On Jan 23, 2009, at 5:00 PM, Charmian wrote: > This is probably something that won't come up immediately at launch, > but will DW's DMCA policy be exactly like LJ's? > (http://www.livejournal.com/legal/dmca.bml) > > I know the DMCA is USA law, and thus the procedures must be followed. > However, there are some ambiguities in LJ's DMCA policy. > > Firstly, it is not mentioned (in the site documentation) that taking > down the material is regarded as an admission of guilt. This is > important because the "repeat copyright infringers" may have their > accounts (all of them, not only the ones that the complaint was about) > terminated. Also, what constitutes a "repeat copyright infringer" is > not defined in the policy. (How many times, etc.)
This actually goes with a mailing list post that I have open in another window to work on (although it's wayyy past my bedtime, heh) about legislation that an online service provider (OSP) such as Dreamwidth has to follow (and the contentious and fractious interpretations thereof) and the problems involved in navigating the muddy tangles of law to limit the service's liability as much as possible. The problem is that the ambiguities you note in LJ's policies are ambiguities in the law itself. The law says that an OSP must deny service to repeat copyright infringers; it doesn't define what that *is*, and there haven't been any court cases to help clarify. So each site defines things the way that their own legal advisors feel comfortable defining them. :) You can read the law itself at 17 USC 512: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/512.html In particular, 17 USC 512(c)(3) and 17 USC 512(g) describe the processes an OSP has to follow. Now, on DW we'll *absolutely* be as crystal-clear explicit as we can with how we finally settle on defining things, and we'll push those definitions as far as we can -- we're willing to accept a greater potential liability level than a major, venture-capital-funded venture would be, especially since we're pretty sure we could construct a court case we could win ... eventually. (We could hold a bake sale for the legal defense fund...) And there are some highly encouraging readings of the law that would allow us to, for instance, reject a single specific bullshit copyright complaint without losing our DMCA immunity for *all* instances of copyright violation on the site. (This is another contentuous subject. Some people believe yes, some people believe no. The EFF, for the record, believes yes.) But ultimately there's always going to be some ambiguity, because, like so much internet legislation, the law was written by people who don't understand the internet and how it works. I know that's not a completely reassuring answer. I *can* promise you that by the time we launch into open beta, we'll have a clear, detailed explanation of what our legal advisors have told us we can and can't do and why, and we will write our enforcement policy in an attempt to mitigate some of the worst abuses (of really, really, really bad legislation) that we've seen over the years. Look for the mailing list post on internet law sometime soon. --D -- Denise Paolucci [email protected] Dreamwidth Studios: Open Source, open expression, open operations. Coming soon! _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
