Disgraced ministry wields DMCA against dissenters

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a tool of the modern-day scoundrel to bop people around with. The 1998 law is a rogue law, passed by a rogue Congress. As part of the post-1994 spittle wave, I deem it null and void (being the regular guy I am).

But that doesn't stop the silly assclowns of the Far Right from wielding the DMCA in an attempt to bludgeon all who dare to disagree with them.

Kent Hovind - who got an entry on the Conservative Fool Of The Day blog back in its heyday - is a right-wing Young Earth creationist minister who was so obsessed with the idea of dinosaurs coexisting with humans that he started a theme park based on this notion. (One of Hovind's funniest claims is his insistence that the Loch Ness Monster is a dinosaur.) Hovind also declared that he was going to renounce his American citizenship so he could avoid paying taxes. Now Hovind is serving 10 years in prison for tax evasion.

Hovind founded a ministry called Creation Science Evangelism, which is now run by his son, Eric Hovind. Now this group is sending out bogus, idiotic DMCA notices to YouPube trying to silence video clips it disagrees with.

The funny part is that anyone who sends out these notices must swear under penalty of perjury that they own the copyright on the material in question and that they actually believe the material is encroaching on their copyright. Now it turns out that this ministry had explicitly declined to copyright its own materials and actually encouraged people to distribute them. But not too long ago, they suddenly began claiming all these items were copyrighted.

So which is it?

Are they copyrighted or not? Or are the Hovinds just changing their minds to suit the purpose at hand? And if the Hovinds, like other conservatives, think the Newt is so great that the DMCA is a legitimate law, that means they have to be bound by the perjury part too, don't they?

Because they initially encouraged distribution of their materials, it's obvious they're using the DMCA just to silence opponents - not to stop a copyright infringement. So if the DMCA is legit like they think, that means they've committed perjury.

Maybe Congress can settle this shit once and for all by repealing the DMCA (like they're s'posed) so the Hovinds can't use it to bully people around in the first place.

(Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070919-dr-dino-uses-dmca-takedowns-on-critics-admits-to-mistakes.html)