Geller, God and the DMCA
A battle has been smoldering behind the scenes in Web 2.0 companies--inappropriate use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to force material to be pulled from a website. There have been many recent cases of this. Earlier this year, noted fake psychic Uri Geller (remember the bent spoons?) used the DMCA to force Youtube to take down a video critical of Mr. Geller, mostly by showing him up as a fraud.
The DMCA was passed in 1998 and was supposed to make things easy for web site owners--if they were hit with a DMCA request to pull down an article and complied promptly, they were given a shield against being sued. This was supposed to be used for copyright infringement only, but people like Mr. Geller have found that it's the easiest way to force a site to remove a bit of content that may offend for other reasons.
Most recently, the Rational Response Squad (they were the same people that went after Geller) got into it with the Creation Science Evangelism ministry group over the same issue. Youtube happily complied with the Creationists DMCA-based demands and removed an expose video posted by the Squad. Now the DMCA doesn't require the content hoster to do any detective work to prove or disprove the truth of the DMCA claim, they just have to react to it.
The problem is that the DCMA, like so many other areas of intellectual property law, benefit those who can pay lawyers and by default, protect the copyright owner primarily, the hoster second and the poster, dead last.
Posted on September 26, 2007
