[pp.int.general] Julia Schramm

[Will Tovey]

tl;dr, we shouldn't jump to conclusions - we need more information.

There seems to be a rush to judge here, even from within the Pirate movement - understandable, but perhaps a little hasty. Perhaps someone with access to the relevant knowledge could answer a few key questions?

1) Did Ms Schramm enter into a contract which involved either signing over the copyright to the book to a third party, or signing over rights to issue take-down notices over it?

2) Did she have any say in the issuing of take-down notices?

3) What did the take-down notices actually refer to?

4) Were the take-down notices actually valid?

A few things have occurred to me about this (in no particular order):

a) Firstly, the big/mass take-down notices are rarely sent by copyright owners, or lobby groups. They are sent by professional monitoring companies which charge to spam these out (possibly knowing how useless they are).

b) Secondly, take-down notices are often sent automatically (see also ContentID), meaning that the publisher may have automatically forwarded the work to their monitoring company, who may have automatically sent take-downs, without checking if there was a basis for it.

c) Thirdly, sending such a take-down notice (dishonestly) would be a great way for someone (whether within the Pirate movement or elsewhere) to discredit her (whether for personal or political reasons).

d) A single work can be protected by various different copyrights. Under UK law (may need to be checked with the relevant jurisdictions) there is copyright in both the literary work (the book) but also the typographical arrangement (the layout, formatting etc.) which usually rests with the publisher. If that has happened here, it may be that she retained copyright in the book, but the publisher is still trying to enforce their copyright in the formatting etc..

While this looks bad on the face of it (and given the existing media response, has provided some of the anti-pirate trolls a great platform for their stuffs), if this is a case where either the takedown is technically fraudulent, or there are complications due to the layered copyrights (with Ms Schramm being 'innocent' either due to ignorance/naivety or dishonesty elsewhere), then this would be a great example of how copyright law (particularly wrt takedowns) is being abused, and we (as a collective) should be able to capitalise on it if we act fast enough.

-Will