[pp.int.general] Julia Schramm

[Amelia Andersdotter]

Why is the DMCA applicable to German citizens?

Surely the sanity of the democratic system somehow rests on the 
principle that the people have opportunity to elect those people who 
make their laws. One asks why the Piratenpartei is not criticizing the 
government more sharply for not remedying that imbalance in the effects 
of application of the American copyright law outside of the US.

/a

On 19.09.2012 22:59, Christian Hufgard wrote:
> Am 19.09.2012 22:18, schrieb Will Tovey:
>> 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?
> In germany you cannot sell your copyright, just usage rights. The
> default contract for authors has a part, that enforces publishers to act
> against illegal sharing of your work.
>
>> 2) Did she have any say in the issuing of take-down notices?
> She knew that her publisher would act this way and defends him for doing so.
>
>> 3) What did the take-down notices actually refer to?
> To a dropbox file.
>
>> 4) Were the take-down notices actually valid?
> Yes.
>
>> 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.
> She exactly knew what would happen when she signed the contract and
> stood up for the election.
>
>> 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).
> The notice is valid.
>
>> 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.
> Well, in germany formatting text does not give you new rights.
>
> Christian
>
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