Re: RIAA DMCA notices malformed this school year

[Tracy Mitrano <tbm3 () CORNELL EDU>]

Since I strongly suspect that the RIAA monitors these lists, may I
use the opportunity of this message to ask their representatives
whether they have corrected all of the "malformed" addresses, or are
they expecting to place the burden on each individual institution to
get in touch with them?

While an address is a correctable error, it seems as if the burden is
on the sender not the sendee especially in light of the clear
language of the DMCA and the Law of Congress database that provides a
content owner with that information.

I don't suppose it is possible that this is not an error at all but a
strategy to find out whether -- or exactly which institutions -- are
paying attention to the notices?  If that were the case, perhaps it
is best that we let them do the correcting and resist the urge to do
their work for them, not only of "correcting" "malformed" addresses,
but letting them know who may or may not be acting on their notices?
Let us not forget the ways in which the content owners and RIAA in
particular have attempted to use these notices in their screeds to
Congress about higher education.  Remember the Reid Amendment?  Does
anyone think that the new provisions regarding copyright in the newly
reauthorized HEA are the end of the content industry's attempt to
place increased burdens on our institutions, or place us in bad light
before Congress or the public?

The Government Accounting Office survey of a couple of years ago, the
one we all responded to before learning that they wrote it,
engineered GAO to send it to us and had access to the responses, is
now outdated information, so it is possible that they have cooked up
a new strategy to find who is doing what?  That survey, of course,
was in addition to the numerous calls over the years from this Media
or that Sentry asking us for this kind of information.

Mr. Landis?

This event is a good time to remind everyone that the 512(c) safe
harbor provisions that establish the DMCA agent registration with the
LOC is for when the alleged infringement derives from the ISPs
servers, i.e. an institutional device, and is not a required
procedure for conduit connections, i.e. between two computers that
the ISP (institution) does not own.

Cheers, Tracy


On Sep 9, 2008, at 10:12 AM, Bob Bayn wrote:

> I also got a call from Jeremy Landis yesterday after sending
> back a DMCA notice which was addressed to our tech.support
> address instead of the DMCA contact, asking for confirmation.
> He gave an explanation and said that my contact info was now
> "reconfirmed".
>
> I had sort of assumed that "Jeremy Landis" was a pseudonym like
> "Betty Crocker" or "Aunt Jemima" and was surprised to hear a real
> voice.  ;-)
>
> --
> Bob Bayn  ride-a-bike (435)797-2396
> Security Team coordinator
> Office of Information Techology
> Utah State University
>
>
>
> > Following up; I spoke with Jeremy Landis of the RIAA yesterday.
> > He was quite helpful and said that they've fixed both these issues.
> > We didn't receive any notices this morning so I cannot yet confirm.
>
> > --
> > ~Jonny Sweeny, GSEC, GCWN, GCIH, GWAS, SSP-CNSA
> > Incident Response Manager, Lead Security Analyst
> > Office of the VP for Information Technology, Indiana University
> > PGP key & S/MIME cert: https://itso.iu.edu/Jonny_Sweeny



Tracy Mitrano
Director of IT Policy
110F East Hill Office Bldg
Ithaca NY 14853
(607)254-3584