We at Daily Kos have been proud to offer community members the ability to post images to illustrate the great content they produce. While we hope that everyone uses properly licensed images, it is impossible to police a community of this size. That’s why Congress created what’s called the “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, allowing sites like ours to host images without fear of legal liability. The catch is that we have to be willing and able to remove any infringing images at the request of the rights holder—something we have always done, usually within minutes of any such requests.
However, some troll lawyers have found a technicality in the law that has put the site at great risk, undermining the entire intent of Congress’ “safe harbor.” We could fight those trolls one by one, and likely win! But winning is cold comfort when you’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending your rights. That’s what these trolls count on, that it’s cheaper to pay them several thousand dollars to make them go away rather than spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting.
This technicality means that we are exposed to such trolls for anything posted prior to December 2015. As such, we are going to undertake what may seem like a drastic action, because it is. But we’ve decided after much internal anguish that it’s best to spend our dollars fighting Trump, than it is to fight troll lawyers. So here’s the deal:
- We will remove images posted on stories prior to that fateful date in December 2015.
- We have internally flagged images we believe are likely kosher—wire service images for services we pay for, images from government sources, images from diarists who we know create their own graphics (like Brainwrap). We will then bring those images back after an internal review to ensure they have the proper rights (after the holiday season).
- A lot of other images do not fall under those categories (or weren’t attributed correctly in the image library). For those, there’s not much we can do. However, there are two things you can do if your stories are impacted:
- You can go into those stories and upload properly licensed images yourself (anything in the image library attributed to Getty and AP uploaded by staff is okay), or
- You can contact Help Desk for assistance in the matter. In fact, if you used a recurring image for something like a series banner, Help Desk will be the better option as they can be more efficient than having you reupload duplicate images story by story. Again, please be patient, as it’s prime vacation season.
Nothing about this is desirable or ideal or anything approaching okay. This is a travesty of the intent of the law. I am beyond angered and offended that we have to do this, and deeply sorry to the community for having to react this way.
If I were a billionaire, I’d fight this all the way through in the courts. But I’m not, and any money spent in a defense would be your money. I have no doubt you would all respond if we asked you to fund a legal defense effort. But in the end, we look at the challenges we face next year winning back the Senate and the White House, and we can’t, in good conscience, justify asking you to divert from that all-important effort.
I’ll be answering any questions you have in the comments for the next several days.
UPDATE: Given some comments below, I want to underscore this—if you are a diarist who has consistently used your own images (there’s a bunch of you who do that), like nature photography or whatnot, we can batch restore your images. Don’t panic or fret. Just let Help Desk know and they'll get to it.
If you have a logo or signature image or anything like that, Help Desk can help as well. All is not lost if you can guarantee the images are your own and legally kosher.