In a similar story Warner Bros abused the DMCA to take down HotFile content that didn't infringe their copyright.
http://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-admits-sending-hotfile-f...
Label's and studio's have every right to defend their products. However, they must do it in a responsible way. Stories like this make it difficult for politicians to legislate for more power's when the existing ones are already being abused by those they are set up to protect.
To be honest I found Warner Bro's mistake, apart from the OSS takedown, to be not that odious, you can't on the one hand have the web industry say that trying to deal with so much infringing content is almost impossible because there's too much of it, and on the other moan that Warner Bros make a few mistakes when trying to deal with that vast amount of infringing content, not on one site but on hundreds of sites.
There's a happy medium somewhere and safe harbour isn't it, for example YouTube knows that hence the auto filtering software they've developed.
Universal's action, however, is pure censorship in a massively misguided attempt to further their own goals. Ultimately it has resulted in utter failure.
On the one hand many sites are making no attempt to stop the flood, pointing at the DMCA, on the other the film and music industry want to legitimately stop these files being shared.
I guess what I'm saying is are they supposed to download and watch every single file?
As that's precisely what the website owners have claimed is something they can't do, but the music/film industry suddenly has to do that on 100s of sites?
It's a rock/hard place scenario.
- Things that sounded sort of maybe like "The Box", like "The Box That Changed Britain" and "Cancer Step Outsider of the Box" (sic)
- Portuguese Harry Potter fanfiction unrelated to the films
- Open-source software that Warner Bros. didn't approve of since it might speed up downloads
- "URLs" such as "http://hotfile.com/contacts.html and give them the details of where the link wasposted and the link and they will deal to the @sshole who posted the fake."
Does that really represent a reasonable effort on their part to get it right?
But in the end the music/film industry has been asked, with little to no programming skills, to try and regulate the web industry, who's livelihood depends on lots of programming skill.
I think YouTube have moved strategically as they can see where that's ultimately going to end up, with a swing back towards sites doing the filtering.
It's time they got theirs. Seriously.
No. But they could at least glance at the titles to make sure they're not firing off takedown requests for content that is quite obviously unrelated to the IP in question. Instead they're doing mindless searches for words that appear in their movie titles and submitting takedown requests automatically, which is pretty obviously an abusive practice.
If you want to use a legal mechanism to force a company remove content from a site, you should be required to put in at least the most basic good faith effort to make sure that you're actually forcing them to remove something that is your IP.
Sure, I get the whining about how it's a lot of work, but look...if enforcing your property rights is too much of a burden to be realistically achieved, then your business model is broken and you should find another type of work.
One problem is that they weren't even doing that well. I mean, they tried to take down things that weren't even files. They weren't just being fooled by deceptive files, they acted against correctly labeled items they did not own.
Now, if you're saying that it's totally impossible to police this, then I agree with you. The problem is that no one can do better than them in terms of knowing who has permission to do what. Yeah, they could be a lot less sloppy in their copy-pasting, but if even they don't know what they own, who does?
Now, there are still ways for artists to get paid in spite of this impossibility, and I think everyone wholly supports that. Everyone wants to see the artists succeeding. If not for them, there would be nothing to enjoy. But that impossibility of enforcement isn't going to go away no matter how much power we give them to censor stuff.
The more power we give these labels, the more innocent people are going to get caught in the crossfire.
It's my most recent dataset for a Thorium reactor design. Or it's a catalog of theses that mention a certain Norse guide.
> I guess what I'm saying is are they supposed to download and watch every single file?
Yes. They're claiming ownership.
Let's look at it from the other side - how can the upload site know who owns the copyright for something?
There is no happy medium anymore than a few rapes now and then are acceptable because you can't always be sure about what the other party wants.
The only solution is to the claimant (human, not script) throughtly research it beforehand and then bill the infringer for the time it took when they go to court.
Labels and studios should not be allowed to move without the express content of the artist who produced the work. Better yet, labels and studio should just move when solicited by an artist.
On the off-chance you haven't already read this: http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
I wonder if you can choose not to use the label's equipment so you can keep more of your royalties.