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Warner Brothers: Automated Takedown Notices Hit Files That Weren't Ours
itwbennett writes "In a court case between Hotfile.com and Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers admitted they sent takedown orders for thousands of files they didn't own or control. Using an automated takedown tool provided by Hotfile, Warner Brothers used automated software crawlers based on keywords to generate legal takedown orders. This is akin to not holding the Post Office liable for what people mail, or the phone companies liable for what people say. But the flip side is that hosters must remove files when receiving a legal takedown notice from the copyright holder — even when the copyright holders themselves don't know what material they actually own."
Yes, it is. However, if one submits such a false take down notice, the according to the DMCA they can be charged with perjury. It's too bad that (to my knowledge) no-one has taken advantage of this...
... they have to in good faith attest that they have the copyrights to those items they send takedown notices for ....
The global judicial infrastructure is not based on good faith. You can't go into a court say you own a country and be granted legislative priviledges to that without research to affirm your claims. So why should individuals be forced to follow other individuals' claims in good faith? With the same concept spamers would have to just order you to install spyware.
That doesn't seem very consistent or legit or even healthy reasoning.
-- no sig today
"Spray and pray" indeed. I received a couple of DMCA takedown notices... and I live in Canada. They don't even know what jurisdiction they're sending these automated notices to. Maybe it is a difficult task to keep tabs on the entire Internet protecting their copyrights. I'd say that the fact that they can't do it reliably means they are going about it in the wrong way.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully