Hacker News: DMCA | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News: DMCA

news.ycombinator.com

138 pointsDanielRibeiro65 comments

Is this new? Because I can't find a corresponding listing in the Copyright Office's list of service provider agents (http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/a_agents.html).

The reason I'm wondering is that the Copyright Office does require you to provide an email address for your designated DMCA agent, and I'd like to know how they got around that.

(The requirement for registering an agent, by the way, is 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(2).)

There's one here: http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agents/n/news_ycomb.pdf

Is that a childs' handwriting?

It might have just been filled out on a tablet.

When I had to fill out all my job paperwork for my new job, I used pdfpen on my iPad for everything, and it looks like it was written by a toddler in crayon.

Why would you do that? I would bin any application that looked that way automatically.

It doesn't sound like he was filling out an application. It sounds like he had the job and was just filling out HR paperwork for benefits and taxes and such.

It was an offer letter, not an application; and was sent to me on a Friday, and needed to be returned the same day (and I didn't have access to a printer).

Potential law suit for disability discrimination?

Or a field which requires fine motor skills.

Yes, that's a good point. Some jobs have intrinsic requirements for which no reasonable adjustment can be made, and thus legal discrimination happens.

Interesting--there is an email address listed. Wonder what happens if you email your notification there? Presumably, if you do, you are in compliance with the statute, regardless of the no-email policy, so they would have to do the takedown.

I think it's just lame that a site like this could be accused of copyright infringement, unless it's a text-only post or a comment. Linking to copyrighted material should not be illegal - the DMCA takedown notice should have to be directed at the linked site, not the linking site. It's not YC's job (or Google's job) to fight copyright infringement by policing their indexes.

But more importantly, it shouldn't be the job of small organizations with few resources to have to create a DMCA policy like this, much less enforce it.

Anyone could copy-paste a news article verbatim. That's a copyright violation, and without a DMCA policy like this Y Combinator is by default liable for the infringement.

The DMCA policy and registered agent gives a content creator a method to notify Y Combinator of the violation so YC can take it down. How else would they know who to contact or how to protect their rights?

If a site has a proper policy and agent (and abides by the policy) it gets safe harbor - it's not liable for the infringement. It's not an unreasonable amount of effort, and the scheme is a pretty decent compromise between protecting copyright holders rights and allowing user generated content.

>Anyone could copy-paste a news article verbatim.

Yes, andrewljohnson agrees about that. However, his point is:

>Linking to copyrighted material should not be illegal

And I have to concur. This should not be a copyright violation.

So... what of TPB? All they do is link to copyright material; none if it's hosted there.

TPB is legal. And they don't even link to copyrighted material, they link to a swarm from which you can git information on where to download copyrighted material.

It was implied 'link to legally copyrighted material'...

The Pirate Bay does not have to worry about the DMCA, they were originally (are?) hosted in Sweden, and US law like the DMCA doesn't apply there.

Why on earth should TPB be illegal! You know, not every torrent on there is illegal.

Absolutely agree that it's entirely reasonable to comply with the requirements of 512(c) to get the safe harbor, but to pick a couple of nits:

1. Copying a news article is likely to be infringing, but it might not be; it's always worth considering whether it's a fair use, especially for very factual material. 2. More importantly, it's not that HN would be liable "by default". Without the safe harbor, they would be open to claims of secondary liability, but the copyright holder would still have to prove the elements of contributory, vicarious, or "inducement" infringement.

Again, still worth it to be able to avoid lawsuits or at least dispose of them at an early stage, but the risk isn't automatic, full liability for the hosting site.

The reason for setting up a DMCA takedown policy is precisely so that the site doesn't have to deal with copyright infringement: by doing a fairly minimal task of responding to takedown notices, the site operator gets freedom from liability for pretty much any related copyright infringement lawsuit (which otherwise could cost a lot of time and money).

It's pretty easy to set yourself up with such a policy, and anyone running a site that includes user-provided content should have one. EFF used to run a startup boot camp that went through all the steps of how to do it, and if they still offer it I would recommend it.

This is why bad laws like DMCA need to be fought before they get passed, because it could take decades before they are tested in court for stuff like this, whether linking falls under DMCA or not.

The DMCA made HN possible.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/10/ten-years-later/

That doesn't make its implementation or provisions perfect...

I see full-copies of the content of sites that have gone down under load all the time on here. I can imagine a situation in which someone might take exception to that.

(I agree, it's dumb, but you can see how it might happen; especially for a site where someone has been smashed for being stupid, taken a post down, but a copy of it remains in the comments...)

Times have sure changed: http://web.archive.org/web/20050331050049/http://ycombinator...

Not that much: http://ycombinator.com/legal.html

Interesting. From today's page source:

   <!-- | <a href="legal.html">Etc</a> -->

Does this mean that YC holds the copyright on HN comments?

You may not communicate the information specified below by email.

haven't really read through a dmca policy notice (or whatever you call this) before, but is this standard practice?

i think it’s a good policy as it (somewhat) raises the cost of submitting a notice, which would presumably deter overzealous lawyers and prevent some false takedowns, but given how quickly i've seen things get pulled i'd never have imagined that notices would have to be sent by any means but email..

They aren't emailing them, they are faxing them. This won't raise the cost since they accept faxes.

oh, haha. well that makes sense..

seems i've shown my age.. though i definitely read that, my mind seems conditioned to totally ignore the notion of faxing something. not discounting anything here, but just find it kind of funny. given my perception of fax machines, it could very well have said send notice via telegraph.. that aside, i can see how as a technology it stills has practical applications, especially in the legal field where paper records are heavily relied upon.

People in US still use faxes? Funny!

Fax usage in the United States is a small fraction of what it is in Japan.

