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Google Receives Takedown Request Every 8 Milliseconds
Via TorrentFreak comes news that Google is now being asked to remove one million links per day (or an average of one takedown notice every 8ms). In 2008, they received one takedown request approximately every six days. From the article: The massive surge in removal requests is not without controversy. It’s been reported that some notices reference pages that contain no copyrighted material, due to mistakes or abuse, but are deleted nonetheless. Google has a pretty good track record of catching these errors, but since manual review of all links is unachievable, some URLs are removed in error. ... The issue has also piqued the interest of U.S. lawmakers. Earlier this year the House Judiciary Subcommittee had a hearing on the DMCA takedown issue, and both copyright holders, Internet service providers, and other parties are examining what they can do to optimize the process.
In the meantime, the number of removal requests is expected to rise and rise, with 10 million links per week being the next milestone.
No one forces you to provide a search engine that accepts illegal content. Just screen everything before it goes into the index or don't host it, as simple as that.
It would not be the first top dog search engine that disappears into obscurity because all it displayed anymore were paid-for links, ads and other crap the powers that are considered "agreeable".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Instead of having software automatically remove every alleged infracting page, how about having the software automatically send a notice back informing the complainant of a lack of credible evidence, and dropping all the takedown notices into some summer intern's Inbox?
I mean, jeez...
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Just take down everything permanently because it'll eventually infringe another corporati--excuse me, "non-human person"'s copyright in the future anyway.
Your statement is based on an absolutely false assumption. You really don't have to look hard to find that most requests have nothing to do with illegal content. The overwhelming majority of the take down requests are for censorship purposes.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
"...parties are examining what they can do to optimize the process."
Well, you could start by requiring that the entire notice be filed under penalty of perjury, not just the part that says you are who you claim to be.
You could also start by requiring that the notice provide *evidence* (sufficient to sustain a claim of copyright infringement in a court of law) of the claimed infringement.
Failure to do *either* or *both* of these is just going to result in the request rate increasing to the point where it is impossible for even a fully-automated system to handle them on the receiving end, because there's currently no downside to sending a bogus DMCA takedown notice.
These great numbers allow them to complain to our government corporate puppets that the DMCA is broken and needs "fixing", ie, make all search engines and service providers liable for infringement, thus requiring full keyword filtering, isoHunt style.
They aren't hosting the content, they're merely making pointers to it. Isn't this an issue that should be handled by the company hosting/managing the web content? I'm surprised Google is getting involved in this at all and it makes me wonder what their motivations for doing so are, given the obvious administrative burden this is imposing.
The rightsholders have claimed copyright on birdsong, a public transmission of the space shuttle launch, and many other claims of complete nonsense, proving that their algorithms are way too aggressive in flagging videos and that they can't even be bothered to review the "infringing" material before issuing a takedown notice. So who wants to bet that the legislative resolution to this issue has nothing to do with harsher penalties for fraudulent requests and everything to do with harsher penalties for "pirates" who happened to have a radio or television playing in the background when they caught something unusual on video?
86400 seconds in a day, 1 million takedown notice per day --> 1 notice every 0.0864 s, so 86ms
Seriously, how hard is it ?
Doesn't 8ms add up to 10 million links rather than 1 million?
24 * 60 * 60 * 1000 = 86,400,000ms
86,400,000ms / 8ms = 10,800,000
Eh...
All takedowns have to be sworn under penalty of perjury. Next time google gets one that points to a page with no infringement (just happened) (just happened again) (oops, and again, okay, I'll stop counting now) whoever sent it needs to be prosecuted for perjury. The infringement notice bots would be shut down in 10 minutes when those behind them are suddenly facing prosecution.
As I've said time and again: we don't need a new law - we need to enforce what we've got.
Do you have ESP?
This mentality will destroy the country. Stop turning things into Republicans vs Democrats. Truth is they both serve the same corporate masters.
Under Obama, for example, a former Monsanto Exec became the head of the FDA. A former telecom lobbyist became the chairman of the FCC. I mean, what the fuck, right?
Basically, whether you vote Republican or Democrat, this kind of thing will go on. The two party system is just useful for distracting people, and getting them to vote in such a way where nothing will actually change.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
A.k.a. justice for the rich rather than the starving artist.
The actual fix is to require the plaintiff to sign the whole statement under penalty of perjury rather than just that they represent someone - or at the very least, put a punishment for flinging out fradulent DMCA takedown in the same way filing frivilous lawsuits is punished.
Google should fill a request to be forgotten...
That's nice and all - but Google isn't a judge and only a judge can make a decision on whether something is infringing or not. This is just the way copyright law is setup in the US. Google can't look at the content and say, "this doesn't infringe because it is fair use" or whatever. Google can't make the claimant prove that they own the copyright to the material - the DMCA isn't setup that way. We have a crap system because the laws that govern copyright are crap.
