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

[stollman.livejournal.com]

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Terrorism/form-letter.html

[elf]

If this is where you came to find legal representation, errr, I think you're setting a terrific base for a "diminished capacity" plea to whatever.

That said, I'm glad you posted it... I predict a great need for Discordians of all ilks to need to understand aspects of the DMCA-in-action.

(Dammit, I will *not* create a pile of throwaway identities to go trolling at emmyrose's silly community. I really don't have time.)

I do happily exhort all members of Fifthtrinity to join wiccans_untie and see if it can get more members than Wiccans_unite. I'm always pleased when the mere existance of a meme (in this case, an LJ community) can drive someone else up the wall, especially when the someone else is a truly deserving hypocritical jerk.

I'd also like to know if members who join the Untie community get pre-banned from Unite. Anyone up for pointless memetic warfare research?

[jenett]

Quick and unofficial comment.

Hi. I'm Jenett. I happen to be a member of the Abuse Team, but I'm also aware of the Wiccans_unite/etc. stuff going on because of a bunch of people on my friends list. (elfwreck, blackthornglade, etc. which I hope gives you some idea where my personal sympathies lie.)

(I'm trying to stay out of it: one of the deals with being on the Abuse Team is trying to avoid wading into certain kinds of messy situations like this one if we see them coming. I'm also, incidentally, not involved in handling the Abuse side of stuff that's going on at all: we don't take action in cases where we know people involved or are biased about it.)

Anyway, what I really wanted to say is that in the case of copyright, there's a specific legal procedure we're obliged to follow (or else we can get hit with pretty massive fines.) If someone files a full DMCA request, and swears under penalty of perjury that all the information they are providing is correct, we're pretty much required to take them at their word. (There's a few things we check, of course.)

If someone else then comes along and says "Hey, I think there's something wrong with that." then we can't resolve it: we have to leave it for the court system, that's how the law works. (And that's the counternotification process)

We're also not lawyers (though a bunch of the Abuse Team is pretty well informed about relevant law, and we have someone about to start law school, and various other levels of professional experience or training) so we can't give someone legal advice if they want to contest someone's right to the material. (Because if we did, and we were wrong, we'd be legally liable ourselves.)

Lovely balancing act, no?

The short answer is after we have a complaint, we need the material either to be removed (in which case no further problems on that account.) or we remove it (generally this means suspending the account in which the material is located.) and working it out from there if needed. Again, a lot of this is US legal requirements: we don't have a lot of say in the timeline or removal aspects once we get a formal DMCA complaint. And again, there are nasty possible penalties if we don't take action, which would be bad for the site as a whole.

I don't know if any of this helps you out at all. There are limits to what I can discuss about specific instances or Abuse policies or whatever (plus I'm going to be out a lot of today, Wednesday, and then out of town for the weekend with somewhat limited 'Net access) but feel free to email me at jenett@livejournal.com if you want or have further questions. If you ask stuff I can't answer for whatever reason, I'll say so.

I just hoped that a little more explanation of the legal bits of this (and what LJ is required to do/not do) might maybe help out.

[ian-gunn.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to decide what is more amusing and chaotic, that you came to a discordian group asking for legal advice or that you got good and pertinent advice.