I haven't received (or sent) a fax in 2+ years, and I used to deal with them (multiple times) every day in 2003.

They also use pagers. Crazy.

Pagers, in their niche, are better than any other technology available. Considering how often my phone battery runs dead by accident, I feel a lot more comfortable with surgeons having pagers that run for months off a single AAA battery.

http://mobihealthnews.com/12503/why-doctors-pagers-still-tru...

A simple nokia from 10 years ago or so will run for a week on a charge. It's only modern phones with massive screens, GPS, etc that eat battery.

A week is a far cry from months. Range, reliability, and delivery guarantees are also an issue with phones.

The only real argument against pagers is that it's another thing to carry around, but in that regard modern pagers are a lot better than dumb-cellphones so pagers still have the advantage (because lets face it, people are still going to want their smartphones).

(Well, that and "they are old, and old is lame", which is not really an argument. ;)

Outside hospital workers, you'd be hard pressed to find many in the UK that even know what a pager is, let alone someone who has one.

I'd like to know where you're finding a pager that runs for months on a single AAA. My pager takes a AA battery, and it has to be replaced roughly monthly. Why, yes, I do work in Healthcare IS, why do you ask?

Only lawyers and realtors, from my experience

and insurance companies

And accounting firms. Many plumbing supply companies accept invoices this way as well.

Healthcare offices as well, e.g. for requesting records, transferring records, etc.

Honestly, I don't know what terrifies me more about such businesses: storing my personal information on pieces of paper with no way to track their movement, or storing my personal information on (what is most likely) unsecured computers. They are both pretty horrific, but I think I prefer them to store it on paper if they can't/won't afford to have secure computers.

I can't count how often I've seen doctors offices use Windows 2K or XP Home Edition this year alone. Even saw a doctor use a computer after closing down "does your computer have viruses" IE popups -- and then proceeding to enter my private info into their (probably HIPAA-certified, which, at that point meant squat) patient tracking application.

Just saying that paper is not always necessarily worse than electronic records.

And Apple.

APPLE asked me a faxed copy of an ABN Certificate for a friends business I was setting up as a business developer account.

They've changed this requirement and now require your company's DUNS number instead. I'm still not sure which is more annoying.

The idea behind that is probably that a fax or written message is "less anonymous" than an email.

It's also a (moderately) higher barrier to entry, so it's less likely to be aggressively used by heavy-handed copyright holders.

Though in practice, fax has turned into this bastard child of excessive analog-to-digital conversion, at least among newer companies. Senders email their attachment to an email-to-fax service, which sends it over POTS to a fax-to-email service converting it back into a PDF and emailed as an attachment to the recipient.

If a company sells both services (hardly unusual) and a client of theirs sends a fax to another, I wonder if the system calls itself... ;)

Based on my own experience... yes, at least to start. Depends how easy (and fast) it is to detect that both parties exist within the network.

Really? I can't say I have experience building such a system, but to me it seems the solution has already been built: fast off-the-shelf DNS servers, using phone numbers as virtual (sub)domains.

My experience is in the context of payments - when charging someone's payment card, check whether it's one we've issued and just run it as an internal balance transfer rather than run it through Visa (read: free). When doing the whole "build fast, iterate quickly" thing, it's easy to forget about such optimizations, especially when it's a relative edge case and works just as well if you leave it alone (arguably better, since there's less conditional logic in the code)

So by "network" I more meant database (i.e., network of users).

Also, there's one workflow which is still easier by fax than email: receive it, physically sign it with a pen, send it back with the signature.

Have you ever used Preview that ships with OS X? There's a signature button in it... It's ridiculously simply!

I recently refinanced my house, and realized that there was a potential for a LOT of this sort of thing. So I paid the app store a few dollars for a PDF modification program, and just put a shortcut to a scanned signature of mine, and added that in the right places. Requested the documents as email instead of fax, and emailed them back. Totally acceptable and saved a bunch of time (in waiting for the printer and scanner) and money (in paper and ink).

HelloFax is great for this as well.

The best part is that it SLOWS DOWN the request process.

IANAL, but I did just look up what looks like the current version of the relevant part of the DMCA[1]. Unless there's one of those funny legal things I don't understand going on, it appears fairly black and white that failing to provide an e-mail address for the designated agent basically nullifies the entire safe harbor provision (see (c)(2)(A)). Whether that is actually what Y Combinator are worried about we don't know, of course; I can't be the only person wondering what prompted this change on a site like HN where DMCA notices/abuse don't seem likely problems under normal circumstances. Or maybe YC's lawyers just know more about the law than I do. :-)

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

I guess the point is to make DMCA claims more annoying to file, or at least to automate. I'd also hope that in true HN spirit, this is intended to be portable, so that if enough web sites replicated this policy, it would seriously handicap DMCA claimants.

Of course, this only works if the "not by email" requirement is legal. IANAL, let alone an American one, but I'd love to read informed opinions about the legal validity of this point.

Are we allowed to submit DMCA Counter-Notifications by email, or do we still need to use (fax or regular mail) to do so?

in bold 6 lines down. http://news.ycombinator.com/dmca.html

try faxzero, works for me. http://faxzero.com/

I have never sent a dmca request to ycombinator.

I sincerely hope the YC team has made sure the HN entity is legally separate from any asset-bearing entities they might have. Last thing anyone wants to happen is for you guys to get sued by some sort of errant copyright or defamation BS and have them get at any other assets you have.

DISCLAIMER: This is not legal advice. I am not a lawyer. Do not use this as legal advice. I am just a dude.

Link should also appear on this page:

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Usually procedures and policies are put in place because of out of ordinary incidents. Haven't seen DMCA notice from HN for the longest time and it pops up now. Can we assume someone actually tried to sue HN for copyright infringement on the user-submitted content?

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