DMCA is 1998, so Bill Clinton.
...so, if under your plan, I submit a takedown request for a subpage on Apple.com or StackExchange, I can troll the whole world by having all the search results for their entire domains purged from google?
Conversely, I guess YouTube would be permanently offline.
Nevermind, fuck it: your idea is brilliant—bring on the trollpocalypse!
What do they consider a take down request though? For the website I administer for my job I just submitted 60 take down requests using the Google webmaster tools this morning as our Chat Form Page got incorrectly indexed (robots.txt error on our part) and we want our customers to go through the contact reason page first.
These are legal requests but are they counting these in that number?
...both copyright holders, Internet service providers, and other parties are examining what they can do to optimize the process.
The solution is not to optimize the process. The solution is to scrap the process, and the DMCA along with it.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
If they asked for evidence, they'd become liable for any infringement. This is all controlled by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Under DMCA, when they receive a notice, they have to remove the content. If the other side sends them a counter-notice, they have to put it back up. If the complainant then notifies the carrier that they are filing suit in federal court, the carrier takes the content own again. If they choose not to follow this procedure, if they set themselves up to judge the evidence, they then become liable for any infringement. In other words, if they are going to judge the evidence, they better get it right 10% of the time, always coming to the same conclusion that a judge or jury does later. Otherwise, Google would be liable for any instances where the court disagreed with Google's decision. The problem is that DMCA doesn't effectively provide penalties for filing bogus notifications. You can send out completely false notifications and have things taken down all day long and nobody can do anything to stop you (almost). DMCA does one good thing in that it allows Google (or a web hosting company, or Slashdot) to operate without having their own internal court system to decide these things. The problem is that it requires Google to do the claimant's bidding without any cost or risk to the claimant.
You have to wonder if competing search engines could be spurring these claims somehow, culling such vast numbers of pages from Google's index is a great way to degrade the usefulness of Google's search...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Seems like those that send the DMCA takedown requests are trying to strangle Google (and others) to the point of making the Internet useless. If the search engines get hammered makes it harder to find content you are looking for. And to what end?
Obviously there should be a way to report copyright issues.
By going to court. Oh, you want to subvert the court system and have takedown notices that remove safe harbor if ignored? Fuck off.
I beg to disagree. Under the 2 party system things change, just not for the better. One party can erode one set of rights and then in a few years they lose power and the other party gets to erode some other rights. They both then get to campaign on the rights that the other side took away, yet never manage to get around to reinstating them when they are in power.
Time to offend someone
I used to work in a department that handled DMCA notices on the consumer side. (They were complaining that our customers were hosting the content) The vast majority of these complaints were fraudulent. The problem is that the media companies hire other companies to monitor for infringement and send take-down notices. I suspect they pay per notice sent and they are getting swindled. Some were so bad, we literally blacklisted their domain so they'd stop sending us complaints. They'd send take down notices for people that weren't even in our IP block. They were just sending nonsense and collecting money from the content provider. This likely also where the content providers get their insane numbers about the amount of money they are losing.
put a punishment for flinging out fradulent DMCA takedown in the same way filing frivilous lawsuits is punished.
In other words, a slap on the wrist and a stern talking-to? Yeah, that'll work.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I don't see that this strategy solves anything at all, except making frivolous copyright claims even more powerful.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
so take your homepage down. that's how silly it's getting. geez
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
DMCA requires a statement:
"under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc...
The perjury statement is just that the person sending the complaint is an authorized representative of the _alleged_ owner.
In other words, if you or I sent a complaint that someone is violating Bill Clinton's copyright, THAT would violate that section, because we're not authorized to enforce Clinton's rights.
As to the accuracy of the complaint, DMCA provides that you can be sued for actual damages if you KNOWINGLY file a false complaint. "Knowingly" is a special word in law, with a carefully established definition. It means more than recklessly or negligently. To sue them, you have to prove that they KNEW it was bogus. If they filed it without caring whether or not it was bogus, that's insufficient. It would be better if you could sue for reckless or negligent claims, but you can only sue for knowingly false claims. Changing that one word from "knowingly" to "negligently" or "recklessly" would go a long way toward fixing DMCA.
Secondly, the bogus claimant can be sued only for actual damages. Suppose it costs Google $5 to process each takedown. For a knowingly false takedown notice, they can sue to get that $5 back. They're not going to pend $100K to sue someone for $5. Not going to happen. What would fix that would be the same thing that holders of registered copyrights have under the law - statutory damages. The current text of the law is:
Any person who knowingly misrepresents ... shall be liable for any damages ... incurred
We could just change that to:
Any person who RECKLESSLY misrepresents ... shall be liable for the greater of $25,000 or any damages ... incurred. ... shall be liable for the greater of $10,000 or any damages ... incurred.
