intervals that documents would be destroyed, it might still be in existence today. But it did not, and panicked, and is gone. It is good that 4chan is being more forward thinking.

      --
      "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
    5. Re:Doesn't this pretty much kill 4chan? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This. So basically 5 minutes until 4chan popularises a link to software which subtly changes an image to change the hash and other identifying features.

      You're welcome, Internet.

  3. Technicalities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Effectiveness by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You think the media publishers type up each individual request?

    I used to have a job where I handled them. They are pretty much auto-generated by companies that charge the content owners for each notice. Most are fake and it's a massive scam to steal money from them. We ended up deleting most of them as the data in them was clearly made up. Basically they are required by law to do "something" about DMCA complaint, and you're seeing it. The net effect will probably be nothing. We rarely got to then in under a week, so I suspect they will take even longer. By then, the threads would be dead anyway.

  5. to clarify what this means. by nimbius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.