1: 12 nations top US list on copyright piracy

First off today, the United States announced its latest “priority list” of nations on copyright and piracy matters. This is a list of countries that the U.S. is most worried about on the intellectual property front and the nations are subject to additional scrutiny as well as possible sanctions.

Though most of the list wasn’t a surprise and included the usual suspects China and Russia, it included at least one new addition that caught many off-guard, Canada.

This is Canada’s first appearance on the list and, according to the administration, is prompted by lacking laws including no anti-circumvention regulations and difficulties with getting ISPs to remove infringing materials.

In addition to the 12 on the priority list, 33 nations were added to a lower level “watch” list including Egypt, Poland and Saudi Arabia.

2: update on Warner Music

Next up, we have an update to the ongoing Lessig/Warner Music situation.

The organization that had posted Lessig’s presentation, which is unnamed in this blog post, had received a notice from YouTube, where the video was hosted that WMG had filed a takedown notice on the talk since it included short sections of various WMG songs.

Today we have word that the group is disputing the claim and seeking the restoration of the presentation.

Indeed this is a predictable move, but an important one nonetheless.

3: Deeeeelicous!!!!

Finally today, the person who may well be the most DMCAed person on the Web, Perez Hilton, appears to have learned at least one thing from his battles with the photo agencies. He has filed a takedown of anti-gay marriage a video featuring him and Carrie Prejean.

The group he filed against, the National Organization for Marriage, has been notoriously aggressive themselves with DMCA notices, filing at least one over a clip made up of snippets of the audition tapes for their now-famous “gathering storm” advertisement.

The NOM ad remains available on their site and contains only a few brief seconds of Hilton, bolstering a fair use case. However, it seems pretty clear these takedowns, on both sides, have less to do with copyright and more to do with politics.

The Joke

For those who didn’t get the joke in the title, check out The Arrogant Worms. A band well worth listening too.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

photo credit: ladybugbkt

Every year, at about this time, I take a look back at the year that was and, specifically, my predictions that I had made for it going into the new year.

It’s always fun, and sometimes a bit comical, to look back on year, see where we thought we would be now and compare it to how things actually went down. As my predictions in 2007 showed, this is a tough field to predict and one where my guesses end up being a mixed bag. Still, it is humorous to look back at where we thought we would be and see how far off we were.

So let us take a look back at the predictions I had made for 2008 and honestly evaluate them to see how on or off the mark I was. For each item I’ll do my best to determine if I was “right”, “Wrong” or if no conclusion can be drawn. Then, shortly after the new year, we’ll delve into the predictions for 2009.

Prediction 1: Spinning Spam Increases

This one is a tough one to analyze. The very nature of spinning spam, a means by which content is scraped and then altered, usually by substituting synonyms, is one that makes it difficult to detect. I have noticed a larger than usual number of spam blogs that contain content likely spun, but it seems that the bulk of the shift in spam blogging has been in severely truncated posting.

It appears that many spammers have decided to forgo CPU and time consuming automated spinning (when you factor in the fact that they are running thousands of spam blogs) in favor of simply truncating their posts tightly in a bid to fly under Google’s radar and limit the copyright claims that bloggers can make.

It is an unfortunate situation, but not an altogether surprising one.

Verdict: No Conclusion

Prediction 2: New Technologies Change the Game

In this prediction, I stated that 2008 was going to be a banner year for new technologies and that companies like Attributor were going to drastically change the game. Sadly, that isn’t the case.

Though Attributor and iCopyright both have excellent content detection tools, iCopyright’s being released this year, both are only available to large scale clients at this time and there is no “down market” version available for bloggers and end users. As a result, neither have had a chance to really change the game any.

The good news, however, is that both are working on such a product though release dates are unclear.

As it turned out, 2008 was actually a banner year for the stalwart, battle-tested service in this area. Copyscape took top honors in a broad plagiarism detection challenge and Bitscan released one of the most interesting and exciting new products of the year.

Will 2009 be the year where plagiarism and content detection takes a great leap forward for the average blogger? I guess we’ll see.

Verdict: Wrong

Prediction 3: False DMCA Notices

To be fair, this was a cheat. It was obvious that there would be false DMCA notices filed and, as a result, controversies about them.

