An anonymous reader alerts us to the story that Fox News has sent a series of DMCA takedown notices to YouTube for a guy who’s been putting up clips that have been popular among the “liberal” blogworld. Now, there’s an open question as to whether or not these clips are fair use — but even if we assume that they are infringing, there’s an interesting element to this. They only targeted the guy who posts clips that liberal blogs are using. There are tons of other clips that conservative blogs use — and those remained up.
In many ways, that shows how the DMCA is really being abused. It is not being used because of any loss in revenue from these clips being online. It’s really being used solely to stifle opposition speech. I don’t care which side of the political spectrum you fall on, this is an example of an attempt to stifle speech, not protect some sort of business model. It’s using the DMCA to take down clips that are being used by people that disagree with the copyright holder, even while they leave up tons of other clips used by people who agree. I can understand why Fox News is doing this, but it goes way beyond the intended purpose of the DMCA (while also suggesting that Fox News apparently is way too sensitive about its critics). Update: Amusing. After all this started getting attention, Fox News decided to send takedowns for other content as well. Looks like once it was clear how bad this look, it realized it needed to take down the others as well.
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