Over at Wired’s Threat Level blog, Kevin Poulsen reports on a new DMCA overreach: the U.S. Air Force complained (via outside counsel) (PDF) about his posting of their recruiting video. The post, Kevin says, was initially made at the Air Force’s invitation.

If the government created this work, then the DMCA claim is improper. Works of the U.S. government are not copyrightable. But the statute allows the government to receive copyright assignments, so if an independent contractor created the video, still available at the Air Force’s (non .mil) site, the government could meet that technical requisite of the DMCA.

The DMCA also requires that the notifier assert the posting was unauthorized. Poulsen’s article, however, says the Air Force sent Wired the ad and “thanked THREAT LEVEL for agreeing to run it.” That doesn’t quite square with the DMCA-required statement that the notice-sender “ha[s] a good faith belief that none of the materials or activities listed above has been authorized by the U.S. Air Force, its agents, or the law.”

Even if the Air Force’s DMCA claim is truthful, however, it’s still a policy overreach. Wired posted the video in order to report on government recruiting efforts; the video’s dissemination is part of that First-Amendment protected discussion, whether it happens on or off government websites. The DMCA makes it too easy to takedown first, think later.

Earlier this month, comedy group The Richter Scales released a funny music video, “Here Comes Another Bubble.” The video showed a montage of Silicon Valley images over a sound-track adapted from Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” lampooning the Web 2.0 bubble that seems near bursting again. The video must have touched a nerve, as well as a funny bone, because it got wide linkage and discussion and became the week’s top-rated video.

Then, it was removed from YouTube, “due to a copyright claim by a third party.”

Photographer Lane Hartwell says she objected to use of her photograph of Valleywag’s Owen Thomas, so she sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube. Hartwell says she owns copyright in the image and did not license its use. In response, YouTube appears to have disabled the video pursuant to its copyright policy (perplexingly, it did not identify the “third party” sender of the complaint.)

Now, the video is back, in a revised version that omits Hartwell’s photograph.

To me, the original situation seems to lie near the blurry edge of copyright’s fair use exception. The Richter Scales would argue that their use was “transformative,” using the photograph to comment on the bubbly scene the photographer chose to depict; commentators on Silicon Valley foibles might be unable to get permission for photos used to skewer the establishment. Hartwell, by contrast, tells us that “Photography is my livelihood. It’s how I pay my bills. I’m not treating the band any differently than any other group that uses my work without my permission.” She sells or licenses her work to magazines and others who want to use photo illustrations, and sees no reason to treat the Richter Scales differently.

Is the momentary use of Hartwell’s photo an unfair substitute for something she should have had the right to license, or a fair use the law should license irrespective of the copyright holder’s wishes? I’d be inclined to find the use fair, as transformative commentary, but I couldn’t guarantee that a court would agree with me.

The DMCA harbors no such ambiguity, however. The moment someone claims an infringement, the law encourages the service provider to act “expeditiously” to remove the offending material. The strict penalties in copyright’s “property rule” nature support that response: One who can prove copyright infringement can often get both an injunction and stiff statutory damages. Acting individually, the parties might stand firm or be pushed by the costs of legal uncertainty to settle their differences, but the service provider in the middle changes the calculus.

The intermediary service provider rarely wants to risk outsize damages or get into negotiations with copyright claimants and small content-posters, and so tends to take down rather than face even a remote chance of liability. If, on the other hand, intermediaries’ secondary liability were limited as it is for defamation, content creators would be freer to make and defend fair use arguments. A liability rule or compulsory license, enforcing rights through payment rather than removal, could leave these items in the public view.

Absent copyright reform, we’re stuck with the likelihood that clever montages — which depend on pulling content from many sources — get popped even more quickly than tech bubbles.

Via BoingBoing, comes the account of a sports writer and avid fan who spent $280 to purchase video footage of Major League Baseball games, only to lose the ability to watch his purchases when MLB switched DRM providers.

As Allan Wood, who wrote a book on the 1918 Red Sox blogs tells it:

Since MLB started this download service, I have bought and downloaded 71 games — many of them from the Red Sox’s August-September 2004 hot streak — which works out to a total cost of $280.45 (plus the price of the blank discs). Thanks to MLB, I now have nearly six dozen coasters.

