37 comments

[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] thread
Go ahead Twitter. This road ends in your own downfall, and we'll all be better off for it.
Following the DMCA, a law passed by Congress, will lead to their downfall?
Do you really think Twitter would have taken action on a questionable copyright claim (for a single photo of dubious origin) if they weren't already on a crusade to deplatform Trump?
Does twitter usually vet DMCA claims, or do they usually follow the procedural steps?
I've seen a lot of copyrighted media shared by people on Twitter who are not the owners, and this is the first time I've seen the copyright notice as shown on the president's tweet. I've seen tweets taken down at the request of their authors (or retweets from their original authors), but not in this form - that's what makes it seem (to me) more suspect. If this were happening regularly with the millions of other daily instances (from celebrities to countless other regular users), it would be a little more defensible. The objection here isn't to DMCA takedown requests; it's the blatant (and politically-motivated) inconsistency in the application of their rules.
That's not how DMCA works. It's not automatic, somebody has to specifically target a tweet and show that it violates their copyright.

You see copyrighted material all the time because big studios don't think it's worth it to file a legal document to claim every single 30 second clip anybody posts. It's not Twitter's decision whether to file a claim, it's the copyright holder's.

> It's not automatic, somebody has to specifically target a tweet and show that it violates their copyright.

No, they don't have to show that, they just have to assert it.

Companies tend to do DMCA takedowns immediately and only ask questions when they're challenged. The "outrage" here is that he's being subject to the same rules as an ordinary citizen. Trump is the president, not an emperor. Yawn. Wake me up when there's bipartisan support to end DMCA.
Yes, the whole point of the DMCA safe harbor is that companies are incentivized not to try to adjudicate complaints made in proper form.

If Trump wants to file a counternotice he can...find out how the DMCA process is fundamentally weighted against counternotice because the underlying potential liability that is being avoided isn't symmetric.

YouTube does exactly this as well. In fact, some YouTubers have had emails demanding money or they’ll flood YouTube with copyright infringement notices on their videos and so lose their income.

This is nothing to do with Twitter choosing to do this to Trump, this is all about how the system works.k

Twitter has intentionally and repeatedly ignored their own conduct policies to make sure Trump stays on the platform. Just this week, a user created an account that did nothing but copy the president’s tweets and the account was banned after three days.

He’s worth millions of dollars to them in terms of traffic, and they’ve repeatedly bent over backwards to accommodate his racist, violent, and hateful speech.

I'd love to see what you think is the #1 most racist, violent, and hateful tweet from president Trump. Really, go ahead and find it, then let me know what it is.

Note: I do not support racism, violence, or hateful actions. I don't seek for things of that nature (I denounce them), but I genuinely haven't seen those qualities in the words of our president, so I sincerely want to know what all the fuss is about with respect to Trump's so-called racist remarks. I have seen a lot of people ascribing those labels to various things he's said (but not intended), and I've seen him say and do a lot of anti-racist things, but apparently the coded racism in his language isn't as obvious to me as it is to so many other people.

Here’s a perfect example from today[0]. Trump is denouncing the Kaepernick kneeling trend in the NFL, which represented a protest of police brutality in Kapernick’s own words. His action wound up costing him his career, and now the NFL is apologizing because they got caught suppressing a peaceful and justified protest to speak out against police brutality. Trump, among with many others, refuse to even acknowledge that this legitimate protest in fact denounced a very legitimate problem in America by subverting and redirecting the discussion to respecting the flag. This intentional redirection is an explicitly racist strategy to avoid discussing police brutality.

On the violence front, just a few days ago, Trump threatened to deploy active duty troops on protesters marching for a George Floyd. This was such an egregious action that Trump’s own former Secretary of Defense and one of the most regarded leaders in the military to denounce Trump as a threat to the Constitution[1]. Those were his exact words.

Trump has called immigrants animals, he secretly separated immigrant children from their parents at the border, he’s constantly calling for investigations of his political rivals, numerous types of behavior that we’ve never seen in a democratically elected leader before. If you’re not understanding the accusations of “coded language”, I’d encourage you to read up on the history dictatorships, because authoritarian behavior (deploying troops against peaceful protestors) and dehumanizing speech (calling immigrants animals) have preceded every single genocide in human history.

0: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12689981437330513...

