SOPA, copyright, boards etc

RayCun

this came through from Dav...

So Sherlock has, despite the wishes of the people and despite being offered workable solutions to the problem by the leading legal experts in Ireland on Internet Law, signed off on the Copyright SI (which he was always going to do).

So that leaves us in a postion of having to take a very serious look at issues of copyright on the site. We're currently consulting with a copyright lawyer on what specifics we need to be careful of - this includes issues like republishing content from other sites, links to YouTube, streaming links etc, but here's what we're going to be working on as of now.

News Articles:
Re-publishing an article from another website or news paper (and this includes scans of the newspaper) is absolutely 100% breach of copyright unless they have specifically said that they allow the content to be re-published royalty free. 99.9% of the time, this won't be the case. So, if people want to talk about a news story, they cannot copy/paste the whole thing into a thread. If people want to talk about an article somewhere, they should be providing a link back to where it's come from - ultimately this is someone else's work and they should at least get the benefit of being acknowledged.

We have had one newspaper come after us on this already last year - they even conceeded in their letters to us that a re-publishing of a small section of their work was reasonable to them, but entire copying was illegal and in clear breach of not only the law but our own terms and conditions. That concession was prior to Sherlock's Folly, so we're going to have to take a more black and white approach now because there isn't, as far as I know, any clear definition of what's sometimes referred to as "fair use" of content.

YouTube:
Copyrighted content such as music is already covered as YouTube has a revenue sharing system in place for these things. Full TV shows and so on are quite often in breach of YouTube's own rules and so will get snipped and besides, we have never allowed an entire TV show to be published as per our own "moral" rules on these things. So business as usual there. This applies for other Video sites, but VBulletin only allows for embedding YouTube, so that's the only one that really affects us.

Streams/External links:
Despite the fact that this is coming from sites like Justin.tv for streams or other video hosters like YouTube or Vimeo for "archived" stuff, we know they should be monitoring this but they don't/can't always and so this is very obviously facilitating copyright infringement. I've never been thrilled about having these on the site anyway, but I've always deferred to DeV and the other Board Members on this one. I don't think we should allow them. I think there are plenty of other means to get these sorts of streams on the tubes without Boards.ie being a repositry for them which is the same sort of approach we take for Torrents, porn and other such things. I think they already cause too much stress within different communities who say "why are they allowed do this and we're not" so until we get some sort of proper advice on this from the copyright lawyer, I think we have to remove them from the site. Not going to be popular for the relevant mods, but you can tell people this is coming from the top and I'll pop into any relevant threads if you want me to (send me a PM).

I look at links to streams as being like the Defamation law - if you hold up a sign (or post a link) to something that is defamatory, that is itself defamatory and you are responsible.

dna_leri

does this say you can't talk about legitimate streams, I dont think so.

RayCun

fair point, I suppose there are a few. I'll re-open that thread...

Dan man

Gosh, who'd be a mod in this day and age!? Sounds like you'll have your work cut out for you with all these new rules and regulations!

BobMac104

disaster all right id say

shels4ever

Yep would be impossible to manage that, today i've looked at 2 clips one of a 10 mile race and a 400m is oz.. , only a blanket ban can work and that would be crazy too.. Have fun mods.

drquirky

Obviously not directed at any of the A/R/T mods but this is fu(&king bul^%$t.

drquirky

letsrun.com and flotrack.com are good places to find uncensored athletics footage. Sue me for that Sherlock you tosser.

ThisRegard

That's the thing, it's not you getting into trouble that's the problem, it'll be boards for providing such links.