Copyright Holders Punish Themselves With Crazy DMCA Takedowns

torrentfreak.com

72 pointslightspot16 comments

There really needs to be an immediate financial cost associated with incorrect DMCA takedowns.

For instance, the entity the requests are made of (in this case Google) should be able to claim money for every false take down request.

Furthermore, when a request takes down a bunch of material because it's so broad, there should be an extremely steep fine for each item taken down that should not have been taken down.

Logarithmic scale for each item taken down incorrectly.

Or exponential? You want the steep cost if they do it a lot, not for someone who does it once in error. Logarithmic scale would decrease the fine for subsequent infractions.

Yep, you're right and my post is asinine.

So basically, this is a way for movie/music studios to remove bad reviews from the public eye?

I hope Google did take down the official content, just like their owner asked! That might push the industry to take a harder look at their DMCA takedown automation.

Doing that might give these morons the impression that what they do is legit. In the long run that might not work out well for the smaller websites and their content.

Aren't DMCA takedowns notices made under penalty of perjury? Why are they being sent out in what seems to be an automated fashion without any proper review?

Because only the actual copyright holder of the content can counter-sue and most either don't have the resources to counter-sue or also work in the entertainment industry and are ultimately beholden to the same people sending the takedowns in the first place.

I can't wait for someone to finally start taking fraudulent DMCA takedowns to court.

Also, (please correct me if I'm wrong), another hurdle is that you must prove the notice was sent in bad faith - not an easy task.

Only the part where you claim to represent some copyright holder is made under that penalty. So you can't claim to represent Sony when taking something down without getting into trouble. There is a "good faith" clause in the DMCA, but it just doesn't get litigated very often.

This is another instance of those 'clbuttic' mistakes someone can make when they learn regular expressions and think they can easily censor things they don't like.

From the list of "Infringing URLs" for Wrath of the Titans at http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=291695:

17. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1646987/

32. http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/wrathofthetitans/

37. http://www.hulu.com/watch/344340/wrath-of-the-titans---clip-...

These copyright holders either have non-internet people doing their grunt work, or bots. I don't know which one makes them look dumber.

Does anyone else think they've started to just google whatever they're looking for - then submit a takedown for every url in the results? How else do you submit a takedown for a wikipedia page with a straight face?

This is probably the best thing these studios did on the Internet.

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