Still, there were more DMCA controversies than ever this year. A few examples include Liosgate foiling their own promotional effort, the Church of Scientology filing over 4000 DMCA notices with YouTube, the International Olympic Committee going after a “free Tibet” video on YouTube, Viacom going after a film they don’t own and Mahalo Daily being supspended from YouTube.

All of this being since July first.

However, it was the election that brought out the worst in this area. Takedown notices were exchanged more frequently than barbs. Things hit an all-time low when CBS demanded takedown of a commercial using a very small clip of Katie Couric prompting the McCain camp to ask for special treatment on these matters.

It was an ugly year on this front, but we all knew it would be.

Verdict: Right

Prediction 4: RIAA Loses Traction

I was right about this one but wrong about the way it would happen. The recent news that the RIAA is abandoning its lawsuit strategy is a clear indication that its policy has lost all traction. However, before things got too ugly and the labels started heading for the door, which was something that I predicted would begin this year, they shifted to a strategy that favors working with ISPs.

I was definitely right in spirit that this was a major year of setbacks and reflection for the RIAA, however, they were smart enough to change course and avoid the beginnings of disintegration. It was a good move on their part, as it preserves their legal options and, almost certainly, helps reassure uncertain labels.

Verdict: Right (I’m Giving Myself this One)

Prediction 5: Perez Hilton Loses

This one is tough to call. As I reported on the Blog Herald, this case has been settled and the terms were not disclosed. The images have been removed from Hilton’s site, but it is unclear if he has paid any money in damages.

I have a hard time calling Perez Hilton a “loser” in this settlement since I don’t know the terms, but since the images are gone I think it is safe to say that he did not stick to his arguments and I am hard pressed to call him a “winner” either.

So, in the end, I have to kind of take a pass on this one. We’ve got a conclusion, but not enough information about it to determine what that outcome really was.

Verdict: No Conclusion

Prediction 6: Old Media Joins the Fun

I was unsure about this prediction, which said that traditional media would move more to the Web, but it looks like it came true in a very big way. Not only is mainstream media putting more and more of its content on the Web, some, like the Christian Science Monitor, are going Web-only. There has been a major shift away from “dead tree” media, the paywalls are coming down and the walled gardens are being demolished.

However, the biggest step in this are was likely Hulu, which formally launched in March. Though it was already in private beta at the time last year’s article was written, it had limited support and not much was known about it. Now, it has become a powerhouse with licensed content from NBC, Fox and others.

Hulu has been viewed widely as a major success for TV networks on the Web and could be a sign of what’s to come in this area.

Verdict: Right

Prediction 7: Image Search Grows Up

Another one that was at least half right.

In this prediction I said that 2008 will be the year that “image search grows up and we can actually detect duplicate images on the Web even if the file has been renamed, has had the EXIF data changed or has been altered.” Indeed, that did happen in 2008, one needs look no farther than Tineye.

The problem with Tineye is that the database is still much too small for it to be practical. However, the technology itself is very solid.

So, I wouldn’t say that image searching, at least not end-user image searching, has really grown up fully, but it may be in what one might consider its “teen” years, still unsure of itself and where its going, still learning, but already shaping up to to become a powerful force.

Verdict: No Conclusion (Right and Wrong)

Final Total

Looking over the seven predictions I see one, the second, that was clearly wrong (2) ,three that were right (3, 4 & 6) and three for which there is not enough information to make a judgment or is otherwise half right/half wrong (1, 5 & 7).

All in all, this was a pretty good year for my predictions, well over 50% accuracy and made even better by the fact that the one I was clearly wrong on may change any time now.

All in all, it seemed as if I was more on-target this year but I was also more conservative with my guesses, at least two of my right answers were pretty easy to predict.

Conclusions

There is not much left to say on 2008. It was a wild year for copyright and content theft issues. I’ve done over 50 episodes of the Copyright 2.0 Show this year and every single one had good competition both for the lead story and the “Weird Story of the Week”.

I’ll come back in a few days with my predictions for 2009, but there is one thing I feel very safe saying, that it will be a very busy hear in this area with lots of excitement and news to cover.

I’m looking forward to it already.

So, to help me sense of it all, I sat down with Chris Matthieu from Numly and we tore through the week’s copyright happenings with our usual mix of news, views and abuse.

This week’s stories include:

• Making Available Gets Several Days in Court
• Leadership Changes at Creative Commons and EMI
• ISPs Stand Up for their Customers
• Superman Returns Home to Creator
• Perez Hilton Tries New Litigation Tactic
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/plagiarismtoday/copyright20eps53.mp3]

So, with that in mind, I’m taking a look at the year ahead with seven new predictions about what is in store for us in 2008 when it comes to content theft and copyright issues.

