#like you have to comply with DMCA law to have a user generated content platform operate in the US | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

illionoisprelawland-blog · 4 years ago

Text

We Are Never Ever Getting Sued For Copyright Infringement

By Jennifer Kuo, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Class of 2020

September 8, 2020

Many college students might remember owning Taylor Swift’s Fearless album on CD when it first came out in 2008, with tracks like “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me” becoming some of the most iconic songs of the decade. Fearless propelled Taylor Swift into stardom and made her one of the youngest artists to win a Grammy Award. Now, in 2020, Taylor Swift is as popular as ever, but her music releases are coming in a slightly different format. Her new surprise album, folklore, officially broke the world record a few days after its release for most one-day streams of an album by a female artist on Spotify, coming in at 80.6 million streams [1]. Streaming services have largely replaced CDs in the past few years, with Spotify being one of the most prominent players in the market. Despite folklore’s success on Spotify, Taylor Swift has had a fraught relationship with the streaming giant.

The artist payout model of Spotify, like many streaming services, is based on the number of streams multiplied by the company’s revenue and the artist’s royalty rate. 70% of Spotify’s artist payout goes to publishing owners, which means that on average an artist makes less than a cent per play, but this amount could end up in payouts of millions of dollars for a popular artist like Taylor Swift [2]. Despite this, Spotify has often come under attack for underpaying artists, and record labels have even demanded Congress enact mandatory minimum regulations targeting streaming services. Spotify leadership maintains, however, that its freemium-style service has made significant impact in decreasing the amount of online piracy of music, ultimately increasing legal exposure and publicity of artists and their earnings[3]. Though Spotify maintains its services ultimately leads to net increases in revenue for record labels and artists, Taylor Swift decided to pull all her music off the platform in 2014. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Swift groups streaming together with piracy and file sharing as actions that have decreased album sales and have dealt a blow to “the financial value that artists…place on their music.” Calling music “important and rare,” she maintained that providing music for free as Spotify does is undervaluing art. Swift is not alone in leaving Spotify; artists such as The Black Keys have also spoken out against the platform [4].

Surprisingly, Taylor Swift suddenly returned to Spotify three years after her departure in 2014, with little comment in reference to her earlier criticism of streaming services. If Spotify was a giant in 2014, by 2017 it had become a behemoth. With 100 million-plus listeners, it also holds the important role of supplying data to Nielsen which compiles Billboard weekly charts. With the way the music industry had changed, it made little financial sense for any artist to shun Spotify in spite of any ethical misgivings regarding its model [5]. In truth, artists and record labels have had a love-hate legal relationship with digital music services for decades, and these services have toed the line between IP violations and popularizing musical content since the granddaddy of it all, Napster. Napster revolutionized the music industry by enabling peer-to-peer file sharing through its software back in 1999. Unsurprisingly, Napster was shut down through A&M Records v. Napster Inc. less than two years later, accused of copyright infringement. However, in the short 14 months Napster was in business, it had already changed the music industry in many irreversible ways, although it was only a continuation of a trend that had been happening for years. In 1998, Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in response to rising piracy online. It is this act that legally enforced payment of a sound performance royalty as well as a musical work royalty, which directly impacts streaming services that allow users to play content on demand. Furthermore, the act also expanded upon definitions of. interactive subscription services to include not only on-demand services but also specially created programs. This definition expansion more broadly included streaming services and imposed on them an additional licensing fee requirement [6].

Spotify was founded in Sweden, and for many years had difficulty entering the US market due to the challenge of securing licensing rights to comply with the DMCA. In 2011, when it finally launched in the country, it immediately faced a lawsuit, not from record labels surprisingly, but rather from low profile mobile media company PacketVideo. The charge? Patent infringement, of the cloud-based streaming system that Spotify uses. While the court eventually dismissed the suit, the broadness of the patent points to a larger problem within IP law. The ease at which companies can acquire patents and the lack of discretion the U.S. Patent office uses to approve them is a threat to creative output and technological innovation. With the rising popularity of mergers and acquisitions in the technology business space, more companies are able to grow and quickly own more patents, pushing smaller players out of the market. Beyond the licensing fee necessary to record labels per DMCA, patents slap an extra fee on streaming services like Spotify for so-called “proprietary technology [7].”

The Chief Legal Officer of Spotify, Horacio Gutierrez, has called the company an “intellectual-property based” business whose success is based on navigating the regulatory environment of IP licensing and interaction [8]. Behind the simple model of cloud-based streaming, it has to simultaneously consider the interests of artists, other technology services, record labels, and itself. And artists like Taylor Swift will continue to have a conflicted relationship with streaming, at once craving the exposure it uniquely provides while decrying its attack on traditional music sales.

