Request for LEGAL ADVICE / AID in defense of a LART

[karlthepagan.livejournal.com]

Hail Eris!

The lart began when I saw several friends complain about wiccans_unite. The maintainer of the new comm had copied the user info, icons, and interests straight out of wiccan, where the wiccans_unite maintainer had a falling out over various new Wiccan topics which are familiar to several of us.

Thus wiccans_untie was born. Days later blackthornglade was libeled, and indicated to be the creator (since they had joined, while I had not). I quickly corrected the mistake, but found an abuse complaint of copyright infringement against me. Fortunately the claim was fraudulent, as the content in wiccans_untie's info originally appeared in wiccan and silvertree has (if I interpret "Np." correctly) granted her permission for the use of that text in wiccans_untie (she was in fact notified as soon as I created the lart.)

Unfortunately the Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires that I submit to a legally stringent commitment. The abuse team has advised me to seek legal representation, so here I am!

FYI I am in the 9th Federal Legislative District(?) Eastern Washington U.S. Court District (easy, 30 minute drive for me).

Comments

[jenett]

Yeah, but really, it didn't help much when we didn't have the form (and people had to write it in).

If the "Under penalty of perjury" thing doesn't dissuade someone filing a false report, making the report method a little harder almost certainly wouldn't.

On the other hand, before the current system went in, we spent *way* more time trying to explain to people what we needed to do anything about it, and dealing with a lot of people outraged by the fact we were trying to follow the law.

(as a side note: the FAQ re: copyright stuff hasn't changed much - I think just the relevant changes about how to actually file the report - since we put in the new abuse report forms, which is why I can tell that the forms have actually lightened our workload in this area a bit.)

Faxing and uploading are also much more complicated - we still can't really verify it anyway (so, really, if someone wants to lie, what's the point) and the support and abuse form systems and email addresses don't allow attachments. And the law says we don't need to verify identity or ownership of copyright - we're not the people who do that, that's why the perjury statement is there - simply make sure the required information is there, and that there's a moderately believable evidence for the original version. (prior creation date, etc.)