After a Chicago student gained national fame for editing a picture of President Obama in the image of the Joker villain from “The Dark Knight” and posting it to Flickr, some of the focus, especially among the tech community, quickly shifted to Flickr for removing the image.

On a site forum, Flickr, a Yahoo (YHOO) property, says it isn’t banning accounts for posting the altered version of a Time magazine cover.

However, the company did receive a notice of infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which sparked the removal, wrote Heather Champ, Flickr’s director of community.

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Concerns about DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] takedown abuse and fair use aren’t limited to Lawrence Lessig, the EFF, and Free Press—John McCain and Sarah Palin are going all mavericky on the issue as well. Yesterday, their campaign sent a letter to YouTube complaining about rights holders (especially news organizations) that filed illegitimate DMCA takedown notices and managed to have important campaign clips pulled at crucial times. The letter is yet more evidence of why human judgment—not just automated filtering or scanning—is crucial in such cases.

The letter opens by talking about how important YouTube has been for the campaign’s efforts to get out copies of commercials, speeches, etc., but notes that the site’s usefulness is being curtailed by “overreaching copyright claims.” Many of these claims have involved “fewer than 10 seconds of footage from news broadcasts in campaign ads or videos, as a basis for commentary on the issues presented in the news reports.”

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The micro-messaging service Twitter Tuesday suspended the accounts of users don_draper and peggyolson. If those names sound familiar, you’re probably a fan of the hit AMC show “Mad Men.” Those two Twitter users take their names from two of the main characters on the show, and over the past several weeks had been providing updates, mostly in character from what I could tell.

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A few days ago I came across an op-ed submission that called for file sharing to be decriminalized. The editors here decided not to run it, but it intrigued me for a couple of reasons. First, the author, Karl Sigfrid, is a member of the Swedish Parliament from the Moderate Party–a pro-business party that’s akin to this country’s Libertarians (except in Sweden they’re more than just a fringe group). Second, although he covered much of the same ground earlier this year in a Swedish paper, Sigfrid’s new piece added another provocative contention: that unauthorized downloading isn’t actually theft.

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I tend to be skeptical when people start screaming “net neutrality” when it’s not warranted, but here’s a situation where it may be worth asking a few questions. We’ve been wondering for some time why AT&T would agree to help NBC try to block the transfer of any unauthorized content on its network. It made very little sense at the time. AT&T (in its previous versions) had actually been one of the big proponents of the “safe harbor” clause in the DMCA that meant it didn’t need to police the content on its own network. So why would it suddenly, voluntarily, be saying it wants to spend time, money and energy in an impossible effort to police the content shared across its own network?

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Last weekend I came accross a recent case, In re Subpoena Issued Pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to: 43SB.COM, LLC, 2007 WL 4335441 (D. Idaho Dec. 7, 2007). The decision came down earlier this month, but I hadn’t read anything about it until now, which is surpising because it is a veritable smörgåsbord of some of our favorite topics — anonymity, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and lawyers threatening to sue for copyright infringement of their cease-and-desist letters.

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(Photo courtesy Dan Gillmor)

At the risk of beating an already unrecognizable horse even further into the ground, I see that there’s a new “Bubble” video from the band Richter Scales available, with the offending image of Owen Thomas–the photo that Lane Hartwell filed a DMCA take-down notice about, forcing YouTube to remove the video–replaced by one of Kara Swisher from All Things D.

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