Ashley Madison abusing DMCA "to put genie back in the bottle," EFF says
Source: Ars Technica
Avid Life Media sending bogus takedown notices to Twitter, Reddit, and others.
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And now it appears that the site's Canadian owner, Avid Life Media, is misusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in a bid to make people unpublish the data that lists millions of Ashley Madison members' e-mail addresses and other information. The problem with this scenario is that such data isn't subject to copyright, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says.
"Ashley Madison’s owners have been sending numerous DMCA takedown notices to platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and others in an attempt to stop the dissemination of millions of names and email addresses of the site’s users...," Mitch Stoltz, an EFF staff attorney, wrote in a recent blog post. "While there’s no doubt that the leak is embarrassing and potentially disastrous for the millions of people who have been revealed as users of a site that promotes marital infidelity, Ashley Madison’s attempts to use the DMCA to put the genie back in the bottle are misguided, and in some cases, may violate the DMCA itself."
E-mail addresses and usernames, for the most part, aren't copyrightable, Stoltz said.
"Importantly, the DMCA process applies only to copyright claims. It can’t be used for other complaints like defamation, invasion of privacy, trademark infringement, trade secret disclosures, or violations of a website’s terms of use or community guidelines," he wrote.
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Read more: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/ashley-madison-abusing-dmca-to-put-genie-back-in-the-bottle-eff-says/
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