[cc-community] An online place to post

Lloyd cc at phizz.demon.co.uk
Sun Jun 15 06:55:38 EDT 2008


drew Roberts wrote:
> On Thursday 05 June 2008 23:11:30 jonathon wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 7:29 PM, Bobbie  wrote:
>>> One could probably spend most of every day online trolling for illegal
>>> use of our materials: it almost makes one decide to stop designing new
>>> patterns, kits, books, etc...
>> Why don't you retain a law firm to file DMCA take down notices on your
>> behalf, and to pursue civil, and or criminal copyright violations
>> against those whoa re infringing upon your copyrights?
> 
> I would guess it is the hassle, expense, and poor cost/benefit ratio...
> 
> People want places like youtube to guess which content is authorized and which 
> is not and proactively police postings. (Could be impossible or close to 
> impossible at this point, certainly so expensive for these free hosters that 
> the services they offer to us will likely go away...)
> 
> This is a difficult problem. At least, I see it as difficult. If anyone has 
> any good, easy solutions, I would love to hear them.

Sue Google into oblivion. Or hope that Viacom prevails in their action 
against Google WRT to youtube. In many ways Viacom are correct that 
Google's entire business plan on these sites is based around copyright 
violation (if only Google could make youtube pay). The violating 
material brings in the clicks to the site and thus gives the hosting 
site an opportunity to deliver ad impressions. Google, and other hosting 
sites cynically hide behind their safe-harbour status whilst allowing 
their users to infringe on copyright.

For all the brouhaha about the DMCA it is the most effective way that an 
independent content creator can get some redress. Very few actually want 
to sue a blogger or uploader. Not only is it expensive, but the only way 
you'll get compensation is if the work happens to be registered with the 
US copyright office, and entitled to statutory damages. Most small 
producers don't register their copyright as it could in the past be 
cumbersome, and time consuming. What one wants is the violation to stop 
and the DMCA is perfect in that respect.

The problem is that Google and other sites based around copyright 
violation make the process more difficult than it need be, one has to 
either send them the DMCA by snail mail or FAX which is not always easy 
outside of the USA. Then they will haggle over whether all the Is are 
dotted and the Ts crossed. All the while scrapping ad revenue from their 
Adsense program on the infringing pages.

Having successfully got them to react to a DMCA the chances are that 
they will leave the infringing account in place, despite the fact that 
most of the rest of the content is obviously infringing too.

Flickr happens to be one of the few sites that will not tolerate users 
uploading infringing material. The DMCA can be sent by email, and if the 
account is an obvious repository of stuff from other source it will be 
deleted.


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