________________________________________________________________

[1] Stephenson, K. (2020, July 29). Taylor Swift breaks 24 hour streaming record on Spotify for 8th album folklore. Guinness World Records. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2020/7/taylor-swift-breaks-24-hour-streaming-record-on-spotify-for-8th-album-folklore-625253

[2] [4] Linshi, J. (2020, November 3). Here’s Why Taylor Swift Pulled Her Music From Spotify. Time. https://time.com/3554468/why-taylor-swift-spotify/

[3] [8] Shokes, L. (2016, December 19). Interview with Spotify General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez. Harvard Journal on Sports and Entertainment Law. Retrieved from https://harvardjsel.com/2016/12/interview-with-spotify-general-counsel-horacio-gutierrez/

[5] McIntyre, H. (2017, June 27). Why Did Taylor Swift Really Rejoin Spotify? Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2017/06/27/why-did-taylor-swift-really-rejoin-spotify/#4c10e3e373de

[6] Richardson, J. (2014). The Spotify Paradox: How the Creation of a Compulsory License Scheme for Streaming On-Demand Music Platforms Can Save the Music Industry. UCLA Entertainment Law Review, 22(1), 46–74. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7n4322vm

[7] anikaf. (2011, October 9). Spotify Lawsuit Demonstrates Weaknesses of Patent Law System. Michigan Technology Law Review. http://mttlr.org/2011/10/spotify-lawsuit-demonstrates-weaknesses-of-patent-law-system/#:~:text=Spotify%20Lawsuit%20Demonstrates%20Weaknesses%20of%20Patent%20Law%20System,-In%20July%202011&text=However%2C%20within%20two%20weeks%20of,company%20PacketVideo%20for%20patent%20infringement.

0 notes

neptunecreek · 5 years ago

Text

China’s Global Reach: Surveillance and Censorship Beyond the Great Firewall

Those outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are accustomed to thinking of the Internet censorship practices of the Chinese state as primarily domestic, enacted through the so-called "Great Firewall"—a system of surveillance and blocking technology that prevents Chinese citizens from viewing websites outside the country. The Chinese government’s justification for that firewall is based on the concept of “Internet sovereignty.” The PRC has long declared that “within Chinese territory, the internet is under the jurisdiction of Chinese sovereignty.''

Hong Kong, as part of the "one country, two systems" agreement, has largely lived outside that firewall: foreign services like Twitter, Google, and Facebook are available there, and local ISPs have made clear that they will oppose direct state censorship of its open Internet.

But the ongoing Hong Kong protests, and mainland China's pervasive attempts to disrupt and discredit the movement globally, have highlighted that China is not above trying to extend its reach beyond the Great Firewall, and beyond its own borders. In attempting to silence protests that lie outside the Firewall, in full view of the rest of the world, China is showing its hand, and revealing the tools it can use to silence dissent or criticism worldwide.

In attempting to silence protests that lie outside the Firewall, in full view of the rest of the world, China is showing its hand, and revealing the tools it can use to silence dissent or criticism worldwide.

Some of those tools—such as pressure on private entities, including American corporations NBA and Blizzard—have caught U.S. headlines and outraged customers and employees of those companies. Others have been more technical, and less obvious to the Western observers.

The “Great Cannon” takes aim at sites outside the Firewall

The Great Cannon is a large-scale technology deployed by ISPs based in China to inject javascript code into customers’ insecure (HTTP) requests. This code weaponizes the millions of mainland Chinese Internet connections that pass through these ISPs. When users visit insecure websites, their browsers will also download and run the government’s malicious javascript—which will cause them to send additional traffic to sites outside the Great Firewall, potentially slowing these websites down for other users, or overloading them entirely.

The Great Cannon’s debut in 2015 took down Github, where Chinese users were hosting anti-censorship software and mirrors of otherwise-banned news outlets like the New York Times. Following widespread international backlash, this attack was halted.

Last month, the Great Cannon was activated once again, aiming this time at Hong Kong protestors. It briefly took down LIHKG, a Hong Kong social media platform central to organizing this summer’s protests.

Targeting the global Chinese community through malware

Pervasive online surveillance is a fact of life within the Chinese mainland. But if the communities the Chinese government wants to surveill aren’t at home, it is increasingly willing to invest in expensive zero-days to watch them abroad, or otherwise hold their families at home hostage.

Last month, security researchers uncovered several expensive and involved mobile malware campaigns targeting the Uyghur and Tibetan diasporas. One constituted a broad “watering hole” attack using several zero-days to target visitors of Uyghur-language websites.

