DMCA Works

A week ago a friend sent me a disturbing email: another creative individual has decided to use my content to attract traffic, this time making sure to remove all the links and even the webinar introductions before republishing it. As expected, the well-populated web site had no about or contact me links, and the domain name registrant was an obvious fake.

Fortunately, the web site happened to be hosted by a US-based cloud services provider, and thus I could use a great advice offered by Gorazd Božič during RIPE64 meeting (the video is well worth watching) – don’t even try to argue with the web site owner or hosting provider, contact the provider's lawyers with DMCA takedown notice.

Another hint from Gorazd: don’t send the DMCA takedown notice to the regular ISP contacts, use the Directory of Service Provider Agents.

A week later, my content is gone from the site and replaced with a stolen copy of Cisco Field Manual: Router Configuration ... the whack-a-mole game continues.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous 07 August 2012 04:26
    DMCA works... and fails:
    http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/8/6/nasa-s-mars-rover-crashed-into-a-dmca-takedown
    Replies
    1. Ivan Pepelnjak 07 August 2012 09:58
      That's not DMCA failure but Google's laziness.

      Instead of implementing the minimum due process (including the counter-claim ability of the "offender") they decided to give all the power to people who could actually sue them (who cares about the users - they're a product anyway).

      Welcome to the wonderful world of "free" services and mass-scale peanut-harvesting (what else is ad-based revenue?)
    2. Phil 16 August 2012 02:43
      It IS a failure of DMCA that someone can submit such blatantly fraudulent copyright claims without consequence. I certainly agree that Google is being lazy in this case, but that's because DMCA is so one-sided about this issue. It makes Google liable for failure to comply with a valid notice, and shields them from liability to the true content owner for complying with a bogus notice. If you were Google in that case, what would you do?
    3. Ivan Pepelnjak 16 August 2012 06:07
      I'm no lawyer (and you should never listen to any of my ramblings not related to networking) but the sample DMCA notice I used included the sentence "Under penalty of perjury I certify that the information contained in the notification is both true and accurate, and I have the authority to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright(s) involved."

      Whether someone decides to follow up on fraudulent claims and what the penalty for one might be is in my naive understanding outside of the DMCA scope.
  2. Anonymous 07 August 2012 19:04
    Good advice to never send the notice to the NOC, we used to delete those emails all the time.
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