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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.
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??
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/
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.