The kind of coverage that makes you want to throw up.

I heard a segment on NPR's On the Media Sunday that made me physically nauseated. They were talking about the dangers of the open, anonymous forum that is the Internet.

They talked about the Star Wars Kid, as well as a young girl who committed suicide after being manipulated by a fictitious persona, and a couple female law school students who were slandered on a website. The discussion of that last piece was their segue for bringing in a representative of ReputationDefender in on the discussion. From that point forward, they talked about how these two women were stymied by the 1st ammendment (in the case of the law school website), and then by immunity clauses of the CDA (when they tried to get the pages delisted from Google).

It was then advocated that the average individual be given more power to control what was said about them online, and Youtube, IP holders and the DMCA were brought in as an example where such rights were already given to IP holders. I took it as implied that they were advocating that similar rights be given to individuals.

They also had a representative from the EFF on the piece, but it didn't sound like they gave him even half the audio time as the ReputationDefender representative, much less the time they spend advocating the ReputationDefender rep's perspective.

If the folks at On The Media had done enough research, they might have discovered that the DMCA has already been abused by people falsely claiming to be copyright holders, in efforts to censor the material taken down. That doesn't even begin to address screwups like MediaSentry's overzealously identifying content by pattern matching titles. I've often wondered what would happen if I posted a video to Youtube with a title "TUBTHUMPING", but where the video was just of someone hitting a tub with a mallet with no discernable rhythm. I imagine it'd get a takedown notice, and I wouldn't have the resources to back a counterclaim.

I don't want power like that in the hands of every teenage griefer on the Internet.