Hopefully these predictions will strike a good balance between the dead obvious and the completely insane as I try to figure out what is coming up in this clearly unpredictable field.

Spinning Spam Increases

I made this prediction a few days ago on the Blog Herald but it is worth repeating here.

Spammers are facing increased competition for search engine results from both legitimate sites and other spammers. Couple that with duplicate content penalties, copyright issues and smarter search engines, and innovation is essential for their survival.

One of the forms that innovation will likely take is the form of spinning content, through a combination of synonymizing and translating. This type of content theft is harder to detect and will require new techniques to detect and stop.

Expect more on this here in the coming weeks.

New Technologies Change the Game

Another repeat from the aforementioned Blog Herald article, but yet another important one. Companies, such as Attributor, are poised to really change the game by providing powerful, easy to use tools that can not only improves the effectiveness of content theft fighting, but makes it accessible to a broader audience.

However, even if Attributor doesn’t work out, other companies, some of whom are stealth, will likely be coming onto the scene this year and could have similar results.

In short, this is going to be the year in which companies realize the potential market in helping bloggers protect their content and start to exploit it.

False DMCA Notices

Hopefully I am allowed to repeat a prediction from last year as this one is almost a given. With thousands and thousands of DMCA notices being hurled each day, it is a certainty that some will be off target.

Expect several more DMCA notice controversies over the next year, the perfect storm of rabid copyright holders, remix culture and lawsuit-frightened hosts is just too much to ignore.

RIAA Loses Traction

Though 2007 was a bad year for both the RIAA and the music industry, 2008 will likely be even worse. This may well be the year that the record industry starts to distance itself from its boogeyman and the RIAA will start to loose support even among its members.

Some of this has already happened with EMI planning on slashing funding, but with the record labels turning against DRM, I doubt they will be the only ones.

No matter the wins or losses they receive in the courtrooms, expect the RIAA to leave 2008 even weaker than it went in.

Perez Hilton Loses

Though I honestly didn’t expect these lawsuits to reach 2008 but, since they have, it seems likely that they will come to some kind of a conclusion this year. If they do, expect Perez Hilton to suffer a few grave setbacks.

Granted, the case will probably not be over in its entirety in the next 365 days, appeals and so forth can take many years, but the writing should be on the wall for Hilton well before the ball drops on 2008.

Anything else would be the product of either a stunning upset, or an unbearable delay.

Old Media Joins the Fun

Though the record and movie studios have been fighting to protect their content on the Web for years now, old media, namely magazines and newspapers, have not been extremely active in this field.

Expect that to change in the coming year but, unlike RIAA, expect them to better understand how to leverage the Web. I suspect that their delay in entering the fray has taught them a great deal and, looking at the New York Times shift away from paid content, it seems likely that newspapers “get it” at least a little bit more.

Perhaps this is a case of wishful thinking, but it isn’t without at least some grounding in reality.

Image Search Grows Up

Image search, especially when dealing with content theft, is an ineffective black art. I am hoping, perhaps against my better judgment, that 2008 will be the year that image search grows up and we can actually detect duplicate images on the Web even if the file has been renamed, has had the EXIF data changed or has been altered.

This is easily my farthest step out on the limb as I have little reason to believe this, but the market here is just too big to ignore and. with more and more photography winding up on the Web and so much content theft/plagiarism in this area, image protection is easily the next big market for protection.

That is, if it isn’t already the current big market.

Conclusions

As far as copyright issues go, 2007 was a wild year and 2008 is poised to be even more crazy.

However, no matter what happens in 2008, or how wrong these predictions turn out, stay tuned to this site as I will do my best to keep you up to date on what is going on and, hopefully, share some useful information along the way.

Thank you all for making 2007 such a great year for Plagiarism Today and I am looking forward to a very exciting 2008.

Disclosure: I am a consultant for Attributor.

So, before I look forward into 2008, I want to take a moment and look back over the year that was starting with the predictions and previews that I put forth a year ago, almost to the day.

If you want to laugh at me for being wrong and making a few guesses that, in hindsight, were more than a little wrong, this is your chance. If you’re looking to hire me as a psychic, this will probably completely kill me chances.

