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Old 04-08-2008, 04:58 PM  
Quentin
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Join Date: Dec 2002
Posts: 1,280
Quote:
Originally Posted by gideongallery View Post
you may want to argue that tube sites are bad, immoral or whatever else you want to say

but the 90% plus who claim it is illegal are idiots. The safe harbor provision of the DMCA makes them legal, no matter how much you hate them.

who ever you talked to was 100% right they are legal.
Um..... it's not quite that simple, actually.

There's more to fitting into the liability exceptions than you think. Beyond responding to take down requests, you have to have a "designated agent" to receive those take down requests, and that agent's information has to be filed with the Copyright Office, as well as listed on the website in question.

A tube site (or any other manner of user-posted content site hoping to avoid liability under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA) also cannot modify the content that is uploaded to their site by third parties. It's not entirely clear whether translating files into a new format would be considered a "modification" under the statutory language of the DMCA, but certainly one can reasonably argue that translation is a form of modification.

My point is, this isn't as simple a question as you think it is.... to assert that all tubes are "legal" just because there is a safe harbor provision within DMCA for ISPs and OSPs is a major oversimplification of the legal questions involved here.

- Q.
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