Straight Pride UK uses copyright law to remove critical article
Straight Pride UK, the self proclaimed campaign group seeking equal heterosexual rights, has utilised US copyright law to remove a blogpost from a UK website after an online row in which it sought the removal of material it had issued in a ‘press release’.
Wordpress said the use of DMCA was 'abuse'
An interview had been published online by blogger Oliver Hotham, containing material claimed to have come from an email exchange with Straight Pride’s Nick Steiner, including a press release.
The material supported Russia’s anti-gay legislation which has led to widely reported calls for the Sochi Winter Olympics to be boycotted.
Wordpress, which hosted the blog, then removed it, reportedly at the request of Straight Pride, under the UK’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Copyright specialist Adam Rendle told the Guardian that the DMCA was being used as “a heavy-handed reaction to legitimate criticism.”
“The DMCA system is structured so that the intermediary (WordPress in this case) is very likely to have the complained-about material taken down initially even though (a) the copyright owner appears to have consented to its copyright material being used and (b) one of the defences (fair dealing for the purposes of criticism or review) to copyright infringement may apply,” he said.
“It is for the user of the material to make his case to the intermediary and have the material reinstated which can take some time and may never happen.
“It is, of course, another example of a heavy-handed reaction to legitimate criticism causing more harm than the original criticism.”
WordPress spokesman Paul Sieminski said :“We think this was a case of abuse of the DMCA and we don’t think that taking it down was the right result. It’s censorship using the DMCA.”