1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/james-mattis-trump-statement/

I'm not going to address your numerous disagreements with Trump's policies, but instead respond to the one quote you actually pointed to, which was this:

"We should be standing up straight and tall, ideally with a salute, or a hand on heart. There are other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag - NO KNEELING!"

I agree (and Trump would agree) that people are well within their rights to kneel in protest of police brutality (or any issue for that matter), and Trump has actually been doing a lot to improve the quality of our police force (so he agrees on the principle behind it too).

That said, there's been plenty of publicity lately over our differences in these issues, and it sounds like the president is just asking people to at least unite behind the idea of living in a country that has so much to be proud of. When we show respect for the flag, we aren't saying that the country is perfect. We're honoring the men and women who gave and continue to give their lives for us to even have a place where we can debate these issues peacefully. We honor and have pride in a country where everyone (regardless of race or any other attribute) can be protected by the rule of law rather than oppressive leaders or the fear of anarchy.

If there's one thing we need as a nation now more than ever, it's to look for the good in each other and to find common ground. Respect for our country - and symbolically our flag - is perhaps the best place to start. Trump is telling us we can and should continue to protest those things that need improvement (he says so in the same sentence), but one thing that shouldn't divide any of us is our flag.

Now if that's his #1 most racist tweet, then I rest my case.

To those who obviously disagree, please try and use some imagination for a moment and pretend the video was posted by someone you don't hate. Look at it objectively, and tell me it's somehow offensive to you. Tell me it's so bad that it needs to be censored (and yes, this was censored - if no one has the guts to even point to which image it was, then that's a pretty weak cover for the real reason).
It's not being censored. It's been taken down for (allegedly) infringing the rights of another. This is little different from that time my mom posted a video of my neice dancing to barely-audible music in the background, and it was taken down within an hour. Protest that.
According to the article it was removed due to a copyright claim, it has nothing to do if it is "offensive to you" or not.
No. The point is if Obama tweeted it. The owner works be like meh. But cos it’s the norm to hate trump. Oh I don’t like trump so I’ll issue a copyright claim. The point is people selectively deciding when to invoke a copyright claim just because they dislike a person.
I support abolishing copyright law, if that's the solution you are looking for.
> The point is people selectively deciding when to invoke a copyright claim just because they dislike a person.

I honestly don't understand what's wrong with that. Unless you're suggesting that copyright must be enforced maximally, like trademarks? Even then, I could selectively choose to give licenses to people I like and withhold them from people I don't. How is this different from "voting with your dollars" as a consumer?

I don’t actually have an opinion on the matter. I’m just saying this is what I think the person was saying.
>people selectively deciding when to invoke a copyright claim

Isn't that the right of the copyright holder?

People have been warning of the dangers of selective enforcement for forever. It's not reasonable to say the way we fix it here and now is by eliminating rules for the nominally most powerful person in the world. Let's just...not?
If Twitter gets the DMCA notice and then doesn't take down the video, they're liable for copyright infringement. With the number of views a video like this gets, the damages could be huge. Twitter has no real choice.

There are images in the video from Floyd's memorial service. My guess is that these were taken by someone who is not a Trump supporter. I bet they saw their (unlicensed) photo in the ad and called their lawyer. Their lawyer sent a DMCA letter, and voila.

Maybe we'll get some DMCA reform now.
tl;dr

Someone filed a copyright complaint against the video. The complaint is substantiated. The article does not say who did it.

Trump is of course saying how twitter is biased against him where literally twitter must take down that ad due to the DMCA and them being personally held liable if they didn't.

Trump doesn't understand the law, or at least pretends not to.

Surely the Trump campaign's response should be to claim that they are not infringing. This should put the video back up, according to DMCA rules. I'm not really familiar with Twitter's DMCA work flow. Do they not allow the user to challenge the claim?
They are supposed to allow the user to challenge the claim, and if so, the video can be put back up after 10-14 days, if the complainant doesn't start a lawsuit, if I understand the process correctly.
Are you saying Twitter, or Trump, should do something?
It'd be up to Trump to contest the DMCA takedown to continue the process. Otherwise, it just stays down.
This would break Republican victimization narrative, and they probably do infringe. Under DMCA Twitter must takedown contested content.
I for one am happy to see Twitter not take his crap anymore. He disrupted politics, now they’re disrupting him. He’s such a crybaby, this is genuinely enjoyable. Had he any sort of professional/presidential tone to him, this would have never happened. He did this to himself.