Hilarious. I sent a DMCA notification to LiveJournal since one of the charming imbeciles from WORA decided to repost one of my posts from this journal to his lj. And wouldn’t you know, he sends a counter notification, claiming that its not copyright infringement. He claims that a) I have provided no proof—such as a registration—that the material is copyrighted, b) its fair use and c) I didn’t submit a proper DMCA notification. I’ve seen plenty of stupid stuff from the WORA crowd, but this one almost deserves an award. Maybe I should just have copied & pasted in his whole counter notification, since he seems to think that’s a good way to approach things. I am not, however, as impolite as to do that, given that it includes his full RL address and all. So, my recap will have to do.
Anyhow, as I have said a number of times during the course of all of this, you cannot register copyright in Sweden and when the US signed the Berne Convention they had to agree that registration of copyright would no longer being required for works produced in other countries, not even if someone wants to sue for infringement upon such a work in the US. Anything I create, no matter what it is, is copyrighted from the moment I fix it in a tangible form. I don’t even need a copyright notice. No proof is needed beyond the material’s existence on my website. And ... fair use? Right, I’ll just borrow a few exclusive articles wholesale from some on-line newspaper ... I am sure they won’t mind. It doesn’t matter that he’s making no money off it. He sure isn’t just quoting, and I am not seeing any educational usage either. Finally, if I hadn’t submitted a proper DMCA notification (which I most certainly did) , LiveJournal would not have acted on it at all.
I guess he’s not actually committed perjury by sending in the counter-notification if he really is delusional enough to believe that his usage is acceptable ... but I am pretty sure he’s displayed a criminal level of stupidity. You’d think some of his friends would be nice enough to inform him of this. To be honest, I find that part of this whole matter the most bothersome. I can’t imagine that everyone who gets involved in this on WORA is as stupid as they seem to be, and yet they constantly egg each other on with ludicrous, unsubstantiated statements, behaving much like a pack of rabid dogs. If one of them goes chasing after an approaching train, the others will yap encouragingly.