LAWSUITE?! Not so fast...

[ProvincialTwit]

Granted that none of the plethora of threatened furry lawsuits has ever (or likely will ever) actually go to court, this doesn't really effect anything.  It does mean, however, that sites like ours can not only continue to mock idiots, but actually counter-sue under certain circumstances:

Copyright holders must assess whether material has been used fairly before they demand that it be taken off the internet, a US court has ruled.
...
Rights holders who demand that material be taken offline without such an assessment risk paying out damages and costs to whoever published the material, the court said.

So sayeth this here article over at The Register.  The case in question involves a video posted to Youtube that just happened to have part of a copyrighted song in the background.  Universal sued under the DMCA, and lost - the judge ruled that the video was covered under the Fair Use Act.  The defendant counter-sued, also under the DMCA, which places the burden of proof of infringement on the copyright holders.  In other words, it states that they must prove infringement as opposed to the defendant proving fair use, and if they don't, they are liable for any damages the defendant has incurred.

What does that mean for us here at Viv and other sites where "copyrighted" material is mocked and sometimes photoshopped to hell?  Well, first off, the material must have an actual copyright on it.  More importantly, if one of you knuckleheads posts a piece of artwork protected by Fair Use, and some twat from FA complains to our web host and gets us shut down, then we could potentially take them to court for it.  (Not that I ever would because our web host rocks and also because that'd be pretty fucking gay/idiotic/furry/etc - but the point remains.)

Of course, my ass is also covered by some other bit of law that says I'm not responsible for anything you people post here, but that's beside the point.

Betting is now open for how long it takes some idiot furry to counter-threaten another idiot furry under this ruling due to claims of art theft.

[Freehaven]

The real problem with the DMCA?  The whole "we gotta take everything down while we investigate" bullshit that goes along with a DMCA takedown notice.  Example: a couple of weeks back, the International Olympic Committee slapped a DMCA notice on a YouTube video of a protest concerning Tibet outside a Chinese embassy in New York simply because of the video's title ("Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony"), and while the video itself did feature the famous Olympic rings, it could be argued that they were used under "fair use" statutes.  The video came down for a couple of days as per standard operating procedure with a DMCA takedown notice, but when even YouTube/Google asked the IOC what the hell was up, the IOC admitted they had no real (read: legal) claim on the video, and it went back up.

Since there's pretty much no way we'll see the end of the DMCA any time soon (or any sort of major reform to it, either), I'd like to change JUST that one thing about it -- the notice/takedown deal.

[rodox_video]

    The DMCA is one of the many wonderful gifts of the Clinton administration. Cherish it.

[Pi]

The DMCA actually has a few good points, but it's drowned out in all the dumb garbage that was signed by senators who never actually read the damn thing.

[Freehaven]

And here's a look at the ruling mentioned in the first post, and what it could mean for the possibility of automated takedown notices (a summary of the article and some of the comments made there can be found over at TechDirt).