Slashdot Mirror
Porn Companies Are Going After GitHub
rossgneumann writes Porn production companies are currently engaged in a scorched earth copyright infringement campaign against torrenting sites with URLs containing specific keywords and Github is getting caught in the crossfire. Several Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed to Google by companies representing various porn companies in the last month alone have resulted in dozens of legitimate Github URLs being removed from the search engine's results, TorrentFreak first reported."
Yet another reason not to trust that your data will always be available in the cloud.
Here's the relevant bit from the DMCA:
A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and 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.
Note that the penalty of perjury doesn't apply to the statement that the information provided is accurate, but only to the specific claim that the complaining party is the authorized agent of the owner of the copyright that is allegedly being infringed.
It's got nothing to do with GitHub, or nothing to do with porn, it's all to do with the fact that the DMCA is a bad law, and specifically allows people to make as many fraudulent takedown notices they want, as long as they don't claim to represent an IP owner when they in fact don't. If they do represent an IP owner, then they have carte blanche to be as fraudulent as they want. Sure, they have to state that the information they provide is correct, but there's no penalty if it isn't.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
this is a scam done to the porn companies, not to the illegal downloaders.
the way the scam works is that they contact the porn company and say "hey we can takedown things from google for you" and then they just run a lazy google search, send google some dmca notices based on that lazy search(without verifying, or attempting even to verify the urls) and bill the porn company based on how many links were removed(this is where the lazy search turns into a payoff for the company - they do have an incentive to send too many notices! they're not billing by quality but by quantity).
nevermind that it does nothing to stop the downloading of the stuff(you'll go to the torrent site anyways and search on that torrent site, circumventing the google in that regard).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.