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Gentoo Package Accused of Violating DMCA
cshields2 writes "A recent post to the Gentoo mirrors mailing list passes along a DMCA violation claim that one of the mirror admins recieved. Supposively their bot saw the words "Pac" and "Man" in the filename INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip and assumed it was an illegal copy of PAC-MAN. The file is actually for Unreal Tournament Infiltration. This is comical in one sense, but to be read by a hosting company who does not know any better can be frightening. Has anyone else ran into this with good (or even bad) outcomes?"
This is one of the major problems with the DMCA. By negating the need for a court order to be allowed to send these orders they have opened the door to thousands of frivolous and invalid claims. Companies that have made invalid claims such as this one should be punished. At least they should be held liable for any damages if an ISP removes contents that they claim are infringing. Are these letters totally automated? Didn't somebody actually try to download the file and see if it was indeed an unauthorized copy of pacman?
Also,
>Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the >person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential >and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, >dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, >this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient >is prohibited.
What is this all about? They are trying to hide the fact that they are sending out these letters?
Visualize the world of wine
I think a good faith effort should involve a little more than lame pattern matching.
If companies are you throwing out Cease and Desist letters at random by their bots.. How often do they ever actully follow up on them, or do they just send the letter in the hopes of scaring people off.
The Good Life
So if I've got a file called "HalfLifemappack.zip" on my server they are going to assume that I have an pirated version HL on my webspace/ISP?
What are the factors that decide if a file is really in violation of the DMCA? I can see lots of lameness coming from this type of system.
161MB for Pac Man, eh? Must be all fancy and stuff...
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
The bot is causing a false accusation. .. DO NOT USE IT. You cant go around automating an accusation lawsuit process if it doesnt even work properly.
You can't blame it on the program. If your bot is unreliable
21st century witch hunt is what this is.
At least in the 1600's they got the witches right. Somewhat.
i strongly support this kind of idiocy: there's no better way to discredit the DMCA than to let it do the work for you. in fact, developers should start naming their software after their favorite songs, movies, books -- the sky's the limit! any suggestions? :)
You know, if they want to use computers to help search for copyrighted material, I guess that's fine. But a *person* should actually *look* at the material before they start sending violation notices. What's next, computer lawyers, computer judges? It's the end of the world, I tells ya.
This reminds me of the Simpsons. Homer's car has been impounded by the city of NYC (at the World Trade Center actually), and he's on a pay phone with an automated system:
Pleasant Female Voice: Thank you for calling the Parking Violations Bureau. To plead 'Not Guilty' press one now.
(Homer presses one)
Pleasant Female Voice: Thank You. Your call has been...
Gruff Male Voice: Rejected.
Pleasant Female Voice: You will be assessed the full fine, plus a small...
Gruff Male Voice: Large lateness penalty.
Pleasant Female Voice: Please wait by your vehicle between the hours of nine A.M. and five P.M. for Parking Officer Steve...
Gruff Male Voice: Grabowski.
When spammers go really bad, a lot of us started generating fake email addresses so their bots would find them and get jammed up with crap.
I think its time the same thing happened with DMCA bots. If they are going to be snooping around everything, lets make A LOT of stuff for them to find! Imagine if all of us created web pages that appeared to hold copywrighted material, but don't. Even just a php or cgi page that generated links with *suspicious words* but nothing of interest. No actual person would use them, but the DMCA bots would see a jackpot. Then, when actual people followed up, they'd find absolutely nothing wrong. That would gum them up pretty badly.
So who wants to spearhead this?
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
What's next, automatic indictment by computer? "Sorry sir, the computer has ascertained that there is a 94% probability that you murdered your wife. The trial begins Wednesday."
ESA has a good faith belief that the Internet site found at {IPAddress} continues to infringe the rights of one or more ESA members by offering for download one or more unauthorized copies of one or more game products protected by copyright
"Sanctions: A form of financial 'punishment' where a Judge can order a party or attorney to pay for not following Court orders or not acting in good faith in a Court proceeding."
While it's all fun and games to laugh at this, what if AT&T had cut off his connection? What if that connection was vital to business?
I don't know how you go and get sanctions levied at organizations like this, but the ESA clearly violated good faith in this circumstance.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
and Desist letter citing the DMCA because we have a couple of large files
with the word "Junior" in their names. Junior-2.2-CD1.iso and
Junior-2.2-CD1.iso are in a directory called
which pretty much says that they are
Linux distributions in CD image to anyone vaguely clued.
But Vevendi (or
their funky infringement-seeking robot) thinks they might be the 1994
Arnold S bomb, Junior,
To respond to their completely bogus complaint, we have to grab the files
and install 'em and then report back. At our time and expense. I am not
full of love over this. It's their job to find a infringements -- not just
make a few guesses and then demand that we do the rest of the work for
them for free. Makes me wanna see a movie for free! (not Junior however).
