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GoPro Issues DMCA Takedown Over Negative Review
skade88 writes "Ars is reporting that GoPro, the company that makes cameras used in extreme sports such as sky diving and swimming with dolphins has issued a DMCA take down notice on a review at DigitalRev that they do not like. See DMCA notice here. From the article: 'DigitalRev has a blog post up about the takedown, suggesting that most DMCA takedowns are "abusive" in nature. "We hope GoPro is not suggesting, with this DMCA notice, that camera reviews should be done only when they are authorized by the manufacturers," writes DigitalRev. "GoPro (or should we call you Go*ro instead?), we'd be interested to hear what you have to say" about the infringement notice.'"
I'll be definitely looking into the Sony AS15 now.
Sony has copyright bullying skeletons in its own proverbial closet. Search keywords: Lik Sang; George Hotz
According to their response on Reddit, it was a disagreement over how their products appear in DigitalRev's "ecommerce section." http://www.salon.com/2013/03/20/a_lesson_from_gopro_dont_mess_with_reddit/
Their ISP may have given them no choice.
Isn't there some sort of purjury thing for filing false DMCA claims?
Lenz v. Universal suggests that there are theoretically penalties for bad-faith filing of false claims; but that particular result also took on the order of five years of litigation(only possible if you are an EFF test case or made of money), and didn't actually include any punishment for Universal, so practice suggests that there are no penalties whatsoever.
Thanks for the heads up on this issue. The letter that was posted next to the review on DigitalRev was not sent in response to the review.
That explains why their DCMA request clearly pointed to the URL of their online store:
Accordingly, we hereby demand that Softlayer.com immediately remove or disable access to the Infringing Material at:
http://www.digitalrev.com/article/gopro-hero-3-vs-sony/Njk3MDQ3MDg_A
Yup. Nothing to do with the review here...
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
except the takedown notice explicitly mentions the review URL, not a product for sale.
I was interested in a GoPro as well, but I just can't give money to Sony. Looks like I'll need to find something else.
"Action cameras" are an increasingly crowded segment. Heck, Monoprice, the guys who sell reasonably-priced HDMI cables and such, have released a house-branded one. That's part of why GoPro courting bad PR seems so insane: Right now, they have a pretty dominant brand; but it isn't as though shoving some cellphone parts into a ruggedized case is exactly a proprietary super-secret lost art of master craftsmanship. It seems... foolish... to squander a lead by looking like total dickheads in public.
The "won't GoPro (pun intended), so you MUST deal with Sony" thing misses on one point. There are more than two players in the "ruggedized camera" market. For example, Nikon, during the film era, was synononymous with dive cameras, in the "Nikonos" line, and Hasselblad has cameras so rugged that they can literally fly to the moon (Apollo's cameras were all Hasselblads). Both Nikon and Hasselblad have digital cameras, and they're rugged, but neither of them has one rugged enough to claim that it's up to their exacting standards yet. Canon also makes ruggedized cameras, and even lowly Vivitar has a digital in their "sea and ski" line. As a prosumer videographer, I wouldn't touch Sony if you paid me anyways, they invariably tend to have just slightly crappier CCD/CMOSes than the rest of the market, and they want to push you toward their crappy bundled tech (memory stick, I'm looking at you). If they made a Nikonos digital, I'd break limbs to be the first to mortgage my soul to get one
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Contour is a great option.
http://contour.com/
Sig?! Sig?! We don't need no stinking sig!!
SoftLayer have a history of being very aggressive on DMCA takedown orders - you may get as little as four hours to remove the content or have your server taken offline. Even if it's a shared server hosting many accounts.
Find another camera. Sony hates you even more than GoPro does.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I own a GoPro, a version 1, the Hero 960.
I've taken it diving and biking. It was down deep enough that I am undergoing continued health problems from that dive. (looong story) but the camera did fine. Diving cameras and housing start around $600, so the 960 was about half that price when I got it.
The problem with the camera is that it shows you what happened, but not in a lot of detail. You can't get really close to stuff and it's always fish-eyed. The basic models don't have an LCD display so you don't know what you've filmed.
