Free for a Fee

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act serves many purposes, some of which are good, but certain parts of it are ripe for abuse. The infamous DMCA takedown notice is at the top of anyone’s list of most-abused parts of the act. These notices are meant to make it easy for content owners to have violations removed, and they do. But the notices also make it easy for anyone to try and silence criticism or stifle angles they simply don’t like, even if the party in question is working perfectly within the confines of fair use.

Over the course of our coverage here at Ars, we’ve seen a number of DMCA takedown cases that were just plain lame. And, although there are plenty more lame cases that have happened in the world, we thought we would highlight some of our “favorite” ones to show how the DMCA takedown system can be used in an attempt to control content instead of merely enforcing copyrights. Plus, these examples just make us chuckle at the absurdity.

The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/five-examples-of-lame-dmca-takedowns.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.