Category Archives: Pedantry

Polite DMCA Complaints

Piracy is very serious

I never thought I’d see this, but as part of my job I field DMCA take-down requests. My employer is an Internet Service Provider, and from time to time our end-users may take it upon themselves to skirt around the release schedules and pricing schemes of various intellectual property industries. Traditionally the owners of those properties have been quite strident in their tone towards alleged pirates. This morning I noticed that J.K. Rowling’s folks have taken a more fan-friendly approach for an audio-book version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone:

Unauthorized file sharing is illegal.  However, we truly appreciate your
interest in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Audio).  We are making
every attempt to provide this wonderful content to you in a host of
legitimate ways, one of which is through the following
website:

http://www.apple.com/itunes

That’s a big change from the “You’re a criminal and we’ll see your ass in court” approach I’ve been seeing for years. A welcome change that I hope some of the other IP-enforcement types pick up on. Try to win back your customers. Barring that, stop twirling your mustaches and cackling evilly.

Full text of complaint follows
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Accidentally Telling the Truth

A gaffe is roughly defined as “when a politician accidentally tells the truth.” This is the kind of misstatement that results in press offices racing to rephrase things into a carefully-crafted slate of B.S. that fits better with the message of the day. Earlier today Joe Biden, vice president of the United States, was asked what he would tell his own family in regards to the possibility of a pandemic influenza. Don’t go on airplanes, subways, or other confined places where the air recirculates and the flu can easily spread. That was, unfortunately, a pretty good piece of advice, and politically unspeakable at the moment.

Don’t go on public transit if you have symptoms. That’s the official advice. If you have to cough or sneeze, cover your face. Again, the official advice. Wash your hands frequently. Finally some good advice for avoiding a flu. The other advice has to do specifically with not communicating a flu to other people. If you’ve got the dreaded swine flu, staying off the subway isn’t going to help you. If you have reason to think you have it, get your ass to a doctor.

Nobody wants a public panic or anything, but Joe was just telling it like it is. He doesn’t want his family to get sick in the first place. Oh no.

Pirate Bay Verdict

Pirates on the Internet

File under O for “obvious.”

Today the Swedish justice system has found four muckey-mucks from The Pirate Bay guilty and subject to a year each in the klink, along with just under $1,000,000 in penalties each. The charge? “Assisting in making copyright content available.” Huh. The Pirate Bay’s administrators and financial backers were assisting in copyright infringement. Who’da thunk it?

One thing I’m quite unclear on about this matter is why they’ve bothered to fight this (including continuing the operation of the torrent tracker) when apparently they’re going the martyr route. They have been able to offer no defense that their site wasn’t intended to assist in infringing copyrights. This was clearly their intention. The Pirate Bay isn’t a massive clearinghouse for open-source freeware and public domain art. If this is an exercise in civil disobedience, they should be pleading guilty and getting to work on the Swedish nerd version of Letters from a Birmingham Prison.

TorrentFreak link