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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."
It's as if millions of left hands suddenly cried out in terror and stopped moving.
In theory submitting a false DMCA request is illegal. And there are theoretically plausible civil suits as well, if someone submits a false or reckless DMCA request that damages your business. But has anyone in history actually suffered any repercussions from submitting false DMCA requests? It seems people submit false ones all the time, and not only borderline mistakes but things ranging from reckless disregard for the truth to outright maliciously false requests (e.g. for SEO purposes). Yet I have never heard of anyone being prosecuted or sued for it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yet another reason not to trust that your data will always be available in the cloud.
Not the porn companies.
In most cases these aren't even the porn companies. It's a scam. If they can get the ISP to hand over your name... and they can in some cases... then they send you threatening letters: "On suchandsuch date you downloaded our film 'Priests and Alterboys 5' illegally. Pay us $5000 or we will sue you" And then they send it certified mail to your front door. The signature requirement means there's a 50/50 chance they get your wife and how much would you pay to avoid that happening?
It's a scam, plain and simple.
So these companies are committing mass perjury by submitting false DMCA takedowns. If only there were a way to prosecute this sort of behavior.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I know the law requires you to be making a statement under oath ... but since it was bought and paid for by *AA lawyers, it has the "if we're incompetent but thought we were right" escape clause, they can probably weasel out of it.
I really hate this that piece of shit law was written in such a way as to stack the deck for those companies. Because it's not a level playing field, and they can go all scorched earth and later just say "oops".
Somehow they managed to put the burden of proof and cost onto those saying "WTF are you talking about?" instead of themselves.
Assholes.
There really needs to be some penalties for these clowns, otherwise they and every other copyright troll can just do this indiscriminately.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I don't want to know..
Bah, lemme go see if the company beer fridge is still stocked.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
eventually someone will.
because they don't have the rights to the shit they claim to have the rights to.
like, they don't think at all. basically running a google search on the word EDGE and banning that comes out. like what the fuck!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Bing does not filter results that are known attack pages. ixquick just gets its results from Bing. Yahoo just gets its results from Google. apnstatic is only for domain-related queries, such as whois. You might as well claim that Alexa is an alternative to Google.
Until Microsoft gets off their asses and makes sure their search engine is actually safe instead of just having shills insult anybody who suggests the truth about it in social media, there really is still only Google.
google no longer honors, or even acknowledges, take down requests for keywords.
better solution.... abolish the law, or at least rewrite it so that companies filing bogus requests get hit, and hit hard, with financial penalties and revocation of their take down notice rights. companies like google spend millions of dollars processing these bogus requests, it's about time the companies that file them get nailed to the wall.
The "penalty of perjury" clause of the DMCA applies to identifying yourself, but the DMCA isn't the only law. Recklessly causing harm was a tort before the DMCA, and it still is. I believe there has been at least one law suit for tortuous interference and I'd like to see more. I think the plaintiffs could prevail where the notices were sent out recklessly.
In some cases, the person CONTINUED to send notices after being notified that many of them were clearly invalid. One can argue that they TRIED to come up with a good list of URLs, but once they've been informed that their list is crap, it's reckless to continue sending them.
Of course it's possible that they could show that they sent out 10,000 notices and 9,990 of those were perfectly correct. With a 99.9% accuracy rate the claim that they were reckless would be tougher to argue.
So can anyone of those whose site was removed with out notice take the porn companies to court for stealing their compyrights? After all these companies are saying that they own the copyrights to the aledged git hosted code. That would mean they stole the actual copyright not just infringed on it.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
You can get your stiffy reading court records (pdf). It doesn't get any better. This stuff would be illegal to publish in any other way.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
GitHub went after "gamergaters". Let someone go after them.
make them post a bond for every URL they are claiming infringement.
That idea is horrible.
When I find that an advertising company has used my song without permission, and plastered it on fifty sites, I cannot afford to post a bond for each link. But Big Business can afford to do so.
Anything that requires fees or lawyers will benefit Big Business, who can afford it, and not the little man, who can't.
A better solution is to mandate a public fine for anyone who makes false accusations, whether due to negligence, incompetence or malice. And even better, to make fines proportional to the income of the fined, like in some countries.
Total Wipes, on the other hand, appears to target sites indiscriminÃately based on keywords,...
Wait, so there's a company called Total Wipes doing porn copyright infringement management? What a wasted use for the name in that industry.
Edge and Hide are two of the words they went after
Well done, you have just got slashdot delisted
Based on the similarity in names, these porn movies are quite obviously infringing on the copyright of these open source projects.
How about sending DMCA requests to get these porn movies banned from Google?
Two can play this game!
(as a side note; cue bad joke replies in 3.. 2.. 1..)
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I can't believe there is still no comeback when companies interfere with other people's legitimate shit
SURELY NOT!!!!!
F#, with some Python involved
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
github.com/knockout/knockout was one of the repos listed, and here is the letter they sent (which seems to be a reasonable template):
To: marketing@takedownpiracy.com
Date: Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 9:33 AM EST
Dear Sirs,
It has recently come to my attention that your firm has filed a DMCA notice to Google identifying copyright infringement for works to which I am personally associated. I apologize if this email is not directed to the correct address, but it was the only address apparent to contact your company and I would be grateful if you could forward this message appropriately or direct me accordingly.
The notice that has come to my attention includes the details from the web-site as follows:
https://www.chillingeffects.or...
This site identifies Takedown Piracy LLC as an agent of Wicked Pictures sending a DMCA notice to Google. The notice apparently references the following works, which works appear to have since been removed from the results of searches via the Google search engine:
https://github.com/SteveSander...
https://github.com/rniemeyer/k...
https://github.com/rniemeyer/k...
https://github.com/Knockout-Co...
https://github.com/knockout/kn...
https://github.com/knockout
These works are entirely software and are in no way associated with Wicked Pictures, nor do they contain any adult material whatsoever (which I understand to be the preponderance of copyright held by Wicked Pictures).
Through the above-referenced DMCA notice your firm has stated that I have committed or endorsed copyright infringement, as well as associated me with republishing unlicensed works of the adult industry.
[As a software developer], I am sure you can appreciate that the above implication and association could cause serious harm to my reputation.
I trust you will not mind issuing an appropriate revocation of appropriate portions of the DMCA notices to Google and any other recipient that may have received a notice referencing the above content, as well as similarly revoking and white-listing from any future notices any work referred to with a URL containing the following:
github.com/knockout
github.com/SteveSanderson
github.com/mbest
github.com/rniemeyer
github.com/brianmhunt
âAgain, these repositories contain entirely software and are clearly not the intended target of your operationâ, which you can readily confirm by navigating to them in a web browser.
âMany thanks for your co-operation on this matter, and I would be grateful for your âconfirmation that the DMCA notices have been appropriately revoked. If by February 7th, 2015 it is apparent that the DMCA notices have not been revoked, I will be obliged to pursue appropriate legal action, and will hold your firm responsible for all associated legal costs.
âKind regards,
Brianâ
http://xkcd.com/624/
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I promise "// Sucky" is just a self assessment of my code, and nothing else