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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 kaszz on Wednesday April 12 2017, @12:04AM (1 child)

    by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday April 12 2017, @12:04AM (#492537) Journal

    What if SN saw your COMMAND.EXE post and did nothing unless asked to by copyright owner?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 12 2017, @02:16PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 12 2017, @02:16PM (#492753)

    What if SN ... did nothing unless asked to by copyright owner?

    That's the definition of the safe harbor provision of the DMCA.

    SN saw your COMMAND.EXE post

    And that's almost the definition of the "red flag" test which LJ failed by posting in their equivalent of the sidebar that "here be copyright violations" and advice on violating copyright. Especially on SN it would be hard to argue "we" don't know that COMMAND.EXE is copyrighted software. That would fail both the subjective AND the objective test which is kinda impressive in its own level of fail. Especially if SN had a nexus or section named "torrents of copyrighted files and stuff" containing commentary on avoiding DMCA takedown notices when users intentionally violate copyright.