As cloud computing becomes more pervasive and mainstream, it is likely an increasing quantity of our information will exist only online, on servers managed by someone else. That has its downsides.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a swine of an act. In essence, a copyright owner can issue a takedown notice to a web site owner or, more likely, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) hosting the web site when they believe their content is being misused by the site. It costs virtually nothing to issue a takedown notice. If the recipient chooses to challenge the notice, they have to challenge it in court = legal costs. Lots of them. As a result most people, especially ISPs, comply with notices regardless of their accuracy. This can be a problem if you are trying to publish content about an organisation that doesn’t want you to publish…
There are two sides to most things in life. If we have cloud computing, can we also expect to see anti-cloud computing at the fringe? An article in The Observer – The Brit dishing the dirt – about Nick Denton and his controversial Gawker gossip blog provides an anti-cloud quote.
‘We actually own our servers, which means we decide what stays up. That’s why we didn’t have to remove the Tom Cruise video. There’s no service provider telling us what to do.’ – Ted Plunkett, Gawker
Whilst YouTube complied with requests from the Church of Scientology to remove a certain video involved Tom Cruise, Gawker has kept the video online. It has been viewed more than 2.5m times.
References:
Related Blog Posts:
- Who controls your data (May 2007)
- Post and be damned (Jan 2006)
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