Prediction 1: Content Licensing Grows Up

2007 was supposed to be the year that content licensing grew up and became not just the norm, but a business model. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

The reasons for the prediction were clear. Companies such as Lisensa had just started and others were rumored to be started. However, Lisensa ended up not gaining much traction and the other companies failed to materialize.

This isn’t to say that it was a bad year for content licensing. Creative Commons introduced the CC+ initiative, which in turn enabled the promising rights company RightsAgent, from the same people who founded Lisensa, only this time with much better backing (More on RightsAgent to come).

Things did indeed start to “grow up” in this area but it was much too late in the year. All in all, content licensing did not live up to its potential in 2007 but may be poised to make another run at it in 2008.

Prediction 2: Copyright Tools Get Smart

This is similar to the first prediction in that a great deal of progress was made, but the full potential was nowhere near realized.

Copyscape, for example, made vast improvements in its monitoring of content theft. However, all of the content theft tracking tools remain, fundamentally, dumb. They don’t support licenses, detect attribution or spot commercial use.

Attributor holds the greatest promise in this area and they launched their service this year. However, their current offerings are just for corporations such as Reuters and the Associated Press. A version of their service for bloggers and Webmasters is due in early 2008.

This may easily fall in the category of predictions that turn out to be right, but were just made a year or two too early. 2008 holds a great deal of promise for these tools, it is just a shame that 2007 didn’t see more.

Prediction 3: More False DMCA Notices

This one was a bit too easy. But it certainly came to fruition, largely fueled by YouTube. Consider these three examples:

• The Rational Response Squad suffered a series of takedowns and bannings at the hands of ideological opponents over public domain clips.
• Prince secured the removal of a 29-second video of a dancing baby due to the fact his song “Let’s Go Crazy” was playing in the background.
• Viacom demanded the takedown of a clip from their Web 2.0 Junk Show even though the clip was, almost entirely, the property of the person who posted it to YouTube.

This was easily the safest prediction I made but it still held a few surprises. The biggest one, for me, was that most of the false notices weren’t due to malice, but due to faulty copyright protection systems. Either bad algorithms or overworked humans.

Still, despite the attention these incidents attracted, the number of false notices remained fairly low, especially when compared to the number of legitimate ones filed.

Prediction 4: Hosts to Rethink DMCA Policies

This one is hard to say. The hosts I’ve spoken to have definitely been looking at their DMCA polices and making adjustments, but there has been little public attention given to this.

YouTube, for example, has been the subject of both a billion-dollar lawsuit and the highest number of questionable DMCA notices. Yet, their actual practices remain very much cloaked in secrecy and unchallenged.

All in all, I think I was pretty off the mark with this prediction and it may have been more a case of wishful thinking than anything. Sadly, this one does not seem to be poised to change in 2008, that is, barring any major changes.

Prediction 5: Lawsuit Outlook

In this section, I made a pair of predictions. The first was that the Perez Hilton case would be settled out of court by the end of the year and that the Michael Crook case would be ongoing.

Whoops.

Though I rarely get to be wrong twice in the same prediction, I was here. I not only underestimated Crook’s resolve to dodge, delay and stall his lawsuit but I severely overestimated Hilton’s ability to see a good deal and take it.

As of this writing, the Michael Crook case was famously settled in March and the Hilton case is still ongoing, with other lawsuits tacked on for good measure.

I have to admit, I was wrong, dead wrong, on this one. Just goes to show how unpredictable these things can be.

Prediction 6: Legal Tide Turns Against RIAA

With the Jammie Thomas ruling grabbing so many headlines this year, it is very tempting to try and deny I ever made this prediction in the first place. However, I don’t think it is that cut and dry.

The RIAA has had some severe legal setbacks, the most recent being a case it was forced to drop for using an “unlicensed investigator”, namely MediaSentry. Furthermore, they’ve started trying some contradictory and even insane legal arguments in order to keep their ongoing cases afload.

It is hard to tell if the legal tide is turning or has turned against the RIAA this year. We won’t know that until some time next year when the next round of rulings come down.

The Thomas verdict was a win for the RIAA, no doubts there, but it was just one case in the year. It won’t mean anything if it is their only win.

Prediction 7: UGC Revolt

Revolution was indeed in the air this year at UGC sites. The most famous being the Digg User Revolt of 2007.

However, these revolts, big and small, were not over wanting some of the money, as previously predicted, but over wanting control over the sites.

