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."

Comments

Dangerous to mess with ./ crowd on this one

[DoofusOfDeath]

It's as if millions of left hands suddenly cried out in terror and stopped moving.

Re:Dangerous to mess with ./ crowd on this one

[darkain]

You've never typed with one hand?

Re:Dangerous to mess with ./ crowd on this one

[DoofusOfDeath]

So how is it that you were able to type your comment?

Well, if Randy can do it......

any repercussions?

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:any repercussions?

[LordLucless]

It's because the only punishments for false takedown requests in the DMCA is for misrepresenting yourself as the owner of the alleged infringing material. There is no punishment for making a take down request against materials that do not infringe. It's one of the stupider bits of the law.

Re:any repercussions?

[duck_rifted]

Wait a minute. The Github projects being taken down contain source code that is definitely somebody's intellectual property in each case. And by filing fraudulent DMCA takedown requests, these porn sites are misrepresenting themselves as the owners of that intellectual property. Even in the case of open source projects with, say, Creative Commons licenses, these sites are not granted sole rights to the work in question.

If what you say is true, then the people submitting these requests certainly can face liability. I don't know how you arrive at the conclusion that because it's Github or because it's porn sites, somehow nobody owns all that code.

Re:any repercussions?

[The Snowman]

The Github projects being taken down contain source code that is definitely somebody's intellectual property in each case. And by filing fraudulent DMCA takedown requests, these porn sites are misrepresenting themselves as the owners of that intellectual property.

I know this is Slashdot, and asking someone to read the article is a bit much, but nobody is removing projects or any IP from Github. They are demanding that Google remove the links from their search results. From the article, emphasis added:

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.

The exact same text appears in the summary at the top of this page. You do not even have to read the article, just the summary!

Re:any repercussions?

[LordLucless]

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.

Re:any repercussions?

[TheRaven64]

In this case, the porn owners are falsely claiming ownership of content on the Github pages.

No they aren't. There are two claims in a DMCA takedown notice. One is that you are authorised to act on behalf of the owners of copyright work A. The second is that work B infringes on work A. Only the first claim is made under penalty of perjury. There is a good reason for this: determining whether a work actually infringes (and is not covered by fair use and so on) requires a court ruling. The problem is that it's overly broad. I can write a DMCA notice that says that I own the copyright on this post (true) and that some other random site infringes on this copyright (false), and that's fine. The protection for this under the DMCA is that you can send a counter-notice and invalidate the original. The problem with this is that it's far easier to spam a load of take-down notices than for everyone to respond with counternotices.

If you want to get this fixed, send DMCA take-down notices to YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook for everything that every current member of Congress has online. Send notices to their web hosts. Do the same for every Republican and Democrat party web site. Knock both parties off the web until they fix their stupid laws.

Re:any repercussions?

[AmiMoJo]

Can non-US citizens submit DMCA take-downs? Does Google even check? I suddenly feel like writing a script...

Re:any repercussions?

[dbIII]

It's almost like they knew the law would be misused and wrote it to allow abuses.

Not almost, guess who drafted the thing. It's acting as designed and the "perjury" that never applies was a trick to get it passed.

Cloud...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another reason not to trust that your data will always be available in the cloud.

Re:Nope

[Trepidity]

In this case it appears to actually be a firm hired by the porn company in question. The complaint was sent by Takedown Piracy LLC, which is one of those fly-by-night operations that sends out mass incompetently drafted DMCA requests on behalf of clients (it's important not to do any competent lawyering, because that would reduce the profit margin). In this case they were hired by a company called Adam & Eve (NSFW, obviously) and sent the letters on that company's behalf.

Re:Mass perjury

[gstoddart]

If only there were a way to prosecute this sort of behavior.

Could it involve that gun that streams to the interwebs? Please?

Yes, I know, I'm a bad person ... but .... they're only lawyers.

We could even hold out for the "varmint gun" version to make it sporting.

not barred by DMCA, but tortuous interference

[raymorris]

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.

Re:Mass perjury

[Greyfox]

So then someone with an axe to grind and a bit of perl programming know-how could pretty much remove a porn studio from the internet using the same DMCA scorched-earth tactic that these studios are, getting links to all their pages removed from all the major search engines?

not that scam, a different scam

[gl4ss]

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).

Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

GitHub went after "gamergaters". Let someone go after them.

Counter-DMCA them

[mwvdlee]

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..)

Knockout.js letter of response

[debrain]

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

Relevant xkcd

[Ed Avis]

http://xkcd.com/624/

Sucky

[s122604]

I promise "// Sucky" is just a self assessment of my code, and nothing else