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RE: Easily help Steemit avoid copyright liability
Good tip.
I believe, in terms of legal consequences, it is the image or video host that will typically have an issue with take-down notices etc.
Good tip.
I believe, in terms of legal consequences, it is the image or video host that will typically have an issue with take-down notices etc.
Thanks. Even if you are correct, it could still be liability because they could be potentially brought into court and incur risk and expenses of losing and/or the cost of compliance when settling out-of-court. Numerous high profile cases have been settled out-of-court ostensibly in order to avoid this risk of losing the case. Analogously, I had read somewhere that the record labels were even threatening the online distribution sites with lawsuits for royalties on even a small riff in a song that sounded any similar to a riff in one of the copyrighted songs.
Notice that the cases where the court ruled in favor of hotlinking copyrighted images, this was for “fair use” of search engines providing preview thumbnails as an additional functionality. Whereas, Steemit is displaying the images as blog content, which some opinions think is copyright infringement. And even the courts are sometimes ruling it to be copyright infringement.
Additionally, blogs posted on Steem and displayed by Steemit are often hotlinking to image files uploaded by the blog author to a free image hosting site, thus can be viewed by the court as an attempt to avoid infringement by merely offloading the liability to an innocent third party website. Courts usually see right through such obfuscations of the economic reality and rule accordingly. The placement of the original file on a third-party image hosting site eliminates the technical ability of the original source to remove the image and disable hotlinking with server-side Apache rule.
There is an extra risk of being targeted because of that 59 million coin supply that Steemit Inc. is holding. Flies are attracted to honey.
Hmmm... if you have a good technical lawyer they may be able to argue that this part is wrong:
"Additionally, blogs posted on Steem and displayed by Steemit"
Why? Because Steemit only serves HTML code - not images. It's the browser (user side) that displays the photo after downloading it from a third party after being referenced by steemit. We think it is displayed by Steemit, but it is our browser doing it.
In other words, the "displaying" part is not as it seems. Sites give "building blocks" and the user-side assembles them into a structure.
One of the links in my prior reply disputes your logic.
Even if we argue that Steem would be the one liable and that Steemit is just a pass-through layer, the other issue is the economic reality that Steemit is either not paid anything for offering the service or is paid because it is controlled by the same few insiders who stand to profit most if the Steem token becomes more valuable. Also if Steemit is building a userbase to profit off of, then that is another economic argument against them merely being a pass-through.
I am not trying to help build a case against Steemit. Rather I am just suggesting to users to help out by not using copyrighted images.
I know that this is old, but I know that it is the website which hosts the images (Steemit Inc. ) that is served with DMCA takedown notices - not the person swiping the image! I have served a few DCMA takedowns myself on the web, and they do go to the website or server! If the website is a "Safe Harbor" meaning they have clearly posted rules about copyright infringement, then all the liability would likely go to the infringer. Without that in place, the website (Steemit Inc. ) are liable. Would like to see you post more about this topic. I'm writing about it quite frequently because I'm appalled at what I am seeing on here, and what is a time-bomb ticking away, but it's NOT a popular subject. LOL!