For example, the revolt above dealt with the removal of an encryption key used to protect HD-DVDs and the alleged censorship of the topic. Other mini-revolts dealt with the desire for a picture section, the new comments system. Similar ones on Reddit dealt with desired features and algorithm change requests.

Users of popular UGC sites are clamoring for dollars yet, but are definitely trying to assert their authority. It seems that I was at least somewhat right on the event, but very wrong about the reason.

Conclusions

In the end, I had one prediction dead on, one dead wrong and five somewhere in between. It was a mixed bag to put it generously but not altogether surprising given how unpredictable this news area tends to be.

Though I can’t say I’m proud of the predictions I made last year, I’m not terribly discouraged either. After all, things could have easily gone much worse.

But what really surprised me this year wasn’t any of the items above, but rather, a shift in the conversation about copyright and content theft on the Web.

Previously, the argument over these issues has been dominated by the two extremes. One group wanting copyright to be little more than a fantasy on the Web, the other wanting the strictest interpretation possible.

Though the extremes were definitely vocal this year, 2007 may well be remembered as the year that, despite everything that happened, cooler heads prevailed.

After all, Creative Commons thrived, spammers were battled and attribution was fought for. The “Us vs. Them” mentality that has thrived on the Web in years gone by is weakening. It is being replaces that artists need to be supported for their works, that piracy is wrong but, at the same time, creativity can not be stifled.

We may finally be pushing our way toward a middle ground. Though it may be optimistic of me to say so and I certainly wouldn’t call that a prediction for 2008, things certainly do “feel” better on the Web than they did just a year ago.

Let us hope that trend continues.

Disclosure: I am a consultant for Attributor.

However, holiday aside, it is still Monday and, as usual, that means it is time for another episode of the Copyright 2.0 Show. Thanks to an extreme sense of dedication, the lack of a social life and the miracle of forward posting in WordPress, we will not miss a beat this holiday season.

As usual, I sat down with Chris Matthieu from Numly to discuss the past week in copyright news, views and abuse.

All totaled, the show had seventeen stories, including the following:

• TorrentSpy Destroys Evidence and Then Gets Destroyed
• Perez Hilton Gets Banned… Twice.
• Microsoft Gets Sued For Copying Office XP Manuals
• The Simpsons Test Fair Use
• Did McDonald’s Lift Art from Trent Reznor?
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/plagiarismtoday/copyright20eps38.mp3]

Still, there was a great deal going on and a lot to look at including a major defeat for the Torrentspy search engine, Perez Hilton losing two more hosting accounts, this time on YouTube and a great deal more.

Remember, the linkroll below is a “raw” link collection. Some stories are repeated and others don’t point to their original source. I’ll did a great deal of massaging and reworking to craft the show notes for the actual Copyright 2.0 Show.

The episode itself is already online at the link above and will be posted here, as usual, on Monday.

Hope you are having a great weekend!

Much like last week’s show, this week’s show is a solo effort. This time though, a kidnapping plot is not to blame, but rather technical difficulties. We found it completely impossible to get Chris on the line.

With that in min, we once again decided to skip the “classroom” portion of the show and skip straight into the news, covering the latest Perez Hilton, RIAA, The Pirate Bay and other copyright news on the Web. We learn the fate of the Australia extradited to the U.S. for copyright infringement as well as the tale of the misguided 71-year-old attorney who challenged his legal foe to, of all things, a street fight.

You can download the MP3 file here. Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

[audio:copyright20eps12.mp3]

Hilton, who is already involved in four different lawsuits with eight different agencies, including the case with the X17 photo agency, was able to get his site back up in limited capacity. As of this writing, new posts are going up but there is no ability to leave comments and no archives.

On his site, Perez refers to these problems as “technical difficulties“.

However, there is no doubt that this is a major victory for the photo agencies, who have been pressuring Hilton’s Australian host, Crucial Paradigm, to take action. On Wednesday the company said it would shut the site down if it received just one more copyright complaint against Hilton, the next day it made good on that promise.

What remains to be seen now is whether or not this victory can and will translate into a victory in the courts.

A Different Kind of Takedown

One of the things that makes the case so interesting is that Hilton, who is from Los Angeles, California was using a host based in Sydney, Australia with its servers in Dallas, Texas.

