Hello World

Dear LiveJournal User calamityjake,

We have received proper notification under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act requiring the removal of your entry at http://www.livejournal.com/users/calamityjake/115086.html on the basis of it violating the copyright of the author. As such, we must require that you delete this entry by no later than 00:01 (midnight) EST 8 March 2005.

If you feel that this report is in error or that your use of the material falls under one of the categories permitted under copyright law, you are entitled to file a counter-notification, also under the provisions of US law; please contact us for information on how to do this. Filing a counter-notification indicates that you are willing to defend yourself in court against a charge of copyright infringement, and you may be bound by civil and possibly criminal penalties if you are found liable. Regardless of whether you choose to file counter-notification or not, the material removed by the deadline given above.

Regards,
Eric
LiveJournal Abuse Team

What should I do?


Update: I excised the offending content. You win this round, corporate law.

Did I delete this entry after receiving a DMCA copyright violation complaint?
Yes.

Do I suspect the complaint is total bullshit?
Also yes.

Was it worth fighting it?
Probably not, but I still feel like a chump for giving in.

Engadget scores an interview with Jack Valenti, the lame duck head of the Motion Picture Association of America. He seems to be either senile or obsessed with getting his talking points out there:

Some have suggested that tech companies need to reengineer the PC to make it a ‘trusted appliance’ for watching copyrighted entertainment. Do you share that view?

Right now, I don’t know exactly. But in time, the technology innovation is moving with such celerity that Gordon Moore’s old deal, that every 18 months a chip doubles in capacity and power, is being brought down to about 12 or 8 months. When I look at what Caltech and Internet2 are doing, it’s incredible.

He also seems to have no idea how copyright works:

Do consumers have a fair use right to remix a few seconds of a Hollywood movie into a home movie project?

There is no fair use to take something that doesn’t belong to you.
That’s not fair use. If you’re a professor in a classroom, you show ‘Singing in the Rain’ to your class. You can fast forward it, and there’s no performance fee for that. That’s fair use. Now, fair use is not in the law. People are taking fair use and changing it to unfair use and claiming that it’s fair use.

Uh... what? Maybe I'm just a complete and utter moron, but I thought the whole point of fair use was that you don't have to own a piece of intellectual property to use it (assuming you meet various conditions that are encapsulated in the phrase "fair use"). Wasn't this guy the head of the MPAA for 38 years? Shouldn't he know this stuff?

Might I just be missing something? Someone edify me.

This is, technically, a livejournal. It's like a blog, except it's much easier to get a bunch of people to half-heartedly read what you write. See, LJ people want to be loved, so they pretend to love other people so that the other people will pretend to love them back. It's quite disgusting, really, but it is what it is. And that's why people read mine--because I pretend to care about them.

Anyway, most people on LJ write, with varying degrees of skill, accounts of their day-to-day lives, and although there's a smattering of that in my LJ, I try to write about things that might actually be of interest to strangers who don't know me or care about me (or have any reason to pretend to care about me). Some of the things that interest me are technology, politics, grammar, literature, and pop culture. This means that you are probably bored to tears by at least 40% of what I like, but on the other hand you're not likely to hate everything I like.

If you know me in real life, and you read this thing, let me know. You are familiar with the fact that I am an egotistical, self-centered person, so you surely understand why I crave attention and accolades. Give them to me.

If you don't know me in real life, and you read this thing, let me know. I am an egotistical, self-centered person, and I crave attention and accolades. Give them to me.

Oh, and I guess this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License by me, calamityjake. That sounds iron-clad to me.