Ashley Madison Seeks Relief – In Copyright Law
Hacker group Impact Team has followed through on its threat to release over 30 million user records from the extramarital dating service Ashley Madison, but site owner Avid Life Media continues using copyright law to limit the distribution of the leak. Relying on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Avid Life has successfully obtained takedowns of links to the data posted onFacebook, Twitter and Reddit. Additional takedown notices have shut down metasites permitting search of the data leak by account email address or phone number. Despite the extensive public criticism of Avid Life for its alleged misuse of the DMCA, it appears to be a relatively successful strategy.
Whether the data is actually subject to the DMCA, on the other hand, is a completely separate question. The general consensus is that the user account information is no more than a compilation of data, which the United States Supreme Court clarified in 1996 is not protectable under copyright law:
As a constitutional matter, copyright protects only those constituent elements of a work that possess more than a de minimis quantum of creativity. . . As a statutory matter, 17 U. S. C. § 101 does not afford protection from copying to a collection of facts that are selected, coordinated, and arranged in a way that utterly lacks originality.
Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340, 363-64 (1996). Are there other intellectual property paradigms that may cover the data? Trade secret is the most likely, but such a characterization takes the data out of the realm of the DMCA.
As a basic tool to discourage copyright infringement, the DMCA is easy to use and provides a simple mechanism to notify potential infringers. Securing takedowns from major sites, however, may be the least of Avid Life’s problems – 20 additional gigabytes of internal emails and data were released August 20, 2015.
Sources: http://gizmodo.com/the-ashley-madison-hackers-just-dumped-more-data-a-lot-1725392927 http://www.thedomains.com/2015/08/20/ashley-madison-hacked-info-site-checkashleymadison-com-taken-down-after-dmca-notice/
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