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DMCA 'Safe Harbor' Up In the Air For Online Sites That Use Moderators (arstechnica.com)
"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act's so-called 'safe harbor' defense to infringement is under fire from a paparazzi photo agency," reports Ars Technica. "A new court ruling says the defense may not always be available to websites that host content submitted by third parties." The safe harbor provision "allow[s] websites to be free from legal liability for infringing content posted by their users -- so long as the website timely removes that content at the request of the rights holder," explains Ars. From the report: [A] San Francisco-based federal appeals court is ruling that, if a website uses moderators to review content posted by third parties, the safe harbor privilege may not apply. That's according to a Friday decision in a dispute brought by Mavrix Photographs against LiveJournal, which hosts the popular celebrity fan forum "Oh No they Didn't." The site hosted Mavrix-owned photos of Beyonce Knowles, Katy Perry, and other stars without authorization. LiveJournal claimed it was immune from copyright liability because it removed the photos. Mavrix claimed that the site's use of voluntary moderators removed the safe-harbor provision. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Mavrix to a degree, but the court wants to know how much influence the moderators had on what was and was not published. With that, the court sent the case back to a lower court in Los Angeles to figure that out, perhaps in a trial. The highly nuanced decision overturned a lower court ruling that said LiveJournal was protected by safe harbor. The lower court said LiveJournal does not solicit any specific infringing material from its users or edit the content of its users' posts.
Shaking in their booties! Imagine if Twitter were held responsible for the terrorist shit they allow?
If each post has to be approved by moderators I can see the safe harbor being eroded, but if it's a post facto moderation then I don't see how that changes anything.
Good. This will be the end of "moderation" which silences one voice and amplifies another. This is a win for free speech. For freedom. If you love freedom you would also love anything that puts an end to this great injustice.
+5 insightful!
Oh, wait...
Isn't removing infringing content at the request of the rights holders its-self an act of moderation?
You must do that in order to be considered a safe harbor, but having moderators means you don't have safe harbor protections.
Pretty soon the only thing we'll be able to post are pictures of our own penises.
See how the so-called "rightsholders" squeeze and squeeze... try to get a little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more every time? And every time they get it? They learned from SOPA/PIPA. Don't go for the big bang. Go for it step by step. If you told Europeans 20 years ago that the Copyright Industry would have the power to block you at the ISP level from accessing websites (except for the Germans, they have a very strong Copyright Industry that made them pay fees on computer printers since forever since you "might print out a book with it") they would have said you were completely insane. Yet here we are. Soon the US will be on the block "internationals standards" etc. that they put in place themselves through endless, tireless lobbying and litigation.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
It's not that sites that use moderators can lose their safe harbor protection, but rather sites that give too much direction as to how to moderate AND where moderators exercise prior restraint such that no post goes up without having been reviewed by a moderator, can cause said moderators to be viewed as agents of the sites they moderate for rather than uninvolved third parties (and hence the Safe Harbor no longer applies).
In this case, moderators for a Livejournal community knowingly used photographs that were clearly watermarked such that any reasonable person would know they were copyrighted and they had no fair use rationale for posting them. Because Livejournal provides such explicit direction to moderators, and these moderators held posts for review, there is no way they couldn't have known what they posted, and they thus appeared to do so on behalf of Livejournal.
Communities that don't want to run into this problem simply need to avoid giving too much direction to moderators (since that could be viewed as exercising arbitrary control over them such that they are your agents), don't exercise prior restraint or otherwise hold comments for review, and remove infringing content when you become aware of it.
If you want the real story without the hyperbole and clickbait, try reading the actual fucking ruling.
Because 4chan is such a shinning example of interesting arguments made by knowledgeable parties, that does not degenerate into name-calling or trivial logical fallacies.
entropy happens
faggot
and some text to get around the filter
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In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
There are many images on the web, and tons of source code, for which I don't know the license. Therefore I don't use them, since I don't know whether I'm allowed to or not. (Or I first find out what the license is, such as by asking.) That's the general rule - if you don't know whether you are allowed to use some content in a particular way, either find out, or don't use it. As a general rule, that's more or less reasonable.
If the editor of a newspaper doesn't know the license status of a particular image, they generally won't run that image in their newspaper. If an editor / moderator of a web site doesn't know if an image is licensed for the site's use, they CAN simply not allow the image to be posted to the site - they are already approving or rejecting the posting anyway. The legitimate question is "given the exact wording of the law (DMCA) as applied to the particular site in question, do the editors/moderators have a role similar to the editor of a newspaper?" (Again, as defined by the particular wording of the law.) This case isn't about the concept in general, but about the particulars of this specific case.
People who volunteer to be editors / moderators may indeed be unable to effectively serve as editors. In that case, perhaps if the site wants editors, they should pay editors, or else not have them. It's been known since at least 1997 when I started doing web sites professionally that weak moderation / editing is risky. Once you have staff deciding what should be posted, you start to become responsible for those decisions. (Including unpaid staff).
So GP is absolutely correct, beheadings don't come under the Copyright Act.
Well, not under the "offenses" section, but certainly under "penalties," right?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.