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Ummm If you post something in a public place, that is the opposite of private.

You can't say something on live television and then ask them to delete the tape for privacy reasons, well you could but it would be dumb.

You can't expect privacy when you have a meeting in a glass room I guess is what I'm saying.

If you're saying something on live television, you're probably a public figure. Nonetheless, you would own the copyright to any original statement you made on TV, and people couldn't just copy and replay it without getting legal permission. Most people who appear on TV probably sign documents granting the station licensing authority for any statement they make whilst appearing.

When you are meeting in a glass room, you can't expect privacy in the moment, but if someone takes the intellectual property you shared in that glass room and puts it somewhere else, you certainly can expect them to respect the laws that allow you to require them to stop. If they don't, you should expect law enforcement and/or the courts to assist.

>Nonetheless, you would own the copyright to any original statement you made on TV, and people couldn't just copy and replay it without getting legal permission. Most people who appear on TV probably sign documents granting the station licensing authority for any statement they make whilst appearing.

The broadcaster would typically own the copyright to the video. I am sometimes given specific waivers to sign when I'm recorded at conferences and the like--mostly because rights to use material for marketing/commercial purposes are more restricted than the same material used for editorial. Frankly, most events etc. don't bother because the (correct) assumption is that people doing things in public aren't going to suddenly want to get rid of the content.

Yes, they would own the copyright on the elements of the video that they produce. They wouldn't automatically own the copyright on any statement you made. The papers you sign would probably contain language much like the language on a random forum's ToS, discussing an irrevocable, non-exclusive, limited, global license to use any statement you make and/or to license the clips containing your statements out to partners. I've never been on TV, so I don't know. While it is possible that they try to get you to transfer the copyright to any statement you make, the courts are generally pretty dubious of such attempts.

Also, giving a presentation to thousands of people, whether at a conference or over a broadcast, is at least perceived a lot differently than leaving a comment on a message board, especially if it's a small one or a niche community, so different things are shared.

Suppose one is foolish as an 18-yr-old and posts on a forum most browsed by his friends, "Ha! I just got Lifelock and since I know you can't do anything to me when I have that, my SSN is 999-99-999. Just try to steal my identity!" Suppose the IA saves this statement. The OP would have a copyright interest in it and would be within his rights to point out that the IA has no privileges that entitle it to rehost that content, so please take it down. That is totally fair.

There is no reason that copyright law should only be usable by media conglomerates that mostly use it to stop the spread of free culture and not by private individuals trying to clean up some of their past mistakes.

I'm not sure we really disagree. Anything my 18 yo self wrote that's still accessible online was filtered through editors etc. and I'm not unhappy for that :-) While I'm no fan of much of the EU right to be forgotten thinking, I'm also sympathetic to the idea that not everything we write in a young, foolish moment should be discoverable forever with no recourse. I also think that there are a lot of practical issues to getting rid of the foolishness without also creating the opportunity to eliminate things that are legitimately in the public interest/part of a historical record although, in practice, I expect that some combination of time and the sheer volume of data deals with a lot of it.

We are talking about abuse of DMCA related to takedowns and copyright, and you are muddling the issue by stretching into privacy. Is privacy covered by DMCA? Is the DMCA something that an OP could use to request takedown of data from a site? If it is, then that would be what you should be speaking about, not grand visions of "how dare they copy and then host things that were on the public internet because some of those things might be privacy-sensitive!"

To play devils advocate against myself, I have made mistakes in the earlier days of the internet, that I am glad the archives failed to keep. I do understand that there is a need for privacy friendly user sites, but I am sceptical about what tools are allowed to actually perform this structure. Right now, the internet is a threat to the power that be, which is why we will see an ever increasing attempt to legislate it into the ground. If we allow government corruption to seep into the internet anymore than it already is, the real concern will be one of censorship and propaganda, and user privacy is less to do with publicly posting things you shouldnt, but more to do with the corporate/government merger and data sharing that is going on around us. Loopholes everywhere for suppressing dissidents.

I don't have a problem with IA's operation in general, but individuals do own the exclusive copyright on their works. The forums they post on generally have a ToS that states the user grants them non-exclusive license to display the content. This doesn't automatically extend to the IA. Thus, if an individual doesn't want its work to appear on the IA anymore, they can issue a DMCA takedown request, as can be done for any other copyrighted information on the internet. The IA should respect these instead of trying to claim that there is a public interest in keeping them accessible.

It's a valid question. If, for whatever reason, someone wanted to purge their identity from the Internet Archive as much as possible--including from properties that they did not control--I suppose they could try, but I doubt they's have much luck. For example, if you were to ask them to expunge any HN page that you had comments on. One issue is that there's no easy way to delete only your content if you're embedded in other discussions.

I expect it's a legal gray area that mostly works in part because most random forum posts are pseudonymous.

Not all pages contain content from other people. Most message boards have a page that shows just that users' posts. At least these should be pretty easy to get taken down by informing the IA that they don't have a license to display the content (which is true).

Is the DMCA something that an OP could use to request takedown of data from a site?

Why not? Forum posts are copyrighted at the moment of creation just like any other work, and while one certainly gives a license (implied or not) to the forum, there's no reason why that license would extend to the IA.

Interesting. So under this working theory, the entirety of the IA is fundamentally against copyright unless specifically allowed/released per site?

So perhaps a new IA that only indexes creative commons licensed sites might be in order?

>Interesting. So under this working theory, the entirety of the IA is fundamentally against copyright unless specifically allowed/released per site?

IANAL, but basically yes. It's one reason why the IA respects robots.txt even retroactively. The reality is that, if something was posted publicly by a copyright holder and intended to be shared, the overwhelming majority of people/entities don't care that it's being archived somewhere but there's no particular exemption for something like the IA.

The IA is like a library. Libraries don't have to get special permission from book publishers to be libraries.

Because of first sale doctrine. Anyone can set up a library by buying physical books, DVDs, or anything else they want to lend out to one person at a time without any sort of special permission. Digital library content, on the other hand, is based on specific contracts with the rights holders.

Except it isn't. By this standard, book publishers would have to go pound sand if libraries started giving away infinitely many copies of their book.

To be more precise, it doesn't *matter" if the Internet Archive is a "library" or not because libraries don't have any special status with respect to copyright law in the US. (Beyond whatever special status publishers may choose to give certain classes of libraries with respect to digital rights.) You or I can choose to setup a lending library tomorrow and we have the same rights to loan out physical books as the New York Public Library does.

Yes, as you point out, due to the first sale doctrine. Such a thing doesn't exist in the digital realm.

I haven't done my research yet, but the website I made when I was 15-16 is archived and needs to come down. I'm hoping being made by a minor helps? Anyone had experience taking stuff down or do you have to issue a DMCA?

It's hard to put genies back in bottles. If you still own the domain, my understanding is that the Internet Archive does respect robots.txt even retroactively. Otherwise, you can try doing a DMCA takedown but you may not have much luck as you no longer have any directly-established ownership over the content.