Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
86400 seconds in a day, 1 million takedown notice per day --> 1 notice every 0.0864 s, so 86ms
Seriously, how hard is it ?
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.
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.
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.