Vimeo chills out to DMCA demands

There has been no small amount of coverage of YouTube’s recent-ish introduction of its copyright strike system which has both enabled legitimate copyright owners to issue infringement notices against people uploading their content without permission, and a whole host of cheapskate scammers and fraudsters to issue claims for content they have no rights to whatsoever.

Alternative video hosting platform Vimeo also has a “DMCA” (Digital Millennium Copyright Act – the US law that provides for all this) policy in place but has decided, in the interests of balance, to also lodge any takedown requests issued to it to a monitoring organisation.

“Chilling Effects” provides a “resource for understanding speech issues and legal complaints about online activity” by collecting and publishing complaints made under the DMCA thus providing a bit of transparency to how the system is being used.

Vimeo says it’s a big fan of creative video work, openness and copyright and wants to strike a balance between the lot but acknowledges that simply applying the DMCA and removing works is not necessarily always right without some kind of monitoring.

They are going to anonymise their submissions though.

It’s an interesting step; get more info on Vimeo at www.vimeo.com/blog/post:662 and at www.chillingeffects.org