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
Similar to the way people have salted web pages with phony email addresses to poison robots that scrape web pages for email addresses an effective way to poison the DMCA robots is to salt your web site with nonsense files with names the robots will pick up. There is a procedure for contesting DMCA take down notices. http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~benjamin-chapman/c le/dmca_summary.htm
My brother and I run a online game called TFOS Mux (www.tfosmux.org). It's based on a roleplaying game by R Talasorian Games and we have permission.
Our game is set in the fictional city of Pebble Beach, in an undetermined state. We state on our web site that it is not affiliated with the original Pebble Beach Golf Course (which we learned about five years after we'd started playing), but jokingly make a comment about a mini golf course for wayward visitors.
In January we received a C&D letter from the lawyers of Pebble Beach Company, stating that our online site was causing confusion in the marketplace and that we must immediatly change our name.
TFOS stands for Teenagers From Outer Space. It's a roleplaying game based in anime, where aliens come to Earth, go to high school and such.
-Aliens
-High School
-Anime
-Statement that we aren't the REAL Pebble Beach
Pebble Beach Company
-Golf
-Florida (or is it CA?)
-Real
These corporations/DMCABots are sending out C&Ds without even looking at what they're sending it out. Five seconds on our web page would have saved them and us a lot of trouble.
Fortunatly, my brother contacted the EFF, and a lawyer wrote to them....and we haven't heard from PBC since.
Why hasn't anyone tried to take them to court for wrongful prosecution, or whatever violation they're committing?
It could be construed as harassment. The ESA has deep pockets, and they could get out of it fairly well. I still think that filing small claims for $5K would get their attention if everybody started doing it. You can represent yourself, and say that it caused emotional damage as well as technical time to validate their claim. On top of wasted bandwidth and time, at your contracted rate, you can get a decent damage claim.
"They said this file was infringing, I had to verify no files were actually part of what they were saying. It was unreasonable to assume they made the claim based purely on a filename. I spent 60 hours verifying no intellectual property violations where there, and expect to be compensated."
It would be funny, anyway.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
We get about 3-4 of these a day, roughly 1 per thousand accounts. It has gotten to the point were you have to review them, to live up to your end of the law. However out of the 90-120 I get per month usually 1 will have any merit at all and this is usually cleared up with all due haste when the webmaster is notified. The funniest one (or saddest depending on how you look at) was when someone tried to register techcomputerbay.com and was notified within 24 hours by ebay that this was copyright infringement because it had e and bay in the domain name. We of course notified the registrant, and told him that this was between him and ebay and we were going to stay out of the way unless ordered by a court to perform an action. Point being this is happening way more than most people realize, and it takes a lot of time to sort through the BS ones.
Gotta move
On the part of the company sending that letter out. The DMCA may allow them to do that, but I wonder if it shields them from liability for doing so improperly? Seems like you could sue them for defamation, all the pieces are there. They've accused you of being a software pirate, someone else has seen the accusation and you had to spend time (and money) answering the complaint. I'll admit my knowledge on defamation suits is lacking, maybe someone with more legal background could comment. The real meat is punitive damages and I'm not sure what a court would see in this. Reputations are fragile things and to have yours slandered by someone not exercising a reasonable and appropriate level of care (ie looking at the file name before sending the notice) seems pretty serious. I'd probably at least have my lawyer call them. That gets their attention.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
May I suggest that someone put together a DMCAbot honeypot with loads of .zip filenames which contain words that appear in many popular games and other copyrighted materials.
If you could go to a court with, say, 100 of these ridiculous claims from a particular firm of lawyers for files in your honeypot, then maybe the courts would listen and do something about these claims?
I guess I'll have to find a new name for my latest project: BritneySpearsAVIMP3WarezSuperMarioBrosWindowsXPEpi sodeIII. (It turns Caps Lock on when you sneeze)
As I mentioned in the list post, yes, this is silly and amusing, but it still has to be treated seriously. I met with our company lawyer yesterday (who is pretty well-versed in the DMCA, and hence has slightly less than glowing praise about it). The basic response of course is to reply, explaining that they are in error and to consider the matter closed.
While I would like nothing better than to go after these people for gross abuse of the legal system, my company, like many other companies, cannot justify the costs associated with going to court over something like this. This is why you should donate to an organization like the EFF, and tell them you are concerned about the DMCA and its effects.
(Standard IANAL disclaimer for the following:) Also, check out this form if you are a mirror provider. It deals specifically with the DMCA, but does not necessarily provide protection against, but it may help. It is intended for transit providers/datacenters (which we are), but from reading its defintion of a "service provider", mirror sites MAY (again, IANAL) qualify in the same respect.
