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.
Of course the nature of abusive DMCA claims in Second Life are of largely very different to those of a blogging site. In terms of Second Life they are usually between one Second Life user and another and this means it’s extremely difficult for Linden Lab to take sides. I doubt very much whether Linden Lab would consider a Hall Of Shame equivalent. However it would be good if Linden Lab pointed out the serious nature of false DMCA takedown requests.
Automattic are very transparent about the requests they receive, so transparent that they have a site called Transparency Report. That site details the number of requests from governments for information about users, the number of takedown requests from governments and the number of Intellectual Property takedown requests they’ve received. For example they received 3,360 IP takedown notices in the first half of 2014. 64% resulted in complete removal of the offending material whereas 44% received counter notices.
Linden Lab could certainly learn something from the transparency of the Automattic approach. Linden Lab and Second Life users may also want to take a look at Automattic’s Open Source initiative with their DMCA documentation :
One of the challenges faced by online service providers is how to implement an effective policy for dealing with the DMCA takedown process – especially in cases where the system is being abused. We strive to protect users’ freedom of speech, and would love to see others do the same. However, the possible scenarios and requirements can be confusing; the language intimidating… especially for websites run by individuals or small organisations.
As a result, we are pleased to announce that today we are open sourcing our DMCA process docs on GitHub – under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
The documentation is well worth a look at if you’re a Second Life content creator who is involved in or is considering being involved in, a DMCA dispute. The DMCA process is far from perfect, but it’s all content creators and Linden Lab have for now.
I would find it encouraging if Linden Lab were transparent on the number of internal and external DMCA requests they received, it would also be encouraging if they reiterated that abuse of the DMCA process to undermine others will not be tolerated.
Linden Lab do of course offer some guidance on the DMCA process, that can be found here : DMCA: Digital Millennium Copyright Act.