As we’ve noted previously, this represents a sea-change in how zero-days are being used; while China continues to target specific high-profile individuals in spear-phishing campaigns, they are now unafraid to cast a much wider net, in order to place their surveillance software on entire ethnic and political groups outside China’s border.

Censoring Chinese Apps Abroad

At home, China doesn’t need to use zero-days to install its own code on individuals’ personal devices. Chinese messaging and browser app makers are required to include government filtering on their client, too. That means that when you use an app created by a mainland Chinese company, it likely contains code intended to scan and block prohibited websites or language.

Until now, China has been largely content to keep the activation of this device-side censorship concentrated within its borders. The keyword filtering embedded in WeChat only occurs for users with a mainland Chinese phone number. Chinese-language versions of domestic browsers censor and surveill significantly more than the English-language versions. But as Hong Kong and domestic human rights abuses draw international interest, the temptation to enforce Chinese policy abroad has grown.

TikTok is one of the largest and fastest-growing global social media platforms spun out of Beijing. It heavily moderates its content, and supposedly has localized censors for different jurisdictions. But following a government crackdown on “short video” platforms at the beginning of this year, news outlets began reporting on the lack of Hong Kong-related content on the platform. TikTok’s leaked general moderation guidelines expressly forbid any content criticizing the Chinese government, like content related to the Chinese persecution of ethnic minorities, or about Tiananmen Square.

Internet users outside the United States may recognise the dynamic of a foreign service exporting its domestic decision-making abroad. For many years, America’s social media companies have been accused of exporting U.S. culture and policy to the rest of the world: Facebook imposes worldwide censorship of nudity and sexual language, even in countries that are more culturally permissive on these topics than the U.S. Most services obey DMCA takedown procedures of allegedly copyright-infringing content, even in countries that have had alternative resolution laws. The influence that the United States has on its domestic tech industries has led to an outsized influence on those companies’ international user base.

That said, U.S. companies have, as with developers in most countries, resisted the inclusion of state-mandated filters or government-imposed code within their own applications. In China, domestic and foreign companies have been explicitly mandated to comply with Chinese censorship under the national Cybersecurity Law passed in 2017, which provides aggressive yet vague guidelines for content moderation. China imposing its rules on global Chinese tech companies differs from the United States’ influence on the global Internet in more than just degree.

Money Talks: But Critics Can’t

This brings us to the most visible arm of the China’s new worldwide censorship toolkit: economic pressure on global companies. The Chinese domestic market is increasingly important to companies like Blizzard and the National Basketball Association (NBA). This means that China can use threats of boycotts or the denial of access to Chinese markets to silence these companies when they, or people affiliated with them, express support for the Hong Kong protestors.

Already, people are fighting back against the imposition of Chinese censorship on global companies. Blizzard employees staged a walk-out in protest, NBA fans continue to voice their support for the demonstrations in Hong Kong, and fans are rallying to boycott the two companies. But multi-national companies who can control their users’ speech can expect to see more pressure from China as its economic clout grows.

Is China setting the Standard for Global Enforcement of Local Law?

Parochial “Internet sovereignty’ has proven insufficient to China’s needs: Domestic policy objectives now require it to control the Internet outside and inside its borders.

To be clear, China’s government is not alone in this: rather than forcefully opposing and protesting their actions, other states—including the United States and the European Union— have been too busy making their own justifications for the extra-territorial exercise of their own surveillance and censorship capabilities.

China now projects its Internet power abroad through the pervasive and unabashed use of malware and state-supported DDoS attacks; mandated client-side filtering and surveillance; economic sanctions to limit cross-border free speech; and pressure on private entities to act as a global cultural police.

Unless lawmakers, corporations, and individual users are as brave in standing up to authoritarian acts as the people of Hong Kong, we can expect to see these tactics adopted by every state, against every user of the Internet.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2Mz65le

#Deeplinks

0 notes

theinvinciblenoob · 6 years ago

Link

WordPress has taken down a handful alt-right blogs, according to several complaints from affected blog owners and readers who claim the sites were removed from WordPress.com, despite not being in violation of the company’s Terms of Service. Some site owners also said they were not notified of the shutdown in advance and have lost their work. The removals, we’ve learned, are in part due to a new policy WordPress has rolled out that now prohibits blogs from the “malicious publication of unauthorized, identifying images of minors.”

Yes, that’s right: the company has created a new rule to specifically handle the Sandy Hook conspiracists, and boot them from WordPress.com.

While some of the affected sites had already been flagged for other violations, many were hosting Sandy Hook conspiracy theories and other “false flag” content.

