Dealing With a Copyright Takedown Request? 547
George Maschke writes "I recently received a takedown notice from a corporate lawyer demanding that I remove a post on my Web site's message board. It purportedly lists the first 75 of 567 questions on the MMPI-2 paper-and-pencil psychological test. It seems to me that such posting of a limited amount copyrighted material for discussion purposes on a public-interest, non-profit Web site falls within the scope of the fair use exemption of US copyright law. I have thus declined to remove the post. I believe that the corporation in question is seeking to chill public discussion of its test, which applicants for employment with many governmental agencies are required to complete. I would be interested in this community's thoughts on the matter."
WANAL (Score:5, Interesting)
Hi, I'm not a lawyer nor are many people you're likely to see posting here.
But that percentage sounds like it may just cross the line for fair use, or perhaps even editorial comment. If you are going to go against the wishes of a larger entity, be sure of the percentage that might cross a line and trim to that. It may not be necessary to remove if you can editorialize.
Otherwise, I hope you run the website through an LLC.
Just throw it away (Score:5, Interesting)
Was it certified? Can they prove they sent it?
Update on Situation (Score:5, Interesting)
Peer1.com seems to be under the impression that once a DMCA takedown notice is received, the material mentioned in the notice must be removed for a period of 14 days, after which, if the complainant does not provide notification that it has sought a court order, the material may be restored. However, my understanding is that the material may be placed back on-line [dri.org] (PDF) promptly upon the service provider's receipt of a counter-claim (which I have already sent), that is, there is no need to wait 14 days.
It's also worth noting that Pearson, the copyright holder of the MMPI-2, filed a takedown notice for the very same post in 2007. We promptly filed a counter-notice, Pearson took no further action, and we thought the matter resolved. Has anyone had a problem with a copyright holder filing repeated DMCA takedown notices to one's service provider for the same material?
MMPI - VOODOO AND COPYRIGHT (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Advice (Score:1, Interesting)
While IANAL and I can't locate the reference, I seem to remember that 10% was a magic figure in Australia.
Maybe 56 questions (rather than 75) should have been the limit, or even better in the response to the lawyer ask them as to how many questions they view as fair use, and specify that you will await their response before actioning any take-down.
My $0.02 worth.
Re:What, These Questions? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're going to get sued soon if you don't. (Score:2, Interesting)
Test makers are notoriously vicious in the defense of their property. Psychological tests especially, since it cost them a lot of money to create those items and test their reliability and validity, and they will have to replace those items if they are disclosed to enough people.
Granted, projective tests like the MMPI are generally garbage that don't tell you anything you can't figure out yourself with a little introspection, but publicly airing their items directly costs them money. Anyone that was awake in psych 101 knows how "useful" a person's MMPI personality type is, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the most popular go-to personality assessments.
Pearson in particular is a very large test maker with very hungry lawyers. They WILL sue you for this. They'll sue you for selling any of their products on ebay, too... even if it's just a xeroxed BLANK assessment protocol (the paper that the taker writes answers on). They'll sue you for talking about their items in a way that reveals items. They'll sue you at the drop of a hat.
Disclaimer: As a School Psychology student myself, most of our texts don't even use actual items from tests as examples. Tests themselves (and the protocols that go with them) are kept under lock and key, and cost a fortune.
Re:What's the question again? (Score:1, Interesting)
- Give to Wikileaks (If it's actually important but they seem to have a low standard)
- Host in another country (Preferably some country which doesn't give a shit) and link to it
- Host on various free services and cycle the links when ever they remove it from somewhere
- Torrents (annoying but hey, it would work)
I could go on and on and on.
Is this test legal in the US...? (Score:5, Interesting)
20.My sex life is satisfactory
69.I am very strongly attracted by members of my own sex
Both questions could count as sexual harassment. (Aside from the fact, most sane people would tell the questioner to fuck off and mind there own business)
14.I have diarrhea once a month or more
Surely questions about your health that are not job releted are illegal?
58.Everything is turning out just like the prophets of the Bible said it would
LOL ! Don't get me started on the legality of this one!
I'm honestly amazed these questions are considered acceptable.
Here, they WOULD bring the law crashing down on you.
Re:Update on Situation (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, my guess is they will continue to send notices periodically (as whatever sweep they do happens across it again). As to if they go farther, who knows? I'd suspect not, but then they may get fed up with you, or there may be new management or what not.
