Pirate site with No Traffic attracts 49m bogus DMCA notices | Hacker News Reader

Pirate site with No Traffic attracts 49m bogus DMCA notices

torrentfreak.com

158 pointskilburn39 comments

> Instead of scanning the site and sending an accurate takedown notice to Google, APDIF tries to guess the URLs where MP3Toys stores its content.

So, they commit a federal crime, then (when they send the DMCA notice)?

The courts have ruled that unauthorized directory traversal is illegal. The case against weev already proved that.

Can't they now be sued for invalid DMCA's? It's perjury to lie about those things I believe. One probably shouldn't fully automate something that perjures you if it's wrong.

Sadly the law is set up so that total negligence is okay. As long as you don't specifically know it's invalid, you can send out all the DMCAs you want.

B-b-b-but I didn't know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So can we simply bulk-send registered letters to everyone involved so they know and we know they know?

Unfortunately, the only element of a DMCA notice that's made under penalty of perjury is the one least likely to involve perjury: the claim to be authorized to act on behalf of an entity which holds copyright. All the other elements of a notice you can lie about until you're blue in the face, and there is no perjury involved.

Not sure where you are getting this from.

Penalties are provided for knowing material misrepresentations in either a notice or a counter notice. Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that it was removed or blocked through mistake or misidentification, is liable for any resulting damages (including costs and attorneys’ fees) incurred by the alleged infringer, the copyright owner or its licensee, or the service provider. (Section 512(f)).

That's talking about being liable for damages.

The only thing that's asserted under penalty of perjury is that you're authorized to act on behalf of a copyright holder. If you lie about everything except that one fact, the only thing that can happen to you is someone can try (and good luck with that...) to claim damages from you. The only way you face perjury charges is if you lie about being authorized to act for the copyright holder.

"knowingly"

I think that may have been added after the initial act.

It is my opinion that no one should accept an automated DMCA notice. Without human review, how can one attest to anything, especially since it is possible that fair use might apply.

If you're a search engine and I send you a billion takedown notices, of which one is legitimate, and you don't comply with that one, then you will be liable for infringement. Is it worth the risk?

That's the point. Email spam works because sending a billion emails costs nearly nothing, and these companies in effect spam takedown notices that clearly have no basis in reality. A DMCA takedown is supposed to be a legal document, I've never once heard of legal documents that it's ok to just throw into the fucking wind with a minigun, that metaphor working both for quantity and accuracy here.

This is similar to the problem where YouTube content claims cause all video revenue to be diverted to the complainant, before any review has actually occurred and leaving no recourse to the victim. There's literally zero downsides to filing the claim, so why not do it? Why not claim everything?

Here's an even better question: Why should search engines be complicit in DCMA takedowns? They're link aggregators only. Send the DCMA requests to the websites directly.

Torrent websites are "link aggregators" only as well, yet they get taken down.

I don't think it's not the same if you mostly link to infringing torrents or link to a lot of the Internet which might include infringing files..

Unrelated: I wonder why the textarea for posting comments on HN turn orange when you click on it? It is really annoying....

You should not be able to send automated takedown requests either in the first place

Why not play their own game and submit a takedown notice for everything on YouTube.

Good luck telling the humans from the machine. Form demand/takedown emails are the norm amongst human lawyers, and for good reason.

To sue you need to articulate some form of damages. Im not sure a no-traffic website can do that. This isnt much different than the dozens if spam emails i get from "banks". Sure, what they are doing is fraud, but that doesnt mean i have grounds for a lawsuit without me first falling for the con.

Is it perjury if you were never sworn to not perjure yourself?

A valid DMCA notice requires just such a declaration.

Which means either:

- It does not contain a declaration of truth under penalty of perjury in which case it is invalid - It contains an automated declaration of truth under penalty of perjury. I believe even an automated declaration opens up the declarer to perjury. If it does not, then it is a fraudulent DMCA notice. - It contains manual declaration of truth under penalty of perjury, which would require a human to have reviewed the document and made such a declaration.

No. It's called Fraud instead.

This smells like it's designed to maximize numbers that get reported back to APDIF's members as "number of pirates shut down" instead of actually preventing infringement.

Also, people have gone over the perjury stuff, but isn't there some kind of ground that encompasses flooding somebody with groundless legal demands/notices like this? I'm not sure tortious interference or abuse of process would apply, but the general principle seems to be around in various forms.

So if I understand this story correctly, the .xyz site robots have baited APDIF robots into filing complaints to googles robots which in turn block .xyz sites URLs? For what purpose? Is is just to promote their site? Or is it so that .xyz can now sue Google for removing their URLS without doing their due diligence based on future losses? Very interesting concept, might this be an early example of machine warfare?

Reminds me of (web) spider traps! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_trap

If it's an extension of this idea, then it's been around for a while already (close to 20 years?)

while I understand what you meant, it's kind of funny that "web spider" could refer to both of them!

I doubt that .xyz did this intentionally. They just wanted to "capture" 404 traffic by responding to every URL with some content.

If just 1% of real users that hit this 404 page decided to stay on the site and browse related links, that's a huge win.

Indeed one has to wonder whether there are, say, Adsense ads inserted into those instapages.

This is amazing.

tl;dr APDIF guesses the URL for the infringing content, mp3toys.xyz auto-generates a page with different infringing content as soon as the new URL accesses that route, new URL gets indexed by google in the DMCA takedown notice.

if only they could also monetize the fake DMCA requests as well

Did someone with knowledge of APDIF's practices make this site to exploit a weakness in their automation? That would be precious.

More likely it's a site used for seo spam. You see similar auto-generated sites for Windows error messages advertising "registry cleaner" programs.

This is a fascinating example of frivolous use of takedown requests. Presumably it is prohibited to make a takedown request on something upon which you do not own copyright? Can this be contested in any way?

By the person who has had material wrongfully taken down, yes. But these fake takedowns dont result in material actually being taken down. So no.

This hits close to home. I worked on a music blog and we got thousands of bogus DMCA takedowns. You basically have zero recourse from the SEO punishment.

How can a Brazilian organisation send a DMCA request in the first place? Unless I missed that DMCA has somehow been elevated to international law.

It's been a while since I read up on this, but I believe that under the Berne Convention, foreign copyrights of signatories are entitled to the same protections that each signatory provides to domestic copyrights. In that case, the applicability depends on whether the recipient, not the copyright owner, is subject to US jurisdiction.

They're sending the requests to US Google to have the links delisted. Google in the US complies with DMCA.

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