Musk suspends “overzealous” rightsholders for “weaponizing” DMCA on Twitter
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
Yesterday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk declared that Twitter will now be temporarily suspending any accounts found to be engaging in repeated, egregious weaponization" of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Musk's tweet came at the same time that an intense copyright dispute was unfolding that resulted in the suspension of a rightsholder's Twitter account. The suspension came after a professional photographer and Twitter user, @NightLights_AM, submitted a takedown notice to a hobbyist Twitter user, @Rainmaker1973, who posted one of the photographer's videos without permission.
It's difficult to track down the full story here because the suspended account's tweets are unavailable, and some of the hobbyist account's tweets have been deleted. And it's unclear if Musk was aware of this particular dispute or the subsequent account suspension of the rightsholder. But TorrentFreak documented the DMCA Twitter saga in great detail, gathering archived and cached tweets to piece together what happened.
According to TorrentFreak, @NightLights_AM is run by Norway-based nature and astrophotographer Adrien Mauduit, whose Twitter feed was full of colorful videos and photos that he took as an Aurora chasing specialist." In early March, Mauduit uploaded a video of a geomagnetic storm that was then embedded in a tweet sent by @Rainmaker1973, which is run by an Italy-based Twitter user named Massimo.