The interface is also totally stupid (I've used worse, but only for weirdly specific electronics). They fixed that on the newer versions apparently. Same with the case, there was a chance it would pop open when surfacing. Workarounds exist but again, it was fixed in the 3.
The Hero2 suffers from too much heat, so taking it diving can make it foggy. That'll ruin a day's photos. Turns out you can cut up a tampon and that will do enough of a job dessicating the case that you can get a good day's shots.
Check out the threads on Scubaboard. They don't pull punches anywhere on that forum.
Would I get another one? No. It's great to have as a fun toy, but for getting really good pictures I'm going to have to spend double or more compared to what the GoPro sells for.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I surf, and ride motorcycles, so my girl decided a gopro would make a cool xmas gift this year. We went to New Zealand in December so she gave it to me early...
Strike 1:
So before we left on our trip, she ordered a Hero3 silver from gopro's website, which advertised "ships by Nov 30th" when she placed the order. After hearing nothing for 4 business days, not even an order confirmation, but having her CC charged $300+tax, she checked the website again and it said the Hero 3 cameras were on 14 day backorder. She then attmpetd to call GoPro. Big mistake. It took 54 minutes to get a live person on the phone. They stated that they could not guarantee when the camera would ship, and could not cancel the order. She gave up, called her Credit card company and disputed the charge, then she went to Best Buy and bought the camera off the shelf there for the same price. The camera from the gopro website never showed up and she got a cryptic email two weeks later from a manager saying the order was cancelled.
Strike 2:
Fast forward two weeks. We used the camera in New Zealand while enjoying our trip, and I was learning to use the camera etc... It seemed ot work OK but had really bad battery life but not a huge deal as I ordered the extended battery pack along with several other accessories, totall around $120. Then we went on a road trip to Baja for New Years. While driving south the GoPro locked up. At that point it wouldn't record at all, evena fter removing the battery and memory card and reinsterting. When we got back I found out it had corrupted the memory card so badly that I couldn't get any videos from that trip off of it. I then followed gopro instructions to reset the camera, and the website said there was a known issue and directed me to update the firmware, but I already had the most recent. Long story slightly shorter, I spent several hours messing with the camera, was hung up on after waiting on hold for 45 min by gopro support, and bought another SD card ($20), before returning it to Best Buy and getting a replacemnet camera.
Strike 3:
Now I have my new camera #2 all updated with the same FW (12/15/2012) and new memory card (which I have two of now) and it seems to work. Yay! So I start recording my commute to work on my motorcycle. After a couple weeks, this camera starts doing the EXACT same thing as my last one. Locks up, corrupts memory cards, factory reset/FW flash/Card reformat doesn't help for more than a few videos. This took about 30-40 videos to start happening, just like the first camera. This time I email gopro support hoping fro better luck. I didn't hear back for 9 days, when I got an email telling me to do all the things I had already tried (and I ahd told them I tried in my first email) and suggesting that I had bought a substandard memory card, which is the same thing their website says (I bought two class 10 san diesk cards along with teh class 10 best buy gave me with the camera). So, I took this camera back to Best Buy as well and complained heavily to their staff about GoPro and the camera. They urged me to try one mroe camera so I did.
Strike 4 (yes there are more than 3):
GoPro Hero3 camera #3 seems to work, jsut like #1 and #2. I start recording videos on my motorcycle and in my truck and what do you know... After about 2 weeks and 25 videos, it locks up, same symptoms as the first two. I waste another 2 horus messing with camera #3, then give up and take it back to Best Buy. They refuse to give me a full refund and I end up with store credit instead. I really can't blame then since it took me 2 1/2 months to ask for my money back after replacing two of them already.
Strike 5 (poosibly another gopro strike):
I write a review of the camera on Amazon and state my experience. Within 2 weeks my review is removed, no word from Amazon about it. I also noticed that sevveral other negative reviews had been taken down (all with the same problems I had) and the camera's rating had actually increased from 2 stars to three. It seems t
It isn't clear that you'll hit the bar for perjury by doing just about anything related to DMCA takedowns; but the US District Court specificially agreed with Lenz's lawyer that fair use is one of the elements that the copyright holder must consider in order to file a takedown request meeting the standards set out by the DMCA:
(Quoted from pages 5-6 of the above):
"Fair Use and 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A)(v).
