Should Websites Charge A Fee To Process Copyright Takedowns?
Every day copyright holders send out countless notices which order BitTorrent indexes, cyberlockers, forums, blogs and search engines to remove links to allegedly infringing content. The process is time consuming for everyone involved. So, since time is money, shouldn’t those being burdened by the actions of third parties be compensated for their work? One anti-piracy company says charging for takedowns amounts to extortion.
The publication last week of Google’s Transparency Report gave us a clearer idea of the pressures the search engine is under from copyright holders. The report revealed that in a single month Google was asked to take down an astonishing 1.2m links to allegedly infringing material. Read more...
Wikipedia, Google protest US antipiracy proposals
January 18 is a date that will live in ignorance, as Wikipedia started a 24-hour blackout of its English-language articles, joining other sites in a protest of pending U.S. legislation aimed at shutting down sites that share pirated movies and other content.
Reddit.com shut down its social news service for 12 hours. Other sites made their views clear without cutting off surfers. Google blacked out the logo on its home page, directing surfers to a page where they could add their names to a petition against the bills. Read more...
India may overstep its own laws in demanding content filtering
India's reported plans to ask Internet companies to filter objectionable content may overstep the country's own laws, according to legal experts.
The government has asked Internet companies like Yahoo, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content on their sites even before it goes online, according to newspaper reports on Monday. By Tuesday, the Indian government publicly accused the Internet companies of lack of seriousness in dealing with issues that hurt local sensitivities.
Executives of two of these companies confirmed on condition of anonymity that the country's ministry of communications and IT has indeed asked for such filtering of content. A spokesman at the country's ministry of communications did not return calls. Read more...
Facebook marks pictures of a child with Down syndrome offensive
Posted by vica
In terms of size, social networking giant Facebook is bigger than big — over 2.7 billion comments are posted to the site each and every day. That's far more content than Facebook's 3,000 or so employees can moderate, so they largely rely on special filtering software to weed out offensive content. But that filtering process has landed Facebook in hot water after mother Diana Cornwell was forced to remove photos of her child with Down syndrome after they were flagged as offensive content. Read more...