from the everyone’s-favorite-law dept.
“From the article: ‘A dizzying story that involves falsified medical research, plagiarism, and legal threats came to light via a DMCA takedown notice today. Retraction Watch, a site that followed (among many other issues) the implosion of a Duke cancer researcher’s career, found all of its articles on the topic pulled by WordPress, its host. The reason? A small site based in India apparently copied all of the posts, claimed them as their own, then filed a DMCA takedown notice to get the originals pulled from their source. As of now, the originals are still missing as their actual owners seek to have them restored.’ This is extremely worrying. Even though the original story is careful not to make accusations, I will. This sure smells like a ‘Reputation Defense’ dirty trick.”
I do have to admit, this is literally what I’m doing to Slashdot, and other sites. Well. Not literally, because I’m not suing anyone, and I’m in no way or shape out to take credit for other author’s works. I want everyone to know, I don’t copy, and take credit. I leave tags, links, or categories to help remind me of where I obtained the information from. (70% of the internet are copies of the other 30%)
Based on this principle, as long as I give due credit to the author (website, name, link, etc) I’m making sure I can take what I have, and search for the original author’s published page. I justify copying and creating posts on my site(s), as means to keep myself involved on a daily basis with my sites. To help me build a foundation to expand on my own content creation, versus using others. Eventually I will develop the actual habit to take my existing self creating materials and post them online for anyone to learn from.
Copying is the best form of flattery.
Back to the Post…
If this can happen it points to the fact that the entire DMCA process is utterly broken and open to abuse.
No proof is required on the side of the claimant, but the accused can immediately lose their stuff.
This is a side effect of a process which was designed by content owners to get stuff taken down with minimal effort and red tape. It has the effect of random idiots being able to take down stuff without any oversight.
What needs to happen is the content owners need to have some higher burden of proof that they are the copyright holders, and that there’s real infringement going on.