In a YouTube video, the host of one site lamented, “They have wiped out 11 years of my fucking life.” He then read through WordPress’s Terms of Service, confused as to how he was in violation.

According to Google’s cache, his site hosted 9/11 “truther” content and claimed that Sandy Hook was a staged event. These are generally repugnant points of view to a large swath of people, but he’s correct in saying they weren’t views that WordPress had prohibited.

The update to WordPress’s policy follows a damning report from The NYT this week that explained on how the world’s largest blogging service has allowed Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists to remain online.

The issue, in part, has to do with how WordPress’s policies were originally written, the article explained.

WordPress policies were designed to be more resistant to the strategic use of copyright claims as a means of getting content removed. Longtime web veterans know they were written this way because they were created at a time when large corporations would wield copyright law – like the DMCA – as a weapon used to force platforms to take down content about their company that they deemed unfavorable.

But in recent years, the permissiveness these policies has also created loopholes for those whose spread disinformation, incite hatred and violence, and post abusive and offensive content to the web.

With little other recourse available to them, some Sandy Hook parents have used copyright law get images of their children removed from the web.

As The NYT explained, a Sandy Hook victim’s father, Leonard Pozner, filed copyright claims with a number of platforms, including WordPress, on images of his son Noah, a 6-year old victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Facebook, Amazon and Google complied with those requests. But WordPress responded with form letters that explained why the content could stay online.

The responses, which Mr. Ponzer described to the paper as “automated, very generic,” and “very cold,” said that the conspiracy blog posts represented “fair use” of the material. It defined fair use as anything that included “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.”

Unbelievably, the letters also warned Mr. Ponzer that it could collect damages from him for knowingly materially misrepresenting copyrights.

Imagine contacting a company to complain that it's mass disseminating deceptive content about the death of your son and being told by that company that it could seek damages *from you* for doing so. Tech, you have a long, long way to go. https://t.co/MfWm80hJsx pic.twitter.com/O2K1Dg1acA

— Shannon Coulter (@shannoncoulter) August 14, 2018

Yes, WordPress told the father of a murdered 6-year old that it could seek damages from him if he didn’t stop asking it to remove the stomach-churningly offensive content from those who believe the Sandy Hook shooting never happened, and that parents mourning the loss of their children were actors.

The company told The NYT that language was a part of a predefined statement it used, and was sorry that it did so in this particular situation.

However, it also admitted that the posts in question weren’t in violation of any current WordPress user guidelines or copyright law.

We understand the company has since phoned Mr. Ponzer to apologize directly. It then created a new policy to address the problem.

Its new policy reads:

The policy affects blogs hosted on WordPress.com, not self-hosted blogs using WordPress software.

Combined, WordPress powers 31.6 percent of websites on the web, and has 60% of the CMS market, so this change has a sizable impact on the web as a whole.

The company declined to comment on the new policy.

If the booted bloggers now move to their own self-hosted sites, the responsibility of shutting them down will fall on the web hosting companies. Of course, don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.

Some of the affected bloggers will probably claim their rights to free speech are being violated. They’re wrong. The First Amendment protects people in the U.S. from the government censoring or punishing you for what you say. It doesn’t protect your Twitter account, Facebook profile, or now, your WordPress.com blog.

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

0 notes

pauldeckerus · 6 years ago

Text

Article 13 in the EU: What Does it Mean for Photos?

Just this past week, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs approved amendments to EU’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which includes the infamous Article 13.

The article “creates an obligation on information society service providers storing and giving access to large amounts of works and other subject-matter uploaded by their users to take appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightsholders and to prevent the availability on their services of content identified by rightsholders in cooperation with the service providers.”

In other words, no authorization from the copyright holder, no rights to display on any websites or services.

Up to now and mostly based on a US legislation called “safe harbor,” a website or service receiving content from users is not liable if it hosts unauthorized copyrighted content. As long as they inform their users, they should never upload claimed content and that they have a procedure in place that allows copyright owners to have their content taken down.

How many images on Pinterest are copyrighted and used without authorization?

This relaxed application of copyright law has allowed companies like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and others to create mega content companies without ever paying a license fee. Billions of images, a lot copyrighted and used without authorization, are what made these companies into multi-million dollar successes. The EU, with this amendment, would like to change this. Or at least, redistribute the value created to the creators of content.

