I Have No Legal Mouthpiece
And I Must Scream

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals cleared a path for Harlan Ellison to sue AOL, reversing a lower court ruling that had dismissed his copyright infringement suit against the online services provider. Basically, it seems to boil down to this: Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an ISP can be shielded from such litigation when its users violate copyright, as long as it has a system in place to deal with infringement complaints. Simply put, you tell an ISP one of their customers is publishing your work without authorization, they tell him to lose the content or lose the site, and that's that.

AOL's handling of such matters, though, was so disorganized as to constitute not having implemented such a system, or at least not having done so effectively, thus opening it up to a lawsuit after spent two weeks ignoring Ellison's complaints about unauthorized republication of his stories on a user's web pages.

Intellectual property rights mavens among the Beatrice readership may wish to peruse the text of the decision (PDF file, brought to my attention by Mark Evanier). UPDATE: BoingBoing calls our attention to an analysis by EFF staff attorney Jason Schultz.