Michael Crook v. BoingBoing

In November 2006, BoingBoing reported that its Canadian-based ISP received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice from Michael Crook requesting that BoingBoing remove a screengrab of him from a Fox News channel program "Hannity and Colmes" that BoingBoing posted on its blog. Crook had appeared on the Fox program to talk about a website he created, "craigslist-perverts.org," that contains responses sent to fake personal ads posted on Craigslist.

Crook's takedown notice appears to be self-created, and alleges (by all appearances, erroneously) that Crook owns the copyright in the screengrab, which BoingBoing had taken from a program produced and broadcast by Fox News.

BoingBoing characterized the takedown notice as "bogus" and refused to remove the image from its blog. It says that all copyright in the image resides in Fox, which has expressed no concerns about its reuse of the image, and in any event BoingBoing's use of the image falls squarely within fair use. Prioritycolo.com, the upstream provider to BoingBoing's ISP, replied to Crook that it considered the notice to be illegitimate.

This is not the first DMCA takedown notice Crook has sent. The Electronic Frontier Foundation launched and settled a legal action against Crook for sending an allegedly vexatious takedown notice to the ISP for 10 Zen Monkeys complaining about that website's use of the same image. As part of the settlement, Crook agreed to recall the takedown notices, take a copyright law course, and record a video apology. (For more information on the case, see the CMLP database entry for Crook v. 10 Zen Monkeys.)