Technology

Ashley Madison Still Trying To Abuse The DMCA To Hide Leak

Desperate times call for desperate abuses of intellectual property laws.

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So just a few hours ago, we were mocking the company behind the “dating site for cheating on your spouse” site Ashley Madison for abusing the DMCA in the false belief it would somehow stop the full leak of the data. And… now that the full leak of data has actually happened, apparently the geniuses at Avid Life Media (said parent company) are still abusing the DCMA to try to get those horses back in the barnyard. From Vice’s Motherboard’s Joseph Cox:

A few hours ago I received a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) relating to three of my tweets.

“Hello,” the email from Twitter starts. “The following material has been removed from your account in response to the DMCA takedown notice copied at the bottom of this email.”

The tweet in question had been a “partial screenshot of an apparent floor plan of the Avid Life Media office.” But the company asked for more too:

… the DMCA request also asked for another two to be removed. One was a heavily censored screenshot of a spreadsheet which details the shareholders of the company and the percentile of shares they own. The screenshot did not include any names, figures, or other data, but simply the headers of two columns. Another screenshot showed the column headers of a spreadsheet detailing the company’s bank accounts. No actual bank data was included. Twitter apparently did not remove these two tweets.

It’s worth noting, here, that the DMCA notices were not sent on the leaked customer data, but about things that are at least marginally more closely tied to the company — though it’s still unlikely that Avid Life Media has a legitimate copyright claim in any of them. It’s possible that it holds the copyright in the floor plan, but such a tweet is pretty clearly fair use.

All this should make you wonder why Avid Life Media is running around filing bogus DMCA notices, rather than actually taking care of the damage from this leak?

Ashley Madison Still Trying To Abuse The DMCA To Hide Leak

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