With all the lack of intestinal fortitude with regard to DMCA requests and various judges’ orders to reveal identities of anonymous bloggers and commenters, it’s heartening to see examples of guts in the face of a clearly bogus DMCA request.

Of course, if you’re to run down the list of likely candidates to stand up such scrutiny, the folks over at Boing-Boing would be high up on that list.

From a post by Cory Doctorow Tuesday:

Last month, Xeni blogged about the photoshop disaster that is this Ralph Lauren advertisement, in which a model’s proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body ("Dude, her head’s bigger than her pelvis"). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question. This is classic fair use: a reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting," etc.

However, Ralph Lauren’s marketing arm and its law firm don’t see it that way. According to them, this is an "infringing image," and they thoughtfully took the time to send a DMCA takedown notice to our awesome ISP, Canada’s Priority Colo. One of the things that makes Priority Colo so awesome is that they don’t automatically act on DMCA takedowns. Instead, they pass them on to us and we talk about whether they pass the giggle-test.

This one doesn’t

Cory goes on to explain how upon consultation of legal counsel and consultation with their hosting company, they consciously decided to ignore the order. No doubt, part of the decision was affected by the fact that their hosting company was not within the borders of the United States.

Still, jurisdictional issues regarding intellectual property and international borders are pretty murky, so the risk to Boing Boing and their host are still not 0%.

This particular case highlights a number of things of interest. For one, the fact that publishers wise to intellectual property vulnerabilities can and do use international borders as a shield is fun for me to see.  I’ve long warned that extensive governmental regulation in technology and content is a sure-fire way to drive creativity, both in app development as well as content production, overseas (or at the very least over the border).

This is ultimately a self-destructive route for the United States government to pursue.  Social media is quickly becoming a required channel for all companies to use in their marketing and customer service efforts.  As Rich Cleland enumerated in a Fast Company interview yesterday, the only people at more risk than bloggers for violation of the new non-disclosure rules are the advertisers.  Should their customers or contractors not properly disclose they open up a world of liability.

The FTC pursuing their landgrab into the world of regulation of digital speech puts at risk every US-based company with a social media strategy. If you don’t think this will eventually drive companies across borders should the FTC start to enforce their new guidelines, you’re sadly mistaken.

All this further interference into the lives of the digerati will impact decisions on where to host.  Who has the better cloud solution will matter less than who has a datacenter in a country without formal relations with the United States.