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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday June 09 2018, @10:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the bad-critic-no-cookie-for-you dept.

So a professional critic is the last person you’d expect to use copyright to try to squelch someone else’s fair use rights. But that’s exactly what happened last month, when James Grubb, a journalist from VentureBeat, used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to censor a critic just for highlighting a few paragraphs of his work on Twitter.

On May 2, VentureBeat’s gaming section published Grubb’s review of a forthcoming video game, Red Dead Redemption II. His opinions on the game weren’t shared by everyone, which is no surprise. Another video game critic, Jake Magee, took a shot at Grubb on Twitter, suggesting he only liked games that contained “progressive political posturing.” Alongside that criticism, Magee posted screenshots from Grubb’s review—his goal was to show his followers the text that, as he saw it, supported his point.

That was apparently too much for Grubb, who promptly sent a DMCA notice to Twitter over the matter. Twitter soon slapped black boxes over the images that Magee had posted. It wasn't until several days later that the boxes were removed and the post was restored.

What justified this copyright takedown, in Grubbs’ view? First, Grubb said that Magee posted his entire article in a screenshot, a post which, in his view, “crosses the line of acceptable fair use.” Grubb also suggested that he wouldn’t have taken legal action if Magee had simply included a link to his article.

[...] Journalists and critics should know the basics of fair use. It’s a right that their work relies on. At the very least, before a professional critic uses the DMCA to have another critic’s material removed, a double-take is needed on fair use.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:20AM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:20AM (#691073)

    Unless people still use the Wayback Machine: http://archive.org/web/ [archive.org]

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  • (Score: 2) by boltronics on Sunday June 10 2018, @06:14PM (1 child)

    by boltronics (580) on Sunday June 10 2018, @06:14PM (#691146) Homepage Journal

    You're assuming the Wayback machine cached the article that quickly, that robots.txt was configured to permit it, and that Grubb doesn't update the robots.txt file to have it removed again - which would be a lot quicker to do than all the paperwork for a DMCA takedown.

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 10 2018, @06:28PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 10 2018, @06:28PM (#691149)

      If Grubb even knows about the Wayback Machine.

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