The Fallout From a Flickr DMCA Takedown

Maddog Batty writes "Dave Gorman, UK comic and Flickr user, recently received a DMCA takedown notice for one of his own pictures which had become rather popular — 160,000 views + lots of comments. The takedown was in error (from a porn company) and Flickr allowed him to repost the image. However, the fallout is that all the original comments are now lost and the many links to the original picture are now broken. Sure, Flickr needed to remove the image, but shouldn't there be a way to reinstate it while keeping all the original comments and links?"

Re:Of course there should

[Marillion]

Better yet, go after the company that issued the false takedown. While I'm all in favor of legitimate rights holders defending their property, we've seen too many erroneous takedown notices issued with cavalier disregard for the rights of owners who prefer to share their intellectual property with the world. This has to stop. As long as takedown notices have no risk to the issuers, don't expect the errors to stop.

Re:This is more Flickr than the DMCA

[PRMan]

MegaUpload admitted that many of their "partners" had DIRECT DELETE access to MegaUpload. It sounds like Flickr may have the same arrangement, making the lawsuit for damages against the complainant even more likely to succeed.

Re:Remove it, why?

[pixelpusher220]

'How' they implement the DMCA is up to them. 'How' they repost the content is also up to them. I don't believe there's anything in the DMCA about where that content needs to be located beyond posted by the people who previously took it down so Flickr has covered their requirements.

The important question, is why isn't Flickr doing the grand gesture of simply restoring the content from BACKUPS. They have to have backups of the damn content, they didn't have 160K comments residing in memory...

Re:Own your hosting

[byolinux]

GNU is working on a project to replace Flickr and such sites.

http://mediagoblin.org/ [mediagoblin.org]

Re:Of course there should

[Fluffeh]

There have been a few nice cases [targetlaw.com] where the folks that issued a false takedown notice ended up being given some interesting punishments. It's not a level playing field, but it's not totally utterly one sided.

Re:Of course there should

[icebraining]

What they appear to be accusing MU of is having deduplication and therefore knowing that there were multiple links to the same file, only taking down the links actually identified in a DMCA 512(c) takedown, and having actual knowledge that other links to the same file were also copyright-infringing and doing nothing about it.

Uh, no, they didn't know (at least, not legally) that the other links were infringing.

If I take a picture and upload it to e.g. Flickr, and then someone else downloads it from my profile and uploads to his, that copy is infringing and mine isn't, even though it's the same file.

Whether a file is infringing depends on its colour [sooke.bc.ca], not just on its bits.