Yahoo! gets no comfort from Cryptome (and the band plays on)

As reported on PogoWasRight.org earlier this week, Yahoo! sent a DMCA takedown notice to John Young, administrator of Cryptome.org, over its posting of their compliance guide for law enforcement agents wishing to obtain customer or subscriber information. The guide describes all of the types of information Yahoo! collects, how long it retains it for, and fees for various services to provide such records.

Well, “high noon” came and went on Thursday, and the file is still up on Cryptome. Young has published additional correspondence on the copyright/legal threats that continued after the deadline came and went. Young’s position seems to be that Yahoo! must provide proof of actual copyright; Yahoo!’s lawyers beg to differ, as evident in this exchange:

Subject: RE: DMCA Notice of Infringing Material
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 17:32
From: “John Young”
To: “Gershberg, Michael”

Dear Mr. Gershberg,

I cannot find at the Copyright Office a grant of copyright for the Yahoo spying document hosted on Cryptome. To assure readers Yahoo’s copyright claim is valid and not another hoary bluff without substantiation so common under DMCA bombast please send a copy of the copyright grant for publication on Cryptome.

Until Yahoo provides proof of copyright, the document will remain available to the public for it provides information that is in the public interest about Yahoo’s contradictory privacy policy and should remain a topic of public debate on ISP unacknowledged spying complicity with officials for lucrative fees.

[…]

Subject: RE: DMCA Notice of Infringing Material
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 16:16:38 -0500
From: “Gershberg, Michael”
To: “John Young”

Mr. Young,

A copyright notice is optional for any work created after March 1, 1989. Yahoo!’s document is in fact copyrighted. Cryptome’s delay in removing the infringing material is not warranted.

Sincerely,

Mike Gershberg

You can read the entire exchange on Cryptome.org.

PogoWasRight.org will continue to follow this story.

Image credit: OBEY COPYRIGHT is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work by kreetube at www.flickr.com.