4chan Introduces DMCA Policy After Celebrity Photo Scandal

The 4chan forums have managed to gain a pretty bad reputation for themselves over the years, no thanks to the endless trolling of posts, weird and horrible images, and so on. However it seems that in light of the recent celebrity nude photo scandal, which originated on 4chan’s forum, it seems that the website has decided to do something about it.

The website has recently decided to add a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown policy to its rules and regulations. This is a bit odd given the questionable content that has made its way onto 4chan in the past, although we guess with the leaked photos receiving so much scrutiny, perhaps 4chan is just trying to protect itself from potential legal ramifications from the incident and in the future.

According to the policy, “It is the Company’s policy…that repeat offenders will have the infringing material removed from the system and that the Company will terminate such content provider’s, member’s or user’s access to the service.”

While this sounds good in theory, it should be noted that 4chan members on /b/ are anonymous by default, which means that even if the takedown were to be requested, 4chan would have no way of informing that particular user of their infringing material, or ban/revoke their access to the website in the future. However we guess it’s still a step in the right direction.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Web