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from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish? dept.
This piece of news over at Ars Technica may have some startling implications.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act's so-called "safe harbor" defense to infringement is under fire from a paparazzi photo agency. A new court ruling says the defense may not always be available to websites that host content submitted by third parties.
A Livejournal site hosted messages of celebrities, and a paparazzi agency that owns some of those photos took exception. Since the site moderated the posts that appeared, the appeals court ruled that just shouting "safe harbour" is insufficient - the court should investigate the extent to which the moderators curated the input.
As the MPAA wrote in an amicus brief:
If the record supports Mavrix’s allegations that LiveJournal solicited and actively curated posts for the purpose of adding, rather than removing, content that was owned by third parties in order to draw traffic to its site, LiveJournal would not be entitled to summary judgment on the basis of the safe harbor...
It's hard to argue with that: a site that actively solicits and then posts content owned by others seems to fall afoul of current copyright legislation in the USA.
But I can't help thinking of the impact this may have on SoylentNews.... if left to stand, this ruling could make running a site such as SN a very tricky line to walk.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:38PM
So if TMB posts a plagiarized article (unbeknownst to him) with no credit or links
I actually read the first ten pages of the judicial opinion and a better analogy would be if TMB were a paid employee of a site self describing itself as specializing in distribution of copyright violations and he posted a story that even the dumbest non-technical normie could tell was a violation like microsoft-property-(c)-windows-10-(tm).torrent as a story, and SN ran a shitton of ads on that torrent article making a pile of cash, then MS asked for a share of the ad revenue and SN said F you see you in court, because TMB is a member of the general public so you as a copyright owner can kiss my shiny metal DMCA ass, then, and only then, would SN get in trouble. Otherwise we're mostly safe, I think.