• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, June 11, 2008

Last December, at the height of charitable giving season, the nonprofit group Showing Animals Respect and Kindness expected that clips it posted to YouTube showing live rodeos would spur animal lovers to visit their site and, perhaps, send in donations.

Instead, YouTube closed the group's account on Dec. 11, after the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association complained that clips like "Horses Illegally Shocked at 2007 Cheyenne PRCA Rodeo," and "Rodeo Bulls -- Killers, or Gentle Giants?" infringed its copyright. The account was eventually restored, but after the end-of-year donation season had passed.

Now, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation has gotten involved. This week, the EFF sued the rodeo organization in federal court. The EFF is asking the court to declare that the clips don't violate the rodeo group's copyright and ban the organization from sending further takedown notices regarding the clips. The EEF also is seeking damages for the animal rights activists; those could potentially include lost donations during the period the clips were removed.

It's understandable why the rodeo association wasn't happy with the clips, but surely it had other means of countering the message than to try to censor them by claiming copyright infringement.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives sites like YouTube a strong incentive to take down clips first and ask questions later: The act's safe harbor provisions provide that the site isn't generally liable for infringement committed by users, but only if it removes pirated clips upon request. Without court intervention, it's inevitable that people will continue to use this law to make critical material disappear, even if only for a short time.