On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Dan Rosenthal wrote:
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.
This raises an interesting question. One of the criticisms of the whole system is that there is no practical system of even keeping track of how much the system is abused, since apparently only Google is open about what suspected infringing content it is removing. So there really is no one keeping the system honest.
It is clear to me that antagonizing all those people who are making accusations that content on Wikipedia is of an infringing nature -- whether it is or is not -- may well not be a tactically wise to the world move. But it does give one pause. In an ideal world it would be cool to be completely transparent to folks like Chilling Effects.
It's in some ways useful to see all of it - but that also could be considered to be abusing someone who innocently makes a legitimate takedown over legitimately actually copyrighted material which is hosted improperly.
We need to be honest - we do have users upload a lot of copyrighted content improperly. Copyvio problems are a major issue on English Wikipedia, Commons, and elsewhere.
Beating up on people who notify us about that is not appropriate.
Perhaps I'm being too paranoid, but we do have flash mobs gather and go after people for less than completely legitimate reasons.