If you leave the material up, it could go one of two ways:
1) They never go further than take down notices, since real trials are expensive and they could lose. In this case, all you need to do is make your provider happy with whatever counter notice you need to send. You might have to switch providers, they might get sick of it and say "take it down or leave," but that's all.
2) They get tired of it and sue you. In this case, you are going to have to go to court. Doesn't matter if you are in the right or not, the matter will have ot be settled in court and if you don't show, they'll win a default judgment against you. So you'll have to go fight it out. I can't say if you'll win or lose, I can't offer you legal advice for this.
Now the important thing to remember is that even if get a lawyer and they say "You are 100% in the right," you could end up going to court and spending a good deal of time and money on a court case. So you have to ask yourself if you are willing to do that. If you are, well then the next step is to get a lawyer and ask them about the legality. If they say "Nope, you are screwed," then you'd better take it down. If they give you the all clear, then do as you like.
If you aren't willing to deal with a court case, then you have to ask yourself how much risk you want to take, or perhaps more accurately, how serious you think they are. If you think they are just blowing smoke, and many companies do, then you can continue on. After all they may well never do anything but send takedown e-mails/letters. Those are cheap and easy, a lawsuit isn't. However remember they have that option, so maybe they take it.
You just have to decide for yourself if this is something you'd be willing to go through. If it is, then seek legal council and see if they think you'd prevail. If you aren't willing to, well then maybe you have to do as they say. Even if you are in the right, you can still be sued.
So the quesiton right now isn't about the law, it is about you. Answer that, then you know if it is worth looking in to the law further.
Observations. (Score:3, Interesting)
2.) If it's a pre-requisite for a federal job, it should be issued by the Fed, and therefore in the public domain.
3.)You're foolish for not obeying the take-down notice.
4.)You're even more foolish if you don't immediately publish the entire document on Wikileaks.
Thanks for listening.
Re:Well.. It may not (Score:5, Interesting)
Just as a note, if you are ever incarcerated do not take the test.
There, fixed it for you.
Re:text (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm just making some educated guessing
Not so much. They rarely look at individual answers on (real, not one of the fake made-up HR) personality inventories like the MMPI, unless there is some specific reason to do so. The test is scored, and certain questions combine to form a score for a particular category - honesty, outlook (are you happy, morose, depressed?), self-control, etc. They're also looking at your beliefs about things like how much you control the outcome of a situation - is it all deterministic (your actions are 100% responsible) or luck (you can't change the outcome of anything). The same question can and is asked in different ways - this is where they try to get at honesty, or if you're paying attention to what you're doing. Non-sensical scores might cause the evaulator to look at individual questions to see if something is wrong (ie did you mark A,B,C,D,E in that order all the way down the test)
While this type of battery could be performed by HR I suppose, being that it is a psychological test, it is generally administered and evaluated by a trained professional, or agency. Because of this, it is also generally covered by human subjects rules.
Answering the "wrong way" to one or two questions (out of over 500) isn't going to flag you as a crazy anarchist. Now, if the HR dept sees the Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car [kansascity.com]...
* I have a psychology degree, but it has been a while so I've forgotten a few things.
Re:What's the question again? (Score:2, Interesting)
The ones they missed (Score:5, Interesting)
By plugging the text of #66 and #67 into Goggle using quotes to get phrase matches:
1-75 plus some bogus ones [jetcareers.com]
370 questsions of another version [theteencentre.com]
1-75 plus 1-130 of the 370 version [lemmingtrail.com]
(PDF) contains a sampling of about 100 randomly ordered questions [thesociologycenter.com]
1-75 [fanfiction.net]
1-566 as VB .asp program source (!) and possibly with "preferred" answers [gendercare.com]
Enjoy your Streisand Effect!
Re:text (Score:5, Interesting)
The sad thing is that people who lie on the test (and are consistent about it) are the ones that are going to get hired.
I posted a story [slashdot.org] about these types of tests in January. One comment stood out:
Re:text (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What, These Questions? (Score:1, Interesting)
Interpret all medical questions as variations on "Are you feeling so stressed about something that it's negatively impacting your health?" (typically bowel or gastrointestinal system questions), or "Are you a hypochondriac" (typically random things like hot flashes or feeling hot/cold). In most cases, the correct answer is going to be "no".
