DMCA – Ciaran Laval

April 1, 2016

Last Few Hours To Comment On DMCA Via US Government Website

The US government have been inviting comments regarding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and how it works. The comment period has been extended until 11:59pm Eastern Time today, you can see more here.

The main document describing the reasons for comments is Requests for Public Comments: Digital Millennium Copyright Act Safe Harbor Provisions. Comments are closed there, but as I said the commenting period has been extended, so follow the first link if you want to comment. The main document however is summarised as :

The United States Copyright Office is undertaking a public study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the DMCA safe harbor provisions contained in 17 U.S.C. 512. Among other issues, the Office will consider the costs and burdens of the notice-and-takedown process on large- and small-scale copyright owners, online service providers, and the general public. The Office will also review how successfully section 512 addresses online infringement and protects against improper takedown notices. To aid in this effort, and to provide thorough assistance to Congress, the Office is seeking public input on a number of key questions.

This should be of interest to Second Life and other virtual world content creators, although I suspect it’s intended for an American audience, being an American law being discussed on an Amercian Government website. The results of this discussion however, are going to be of interest to content creators worldwide.

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November 20, 2014November 20, 2014

Automattic Exemplify A Sensible And Transparent Approach To DMCA Requests

Nalates Urriah has posted a very interesting blog post about about DMCA Abuse. The post highlights that Automattic, the people behind WordPress and other ventures have been Striking Back Against Censorship. The post is almost a year old so I’m a bit surprised we haven’t heard more about this in Second Life circles. Where this should be of interest to Second Life and other users is that this is about abuse of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The DMCA process is something that frustrates many Second Life content creators.

The issue for Automattic is what they view as abuse of the DMCA process to censor opinion. On their blog post Automattic write :

The DMCA system gives copyright holders a powerful and easy-to-use weapon: the unilateral right to issue a takedown notice that a website operator (like Automattic) must honor or risk legal liability. The system works so long as copyright owners use this power in good faith. But too often they don’t, and there should be clear legal consequences for those who choose to abuse the system.

However whereas this is all very good and well when the DMCA process is used in good faith, Automattic were seeing an increase in the number of cases where good faith does not seem to be being applied, they also highlight one of the issues with the DMCA process that makes people uncomfortable, having to provide your details to the person making the complaint :

We receive hundreds of DMCA notices and try our best to review, identify, and push back on those we see as abusive. Our users have the right to challenge a DMCA complaint too, but doing so requires them to identify themselves and fill out a legally required form saying that they submit to being sued for copyright infringement in a place that may be far away. If they don’t, their content is taken down and could stay down forever. This tradeoff doesn’t work for the many anonymous bloggers that we host on WordPress.com, who speak out on sensitive issues like corporate or government corruption.

So we’re talking blogging and sensitive issues here, not whether someone really created a texture. However the issues raised are similar to those that confront Second Life users in terms of the process and the abuse of the process. One of the big issues that people in Second Life complain about is that it’s too easy to abuse the DMCA procedure.

Automattic assist their users when they see what they feel are abusive uses of the DMCA procedure, they even have a Hall Of Shame where they highlight some examples of what they feel were improper takedown notices.

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November 18, 2012

DMCA Is Far From Ideal But It Remains An Option

So there you are, you’ve created your new item, taken the photos, unleashed it inworld and are sitting back watching the Linden Dollars flow in when you get the nod that someone has copied your content, not only that, they’re also selling it.

Now after cursing, banging your head on the desk and swearing to rip someone a new backside, there are things you need to consider. The first thing to consider is that unless you inform Linden Lab of the situation, nothing is likely to happen. The second thing to consider is that Linden Lab do not adjudicate on these issues, they ask you to file a DMCA. Linden Lab have a page on DMCA, which you can read here. The big thing to bear in mind is that DMCA is not a Second Life policy, it’s a legal policy, this therefore goes beyond the terms of service, as noted on the DMCA page:

Please note that these notifications and counter-notifications are real-world legal notices provided outside of the Second Life environment. Linden Lab may provide copies of such notices to the participants in the dispute or third parties, at our discretion and as required by law – the privacy policy for Second Life does not protect information provided in these notices.

For some people, DMCA is discouraging, they don’t like it, they don’t want to provide the information required and they get frustrated, but unfortunately, the option to use it depends upon following the process.

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November 17, 2012November 17, 2012

Frustrations Lead To Resident Created Petition

I was reading Nalates Urriah’s blog when I noticed a post about the commerce team. Now the commerce team aren’t exactly top of people’s Christmas card lists at the moment, they come in for a lot of stick, rightly or wrongly, and in many cases wrongly. However their communications are abysmal, although my understanding is that they are working on this as well as trying to get the Jira team to allow others to read marketplace related Jira’s. The changes to the Jira with regards to reading other reports are quite frankly, abysmal.

However back to the point, Nalates post linked to a petition that a Second Life resident has created, currently with over three hundred and sixty signatures. The petition is aimed at Linden Lab, rather than the commerce team and is basically a list of frustrations regarding DMCA, Abuse Reports that seem toothless and viewers that connect to the grid with capabilities of circumventing the permissions system to copy content.

At its heart, this petition demonstrates the lack of engagement with Linden Lab on these issues and again I have to say that Linden Lab’s communications are in all too many areas, awful. There are exceptions, the server team do a fine job but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. They should be the example.

However the problem I have with the petition is that it’s short on suggestions on how to fix the problems.

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