If You Have a Blog and Allow Comments, Register for DMCA Protections, Sites Warn | Hacker News Reader

If You Have a Blog and Allow Comments, Register for DMCA Protections, Sites Warn

abajournal.com

31 pointsdctoedt17 comments

Why not just write it into Federal law that a site can act as its own registered DMCA Takedown Agent, instead of having everyone go through additional red tape and pay a $105 fee to run a blog.

In a way it seems like the fee to register is a freedom of speech issue. Pay an inconsequential tiny fee to run a blog, or potentially suffer huge financial losses. Kind of like the old Poll Tax from years ago.

It seems like being proactive as builders and maintainers of the internet, and getting a new field added to the WHOIS data for a DMCA takedown email addresses would make the process easier to administer for the complaintants, and more in keeping with Freedom of Speech that the United States is founded on.

AIUI the $105 fee is to register as your own DMCA agent. Presumably it would cost much more to hire someone to handle DMCA requests for you.

I don't understand the legalities about registration, but there have definitely been problems about sending DMCA notices to the right place. In many cases attackers send the notices to your hosting company who just nukes your server and then notifies you later (or nukes your DSL and sends email to an address you've never used). Would they have sent the notice directly to you if you registered?

Putting abuse contacts in whois is a good idea; it's already done for IP addresses but not for domains. http://www.fr2.cyberabuse.org/whois/?page=abuse-contact

My domains have my actual contact info on them including my name and address of service, I can't imagine a court wouldn't find that a sufficient substitute for the $105 listing. At least, that's the angle I would take if I found myself in that position.

Do services like Disqus handle this for you? The infringing material is hosted from their site, after all.

Note: The DMCA is a specific piece of American legislation. It does not apply in the UK, or Canada, or in general anywhere outside the United States. Different regulations apply.

(I get irritated by articles like this that assume the whole of the world is governed by US law.)

I'm in Canada, but my blog-that-nobody-reads is hosted in the US, as likely will be another site going live soon. Wouldn't they be subject to the DMCA since the host is in the States? Should I be looking into a new datacenter for the new site?

Yup, if your blog is hosted in the USA, your hosting provider would be subject to DMCA takedown notices. The solution is to find hosting elsewhere -- ideally by shopping for a favourable jurisdiction.

Anyone got any good suggestions?

Does this at all apply to a service hosted in the US but owned/operated from Australia? I wonder if there is a separate organisation we would need to register with here.

I was going to mention that DMCA is typo'd in the title, but it's also mis-spelled in the article itself.

Fixed; thanks.

Wouldn't comment moderation be a simple way to avoid this?

Although I can understand that for larger sites that is not feasible - but for personal blogs, avoiding the $109 would be nice...

Not exactly. Technically, if you serve a page which has copyrighted material you are guilty of copyright infringement. So if the copyrighted material is on your page even for a little bit(i.e., before you discover it and delete it), you may be guilty of infringement for those people that have accessed your page before you took the content down.

Also it is very hard to decide what is and isn't copyrighted material on your own.

Comment moderation to me means that comments do not appear until approved. However I don't think this really avoids the issue: are you going to take the time to research every comment to be sure that there is no infringing content?

That is the kind of moderation I had in mind - but you are right, it could take more time than it's worth.

This extra cost will discourage sites from accepting comments, which is a scary idea. It was nice to have the internet as a relatively open medium. But those days are clearly numbered...

How can anything in a comment be a copyright violation? Since when is text or words copyrighted?

Text and words were the original thing that copyright applied to, back with the printing press.

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