Six Apart, Fake DMCA Notices, and Censorship

Copyright on the Internet is oh so fun. A work is copyrighted the moment it is recorded on some tangible medium (i.e. typed to a computer, written on paper, recorded to cd; just thinking it does not count). Back before the Internet that worked fine. It's not like many people had access to your material to steal it. And when it got published, the published would almost always register it with the U.S. Copyright Office thereby making it far far easier to prove it as yours in court, and file infringement claims.

However, now on the Internet, material is published without being registered, thereby giving access to copyrighted material to millions of people. Without a registration, the material is still copyrighted, it is just far harder to prove its copyright and leaving Internet publishers and writers open to false claims.

I think the U.S. Copyright office needs to keep an "official" database that publishers could "register" their material to. It wouldn't be as official as the official registration that is now in place and would have no fee. Instead when you go to publish a work online, you submit it to that database, which basically just stores that work and a time stamp. Thus any infringement claims would just compare the % that each work matches each other and then see whose time stamp was first. This would only work as one tool, but it could help throw away a ton of fraudulent suits.

I guess I haven't seen much about Michael Crook here on Newsvine. I've mostly followed the happenings surrounding him through BoingBoing. Has there been much issue here at Newsvine so far and I've just missed it? Though I'm not wishing any trouble on you guys, Mike.