This mix of Safe Harbor, DMCA, and Fair Use is also what allowed the social part of the internet to become so popular and widespread. Freely and seamlessly exchanging ideas, emotions, opinions, and information using others photos is a now a fundamental of online social communication. Just think how important the photo by John Moore of Getty [Editor’s note: Further reading here] has been instrumental in shaping the world’s opinion on the Trump’s immigration policy. Now think how unknown it would have been if everyone wanting to share it couldn’t do it unless either they or the platform (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) paid a license fee. Sure, Getty would be much richer, but most realistically, not a lot of people would have seen it. And thus, the children separation policy might not have been changed.

The image that forced a policy changed might have never been seen under the new EU article 13

If a company like Pinterest, for example, had to make sure it had the proper licensing rights to publish an image, it would have to shut down overnight. Not only because the technological challenge to comply is immense and could take years to build, but because after all is said and done, they would end up publishing only maybe 2 to 10 new images a month.

The technological challenge is immense because, to abide by this rule, companies would have to create a filter that would automatically validate the available rights of every image submitted. What the opponent of the legislation calls the “censorship filter.” That means, for those companies to have access to an authoritative registry of all photographs and their up-to-date rights. It currently doesn’t exist. Stock photo agencies hold a few hundred of millions of images in their archives along with their associated rights, but that is far from covering the trillions of images available online today. And with close to 1.8 billion new pictures uploaded each day, the amount is quickly and exponentially getting bigger.

This “filter” would undoubtedly use a similarity algorithm, which is notoriously unreliable. Research shows that image matching fails ( false positives) about 20% of the time, still exposing those companies to liabilities or requiring them to supplement it with a large pool of human editors.

The future of social media?

But let’s say that the tech challenge can be solved. Then what? In order to continue to operate, Tumblr, Pinterest, Flickr, Snap, Instagram and many others would have to pay millions in photo licensing fees. Would they charge those back to their users?

YouTube faced a similar challenge when it was sued multiple times by media and music companies for hosting copyrighted content. They thus created Content ID, which can identify content via sound matching. Registered rights holders can choose to block uploads or receive a revenue share generated by the views. But that technology is not foolproof, works only for registered rights holders and allows YouTube to ‘pay’ for licensing rights via advertisers’ money, if any.

The EU amendment makes no distinction between registered rights holder, usually professionals and everyone else who takes pictures. It also, for better or worse, seem to not care about who will build, pay and manage this indispensable photo registry. A few big companies could certainly afford it but what about everyone else?

It also does not elaborate on who and how site compliance will be monitored. Or what would be the penalties?

For too long, tech companies have been able to build multi-million dollar companies on the back of visual content creators, denying them of any revenue. In the photography world, they have greatly benefited from the complete absence of a central organization (unlike music TV or film). This is what the EU is trying to reverse. However, by ignoring the technological and social challenges, they are heading towards a destructive confrontation that will either break the internet as we know it or make some of the most used and popular services go dark for all of Europe.

About the author: Paul Melcher is a photography and technology entrepreneur based in New York, and the founder of Kaptur, a news magazine about the visual tech space. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of his writings on his blog, Thoughts of a Bohemian. Melcher offers his services as a consultant as well. This article was also published here.

Image credits: Header photo by rawpixel

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2018/06/23/article-13-in-the-eu-what-does-it-mean-for-photos/

0 notes

alternate-time-line-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Legal Statements

DMCA

How to Report a Copyright Infringement

We respect the intellectual property rights of others and expects its users to do the same. It is our policy, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, to disable and/or terminate the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe or are repeatedly charged with infringing the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of others.

Although our company is based outside the United States and not governed by U.S. law, we respect the rights of copyright owners and thus have implemented certain policies in an effort to voluntarily comply with laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Nonetheless, our Company reserves all rights and objections to the formal application of U.S. law to its operations.

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the text of which may be found on the U.S. Copyright Office website at http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf.

If you are a copyright owner, or are authorized to act on behalf of one, or authorized to act under any exclusive right under copyright, please report alleged copyright infringements taking place on or through the site by completing a DMCA notice of alleged infringement and delivering it to us via email. Upon receipt of the notice as described below, we will take whatever action, in its sole discretion, it deems appropriate, including removal of the challenged material from the Site.

If you would like to remove content related to non-copyright issues such as privacy, abuse, harassment, inappropriate or illegal content, etc. Please contact us via email with the details of your reasons

You can file a DMCA Request by sending us the following information: 1.A physical or electronic signature

2.Identify the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed, or - if multiple copyrighted works are covered by this Notice - you may provide a representative list of the copyrighted works that you claim have been infringed.

3.Identify (i) the material that you claim is infringing (or to be the subject of infringing activity) and that is to be removed, or to which access is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit us to locate the material, including at a minimum, if applicable, the URL of the link shown on the Site where such material may be found, and (ii) the reference or link to the material or activity that you claim to be infringing, that is to be removed or to which access is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit us to locate that reference or link, including at a minimum, if applicable, the URL of the link shown on the site where such reference or link may be found.

