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Film Studios Send Takedown Notices About Takedown Notices
another random user sends this excerpt from the BBC:
"Two film studios have asked Google to take down links to messages sent by them requesting the removal of links connected to film piracy. Google receives 20 million 'takedown' requests, officially known as DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices, every month. They are all published online. Recent submissions by Fox and Universal Studios include requests for the removal of previous takedown notices. ... By making the notices available, Google is unintentionally highlighting the location of allegedly pirated material, say some experts. 'It would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available,' wrote Torrent Freak editor Ernesto Van Der Sar on the site."
Again. A pity the first amendment doesn't apply to corporations.
I'm sorry but even the government is getting their hand slapped over secret proceedings (see the recent rulings regarding national security letters), there's no way we're going to allow companies to hide their actions in a civil matter.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
By making the notices available, Google is unintentionally highlighting the location of allegedly pirated material, say some experts.
See, Alanis, *this* is ironic.
Was that a comment or a request for a development project?
(...)
Takedown notices have become so widely applied to every aspect of internet content that they have evolved to become self aware.
the DMCA is becoming t2@(35## NO CARRIER
Good people go to bed earlier.
When you send a demand letter it is property of the recipient. They are free to publish it if they wish. A person receiving a DCMA take doewn notice is under no obligation, and in fact would be stupid to, agree to any confidentiality at all. The recipient is under no obligation to do so.
A more pressing area of legal disclosure is charges against otherwise innocent until proven guilty persons. Prosecutors do perp walks, and public news conferences, all the time despite the legal, and ethical, and moral, land mines.
JJ
Stop sending takedown notices. You're helping the so-called pirates and by the logic you've used in the past that makes you culpable for their piracy.
Now they will send to Slashdot a takedown notice to take down the message about the takedown request they sent to google to take down the list of their takedown requests....
"It's like a million Dancing With The Stars, when all you want is Doctor Who..."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Of pirated material that has been mostly taken down. Right. Because that makes a shitton of sense, and it isn't already easy enough to pirate stuff if you want to anyway. They just don't want to look bad.
If there were actually any proof of that allegation, google would be a whole shitpile of trouble.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
By making the notices available, Google is unintentionally highlighting the location of allegedly pirated material, say some experts.
Ha.."unintentionally"
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Why would you need a skilled coder when the databases are in plain CSV format ?
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/data/
Hell, in some places, the laws themselves are copyrighted.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/31/ignorance-of-dcs-copyrighted-laws-can-be-costly/
Some day I'm going to write a page about a "boardwalk game where you manage an empire from your throne" just to see how fast it gets blocked from google search results. Oops, I probably blocked Slashdot just by typing that. The robots who send the notices are amazingly stupid and use leaps of logic that make your average creationist look like an evidence-user.
I'm not saying piracy isn't happening out there, but from what I've seen I bet over 90% of DMCA notices are bogus. If anyone is crawling chilling-effects looking for juicy links to yummy forbidden files, boy are they going to be disappointed. They'll learn that someone's CS101 web crawling assignment has been emailing google about every damn page it finds.
Anyway, since in this case, the content's provenance is systematically known, they can confidently ignore the DMCA notices, as though they virtually received a counter-notice from within their own organization. No need to take anything down. Non-story, other than highlighting how amazingly bad the robots are, and that the special legal obligation created by them, probably ought to be removed or else notice-senders should be held accountable. Congress, do something about that. Can't someone just anonymously slip it into the budget bill?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Shouldn't those film studios be sending DMCA takedown notices to whatever ISP/etc is actually hosting that content, and not Google, who is not hosting that content?
Code or be coded.
By making the notices available, Google is unintentionally highlighting the location of allegedly pirated material, say some experts. 'It would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available,' wrote Torrent Freak editor Ernesto Van Der Sar on the site."
I stumbled on one of these notices filed by the RIAA yesterday, and it seems not only reasonable but important for the notice to be posted, including the relevant URL; otherwise, how will I know that the site hosting the illegal material is doing so illegally? I looked at the site in question, and they most certainly didn't include any notice that downloading that particular song was a violation of copyright. But because of the notice that Google linked to, I knew that I shouldn't do it.
