The Indelible Bonobo Experience

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Every week copyright holders send out millions of takedown notices to websites all across the Internet. While the majority of these claims are legitimate, a healthy percentage are not. These “errors” can cause serious harm to the public, but the senders are never held responsible for their mistakes. Perhaps it’s time to punish repeat senders of bogus takedown notices?

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Should Bogus Copyright Takedown Senders Be Punished? | TorrentFreak

In recent months the number of takedown requests sent out by copyright holders hasincreased dramatically, and we’re now at a point where it’s starting to turn the Internet into a big mess.
Just to give an idea of the scope of the issue, Google previously noted that 37% of all DMCA notices they receive are not valid copyright claims.
The effects of these “errors” are often without any real harm, and in many cases the public doesn’t even notice. Actually, they can be quite entertaining when they lead to self-censorship. When Microsoft asks Google to censor Bing for example, or when Warner wants to takedown the IMDb page of their own movie.
Tens of thousands of YouTube videos are pulled every week by mistake, live streaming events such as that the Hugo awards are killed because of false claims, websites such as TorrentFreak are censored in error and even Presidential campaigns are interrupted by bogus claims.
Unfortunately, these ‘incidents’ sometimes cause serious damage. Earlier this week a Mediafire userlost access to her filesbecause of a bogus notice. Or what about theDajaz1andRojadirectawebsites that lost their domain names because of copyright infringement claims that didn’t stand up?

Bogus copyright notices should be treated with the same severity as copyright infringement. If it’s a criminal offense punishable by huge fines that have nothing to do with the damage caused, so should bogus notices. Sadly, I can’t take this to court even though I should.

Posted September 27, 2012 at 7:49pm in copyright infringement bogus claim dmca intellectual property internet online | 2 notes

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While the first claim (Warman’s article) was dismissed on the basis that it took too long to file the lawsuit, the legal analysis on the National Post claim involving an article by Jonathan Kay assesses the copyright implications of posting several paragraphs from an article online. In this case, the article was 11 paragraphs long. The reproduction on the Free Dominion site included the headline, three complete paragraphs and part of a fourth. The court ruled that this amount of copying did not constitute a “substantial part” of the work and therefore there was no infringement. The court added that in the alternative, the reproduction of the work was covered by fair dealing, concluding that a large and liberal interpretation of news reporting would include posts to the discussion forum. The decision then includes an analysis of the six factor test and concludes that the use was fair.
The court’s discussion is important for several reasons. First, the finding that several paragraphs do not constitute a substantial part of the work has echoes to the Supreme Court of Canada hearing in December when the court opened the door to questions about some of the copying in schools not rising to the level of substantial copying. Moreover, if this amount of copying is not substantial, it has implications in a wide range of additional cases (including the Access Copyright model licence). Second, the court’s conclusion is critically important to online chat forums, blogs, and other venues where copying several paragraphs from an article is quite common. Given the court’s analysis, such copying appears to be permissible on at least two grounds, including the notion that such postings can be treated as news reporting for fair dealing purposes.

— Michael Geist - Cdn Fed Court Says No Copyright Infringement For Linking, Posting Several Paragraphs from Article, important decision, FreeDominion website

Posted June 25, 2012 at 1:10pm in copyright canada fair dealing infringement news reporting journalism intellectual property warman national post fair use ip law federal court | 1 note

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Judge Chris Hensen, who ordered the Dutch Pirate Party to censor all links to The Pirate Bay recently (something Techdirt calls Censorship Crazy), appears to have quite a bit of dirt in his baggage. (via Falkvinge)

There are several more interesting references, links, and facts surrounding this story over at the discussion thread on Hacker News. Also, here is a Dutch source that confirms the factual circumstances regarding the business relationship between plaintiff and judge in the FTD case.
This morning, @Kanarieman pointed me to an article of my own from 2010: just under two years ago, another very strange case went down in the Netherlands. The same judge, Chris Hensen, ordered that talking about file names was legally the same thing as distributing the actual files so named, and ordered the discussion forum FTD shut down. Yes, a discussion forum distributing no files was ordered to be shut down.
However, something odd appeared in the aftermath. A brochure was discovered, where the plaintiff’s representative in the case – a professor Visser – offered commercial courses in anti-piracy, together with the judge, Chris Hensen. The plaintiff and judge were running a commercial enterprise together, one that had a direct bearing on the subject matter of the case.

Let me take that once more, for this is truly mind-boggling: not only was the plaintiff and judge personally and closely acquainted, the plaintiff in a controversial copyright monopoly case was running a commercial anti-piracy outfit together with the judge in the case. Money was involved. Commercial interest was involved. The judge was, as it appears from this brochure for the quite expensive course, getting money. Shortly after the case. In a directly related matter together with the plaintiff. That makes the judge not only corrupt, but textbook corrupt.

Sweden law - much like Canada.

The Indelible Bonobo Experience

Renaissance Monkey: in-depth expertise in Jack-of-all-trading. I mostly comment on news of interest to me and occasionally engage in debates or troll passive-aggressively. Ask or Submit 2 mah authoritah! ;) !