Years of Howard Stern’s interviews with Trump now gone after DMCA takedown (original) (raw)

Similarly, Wendy Seltzer, an attorney to the World Wide Web Consortium and founder of the Lumen Database (formerly Chilling Effects, which keeps track of DMCA notices), said that she was pretty convinced that it is a fair use case.

"People aren’t substituting away from the current show to these transcripts," she told Ars. "They’re reading or listening to these excerpts for a fundamentally different purpose. The purpose and character of the use is for informing oneself about the news and not for the same entertainment purpose or newsworthy purpose at the time as when they were originally published or broadcast."

Down a Stern-shaped rabbit hole

Frischling also said he be would happy if SiriusXM or Howard Stern simply published the audio on their own websites.

Earlier this year, FactSquared had solicited Reddit and other Stern fan sites to obtain copies of all the shows on which Trump had ever appeared, largely as a public service. Bootleg Stern recordings freely circulate on BitTorrent, among other online venues.

While other media outlets had referred to some snippets, no one had made available the full archive before. It wasn’t until early September that someone anonymously e-mailed a Dropbox link with all of the audio files of the entire shows where Trump appeared. Frischling’s company’s software transcribed, analyzed, and linked this cache in an entirely new way.

"If you take that and look at that, Howard Stern had spoken with Trump more than anybody else, over a wider period," Frischling added. "A quarter century, same person, same relationship, quarter century. Stern is a phenomenal interviewer. He gets people to say things that they’ve never said before."

While FactSquared offers similar types of text, audio, and video analysis to corporate clients, the Trump archive was freely made available.

SiriusXM did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.