It seems to me that MPAA and RIAA want to have their cake and eat it, too.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
By making the notices available, Google is unintentionally highlighting the location of allegedly pirated material, say some experts.
I thought that was kind of the whole point of the things being posted?
First there was the Streisand (unintentionally calling attention to what you don't want publicized),
then the reverse Streisand (intentionally calling attention by demanding suppression of ostensibly unwanted but actually desired publicity),
and now comes the meta-Streisand (unintentionally calling attention to intentional demands that caused unintentional publicity of what you didn't want publicized.)
Set your phasers on "funky"!
And what actually is "mega-Streisand"?
Don't you mean mecha-Streisand?
The Movie industry does not want it known how active they are at sending take down notices. After all the price we all pay for movies goes up as there effort to do this sort of activity goes up. The 'take down tax'.
There is also the big brother bad guy protecting their profit against the little guy public relations problem. They certainly would like all that take down to happen behind the scenes where no one notices.
They are trying to do some damage control.
I'm just curious if they'll send takedown notices on the takedown notices on the... well, you know. After all, Google may have to append the original notice on the 2nd one so everyone knows what's being referred to...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I love the smell of recursion in the morning.
"Round and round we go..."
There's something here I don't understand.
If the material has been taken down, then the links should not function.
If the links have not been taken down, then the material is (most likely) not infringing.
So the "problem" would appear to be nothing but a fiction.
In this case I think the takedown notices are not for the removal of the pirate websites, but the removal of their URLs from Google's results. If the URLs remain in Google's takedown notice database, and the sites themselves are still up, people can just comb Google's database for pirate links.
That isn't to say that the larger 'problem' of piracy itself is anything but fiction, of course.
Captcha: LAWSUIT
Disney has a market cap of $104 billion. NBC Universal is owned by Comcast which is worth $109 billion. Your figures are off by quite a bit.
I'm pretty sure the takedown notices are supposed to be public record.
They're using their grammar skills there.
From their perspective, people having legitimate access to copies is a problem.
And while you're busily correcting his mistakes, you're missing the same thing everyone else in this minithread has missed.
Stock comes in multiple classes. Especially for a very large corporation like Disney or Comcast, there are whole swaths of that market cap which are utterly irrelevant. Why? Because there's absolutely no need to buy the company. It's only necessary to gain control of it. It's possible to gain control of a company by buying just enough of the voting stock.
Disney's market cap includes billions in non-voting stock. Those stocks can be completely ignored. They are powerless. All that matters is voting stock, and it's only necessary to buy enough to outvote the rest of the shareholders. Even if the rest of the shareholders try to protect the existing board of directors, you can force an election (according to the articles of incorporation of the company in question), then successfully elect your own board. Your board then fires the executive staff and appoints your hand-picked replacement CEO, CTO, CIO, etc. You don't have to come anywhere close to paying the full market cap of a company in order to do that. It could be that only 30% of the shares of a company are so-called preferred stock, with voting rights. Buy 50% + 1 share of that 30%, and you can control the company utterly (most articles of incorporation specify a simple majority of stockholders as being the winner of votes). If, say, Disney had only 30% voting stock, control could be purchased for $15.6 billion.
It's possible to buy that $15.6 billion for not much more than $15.6 billion, too. Google could spawn a bunch of new suspiciously well-funded baby corporations with innocuous names, get them accounts with a bunch of different stock brokers, and quietly buy up 10,000 shares here, 50,000 shares there. Pretty soon it starts to add up to real money. And with it, control. There's even a name for it. It's the type of hostile takeover called a creeping tender offer. Next thing you know, Sergei Brin and Larry Page show up at the annual stockholder's meeting with suitcases full of proxies and rock their world.
Not that I expect Google to bother. It's a lot cheaper just to continue their passive resistance and let bittorrent do its work.