Dot-Com Websites at War

[Nick Odell]

It would be amusing if it were not so pathetic...

A long-standing web-based advice forum had an argument with one of its
subscribers who, after being booted off, promptly started up their own
web-based forum with a very similar name and with much of the content
scraped in whole or in part from the first. With me so far?

Each web site is a dot com issued by a well-known US purveyor of
websites. Each owner is, I believe an American citizen but their
target audiences are people who live outside the USA.

The owner of the first site is encouraging their own subscribers who
have been "scraped" to make DMCA takedown declarations against the
second site. Those subscribers may or may not be US citizens but
almost certainly live outside the USA. If they do file DMCAs, are
these actions going to go anywhere? Does anybody care? Would it just
be better to buy popcorn and watch the spat unfold?

Nick

[John Levine]

According to Nick Odell <nicko...@yahoo.ca>:

>The owner of the first site is encouraging their own subscribers who
>have been "scraped" to make DMCA takedown declarations against the
>second site. Those subscribers may or may not be US citizens but
>almost certainly live outside the USA. If they do file DMCAs, are
>these actions going to go anywhere? Does anybody care? Would it just
>be better to buy popcorn and watch the spat unfold?

In practice most hosting providers take stuff down when they get a
DMCA notice without making any effort to see if it's valid. The DMCA
says the person who put the content up can counterclaim and say to
leave it up, but most hosting providers never got around to handling
counterclaims, because there are very few compared to the number of
DMCA notices.

Any hosting provider of any size gets a flood of DMCA notices, mostly
robogenerated by companies looking for music and video clips.

--
Regards,
John Levine, jo...@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

[Stuart O. Bronstein]

"John Levine" <jo...@taugh.com> wrote in news:um7kcu$30ng$3...@gal.iecc.com:

> According to Nick Odell <nicko...@yahoo.ca>:
>>The owner of the first site is encouraging their own subscribers who
>>have been "scraped" to make DMCA takedown declarations against the
>>second site. Those subscribers may or may not be US citizens but
>>almost certainly live outside the USA. If they do file DMCAs, are
>>these actions going to go anywhere? Does anybody care? Would it just
>>be better to buy popcorn and watch the spat unfold?
>
> In practice most hosting providers take stuff down when they get a
> DMCA notice without making any effort to see if it's valid. The DMCA
> says the person who put the content up can counterclaim and say to
> leave it up, but most hosting providers never got around to handling
> counterclaims, because there are very few compared to the number of
> DMCA notices.
>
> Any hosting provider of any size gets a flood of DMCA notices, mostly
> robogenerated by companies looking for music and video clips.

In terms of who the DMCA covers, it applies to all websites that are
hosted on servers in the US. It doesn't matter what country anyone is
in. What matters is the location of the isp server where the website is
hosted.


--
Stu
http://DownToEarthLawyer.com