San Diego CityBeat, San Diego's alternative newsweekly, published a great cover story this past week about our work at New Media Rights.
It also has an amazing Street-Fighteresque illustration of a Geek punching a copyright troll. Check it out!
From the story:
This testimonial does not constitute a guarantee,warranty, or prediction regarding the outcome of your legal matter."Let’s say you’re a citizen journalist who wakes up one morning to an alert from Google that, due to purported copyright infringement, it has removed one of your blog posts about a student in Scotland who’d been posing online as a Syrian lesbian to score a book deal. You know the copyright claim is crap, but what then?
“Yes, I’ll use the F-word: Frightening,” says gay-rights blogger Michael Petrelis, whose blog, The Petrelis Files, received such a “takedown notice” in August 2011. “To get that email from Google, I just knew, to keep my stress level down I was going to need expertise to challenge Google. Just saying that—‘challenging Google’—gives me tingles in a way. I’m a person with AIDS, struggling with disability in San Francisco, who now has to navigate Google’s rules.”
During the last decade-and-a-half, major online communities—most notably Google’s Blogger.com and You- Tube—have instituted a largely automatic, frustratingly bureaucratic system of censor-first self-regulation when it comes to alleged copyright infringement. It’s easily, and often, abused and tends to favor aggressive “trolls,” who use the system as a weapon. These trolls are sometimes corporate legal teams; other times, they’re just independent bullies seeking to block critical content from release.“I think he saw me as an easy target,” Petrelis says of his troll. “He’s certainly intelligent, smarty-pants enough that he knew how to lodge the right kind of complaint with Google.”
After talking to attorneys at Harvard University’s Citizen Media Law Project, Petrelis was referred to a San Diego legal clinic, New Media Rights, whose executive director, Art Neill, personally talked him through the process and helped him file a successful counter-claim."