4.Information reasonably sufficient to permit us to contact the complaining party, including a name, address, telephone number and, if available, an email address at which the complaining party may be contacted.

5.Include both of the following statements in the body of the Notice: "I hereby state that I have a good faith belief that the disputed use of the copyrighted material or reference or link to such material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law (e.g., as a fair use).

"I hereby state that the information in this notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that I am the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright or of an exclusive right under the copyright that is allegedly infringed."

6.Provide your full legal name and your electronic or physical signature

We provide this Privacy Policy to inform you of our policies and procedures regarding the collection, use and disclosure of personal information we receive from users of this site. This Privacy Policy applies only to information that you provide to us through the site. This Privacy Policy may be updated on occasion. We will notify you of any material changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on the Site. You are advised to consult this policy regularly for any changes.

This site expressly and strictly limits its membership and/or viewing privileges to adults 18 years of age and over, or having attained the age of majority in their country. All persons who do not meet this criteria are strictly forbidden from accessing or viewing the contents of this Site. We do not knowingly seek or collect any personal information or data from persons who have not attained the age of majority.

The security of your Data is very important and as such we take all appropriate steps to limit the risk that it may be lost, damaged or misused.

DATA COLLECTED

Our primary goals in collecting information are to provide and improve our site, application, services, features and content, to administer your membership and to enable users to enjoy and easily navigate the site.

Personal Information:

•Non-Registered users can watch pictures & videos without registering and without any information being collected and processed. However, the visitor's IP address will be recorded in the event that there is any misappropriation of information and/or content. •Registered Members: Registration is required for uploading pictures & videos, and accessing a number of other features. The following personal information is requested at the time of registration: username (required), and email address (required). All of this data, with the exception of the email address and IP address, becomes publicly accessible information.

Content Uploaded to the site: Any personal information or picture/video content that you voluntarily disclose online becomes publicly available and can be collected and used by others.

Cookies: When you visit this site, we may send one or more cookies to your computer that uniquely identifies your browser session. We use both session cookies and persistent cookies. If you remove your persistent cookie, some of the site's features may not function properly.

Log File Information: When you visit this site, our servers automatically record certain information that your web browser sends such as your web request, IP address, browser type, browser language, referring URL, platform type, domain names and the date and time of your request.

Emails: If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence.

USES

The personally identifiable information you submit to this site is used to provide you as the user with special, personalized site features.

Your chosen username (not your email address) is displayed to other Users alongside the content you upload, including pictures & videos, comments, likes, etc.

Any picture or videos that you submit may be redistributed through the internet and other media channels, and may be viewed by the general public.

We may use your email address or other personally identifiable information to send commercial or marketing messages.

We may use your email address for non-marketing or administrative purposes (such as notifying you of key website changes or for customer service purposes).

Opt-in communication — Subscriber expressly and specifically acknowledges and agrees that his/her email address or other means of communicating with subscriber may be used to send him/her offers, information or any other commercially oriented emails or other means of communications. More specifically, some offers may be presented to the subscriber via email campaigns or other means of communications with the option to express the subscriber's preference by either clicking or entering "accept" (alternatively "yes") or "decline" (alternatively "no"). By selecting or clicking the "accept" or "yes", the subscriber indicates that the subscriber "OPTS-IN" to that offer and thereby agrees and assents that the subscriber's personal information, including its email address and data may be used for that matter."

Opt-out communication — Subscriber expressly and specifically acknowledges and agrees that his/her email address or other means of communicating with subscriber may not be used to send him/her offers, information or any other commercially oriented emails or other means of communications.

We analyze aggregated user traffic information to help streamline our marketing and hosting operations and to improve the quality of our website user-experience.

DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION

If required to do so, we may release data to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce our Terms of Service and other agreements; or to protect the rights, property or safety of this website or our subscribers or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organizations including the police and governmental authorities for the purposes of protection against fraud or any other kind of illegal activity whether or not identified in the Terms of Service. It is our policy, whenever possible and legally permissible, to promptly notify you upon an obligation to supply data to any third party.

Should you deliberately upload any illegal material, we shall forward all available information to all relevant authorities and do so without notice.

We do not share your personally identifiable information, such as email address, with other third-party companies for their commercial or marketing use without your consent, or except as part of a specific program or feature for which you will have the ability to opt-in or opt-out.

