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Internet image board 4chan has introduced a policy for complying with the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for the first time.
The site was the place where hundreds of naked selfies stolen from celebrities including actors Jennifer Lawrence and Mary Elizabeth Winstead were posted.
The policy sets out for the first time a procedure by which copyright holders can send a DMCA takedown notice to the site’s administrators. These inform a website hosting user-generated content that one of their users has uploaded copyrighted material illegally, telling them to take down the relevant content or face legal action.
A DMCA policy is important in helping a site gain “safe harbour” protection from lawsuits, deflecting responsibility for user-generated content that it has not explicitly approved.
4chan has named a DMCA agent for the first time and offers a postal address in Delaware – apparently a box at a professional services firm.
Up until now, 4chan has been relatively well shielded from the consequences of the DMCA because of the ephemerality of the site. Although almost every post on 4chan involves an image, most of which are not licensed for use, most posts are deleted within a few hours of creation because the site trims any board bigger than ten pages.
That means copyright-infringing images are typically removed from the site before the copyright holder is even aware they have been posted.
“Threads expire and are pruned by 4chan’s software at a relatively high rate,” the site’s frequently asked questions page explains. “Since most boards are limited to ten pages, content is usually available for only a few hours or days before it is removed.”
But that ephemerality has not been enough to protect the site from the legal consequences of its users posting the stolen pictures this week.
After the first images were made public, lawyers for Jennifer Lawrence immediately threatened to prosecute anyone who published them, saying that “this is a flagrant violation of privacy. The authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence”.
The hoard of personal photos belonging to more than 100 celebrities was released on 4chan on Monday, after a few pictures went up individually over the weekend. The site, along with Reddit, continue to be a hub for trading the photos but the bulk of the collection has moved elsewhere.
TorrentFreak, a copyright news site, argues that sending DMCA takedown notices to 4chan would only be a partial measure. “In the meantime,” writes Andy Maxwell, “sites such as The Pirate Bay who care substantially less about copyright law than 4chan does, today are continuing to spread the full currently available ‘Fappening’ archives at a rapid rate. Statistics collected by TorrentFreak suggest that the packs have been downloaded well over a million times.”
The attempt to use copyright provisions to scour the stolen pictures from the internet has already run into problems, as one porn site has refused to acquiesce to requests to remove photos of an actor, claiming that she does not own the rights to the images. The site argues that the copyright on the photos, which do not appear to be selfies, is actually held by the un-named photographer.
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