Twitter Improves DMCA Policy: Alerts Public To 'Removed' Tweets

Copyright

from the a-step-up dept

For years, we’ve criticized Twitter’s DMCA policy, in which it completely disappears tweets that are subject to DMCA takedown notices it receives. The company, as part of its transparency campaign, has now changed its policy slightly, such that it will now replace the taken down tweet with one that indicates the tweet was removed due to a DMCA notice. While security researcher Mikko Hypponen has a tweet showing the text that Twitter is replacing tweets with, it quickly became clear that his tweet was a “joke” to show that it’s easy to simply copy the general text that Twitter will be using:

This Tweet from @username has been withheld in response to a report from the copyright holder. Learn more.

The “replaced” tweets now link to this page with an explanation of Twitter’s new DMCA policy. While that policy notes, thankfully, that it also sends all DMCA notices to Chilling Effects, it would be even cooler if the tweets in question linked to the Chilling Effects entry with the DMCA notice in question, so people could understand who removed the tweet and why. There may be some issues with the timing on that, but right now it leaves open a lot of questions about why certain tweets were removed. And, given that it’s somewhat easy to “fake” the new tweets (even though faked ones won’t have the “learn more” phrase linked), I wonder if these will have the same impact.

Filed Under: dmca, takedowns
Companies: twitter