LINKS TO OTHER SITES

Our site contains links to other websites. If you choose to visit an advertiser by "clicking on" a banner ad or other type of advertisement, or click on another third party link, you will be directed to that third party's website. The fact that we link to a website or present a banner ad or other type of advertisement is not an endorsement, authorization or representation of our affiliation with that third party, nor is it an endorsement of their privacy or information security policies or practices. We do not exercise control over third party websites. These other websites may place their own cookies or other files on your computer, collect data or solicit personal information from you. Other sites follow different rules regarding the use or disclosure of the personal information you submit to them. We encourage you to read the privacy policies or statements of the other websites you visit.

SECURITY

Identity theft and the practice currently known as "phishing" are of great concern to us. Safeguarding information to help protect you from identity theft is a top priority. We do not and will not, at any time, request your credit card information, login information, or national identification numbers in a non-secure or unsolicited e-mail or telephone communication. For more information about phishing, visit the Federal Trade Commission's website.

All content included on this site, such as text, graphics, logos, button icons, images, audio clips, digital downloads, data compilations, and software, is the property of this blog or its content suppliers and protected by international copyright laws.

#altLegal

0 notes

omg-ohmygoddess-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Legal Statements

DMCA

How to Report a Copyright Infringement

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the text of which may be found on the U.S. Copyright Office website at http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf.

You can file a DMCA Request by sending us the following information: 1.A physical or electronic signature

6.Provide your full legal name and your electronic or physical signature

The security of your Data is very important and as such we take all appropriate steps to limit the risk that it may be lost, damaged or misused.

DATA COLLECTED

Personal Information:

Content Uploaded to the site: Any personal information or picture/video content that you voluntarily disclose online becomes publicly available and can be collected and used by others.

Emails: If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence.

USES

The personally identifiable information you submit to this site is used to provide you as the user with special, personalized site features.

Your chosen username (not your email address) is displayed to other Users alongside the content you upload, including pictures & videos, comments, likes, etc.

Any picture or videos that you submit may be redistributed through the internet and other media channels, and may be viewed by the general public.

We may use your email address or other personally identifiable information to send commercial or marketing messages.

We may use your email address for non-marketing or administrative purposes (such as notifying you of key website changes or for customer service purposes).

We analyze aggregated user traffic information to help streamline our marketing and hosting operations and to improve the quality of our website user-experience.

DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION

Should you deliberately upload any illegal material, we shall forward all available information to all relevant authorities and do so without notice.

LINKS TO OTHER SITES

SECURITY

#omgLegal

0 notes

uncledmt-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Legal Statements

DMCA

How to Report a Copyright Infringement

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the text of which may be found on the U.S. Copyright Office website at http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf.

You can file a DMCA Request by sending us the following information: 1.A physical or electronic signature

6.Provide your full legal name and your electronic or physical signature

The security of your Data is very important and as such we take all appropriate steps to limit the risk that it may be lost, damaged or misused.

DATA COLLECTED

Personal Information:

Content Uploaded to the site: Any personal information or picture/video content that you voluntarily disclose online becomes publicly available and can be collected and used by others.

Emails: If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence.

USES

The personally identifiable information you submit to this site is used to provide you as the user with special, personalized site features.

Your chosen username (not your email address) is displayed to other Users alongside the content you upload, including pictures & videos, comments, likes, etc.

Any picture or videos that you submit may be redistributed through the internet and other media channels, and may be viewed by the general public.

We may use your email address or other personally identifiable information to send commercial or marketing messages.

We may use your email address for non-marketing or administrative purposes (such as notifying you of key website changes or for customer service purposes).

We analyze aggregated user traffic information to help streamline our marketing and hosting operations and to improve the quality of our website user-experience.

DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION

Should you deliberately upload any illegal material, we shall forward all available information to all relevant authorities and do so without notice.

LINKS TO OTHER SITES

SECURITY

#uncledmtLegal

0 notes

potsmokersguild-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Legal Statements

DMCA

How to Report a Copyright Infringement

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the text of which may be found on the U.S. Copyright Office website at http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf.

You can file a DMCA Request by sending us the following information: 1.A physical or electronic signature

6.Provide your full legal name and your electronic or physical signature

The security of your Data is very important and as such we take all appropriate steps to limit the risk that it may be lost, damaged or misused.

DATA COLLECTED

Personal Information:

Content Uploaded to the site: Any personal information or picture/video content that you voluntarily disclose online becomes publicly available and can be collected and used by others.

Emails: If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence.

USES

The personally identifiable information you submit to this site is used to provide you as the user with special, personalized site features.

Your chosen username (not your email address) is displayed to other Users alongside the content you upload, including pictures & videos, comments, likes, etc.

