Re:The Real Point (Score 2)

I really don't believe this to be the case. The chances that the Yahoo! copyright agent who read my counterclaim knew about my day job are slim at best. Just as Flickr/Yahoo! respond the same way to every DMCA takedown they receive, I'm sure they respond to every counter claim the same way too. I've been around the site - and its forums long enough to know that this is the case. Where they fall down - one of the many places they fall down - is in not providing their user with information. The email telling you your content's been deleted assumes you're guilty. It wouldn't hurt for them to have a paragraph in it saying, "If you think this notice has been sent in error, please visit http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/copyright/en-us/ rto find out how you can file a counter claim." They don't. And their customer service response time is now dreadful (well done Yahoo - http://nolancaudill.com/2012/01/30/the-front-line/ ) So I think some people write back to flickr full of rage, saying that they do own the copyright _actually_ and how dare they delete it and nobody writes back explaining how to file a DMCA counter claim and so they give up fighting and blame flickr (rightly) for ignoring them. But if you file a proper counter claim they respond as officiously as they do to the initial claim. They pass it on to the claimant and start the clock ticking on your 14 days. They don't ignore a proper counter claim, they're just not very helpful at guiding you to file one. Throughout all of this my views on Degban haven't changed much. Whether they're telling the truth or not about being hacked they're bad. Either they filed a ridiculous DMCA or they didn't protect themselves well enough to prevent someone else from doing so. Either way is bad. And their reaction since has been childish. But my views on flickr have changed. And in part down to information I've gleaned here. I think their way of dealing with takedowns is unnecessarily heavy handed and that in deleting the content rather than hiding it for the duration of the claim/counterclaim process, they actually fail to abide by the terms of the DMCA. Their reaction to this is sluggish. When I received the email telling me I could repost the image it ended with the words "Please contact us if you have any questions or we can further assist you in this matter." I replied asking them for the full contact details of the agent who had filed the claim, advice on what, if anything I could do about it. I asked them if they could tell me how many other takedowns they'd received from Degban and I asked for an explanation as to why they couldn't replace all the content they'd removed. Their reply came 5 days later. On the contact details, they provided an email address. But the rest of my questions were ignored. "We trust that this answers your concerns," they said, knowing full well that it didn't. So much for cache. I don't expect flickr to be able to resolve my particular case properly. I think they probably _can_ put the content back in the original URL but I'm not really expecting them to do so. But I intend to stay on this with them in the hope that they change the way they deal with DMCAs in the future. I understand the need for copyright enforcement, but when someone gets it wrong, they have to give themselves the chance to put things right... and right now they don't do that.