Oliver Hotham wrote an article about "Straight Pride UK" organization, with included a quote from Nick Steiner. Nick Steiner disliked the article and sent in a DMCA takedown notice to Wordpress in order censor it.
Automattic, the company who develops Wordpress and the services teamed up with the Journalism student Oliver Hotham and sued for $10,000 in damages and $14,520 in attorneys' fees.
Automattic's general counsel Paul Sieminski said
“The system works so long as copyright owners use this power in good faith. But too often they don’t, and there should be clear legal consequences for those who choose to abuse the system,”Which essentially means the system is broken from the get-go, especially considering that failure to act on DMCA notices removes the service provider from the Safe Harbor provided by DMCA, and the DMCA abuse penalty by default is "under penalty of perjury" - a slap to the wrist for abusers.
Hence the system is inherently and completely broken: Service providers basicly have no means to try to protect their users, and any one claiming copyright, rightful copyright holder or not, and whether it is a actual copyright complaint or not can take any content down. In theory, you could ask a company to takedown their own logo and they'd be forced to do so, and only then can they sue you for damages, in essence, censorship and vandalism worked.
This doesn't stop with big organization etc. any individual can claim copyright to any work and have it taken down. Infact, if you send a complaint to blogger about this post it will be taken down.
Source: TorrentFreak.
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