<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/07/copyright-fraud-deployed-to-silence-journalists-in-equatorial-guinea/>
"The DMCA lends itself to abuse. The intent of the law was to limit copyright
infringement on services hosting user-generated content by providing safe
harbors for service providers who made good faith efforts to respond to DMCA
complaints.
In practice, the law has forced providers to side with complainants and do very
little in the way of due diligence when fielding DMCA takedown requests. Bad
faith operators — who have little to fear from the law — have recognized the
leverage they have and wield it abusively to take down any content they don’t
like.
Even if it only works for a little while, it gets the job done. Very few
platforms push back against removal requests, allowing those who want content
they don’t like buried to heap dirt on the victims at the bottom of their
memory holes.
One common tactic deployed by people operating in bad faith (which often
includes so-called “reputation management” companies) is creating websites with
news-y sounding names to host articles copied, pasted, and artificially
backdated to create the illusion the original reporting by journalists is
actually copyright infringement.
We’ve covered a lot of this in recent years. This tactic has always been
popular but it’s seen a resurgence in recent weeks, thanks to leaked documents
released to investigative journalists. And there’s no end in sight. A recent
report from the BBC details yet another (temporarily) successful attempt to use
copyright as a tool of censorship."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