Any person who negligently misrepresents
A Google lawyer could then sue Warner Bros for 100 reckless notices and damages would be _at_least_ $2.5 million which pays the lawyer's salary for several years. They'd settle for the $1 million "negligent" amount, and Google could have a staff of lawyers suing all the assholes, hitting them for a million dollars each time until they stopped sending notices recklessly.
The DMCA has a section titled "Information Location Tools" which covers linking. Here's the relevant text of the law:
for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity, by using information location tools, including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link, if the service provider—
(1)
(A) does not have actual knowledge that the material or activity is infringing;
(B) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or
(C) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;
http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc...
Further up, it says that once you've received a DMCA notice with all the blanks filled in, you have actual knowledge. So Under d 1 c, after receiving notice a search engine or other locator service (torrent tracker) must "acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material"
The problem is that there's no statutory damages for even knowingly false claims, and no damages at at for reckless claims.
Adding statutory damages for reckless claims would mean these big companies would stop filing all the reckless claims.
Yeah, an earlier draft was better, but since you can only recover damages for KNOWINGLY false claims, and there are no statutory damages, it allows large-scale bogus claims. Truly, though, if it allowed damages for recklessly false or negligent claims, and had statutory damages, that would pretty much fix it. The procedure outlined in the law is actually pretty good. The content goes right back up if the person who posted it says it's not infringing. It's just the lack of any penalty for reckless claims that screws up an otherwise pretty reasonable law.
It seems to me that the infringement is alleged, but the ownership shouldn't be. If they can't even come up with something definitive as to *what* is infringed, I would hope they could be liable.
As an author, I own rights to Apache httpd.
I allege that your post infringes my copy rights on Apache and demand that Slashdot remove your post.
I am indeed "the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed." My ownership of my Apache contributes is a true fact. I allege that you've infringed those rights. The perjury part applies (only) to my statement that I do in fact own the rights to my contributions. Whether or not your post infringes my rights is for a judge or jury to decide, because it's a complicated question.
Whether or not the whole complaint is true is the subject of the "knowingly misrepresents" clause, which would be better if it was "recklessly misrepresents" or "negligently misrepresents".
... they know acting like they are will achieve their objective to stop the nonsense.
The best way to get regulators off your back is to over comply.
That way, the regulators take the fall.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
> Under Obama, for example, a former Monsanto Exec became the head of the FDA.
Can you do a fact check on that one please?
Seriously? This is NOT a hard thing to find out. The guy's name is Michael Taylor, and he's been bouncing back and forth between Monsanto lobbyist or executive, the FDA, and the USDA for decades. Of course, on his official FDA page, you need to read to the very last sentence to find out that he was tied to Monsanto. (I'll have to give them a little credit for mentioning it at all.) I mean, really -- this is a pretty high profile thing. There's even a petition with over 463,000 signatures online to get this guy removed.
You're right about one thing, though -- he never actually became "head" of the FDA, if by which you mean the actual "Commissioner of Food and Drugs." He was only appointed as "Senior Advisor to the FDA Commissioner." So I guess he wasn't the head of the FDA -- but he was chosen for a top position, just one of the top guys who had the most influence and input to the head of the FDA.
I know nothing about this guy's personal policies or integrity or whatever. But I do agree that this guy is a perfect example of the "revolving door" of some dude working for a big corporation, then going to a government agency which is supposed to regulate that corporation, then back to the corporation, then back to the government, etc. And whether this guy is good or evil or whatever, that general trend is a bad one.
> In theory false takedowns could be pursued in court.
The statute specifically says that if someone KNOWINGLY misrepresents tge facts in a DMCA notice, they can be sued for actual damages. In contrast , someone who NEGLIGENTLY infringes can be sued for statutory damages. Knowingly is a much huger standard than recklessly or negligently. If Google can prove that Warner Brothers KNOWS a notice they are sending is bogus, Google can sue for their actual costs, about $5. That's in the DMCA law , and that's the problem with tge DMCA law.
> The real problem here is automated takedowns.
The automated notices you're talking about are sent recklessly or at least negligently. If Google and the target could sue fir reckless notices and receive statutory damages, that would solve the problem.
> How can you have a computer send
You had your computer send that message to Slashdot's computer. You did so carefully, not recklessly or negligently.
Every time a DMCA notice is shown to be fraudulent from any of the corporations lucky enough to have an automated submission system, add a time delay to the processing - say 25%.
They should charge money for each take down request as it uses up man hours. They`ll become the richest company in the world if they do that :D
Or have a manual process. Where you have to go into a google office and submit the links and no more than 10 links allowed to be submitted by any one person at one time. Hire someone who retired years ago but needs the extra cash to manage the very long queue that will form :D
They are actually not the same. Thinking they are is part of the problem