HOWARD HALLIS is a comic book artist who made a big mistake. He used his website to publish parodies of Chick Tracts - Christian comic books chronicling the adventures of mixed-up teenagers who are rescued from lives of sex, drugs and Dungeons and Dragons when they find Jesus. Hallis drew a "Cthulhu Chick Tract" in which the confused youths eschew Jesus in favour of Cthulhu, H. P. Lovecraft's infamous, slimy demon of the deep. Soon after Hallis posted it, his internet service provider received a letter from lawyers representing Chick Publications, ordering the ISP to take down Hallis's comic on the grounds that it infringed their copyright.

Many copyright attorneys would argue that Hallis' work was clearly a satire and therefore would qualify under "fair use", an exemption to American copyright law. Still, rather than face a legal battle, Hallis removed the comic from his website. His experience reads like a digital update on one of the oldest forms of censorship in the west: the church squelching its critics.

~ All this has become clear thanks to two recent studies that looked at hundreds of takedown notices archived at ChillingEffects.org, a website that compiles and analyses legal notices sent to websites, ISPs and Google. Both concluded that a large number of takedown notices would not have stood up had they gone to court. One study, by law researchers at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, found that 47 per cent of takedown notices sent to ISPs concerned material that had "a strong or reasonable fair use or First Amendment defense", that is, the material was likely exempt from copyright laws. And yet they found that half of this content had been removed from the internet. The DMCA, the researchers say, "is a powerful tool for anyone seeking to suppress criticism". ~

http://lawweb.usc.edu/news/dmca.html

USC Law news
	Study questions validity of cease-and-desist notices for online copyright claims Results may pose serious problems for Internet speech                                                      A joint USC and University of California study has revealed that nearly a third of the copyright cease-and-desist notices sent to Google Inc. and other online service providers under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) have significant problems with copyright claims or likely defenses. The study, to be published in Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara Journal of High Tech Law and Technology in March, found extensive and overbroad applications of the DMCA process, which researchers believe severely threatens Internet speech. “The results indicate a possibly serious problem for Internet speech, because DMCA notices cause online service providers to pull material from the Internet to protect themselves from copyright lawsuits, generally before their users have notice or an opportunity to respond,” said Jennifer Urban, director of the Intellectual Property Clinic at USC Gould School of Law and co-author of the study with Laura Quilter, a UC Berkeley Samuelson Clinic fellow.  “When other legal issues were also counted, a very high percentage of notices inspired questions about the process,” Quilter added. Under Section 512 of of the DMCA, passed in 1998 by Congress, copyright holders may ask online service providers to remove content that may infringe upon their copyrights. Because this type of notice is sent with no judicial review of whether a copyright was actually infringed upon, legal researchers have worried that the system is ripe for abuse. Until this study, however, they had no way to know whether Section 512 was working as hoped, or whether people were using it inappropriately. Urban and Quilter studied a group of nearly 900 DMCA notices collected at the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse (www.chillingeffects.org), which has been gathering cease-and-desist letters related to online expression for three-and-a-half years. The majority of the notices were sent to Google Inc., which submits all such notices to Chilling Effects in order to create transparency in the process. The researchers reviewed the notices to see how often the complaint was legally problematic. For example, they looked at whether fair use or other defenses were applicable. “Copyright law gives creators strong rights, an important benefit to society,” said Urban. “But it also has important protections for competitors, other creators and the public. We wondered how strong the legal claims in DMCA 512 notices were, because if the underlying copyright complaints were clear-cut, then the bias toward takedown might be less of a problem. “Unfortunately, we found a high percentage of notices — 30 percent — where material was taken down when there was a clear question about it was actually infringing copyright. These are the kinds of situations where it is very important to have a court hear the dispute before material is taken down,” Quilter noted. Moreover, the problems with legal arguments spilled over into other areas, added Quilter. For example, many of the Google notices involved competitors getting their competition’s sites pulled out of the search index. “When nearly 30 percent of the claims are not clear cut, this escalation of the PageRank wars is troubling,” said Quilter.  Further, some copyright holders who, it was hoped, would benefit from 512 — particularly movie and music companies — do not seem to be helped much, since that traffic has moved to peer-to-peer networks. Urban and Quilter said the process is difficult to study, because it is based on private letters. “We really appreciate the willingness of OSP’s such as Google donating notices so we can check if the process is working,” added Urban. A pre-release summary of the results is available online at http://mylaw.usc.edu/documents/512Rep-ExecSum_out.pdf>http://mylaw.usc.edu