Legal talk:Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedowns/Archive 1
What is "DCMA"? 61.94.149.101 10:02, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- DMCA. It's fixed now. --Dante Alighieri 02:40, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Wikimedia Designated
A protected page listing Jimmy Wales as the Designated Agent under the DMCA amendments to 17 USC sec. 512 has been added to Wikimedia. It seems a good idea to list that fact on Meta. There was a little discussion about the need to have it as a protected page, but as the provisions under OCILLA require that the a notice about the Designated Agent be posted somewhere that the public can view it it and the Interim Designated Agent Designation was filed with the United States Copyright Office under the name Wikimedia (you can go to their site and verify that). It seems just an oversight that the notice regarding the Designated Agent is not on some namespace page in the Wikipedia community.
Benefits of the protection afforded by having a Designated Agent
The relatively new sec. 512 of the US Copyright law provides that if an ISP does register a Designated Agent and posts the contact information for users then anyone who is alleging copyright infringement can seek an extra-judicial remedy (without having to apply for an injunction in Federal District Court against the copyright infringer).
- The remedy is that, subject to informing the infringer and giving them an opportunity to respond that the ISP will remove the infringing material and the alleged infringer has a time period to respond (within ten days) to assert copyright under oath. The exact notice procedure is detailed and there must be substantial compliance for it to apply. In other words someone cannot just say, send an email to a Wikipedia mailing list or post something on a talk page that says, :"this is copyright infringement, take it off".
- It affords the ISP and the Wikimedia community as a whole a period during which the allegations of copyright infringement can be reviewed. Wikimedia already has a large community of people who are concerned about copyright infringement and while someone might attempt to repost some infringing material it seems that would be a new infringement, so by removing it Wikimedia will be protected against any legal liability.
- If the procedure in sec. 512 is followed the only person who might be liable for any copyright infringement in the Wikimedia community is the person who posts the information, not the rest of us (as members of the informal Association of Wikimedians) or the Wikimedia Foundation.