Saturday, July 17, 2010

DMCA used against blogs?

A post by Bruce Tyson on helium states:

Recently targeted by federal action, the free WordPress blogging site Blogetery abruptly came offline after hosting provider BurstNet complied with undisclosed demands from authorities. A message viewable upon visiting the Blogetery site gives this message from its owner: "After being BurstNet customer for 7 months our server was terminated without any notification or explanation.” A link on the site leads to a forum called Web Hosting Talk, where the site operator has posted correspondence with BurstNet, that suggests feederal involvement in the incident.

Also: U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs

There seem to be some copyright issues. [BUT see below]

TechDirt wrote:

TorrentFreak speculates that this may be a part of the recent Homeland Security efforts to shut down file sharing site, and points to some evidence that there were at least a few Blogetery blogs that shared copyrighted works.

**UPDATE
The story Mystery shrouds closures of blog, forum platforms suggests that copyright issues were NOT involved:

"I can not disclose which agency or why they [ordered the action]," Arcus [ Benjamin Arcus, vice president of Scranton, Pa.,-based BurstNet, the Web host for Blogetery ] said. "I can say that this is not a copyright issue."

Elsewhere in the CNET piece: They would first have to confront the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, designed to protect Internet service providers from liability for infringing material that users post to their sites.

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