Calling MLB to inquire, he was told:

“MLB no longer supports the DDS system” that it once used and so any CDs with downloaded games on them “are no good. They will not work with the current system.”

Thus rather than supporting the fans who paid money to watch games, MLB is turning them away — and turning them off from purchasing future content. What you rip from your DVR is more useful, long-term, than what you can buy. And all DRM has this bug built-in — it’s protecting content against its end-users, and can as easily break with less functionality than the users paid for if its supporting infrastructure is pulled.

In the comments, thread, a poster points to the Fairuse4WM utility in the Doom9 forums, suggesting that purchasers can extract the video. Of course that seems perfectly reasonable, as they paid for the content and were promised it would remain accessible, but the good old DMCA makes it legally questionable — circumvention of a “technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected [by copyright]” is forbidden by sec. 1201(a)(1). Don’t purchasers have “authorization”? That’s what DVD owners argue, unsuccessfully so far.

What about exemptions? The Copyright Office, in its 2006 rulemaking created an exemption from circumvention liability for those who circumvent “obsolete” technological protections — seemingly the case here — but it applies only to computer programs and video games. While telecast baseball might be a “video game,” it’d take some creative lawyering to squeeze into the exception for archival use and preservation.

As if there weren’t enough problems with lawyers sending out improper cease-and-desists, Wired News reports that a Nevada man has pleaded guilty to impersonating a lawyer to extort domain registrants to turn over their domain names.

A Nevada man pleaded guilty Thursday to his plotting to steal domain names from their legitimate owners by impersonating a California intellectual property lawyer and send threatening letters to domain name owners in hopes of convincing them to turn over the domains to him.

Las Vegas resident David Scali registered the email address trademarkinfringement@netzero.net in 2006 and then, pretending to be a real Califonia lawyer (whose intials are K.Y.C.), threatened domain name owners with $100,000 trademark infringement suits, unless they transferred the domains within 48 hours.

I wonder if his C&Ds were any further afield than some we see from real lawyers.

Author Denise McCune posts a great account of the workings and failings of the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown procedures.

As Cory Doctorow has also reported on BoingBoing, the VP of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America sent an error-filled takedown complaint to text-sharing site Scribd, causing removal of many non-infringing postings including reading lists suggesting great science fiction, and Cory’s own novels, which he’s CC-licensed for free redistribution.

The DMCA safe-harbor is most charitably described as an intricate dance for all parties involved: the copyright claimant, the ISP, and the poster. When the dancers are synchronized, its notice, takedown, and counternotice steps give each party a prescribed sequence by which to notify the others of claims and invite their responses. That’s why the DMCA requires the claimant to identify the copyrighted works, specify alleged infringements with “information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material,” and state good faith belief that the uses are unauthorized. When a copyright claimant misses one of those key elements, he starts stepping on toes.

The service provider isn’t obliged to respond to deficient notices, but if a notice contains all the right formal elements — even if it’s factually wrong about copyright ownership or copying — the service provider must choose between taking down the material or losing its DMCA safe-harbor and facing potential lawsuits. Posters who believe their material is non-infringing or fairly posted can counter-notify and even file their own lawsuits for misuse of copyright claims, under sec. 512(f).

I share McCune’s hope that the brouhaha will help the SFWA to help authors express all their copyright interests, including that of free sharing:

I hope the SFWA’s lawyers are sitting down with Andrew Burt and explaining how the DMCA actually works, so that actual, legitimate violations of copyright (on Scribd and on other sites) can get dealt with swiftly and promptly and the people who have asked SFWA to be their copyright representative can get infringing uses of their material removed. I’m also glad to see that the SFWA ePiracy Committee has suspended operations until they can investigate further — and, hopefully, come up with an effective process and procedure that benefits both fair and/or transformative use while also protecting the rights of copyright holders to have control over where and how their material is posted — whether that control is a more traditional “nobody gets to use this, period” or a Creative Commons-style authorization of transformative work.