Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
There are penalties.
Check out 17 USC 512(f): http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
(f) Misrepresentations.— Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1) that material or activity is infringing, or (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
I was the plaintiff in OPG v. Diebold, which was the first US federal lawsuit to establish the enforceability: we won. You can't just issue spurious, false DMCA notices without opening yourself up to large damages, such as the ones that Diebold had to pay.
Sure, just like there's a 4th Amendment right to not be the target of unreasonable search and seizure, and a constitutional right (Section 9) to "a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time". Oh, there's also a 5th amendment right to be indicted by a grand jury for a capital or infamous crime.
But you're also almost certainly snooped on every telecomm session, and the US Government has a program for assassinating US citizens.
The US government doesn't enforce laws strictly, or by what the obvious wording says, nor does it enforce laws uniformly. In practice there's a "high court" for large corporations and rich people, and a "low court" for commoners and other smaller personhoods.
Again, this distinction is somewhat de facto, rather than any official status that mean "use the high court" or "subject to the low court". It's just a double standard that seems to be in place unofficially.
For all practical purposes the 512f has proven to be a pretty pointless tool for holding large corporation accountable.
Agreed that not enough people are actually suing companies for false 512f takedowns. Sounds like this could be an interesting business opportunity for an enterprising attorney.
That's because it's very difficult to prove that they did it knowingly, especially in an age of automated DMCA takedowns. It has nothing to do with the pain of a suit or any of that, but that you're likely to lose.
If you run an automated system that deals in any way, shape, or form with legally binding documentation and - entites, you should be liable for the consequences, period.
If you're a financial institution, which runs an automated trading system you can't really argue that this trade, which just cost you a couple gazillions, is from an automated system and should thus be considered invalid.
Any exchange and the regulating authorities will laugh you out of business.
Why should different principals apply if you automate your legal bullying?
Edit: To make an analogy, it's like me firing a gun in no particular direction. If I hit someone, it's at least manslaughter. But if it were like the DMCA takedown system, there would be two options: I didn't knowingly shoot at anyone in particular, so I get off with nothing, or I knowingly shot at them and was in the wrong, making it murder.
Conversely if you set up a gun in the roof of your house and have it randomly shoot into the street, lets see how long you get away with that for.
If they have invalid WHOIS information, isn't that ground for them losing their domain?
Or I could be reading this incorrectly.
Given the situation and the details mentioned in the article. It seems the reputation management company is hiring people to re-post content and send DMCAs. What other explanation is there for why somebody would rip off blog posts. Obviously this sort of thing would be a last resort for the reputation management company. But in some cases, there may be no other way to remove / push down the unwanted content.
I would bet this is a common tactic of reputation management companies. Can anybody here confirm or offer insight about how these companies work?
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That's how.
To me what points to it the most is why would somebody rip off those RetractionWatch articles in India. It seems that something other than trying to increase ad revenue is going on here.
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/
a site that I think I learned about from another user's comment here on HN, to update the reputations of "researchers" who have had to retract many published journal articles. All the more reason, I think, to regularly read Retraction Watch to find out what is going on. The Retraction Watch site's own reporting
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/wordpress-re...
on what Ars Technica passes on in the submitted article is quite interesting, and an example of the carefully nuanced writing on Retraction Watch.
Of course, it's a big question whether they will try to fight it in courts and if DMCA perjury jurisdiction can effectively reach the accused company in India.
The original author need only send these notices and the blog posts must be put back up if WordPress wants to be protected from being sued itself for distributing the material. In most cases, this entails nothing more than 2 minutes to copy and paste an e-mail from a readily available template, simply adding in your name and URLs of the content you attest you have permission to publish.
The DMCA errs on the side of leaving alleged infringing material online, not the other way around. To force something down, you have to go to court and get a judgement.
The perjury statement is actually weaker than it seems. The wording you see in a lot of copy-and-paste notice templates is stronger than is required by the act. You only have to attest under penalty of perjury that you are authorized to act on behalf of the holder of a copyright, not that the contents of your claim are true.
Furthermore, ISP’s tend to remove allegedly offending material immediately, while there is a 10-14 day delay before the ISP re-enables access in response to a counter-notice. For example, if a website advertised an upcoming labor protest outside BlameCo, BlameCo could send a DMCA notice to the site's ISP alleging copyright infringement of their name or logo a week before the protest. The site would then be disabled; even if the site's owners immediately filed a counter-notice, access would not be re-enabled until after the protest, too late to be useful." [1]
The behavior described above is consistent with many ISPs, Google and Youtube, for example. In fact, with Youtube's stated policy [2] it is not even clear that without consent from the original "copyright holder" that they will restore content (though from DMCA terms alone they are theoretically legally obliged). Wordpress's stated policy [3] is more direct but no less frustrating for victims of malicious takedown notices.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L...
[2]: http://www.youtube.com/yt/copyright/counter-notification.htm...
[3]: http://en.support.wordpress.com/content-theft-what-to-do/
Meanwhile, other provisions of the same act directly benefit copyright holders: prohibiting breaking of anti-circumvention measures, for example. This gives DRM its legal teeth beyond simple breach of contract.
How does this fit into your conspiracy theory? There isn't one single group that this act represents the interests of.
Not quite!
There is a re-enabling procedure. But it comes with a mandatory 10 day waiting period before the material can be put back up.
10 days is hardly "promptly".
(I guess I should consider Poe's law a bit more in the future.)
If I'm outside US jurisdiction (i.e., I'm not there, won't be there and I'm not a company with a branch or sales in USA), then DMCA doesn't apply to me. They might send a notice accidentally, but they generally don't bother since they can be safely ignored and usually are.
The local laws do apply, so USA tried to bundle DMCA-style provisions in some international trade agreements; but in general there are a bunch of things (such as breaking DRM or selling jailbreak kits) that are restricted by DMCA but explicitly legal in many countries.
DMCA applies to Automattic who run Wordpress.com, but doesn't reach to the multitude of other Wordpress hosts outside USA.
Pure copyright violations are illegal almost everywhere, so non-US entities may likely honor such DMCA notices - although to them, they are just normal complaints/threats with zero effect on whatever safe harbor provisions apply in their country. But for the DMCA-specific provisions (distribution of jailbreaks, console-DRM-mods, etc) they can be ignored if there are no local prohibitions against that.
We used to receive 3 or 4 a year, and Google was good about getting us relisted when we explained the error to them. I had two DMCAs from Google last month, and they still haven't gotten back to me about my request for relisting....
I'm thinking this would be straightforward to create, but hard to become established as an authoritative source.
EDIT: I see archive.org is a popular way to go about something like this.
Then it would make it harder to actually prove it is your content if you didn't first put it there.
With a statutorily mandated 10 day delay. Such are the DMCA's take-down procedures.
On a sadder note, looks like the alumni association is going to receive a letter from me.
Done.