The Worst Response To A Reasonable Response To A DMCA Takedown I've Seen

from the forgive-the-hyperbole dept

Forgive the hyperbole in the headline. It's mostly a reaction to the headline of this post, sent in by JJ, from the site "Plagiarism Today" declaring: The Worst DMCA Response I've Seen. There, Plagiarism Today's Jonathan Bailey absolutely trashes the webhost Joyent for daring to defend one of its customers after Bailey sent Joyent a DMCA takedown. As we were recently reminded by an entertainment industry lawyer, just because you receive a DMCA takedown, you don't actually have to take down the content, if you believe the DMCA notice is wrong. It's rare to not do the takedown, because ignoring the takedown can potentially add significant liability, because you're rejecting the automatic safe harbors in the DMCA -- but if you believe it's wrong, you can keep the content up. That's what Joyent did. Joyent actually defended its customer and didn't immediately take down the content. That's hardly "the worst response." In fact, that makes me feel even more inclined to trust Joyent as a host that doesn't rush to pull content down.

Still, it's worth exploring in a bit greater detail what upset Bailey so much. Now, to be clear, I tend to think that plagiarism isn't nearly as evil as some make it out to be. I believe that those who do "plagiarize" without adding any value put their own reputations at great risk -- but it's hardly "stealing" or damaging in most cases. Mostly, it's just dumb. In other cases, it can be the root of collaboration and inspiration. On top of that, when it comes to blogs and blog plagiarism, I take an even dimmer view of complaints. People repost our content all the time, and that's great. But it gets even more ridiculous when people whine about their RSS feed being reposted. That's the entire point of an RSS feed -- for it to get posted elsewhere.

And that's exactly what happened to Bailey. He was complaining about an RSS aggregation site that was doing exactly what the RSS feed is designed to do: aggregating content. It redisplayed exactly what Bailey put in his feed -- and even linked right back to Bailey's original. The site appeared to be helping to promote Bailey's feed and using the very tool Bailey provided to do so. In fact, if you look around the web, you'll find plenty of other, well known and popular sites doing the same thing. For example, here's the aggregator Bloglines redisplaying Bailey's feed. Is that a DMCA violation? It seems to be the same thing that this (unnamed) site was doing. Bailey claims that even if this other site was an aggregator site, it doesn't count because somehow he didn't think the site added enough value. Isn't that for the users to decide? If that site really isn't adding much value, then what is he worrying about? No one will bother reading his content on that site because there's no additional value in doing so.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, plagiarism, rss aggregator