Which means of course that a person could claim copyright to the very
technology underlying Wikipedia, and demand the entire project be taken down.
In fact a different mentally ill person could make this claim every month
and force the project offline.
That's the world you're advocating? No responsibility on the part of the
office to even make the slightest attempt to verify the claim?
W.J.
In a message dated 3/4/2010 6:08:50 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
swatjester(a)gmail.com writes:
You've identified one of the criticisms of OCILLA/DMCA -- that it can be
easily abused by copyright holder to keep stuff offline. (This is what the
EFF is probably getting involved over). However, the proper response to
that
is for the alleged infringer to request sanctions against the copyright
holder for misrepresentation. It's not the Foundation's place to get
involved, nor the proper use of their resources to second and third-guess
these decisions. They take the office action, remove whatever it is, and if
the underlying legal battle gets fought, they can then go and reverse it.
So
no, there's no obligation to interject ourselves, but more importantly I
think we DO have an obligation to respect the existing legal system as well
as protect the entire project from litigation.