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September 03, 2014

4chan Implements DMCA Takedown Policy

CYBERSPACE—Call it serendipity, pure coincidence or covering their ass, but in the aftermath of the theft and dissemination of oodles of nude photos of a plethora of celebrities—including, most notoriously, of actress Jennifer Lawrence—4chan, the raucous bulletin board that was the original location of the hacked and pilfered images, has done the unthinkable: it has implemented an official DMCA takedown policy, complete with designated agent, as required by the law. The change took place yesterday, and was immediately detected by the vigilant folk at TorrentFreak, which noted, "While the event itself appears to be dying down, the leak and the worldwide attention it bestowed on 4chan may have prompted a surprise decision by the site’s operator. Whether the leak was directly responsible will become clear in due course (we’ve reached out to the site for a response), but sometime yesterday 4chan introduced a DMCA policy." With its servers located in the United States, reportedly in California, 4chan, unlike the obstinate and peripatetic The Pirate Bay, had every reason to comply with federal copyright law, even before this latest event. As Chris Poole, the site's owner, explained in 2012, “I don’t have resources like YouTube to deal with a $1 billion lawsuit with Viacom. Don’t store what you absolutely don’t need. People are pre-disposed to wanting to store everything.” But 4chan's operating model also practically ensures that no content will stay on it for long. “It’s one of the few sites that has no memory," Poole said of the site he started in 2005. "It’s forgotten the next day." The reason for the impermanence is explained in the site's FAQ, which states, “Threads expire and are pruned by 4chan’s software at a relatively high rate. Since most boards are limited to eleven or sixteen pages, content is usually available for only a few hours or days before it is removed." But even that limited amount of time may be too much, especially in cases like this recent one in which some of those victimized are promising to sue every site that publishes the photos. It is those promises of litigation that may have prompted Poole to bite the bullet and implement the DMCA policy. And people are already using the tool. As TorrentFreak noted today, "Despite the board’s user base being notoriously rebellious, the deletion policy appears to work well. To date Google’s Transparency Report lists takedowns for just 706 URLs." The issue of copyright, which has been rarely mentioned in the copious reporting being done on the "Great Celebrity Hack of 2014," is of course a significant factor in the larger story. Even for Lawrence, who is one of the celebs threatening legal action, her rights to copyright give her added rights that prudent sites would be wise to protect against. As TorrentFreak points out, "While the scope of that action isn’t entirely clear, many of the leaked photos were ‘selfies’ to which Lawrence has first shout on copyright. They’re still being posted on hundreds if not thousands of Internet sites even today, so having a DMCA policy in place will help those sites avoid liability, even if in 4chan’s case the images are only present for a few hours." Indeed, the issues in this case are only just starting to be examined, and include, in the case of certain images, the possible triggering of 18 USC §2257, as well as charges related to the dissemination of so-called child pornography, the allegations of which are already in play.

 
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