When interpreting a statute, a court must begin “with the language of the statute and ask
whether Congress has spoken on the subject before [it].” Norfolk and Western Ry. Co. v.
American Train Dispatchers Ass’n, 499 U.S. 117, 128 (1991). If “Congress has made its intent
clear, [the court] must give effect to that intent.” Miller v. French, 530 U.S. 327, 336 (2000)
(internal quotation marks and citation omitted). Here, the Court concludes that the plain meaning
of “authorized by law” is unambiguous. An activity or behavior “authorized by law” is one
permitted by law or not contrary to law. Though Congress did not expressly mention the fair use
doctrine in the DMCA, the Copyright Act provides explicitly that “the fair use of a copyrighted work . . .
is not an infringement of copyright.” 17 U.S.C. 107. Even if Universal is correct that
fair use only excuses infringement, the fact remains that fair use is a lawful use of a copyright.4
Accordingly, in order for a copyright owner to proceed under the DMCA with “a good faith
belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright
owner, its agent, or the law,” the owner must evaluate whether the material makes fair use of the
copyright. 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A)(v). An allegation that a copyright owner acted in bad faith
by issuing a takedown notice without proper consideration of the fair use doctrine thus is
sufficient to state a misrepresentation claim pursuant to Section 512(f) of the DMCA.
The Supreme Court also has held consistently that fair use is not infringement of a
copyright. See e.g., Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 433
(1984) (“[a]nyone . . . who makes a fair use of the work is not an infringer of the copyright with
respect to such use.”). "
Since the boundaries of fair use are not terribly clearly defined, it could easily be the case that a DMCA takedown is judged to not be a 'misrepresentation' under Section 512(f); but that a counterclaim on fair use grounds could still end up being accepted. However, the courts have apparently decided that, while they may be the ones to step in on disputes over whether something is fair use, 'fair use' is something that you have to take into account to file a valid DMCA takedown. Not that this has had much deterrent effect in practice, of course.
The DMCA does not grant any rights to trademark holders at all. It only applies to copyrights. They can't use the DMCA to get the trademark infringing content removed. Their only option is a trademark infringement lawsuit. It's total BS and you are free to toss it in the circular file.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
They always have a booth at the NAB trade show in Vegas, which starts in a couple weeks. I'll be stopping by and loudly explaining how their actions have guaranteed that I'll never buy one of their shitty cameras, nor will any of the hundreds of friends, family, and business associates who often ask me for technical advice about things like cameras and gadgetry.
Being a huge dick casts a long shadow.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
It's all BS anyway, as legitimate review is fair use.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Hopefully I don't get downmodded as a shill in a thread thats supposed to be bashing gopros but....FWIW, I also recently got a gopro and it works as advertised..that is great! It has a ton of capture options. Its simple enough to use considering it only has 2 buttons. I saw a bunch of complaints about the app, but again it works fine for me. Its a good substitute for not having a way to orient the camera since I can have a preview to help aim it. The app doesn't have playback but you can do that at home when you're not on the mountain, wave, track, reef, etc. Maybe the shot won't be perfect but so what, I'm not compiling a movie so its probably good enough for my personal viewing. I don't doubt that some people have defective units and what major consumer brand doesn't have terrible customer service these days? You could say I was lucky but you could also say my experience is typical and the other guy was UNlucky (since gopro has become as popular as they are). In short I'm happy with the camera, its price and capabilities. And yes, I looked around and didn't find anything comparable. But hey, if you need a tiny "action" camera and find a better one, buy that or don't buy camera at all. Reason for posting: I thought that other anecdote deserved a counter point.
Contour might be good action camera, but at least the earlier models do not suit to motorsport activities with extreme vibrations, such as karting or CrossCarting. My and others (based on looking at their support forum) experience is that the camera gets stuck and needs battery removed to reset it. I went to ReplayXD instead, it has survived those events where Contour died. Do note, that when the contour was attached to a helmet, there was no problems as human body does provide enough suspension on the most violent vibration.