Electronic Frontier Foundation Defends Fair Use with the Takedown Hall of Shame

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created the Takedown Hall of Shame as part of its No Downtime for Free Speech Campaign to showcase what it believes are the worst takedown requests that used “bogus copyright claims or other spurious legal threats”. EFF Senior Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry says that the the content showcased on the site qualified as fair use, but that this did not stop rights holders from attempting to have the content removed.

Hall of Shame “honorees”, as the EFF refers to them, include National Public Radio, who the EFF claims attempted to remove a YouTube video that was critical of same-sex marriage because it used a portion of an interview from NPR’s program All Things Considered, Ralph Lauren, who it claims sent takedown requests to the ISPs of Photoshop Disasters and Boing Boing after both sites posted a picture of a Ralph Lauren ad, and Diebold, who it claims attempted to silence discussion about the security of its e-voting machines following a leak of internal e-mails by sending cease-and-desist letters to ISPs under the DMCA.

Many of the takedown requests are filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which ISPs act on without checking their validity because they fear litigation, according to the EFF. The EFF believes that the DMCA has instead become a tool that corporations use to remove content that is unfavorable to them.