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posted by martyb on Tuesday April 11 2017, @07:41PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 2) by https on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:52PM (2 children)

    by https (5248) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:52PM (#492477) Journal

    Anyone and everyone can set their threshold to whatever the fuck they want, including +5 or -1. Heck, if I was feeling whimsical, I could set all "Funny" moderations to count as -6 and "Offtopic" to +6. Your notion of "disappeared" is probably wrong and at best irrelevant. The comments are still there.

    --
    Offended and laughing about it.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:38PM (1 child)

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:38PM (#492503)

    If it was irrelevant than why do people care that they are modded down? Visibility matters.

    --
    SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday April 12 2017, @03:55PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday April 12 2017, @03:55PM (#492828) Journal

      It's irrelevant in this context to the site owner because they aren't actually removing any content. They aren't actually changing visibility. Moderation on SN is a purely additive process -- other users add extra information to a post, which gets sent to the viewer, who can configure their reader to interpret that additional information in whatever way they choose.

      The information *appears to* disappear, because that's what most users want. But it doesn't. It only gets more tags. The SN "moderation" system could more accurately be described as a "reaction" system or even "instant tagged replies". The moderation aspect is done by the end user, not site owners or staff or even volunteers. I think that IS actually a significant different. Moderators CAN'T hide a post here, no matter what they do. You might moderate a post as "Troll", intending to hide it, and instead it gets promoted because I've got a +6 modifier on Troll and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. So it would be pretty difficult to argue both that SN is responsible for the actions of moderators (who they aren't affiliated with) AND that those moderators are actually capable of controlling what is posted on this site.

      Another good comparison for SN moderation is ratings on reviews. If you view product reviews on Amazon, it often asks if a specific review was "Helpful". Then when other users view that product, the most "helpful" reviews are displayed first. Do those ratings also violate safe harbor by using user content to sort user content? I don't see how...