Under section 512 of the controversial DMCA, a representative of a copyright holder can send a "takedown" notice to a university or other Internet provider requesting that copyrighted material be removed. Anyone receiving a false notice can sue for damages and attorney's fees, but only if the sender "knowingly materially misrepresents" information. Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said on Monday that section 512 hands too much power to copyright holders. "If you have a good-faith belief that use of the material is not authorised by the copyright holder under copyright law, that's the only standard you have to meet," Cohn said. "You can't be liable if you're wrong unless you knowingly and materially misrepresented. I think the situations where there will be liability will be very small." Section 512 of the DMCA is also what's at issue in the RIAA v. Verizon lawsuit, which is before a federal appeals court in Washington. The law permits a copyright owner to send a subpoena ordering a service provider to turn over information about a subscriber. The service provider must promptly comply with that order, and no judge's approval is required first, a process that Verizon says is not sufficiently privacy-protective. While this appears to be the first time that mistakes by the RIAA have been made public, other copyright holders have overreached. A site that offers the open-source OpenOffice program received such a notice from Microsoft's representatives after an automated program searching for MS Office became confused. The Church of Scientology invoked section 512 in an attempt to get Google to delete links to both the church's copyrighted work and a critic's Web site. Disruptive effects
Erroneous takedown notices sent under section 512 can be disruptive. At Penn State, where a song by the astronomer a capella group The Chromatics about a gamma-ray satellite apparently triggered the RIAA's notification-bot, the astronomy department's system administrator spent four days dealing with the fallout. "I knew the DMCA was not the greatest law ever made, but when this came down the pike, I was caught completely off guard," said Matt Soccio, the department's network and information systems manager. Sam Kielek, who is an administrator for the Amiga site he runs from his home with a DSL connection, said he believes Speakeasy took a clearly erroneous complaint from the RIAA too seriously. A note to Kielek from Patrick McDonald in Speakeasy's abuse department defended the RIAA, saying the group's investigators must have found something: "If the current complaint does not have any scan results, this would mean that at one point it did -- otherwise, they would not have sent out an email in the first place -- and they are making a formal notification about it." Kielek said: "I'm unhappy with the way Speakeasy handled this entire ordeal... I wanted Speakeasy to make more of an effort to look at an obvious error in this email. The way the email could have been written is to say, 'We received the email from RIAA saying that there were zero files. So there was an error.'" The Amigascne.org site is devoted to collections of "demo" files, which show off the capabilities of the Amiga computer, which had superior graphics when it was introduced in the 1980s. "There are some files with the suffix mp3 but there is nothing I could find that I could associate with any artist that I know of," Kielek said.
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