Though it is clearly an international incident with all of the legal complexities that come with it, it is at least likely that the photo agencies used Australia’s notice and takedown provision, which looks remarkably like the American DMCA version.

This means that Crucial could have continued to follow the law, removing allegedly infringing works and putting them back after getting counternotice, without fear of being held liable for the infringement. However, it appears that the number and frequency of these copyright complaints simply grew to be too much for Crucial.

They decided, for better or worse, that the best course of action was to dump Hilton and avoid the complaints altogether. However, it was a decision likely reached for business reasons and not one motivated by altruism.

Odds are, Hilton was simply costing the Crucial too much money and causing too much headache to warrant keeping around.

An Expensive Proposition

Though the DMCA and similar laws are designed to save hosts money, offer legal clarity and protect them from being sued for copyright infringement due to their clients, they are still an expense that the company has to consider.

Every copyright complaint has to be researched by someone with knowledge of the country’s laws, often times an attorney, and then, if the notice is found to be complete, it has to be acted upon by a member of the abuse team. Communications have to be sent out to the complaining party. Then, if the subject of the notice decides to file a counter-notice, then the whole process is repeated again, only this time the removed work is located and put back.

This means that, with every copyright complaint there is a set of costs. It costs money to pay the people who process the claim, to store the works in a non-public area as they await a counternotice, to set up a system by which to pull the infringing material down and and also the potential damage to their reputation for getting involved in a controversial DMCA notice. .

Fortunately, for most hosts, these costs are rather flat. Once the system is in place, the abuse agents are hired and the system is set up, the cost of an additional notice is relatively small. However, as the host grows and the number of complaints rise, the system must expand and, as it does, so does the cost associated with it.

If you couple that with how little hosts charge for their services, which are often free or just a few dollars per month, it is important for hosts to keep their copyright-related expenses as low as possible. This leads to many streamline their copyright process, such as Ebay with its VeRO program, and, in Hilton’s case, shutting down accounts that tax the system.

The bottom line is that, if your site generates a large volume of copyright complaints, you are going to have a very difficult time finding a host that will let you keep your site with them for a long period of time.

To the host, it is simply not worth battling a tidal wave of complaints just to earn the monthly subscription fees they charge. There is no financial incentive for hosts to keep sites that regularly become targets of legitimate copyright notices and, as long as the current system stays in effect, there never will be.

Hilton is Moving

In the meantime, Hilton is moving his site to another host. Early indications from Domain Tools are that he is moving the site to a server on Voxel Dot Net, a New York-based hosting company. As such, the host is bound by the DMCA and has already registered an agent with the United States Copyright Office.

If this is true, it means that, most likely, the copyright complaints will continue to flow unless Hilton drastically changes his methods. As such, it seems to only be a matter of time before Hilton’s new host grows just as weary of the copyright complaints as his old one and the process repeats itself.

The problem Hilton faces is that, due to the number of complaints he draws and the amount of traffic his site receives, he is unlikely to find a host that can both meet his needs and deal with the flow of complaints. Since most countries where high-end hosting is available have notice and takedown provisions, Hilton is unlikely to find a powerful enough host with loose enough laws to keep his site up long term.

Barring some kind of special relationship with the host, Hilton’s site is likely going to be a perpetual drain or a legal risk on whatever host he moves to and, thus, will likely struggle to find a permanent home wherever he goes.

Conclusions

Sadly, for Hilton, even if he is able to get his site re-established over the long term, he still faces all of the same photo agencies in court. This is merely the first battle in what is likely to be a very lengthy war and it appears, at this point, to be a strong victory for the photo agencies.

It also serves as a powerful lesson for Webmasters. Though you may believe you have a solid relationship with your host, unless you are a major customer, the amount you pay in subscriptions does not justify them taking either a large legal risk on your behalf of spending a lot of time fielding copyright complaints. A complaint or two is one thing, but once your site places a burden on the system, the host may be forced to cut ties with you.

In fact, in the United States, the DMCA requires hosts to have a plan in place to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. Though the law doesn’t state what constitutes a “repeat” infringer, one can rest assured that, if they draw too many legitimate copyright complaints, they will be without a host pretty quick.

Mistakes happen and misunderstandings are inevitable, but repeatedly drawing copyright complaints is not going to win you any friends. Hosts are businesses and they operate as such. If your site becomes a drain on their time, resources and profits, they will terminate your account.

It is just a matter of exactly how much they are willing to take.