The one about "I do not read every editorial in the newspaper everyday" is a lie detector. Questions with words like "every" or "never" are looking for people who are lying. Nobody (except a fanatic :) reads every editorial in the newspaper, every day. The correct answer here is "yes", "Yes, you skip some of the editorials some of the time, because you're not one of those crazy obsessive freaks who reads every comment on /. at -1, just in case you missed something."
Re:text (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally, I was a store manager for a company that decided to introduce personality tests into the hiring process. My boss as part of the roll out, had the existing employees take the test to give HR a baseline. All of the store managers but one failed. The one who passed was one they were trying to get rid of for poor performance. They did away with the tests shortly after they fired her for stealing from the company.
IGNORE IT (Score:3, Interesting)
Nobody's stated the obvious:
- ignore it
The Supreme Court has ruled that a law contrary to the Constitution is as if the law never existed. I think the same applies to DMCA takedown notices. Since the poster only listed a "fair use" portion of the test, not the whole thing, and copyright law protects fair use, the DMCA notice is contrary to existing copyright laws, and therefore it is as if it never existed. It has no force of law.
The only time I would pay any attention to such a notice is if I was drug into court, and then I'd hire a small gaggle of lawyers to defend me. Otherwise I'd just file it away and forget about it.
Re:Is this test legal in the US...? (Score:3, Interesting)
athiests?
why is there a name for this?
is there a name for people who don't believe in unicorns? is there a name for people who don't believe in flying pigs?
quote from jon miller:
Jonathan Miller: Let me say right at the outset that I've always been very reluctant to use the word "atheist," not because I'm embarrassed or ashamed of it but I think that this view scarcely deserves a title. No one has a special name for not believing in witches--I'm not an "a-hexist"--and I don't have a word for not believing in ghosts or anything of that sort. So the idea of there being a special name for what I've never had--which is a belief in God--seems to me to be odd, to say the least.
Re:IGNORE IT (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with that logic is, I've taken many many intelligence tests over the years. I was in the gifted program from 1st grade through my senior year of high school. We took the tests not only to retest ourselves, but as mental challenges. Quite often, you're not looking for the idiot on the street answer, you're looking for the "what is the author asking".
Like, which of these letters is out of place. I won't give the answer in this message, I'll come back later and put the right one.
A B E F H
And oddly enough, there are again two answers, even based on the absolutely correct answer.
Re:IGNORE IT (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. They pick an arbitrary reason, and then the tester has to be part mind reader to get the right answers.
When I was presented with the question, I came back with quite a few answers, which all were just as reasonable. If I remember right, I came back with "A". Once I knew the answer (because it was a learning exercise), when I was presented with it on another test, I was able to answer it correctly.
The "right" answer was "B", because it was the only letter with curves.
Using their same logic, "A" could have been a right answer, because it was the only letter with diagonal lines.
There are always nice clean questions with very definite answers. Then there are the questions that can be argued in any fashion, and there's no way to know the right answer without having reviewed the test material before, and have knowledge of the right answers.
I like the very precise ones, that take a little thinking. Off the top of my head here's another one. There are two men (A and B) standing at a spot. A challenges B to a duel Standing back to back, they each walk 30 feet forward. They then each turn 90 degrees to their right, walk an additional 30 feet and stop. How far apart are the men?
It had multiple choices. Of course, a little basic geometry answers the question. :) One answer had the total distance the men traveled, which wasn't the answer to the actual question. One answer was the straight-line distance between the men. Two other answers were "correct"-ish, if the math was done wrong, and one was just plain wrong.
Sometimes they'll provide not so clean questions, which does not allow you to actually know the answer (insufficient information), but since they're multiple choice, you can eliminate the absolutely incorrect answers, leaving one possibly correct answer.
Now, these are more complex problems. The questions in the original article are much simpler statements, that cannot have right answers. "Sometimes I get angry." They don't define "Angry". Angry could be a level of frustration. Sure, we're all frustrated by things on occasion. I'm frustrated that my finger hurts while I'm typing this, and have mistyped a few words because of the bandage. Angry could also be a level of emotion where you'd reach over your cube wall, and punch a coworker (or worse). Being that I'm talking to a prospective employer, do I want to give the impression that I may go postal? Probably not. Employers like happy people who do what they're told and smile about it. Anger shouldn't show to coworkers or customers.
I believe the logic to this question would expect a "yes" answer. Their logic is that everyone gets angry. If you answer "no", you're lying. But hey, I could be wrong, and "yes" means that you're mentally unstable. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.