That's how the DMCA works. Any entity that wishes to claim safe harbor must immediately remove the material in question. The DMCA notice goes to the party that is directly distributing the content, not the original infringing party, so there is no option to allow the infringing party to contest it before take-down.

It is only after the infringing party notifies the distributing party that they have a right to distribute the material that the distributor can once again put the material back up for distribution.

That is the procedure that was laid down by law, and yes it is disgusting.

I have no idea whether or not GoDaddy is ethical, but in this case it is not their fault at all. It is the DMCA that is unethical, and numerous court cases have established that in order for someone like GoDaddy to maintain a Safe Harbor status under the law, they must remove the alleged infringing content immediately, with no consideration as to weather or not the party issuing the takedown notice has a legal right to issue such a notice.

Personally, I would be fine with this part of the DMCA if it contained ramifications for filing fraudulent or frivolous DMCA take-down notices. As it is though, it is horribly one-sided.

P.S. Would it kill you to capitalize? Not doing so makes you look twelve, despite the fact that you otherwise write reasonably coherently and punctuate reasonably well.

I think it can be argued that way, and the DMCA doesn't leave any choice in the matter.

If it can be successfully argued that they should have complied and did not, then they will be held legally liable for breaking the DMCA. The absolute only way you get safe harbor in a DMCA dispute is if you comply immediately and blindly. Only when the infringing party denies the claim (either by claim of ownership or fair use, doesn't matter) can you put it back up.

Mod parent up.

Germany is a member of the Berne Convention (a founding member, even - the US came very late to that party), which is the basis for our current copyright laws.

While there might be slight differences, they are extremely similar, by necessity of complying with the treaty.

The InfoSec Directive of the EU (to which Germany complies) is very similar to the DMCA, but I'm not entirely sure about whether or not US DMCA take-down tactics are possible under the EU directive or Germany's version of the law.

As langelgjm said, German copyright is completely non-transferable (which is really, really nice, IMO), but there do exist exclusive licenses which are nearly as good as transferring copyright. It gives the licensee full control over the work. Since corporate ownership of copyright is not possible in this instance, they generally have agreements with their employees to grant exclusive licenses to the company. It works out about the same.

That's exactly what it says to me. Besides, they'd never get a decent google rating otherwise.

Gotta love loop-holes!

I agree as long as you weren't planning on doing anything anyway, and you don't have to pay for it in any way.

Otherwise don't waste your time.

It's long enough that it will take six seasons before it becomes a problem, though. Might even squeeze 8 seasons out of it, the books are pretty dense.

Still waiting for A Dance With Dragons.

Apparently you don't even need to see it to recognize how much it sucks.

I wish I'd known before I wasted my time and cash on it.

So it's geek cred to think a shitty movie is awesome just because it was based on a comic?

Nice.

I bet you enjoy Uwe Boll's movies too. (The difference between an Uwe Boll movie and The Watchmen is an Uwe Boll movie makes money)

Rorschach was about the only character I liked in that movie. The Comedian was alright, too.

Really, it works like this: Box-office sales - production cost = profit.

If profit is negative, it will be very difficult to make another just like it. So if you have a movie like Watchmen, which brought in around $100 million at the box-office yet cost almost $150 million to make and is now relying on DVD sales just to break even, a studio is not going to want to risk that kind of cash on something that will probably fail. They can make a handful of $30 million dollar films and reliably profit from them, so why risk it?

This is why Uwe Boll, despite making the worst movies on the planet, still gets studio backing for his films. They each cost $20-30 million and bring in a reliable $10-20 million in profit, every single time.

The Watchmen (and other such bombs, like Waterworld) did not even live up to Uwe Boll's level of success. What the hell kind of studio would be dumb enough to repeat that mistake?

Unfortunately, the ending in the movie didn't work either. Pretty much ruined it, in my opinion. And I didn't read the original, so this isn't some "it's not the original" disappointment here. The ending of the movie sucked all on its own.

I'm surprised you were more upset about a diversion to Helm's Deep, which was actually in the book, rather than the complete removal of Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Downs.

The reason they had to alter the visit to Helm's Deep was pretty obvious; going through Bombadil and The Barrow Downs would have added another half hour to an hour to a film that was already 3+ hours long, and all it really served to do was give the hobbits some weapons and a little advice.

With that in mind, I found the alteration completely acceptable (though, honestly, Bombadil was one of my favorite characters in the books, would have loved to have seen him in the movie).

I didn't read the Watchmen, but I found the ending to the movie to be trite and unrealistic. It pretty much ruined the movie for me. I'm not sure I would have liked the alien invasion ending, but honestly it sounds better than what was filmed.

It's a lot less extreme than the parent suggested, it was simply an example. Older drives would have written analog values as low as 0.8, but that's still more than enough to get a reliable "1" from the write.

In a hard disk, when writing a 0 or 1 you are flipping magnetic poles, and you can never get a perfect 1 or 0. In a high tolerance drive, writing a 1 might actually only write a 0.99, but the read/write head in the drive couldn't tell the difference between a 0.9 and a 1, let alone a 0.99, so it's fine because it is definitely not a 0, it's obviously a 1. Same with writing in a 0.

After several writes and re-writes, you get "1's" that are actually 0.95, or 0.98, or 0.92, and likewise with 0's. These levels are predictable based on the previous value for the data bit, and a sensitive enough reader can tell the difference, and calculate the changes, reproducing the data at each change. After a certain point there is too much noise and you can't track the changes any further, because the write head on the hard drive is never going to write anything like a 0.8, it's far more precise than that.

This is why for decades the standard for securely wiping a hard drive has been a pattern of 7-15 writes and re-writes. Usually start with all 0's, then all 1's, then alternating 1's and 0's, then flipped, etc.

The technique relies on the forensic reader being far more precise than the hard drive write head. Because of this the technique has become more difficult as hard drive capacities have increased - the platters are much more dense, and so the write heads have become much more precise. Still, several changes are trackable this way.

NAND flash is different, and this study clearly shows that the above sanitation techniques are not reliable (sometimes they work, sometimes they don't). Techniques need to be specifically designed for NAND flash in order to sanitize SSD drives.

Guess what, absorbing light perfectly is.

Dumbass.

Or you could read the article before making yourself look like an idiot, instead.