> Actually, you can shut someone down using DMCA without even going to court
> first. If the supposed copyright owner goes upstream from the
> 'user/abuser' of the copyrighted material, they can have their connection
> suspended first then ask questions. This steams from making the ISPs
> liable for the copyright infringement as well as the 'user/abuser'.
However, under the DMCA the person shut down has the right to respond and
state under similar penalty of perjury that the site does not violate
copyright provisions, at which point the ISP can turn the site back on with
immunity and the liability would fall on the the user making the reply, not
the ISP. All the ISP has to do is tell the other guy "your problem's with
the user; sue him." I went through this three times with Tripod because a
nutcase on Usenet by the name of "Rev. Steve Winter" didn't like the expose
site done on him (which by the way is still going strong).
Under Zeran vs. AOL and other decisions, ISPs are immune from copyright or
other intellectual property suits due to actions done by their users unless
there is a clear demonstration that the ISP was involved or the content is
created/maintained by the ISP itself. The liability for infringement goes
squarely on the user. It's because of that decision that Morpheus and
Grokster got off the hook for copyright infringement recently and the same
reason that Kazaa will also probably wind up off the hook, and why RIAA has
started going after individual users and not the ISPs (because they know
they'll lose with the ISPs and services like Kazaa that aren't hosting the
material on their own servers). That's why senators like Orrin Hatch are so
frustrated that they're willing to allow the RIAA and others to hack into
and destroy computers hosting what they think are "copyright violations" (so
much for due process). I am currently involved in a lawsuit with
aforementioned "Rev. Winter" where these very issues are being raised.
SWB
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:37:42 EDT