This letter was hysterical because apart from being in slightly broken English, it mentioned the name "Toho Co., Ltd" about every sentence, and was full of self-praise about how great and honorable Toho Co., Ltd was.
At first, he ignored it. Then the company came down on him because they got a letter from Toho Co., Ltd's lawyers. There was some debate, and the company decided that it wasn't worth their time to try and deal with this, so they dropped the issue.
The coworker *was* a Godzilla fan, so he wrote back to Toho Co., Ltd that "Godzilla" was not a trademark, but "Gojirra," the proper kanakata spelling was a trademark, and he did not have an account with that name, nor did he have the ability to open an account with that name unless they paid or company for the e-mail address.
They never replied. He had the letter posted on his door for a while, with a photoshop of Godzilla attacking our building. Then Godzilla 2000 ("Ferris Beuller vs. Godzilla") came out, and I think Toho Co., Ltd probably never wanted to deal with Americans again.
__________________________________________________ _
www.punkwalrus.com - As seen on "The Gong Show"
We had the same thing happen to us. One of our mirrors recieved a nasty gram about the OpenOffice file that was on their system. A little bit of digging found that their script was assuming ANYTHING with OFFICE in the name was a pirate copy of MS Office. It was rather entertaining.
Scott Carr
IANAL (although I did score 163 on the LSAT's and turned down a partial scholarship to law school), but this appears to me to be a case of Defamation, Tortious Interference, and Abuse of Process.
Note they claim a good faith belief. Based on what? It's based on insufficient investigation to found a "good faith belief", and is therefore negligent. Their reckless act has caused you, among other ills: personal distress, time lost in correcting the matter, and harm to your reputation.
You should definitely consult a lawyer about your rights to sue this law firm for their reckless and defamatory acts against you!
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
"...it would be pretty hard to prove it wasn't there."
and that's the problem with the DMCA and other laws like this. With a complex situation or structure you can't prove a negative. This is one of the fundamentals of science, in terms of hyoptheses becoming theories. If there is no way to test a hypothesis in such a way as to get a confirmed pass/fail test, then it's not a very good theory.
As for the 'encoding', read "Radio Free Ablemuth" by Philip K. Dick. It specifically addressed this kind of freakishness with coded messages. Or go see "A Beautiful Mind". Another example of why it's not feasible to go around accusing someone who can't prove a negative result. I feel that it should be criminal to accuse someone without having a verifiable positive first showing that they've actually done something wrong. Yeah, this puts the burden of proof on the accuser. Isn't that what the constitution says, with "Innocent until proven guilty"?
Not to give the media conglomerates any more work or anything...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Something to remember about systems is that they have limitations. Something can only store or process so much information at any given point. If people determine the functional bounds of the system, they know how to break it or render it less useful.
Case in point: the idea of a national database on everyone alive
If one, hypothetically, saw the creation of a national database on people, it wouldn't be hard to 'fake' information on a decent scale that is patently false information. It would require some creativity, but it could probably be done in a way that isn't even illegal. It's called fiction. Create stories with names in them, create stories with numbers in them. Make up numbers. We all know that social security numbers are XXX-XX-XXXX format, so it wouldn't be hard to say that "Ol' Jim Houston" has 234-11-5532 for a social security number. So, the national database spidering software might pick up that number and note that the true owner of that number has an alias of "Ol' Jim Houston". Write a story about this character where he uses his 'number', so it comes up. Movies do it all of the time, if you've ever seen "FX", they used SSNs in determining information about bad guys. Create "likes" pages. Say someone likes guns, or rabbits, or construction, or water parks, or anything. Email it around. If there's something out there that we don't like, it'll collect the information. Email "bad" words around without context, in such a way that they trip Carnivore or similar systems but do such in a way to make it obvious that they're complete and utter bullshit.
Make the system have so much information to process, categorize, and store that it either has to ignore information entirely or that it fails in the middle of doing its job. Or, make it so that if it manages to process everything that it gets that it stores so much bad information that the 'record' for any given individual is useless. I'd love to see it store that I go dowhill skiing every Northern Hemisphere summer down in Australia, or that I frequent BDSM clubs, or that I helped design the rocket car "The Spirit of America", just so that there is no credibility to any of the information at all in the system, since nothing can be easily verified as being correct. This breaks the system at a use level.
If a million geeks decide to do this, the ability for any given system to work is very low. I'm sure that people will complain that we're endangering national security, but remember, terrorists that we've seen, Timothy McVeigh, the DC area snipers, the Abortion Clinic bombers, and the WTC/Pentagon attackers, didn't do what they did in a way that was detectable through the methods that they want to start using. They did it with a rental truck and farming fertilizer, or boxcutters, or a rifle and a sheetmetal-modified car. Does any of this revolve around computers? ANY of it?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.