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.
Continue reading “Automattic Exemplify A Sensible And Transparent Approach To DMCA Requests”
