Tag: dmca

While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version of Section 701 that you forwarded to us.

Mike Godwin, general counsel to Wikimedia, in response (NB: PDF link) to an FBI request to take down an image of the FBI seal that accompanies a Wikipedia entry.
When, and only when, this sort of push-back becomes the norm (and not some delightful instance-of) will we get anywhere.

We are the AP, we are a for-reals, big-timey news agency. Without us you wouldn’t even know what was happening two towns over. Thus, re-using our content costs money, because our content is valuable. You, you are just some guy who runs a multi-million dollar company or some a-hole with a blog. Your content is meaningless pablum slathered on the walls of the digital romper room that is “the internet”. It is valueless and thus we are able to reproduce it in any way we choose.

InclinedPlane, Hacker News commenter, distilling what the AP meant to say in response to this.

Zing!

Man, ever since they sold out to Amazon, the one-day-one-deal sales machine Woot has totally fallen into line with the dictates of the man and/or Our Corporate Paymasters:

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through [the AP story on Woot’s acquisition], and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create.

Dare I say hoisted on their own petard? I feel a sudden and strong urge to buy some random bag of crap. Or, perhaps, a bandoleer of carrots.