Board Thread:Wikia Discussion/@comment-22224-20190129194843/@comment-826197-20190130220752

TimmyQuivy wrote: Good morning. I want to address a few points before we proceed:

I understand the concern and skepticism the community has towards this DMCA notice. To be blunt, obviously you guys have noticed some things we noticed and investigated.

How exactly were those things investigated, and what were the findings of those investigations? To this point essentially the most information we've gotten is "we've investigated" or "we've looked into it" or "we've determined its authenticity." I'm sorry, but when random Wikia patrons that have next to no law background (except for a couple of us in here) can find glaring discrepancies in this DMCA that would cause it to be inadmissible in a court of law, then we're missing a great deal of what's going on behind the scenes on your end. Can you please elaborate on what steps have been taken to this point?

Please be aware that the DMCA law and our Safe Harbor status gives us limited recourse for what we can clarify with the copyright holder and how soon we must act. As I stated previously, our general counsel reviewed the situation in its entirety and found it legally binding until such time we have had it retracted by the copyright holder.

Can you please tell us specifically what this general counsel comprises of? Is it a panel of Fandom's administrators? Is it attorneys that are employed by Fandom for issues such as this? I would also like to know how an issue as delicate as this was apparently brought before an official panel and/or lawyers and was decided so quickly as to its legitimacy. As my point stands above, it's taken random Wikia users only about 12 hours to stack the deck in favor of illegitimacy; I would imagine that many days, if not weeks, would be needed to determine with 100% accuracy that this is actually legitimate by a professional legal team.

Someone here has discussed filing a counter notice. I am legally not allowed to give any advice on the matter, but I would urge anyone who would consider that to talk about it with a licensed attorney, as counternotices can open you personally up to significant legal liability.

This is irresponsible on your part. The users of the KanColle Wiki are not who the DMCA are targeted at, despite us being directly affected by its potential outcome; ie, the DMCA does not name individual Wiki users nor the userbase as a single entity. Such, the responsibility for filing a potential counter-suit should fall solely on the shoulders of the body it was cast against, which in this case is Fandom. Your company has (or at least should have) lawyers for reasons exactly like this, we should be taking legal action ourselves.

As I stated, without direct evidence to the contrary, the DMCA Takedown we have is the legally supercedent document and we must act on it. We are pursuing further communication with the owners of the game in hopes of coming to a long-term solution or clarification. I will begin the deletion process within the next few hours.

There is plenty of direct evidence to the contrary, this statement makes it seem as though you and your team have glossed over any potential indications of illegitimacy in favor of immediate, drastic action. I could understand this action being taken after completely and fully ascertaining that this DMCA was filed by the ownership group of KanColle on legitimate grounds; however, this action cannot and should not be taken until it can be proved that without any reasonable doubt that this is a legitimate suit. As things stand right now there are a large number of discrepancies that lead to very reasonable doubt as to this DMCA's legitimacy.