Any picture or videos that you submit may be redistributed through the internet and other media channels, and may be viewed by the general public.

We may use your email address or other personally identifiable information to send commercial or marketing messages.

We may use your email address for non-marketing or administrative purposes (such as notifying you of key website changes or for customer service purposes).

We analyze aggregated user traffic information to help streamline our marketing and hosting operations and to improve the quality of our website user-experience.

DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION

Should you deliberately upload any illegal material, we shall forward all available information to all relevant authorities and do so without notice.

LINKS TO OTHER SITES

SECURITY

#psgLegal

0 notes

neptunecreek · 8 years ago

Text

BWP Media v. Polyvore: It’s All About Control

Major entertainment companies are once again trying to expand copyright law to gain leverage over a wide variety of user-generated content sites. If they succeed, they would have a veto over Internet users’ access to the tools that allow us to remix, mashup, and participate in popular culture. EFF, along with the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Public Knowledge, filed an amicus brief in the case of BWP Media v. Polyvore, urging the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to defend copyright law’s important protections for user-generated content platforms.

Polyvore’s platform lets its users collect images from other sites, then manipulate those images and remix them into new collages. The popular site has millions of users from around the globe and views its mission as “democratizing fashion.” In 2010, when the New Yorker covered the site, Polyvore boasted "1.4 million registered users, two hundred thousand of whom are…dedicated 'creators.'"

For many of us, choosing our clothes is an act of self-expression. Whether we’re donning an EFF T-shirt or emulating our idols, the way we choose and mix our wardrobe expresses our aesthetic tastes and reflects how we want others to see us. Playing with, collaging, and remixing images of fashion and design objects give us a way to experiment with different possibilities, and create new aesthetic stories. By giving users the tools to create their own fashion and design collages, Polyvore lets us ditch the dictates of the fashion industry in favor of DIY assemblages we and our peers create ourselves.

The site’s also become a popular resource for “casual cosplay,” and supports an entire community of users that create and share creative interpretations of their favorite characters’ costumes using everyday clothing and objects.

Big media gatekeepers have a long history of trying to use copyright law to maintain control of technology that enables ordinary people to take popular culture into their own hands. In the 1980’s it was home video recording, in the 2000’s, remote video storage. Since then, the battle has been waged over various forms of user-generated content platforms and search tools. BWP’s suit against Polyvore (with the Copyright Alliance and the MPAA weighing in to support it and assert their own pet theories) is just the latest effort to strip user-generated content sites of their safe harbors under Section 512 of the DMCA, and to hold those platforms responsible when any of their users infringes a copyright.

Without the safe harbors of Section 512, most online speech platforms could not exist. Even the big players that can afford to pay off the media cartels would face swarms of lawsuits from independent rightsholders seeking to cash in on the high cost of defending against a copyright claim, coupled with the extraordinary damages that can be awarded in copyright cases beyond any measure of actual market harm.

That’s not to say that rightsholders with legitimate claims are left without a remedy. The law is clear: when the user is the one responsible for causing an online platform to copy infringing material, they are liable, not the entity that created the tool they were using. Plus, if a toolmaker goes so far as to make a tool that can only be used in an infringing way, or they actively induce people to infringe, then they, too, could be liable under doctrines of “secondary liability” for copyright infringement.

The safe harbor of Section 512 gives online platforms a clear roadmap for avoiding potential liability, to reduce the chilling effect of copyright threats that would otherwise demand a complex and costly defense.

But BWP also has a novel (and incorrect) theory to undermine Section 512 itself. The safe harbor requires that platforms comply with “standard technical measures” for managing copyrighted works and sets forth a process for establishing a technology as such a standard technical measure. Although no technology has ever gone through that process – something the Copyright Office recently recognized – BWP argues that metadata associated with digital images should qualify.

Not only does BWP’s metadata argument get the law wrong (the DMCA has pretty strict requirements for what counts as a “standard technical measure”), requiring platforms to retain metadata would also be disastrous for user privacy. Photo metadata often contains a lot of private information that you might not want to be shared publicly – like your location, the time you were there, and the identity of the device that took the photo. Because of this, online safety guides often recommend that users be cautious about sharing photos with metadata, and some service providers opt to strip metadata from users’ uploaded photos to protect them from stalking, burglary, doxxing, or retaliation for political activities.

Fortunately, legal protections for online speech platforms are well-established, and their benefits for user expression and technological innovation have long been clear. Unfortunately, these legal protections continue to be targets for big content aggregators whose primary innovation is coming up with far-fetched legal theories to shake those platforms down. EFF has been there every step of the way, and will continue to protect the platforms we all use to communicate and express ourselves.