Claremont, Google and the DMCA

The runaround we've received from Google regarding our posting of City of Claremont employee pay information has us wondering if Claremont City Attorney Sonia Carvalho invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) when she contacted Google with a complaint about our original post.

Under the DMCA, a company that hosts a website can be protected from litigation if they immediately remove the material in question after receiving a complaint of a copyright violation. This so-called "takedown provision" should contain the following language:

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above on the infringing web pages is not authorized by my registered copyright and by the law. I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner of an exclusive right that is infringed.

Kembrew McLeod, a University of Iowa communications professor had an opinion piece in today's Los Angeles Times. The article talked about how individuals and corporations can abuse the DMCA by making false claims of copyright infringement. McLeod's article used an example of a YouTube video that was taken down. YouTube, like Blogger, is owned by Google. These abuses, according to McLeod, amount to a kind of censorship.

Don't like something someone has posted on a website? Just contact the company hosting the site, in our case Google's Blogger, and use the DMCA takedown provision. Threaten litigation if the offending material is not removed, and you can silence people saying and posting things you don't want said.

The central issue in our case is that Google has claimed that the images we posted of City of Claremont pay stubs were copyrighted. Google allowed us to repost the original piece minus the pay stub images. From this we can infer that a DMCA complaint had been filed. Both Google and the City of Claremont have refused to release the text of the actual complaint.

We would argue, if we could see the actual complaint, that the copyright complaint is a false one. The images in question are government forms, not copyrighted creative material. Of course, we are not even allowed to see what the complaints against us are.

Further, if the City Attorney did in fact falsely invoke the DMCA using the language we cited above, it's not surprising she would not want to disclose the complaint. The phrases "good faith" and "penalty of perjury" might come back to haunt her.

Ironic, isn't it, that Claremont, which professes to be a Progressive community, acted in an Orwellian fashion, making complaints that can't be rebutted or addressed, and falsely invoking a law that does not apply in this case.

Kembrow McLeod's article noted: "When people make overreaching copyright claims just to censor speech they don't like, they are abusing the law."

It's bad enough when the overreachers are private entities, but it's especially chilling when a government body abuses its power to cut off the free dissemination of information.