A worrying trend has emerged regarding the use/abuse of the DCMA regulations and free speech.
http://lawweb.usc.edu/news/releases/2005/legalFlaws.htmlJennifer M. Urban of the USC Gould School of Law and Laura Quilter of the University of California-Berkeley have found a disturbing number of legal flaws in so-called "DMCA notices"--which result in online materials being pulled from the Internet, generally without notice to the target. Urban and Quilter studied a sample of nearly 900 notices collected by the Chilling Effects project, and discovered that a third of them demanded removal when the target had a clear legal defense. The researchers released a summary report; the full research paper will appear in the March, 2006 edition of the Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal.
You can read the papaer here
http://mylaw.usc.edu/documents/512Rep/In this study, we traced the use of the Section 512 takedown process and considered how the usage patterns we found were likely to affect expression or other activities on the Internet. The second level of analysis grew out of the fact that we observed a surprisingly high incidence of flawed takedowns:
Thirty percent of notices demanded takedown for claims that presented an obvious question for a court (a clear fair use argument, complaints about uncopyrightable material, and the like);
Notices to traditional ISP’s included a substantial number of demands to remove files from peer-to-peer networks (which are not actually covered under the takedown statute, and which an OSP can only honor by terminating the target’s Internet access entirely); and
One out of 11 included significant statutory flaws that render the notice unusable (for example, failing to adequately identify infringing material).
In addition, we found some interesting patterns that do not, by themselves, indicate concern, but which are of concern when combined with the fact that one third of the notices depended on questionable claims:
Over half—57%—of notices sent to Google to demand removal of links in the index were sent by businesses targeting apparent competitors;
Over a third—37%—of the notices sent to Google targeted sites apparently outside the United States
If you give a law too much scope such as the DCMA has, its simply a matter of time before the greedy folks try to exploit it, perhaps all the more reason to read proposed regulations in future before rubber stamping it while counting received donations.
