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Universal Pictures Wants To Remove Localhost and IMDB Pages From Google Results
Artem Tashkinov writes: We've all known for a very long time that DCMA takedown requests are often dubious and even more often outright wrong but in a new turn of events a Universal Pictures contractor which does web censorship has requested a takedown of an IMDB page and the 127.0.0.1 address. I myself has seen numerous times that pages which barely include the title of an infringing work of art get removed from search engines.
That 127.0.0.1 site is nothing but trouble. That's why I redirect it in my HOSTS file to localhost.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling that no matter how blatantly bad and stupid these companies get with takedown abuse, it won't be until some senator or congressperson's page gets sent a spurious takedown notice. Anyone with any awareness or interest in the issue already knows how bad the situation is.
Maybe this incident will get more press, but I'm not holding my breath.
This is Google's opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and do no evil:
Forget Universal Pictures and the contractor.
So we're just reposting torrentfreak articles now? Ok, sounds about right.
This is a prime example of how the DMCA is a farce. The entire burden is loaded onto the user, not the ones demanding things to be taken down. How the hell local host even showed up in their crawl is something I want explained to me, that simply does not compute, 127 would NEVER be involved in a torrent pool, so how did they crap that address?
and shouldn't imdb be flagged as save at the base url? Don't these companies actually PAY to be on imdb? I might be confused there, but in any event, IMDB is fully operating within the law and in no way infringes any copyrights.
So they run a script and scrapes, I guess the entire internet and their local network, and this automatically sends DMCA takedown requests, which for the most part are honoured without question. Then the user, who had every legal right to do whatever they did, has to spend their time and money to try to get this undone. The system is broken and ripe for abuse.
DMCA takedowns for bird chirps? Sorry, you can not own a copyright to generic bird songs, that's insanity.
Here's a funny thought... 3 bad takedown requests in a month means you can no longer make takedown requests. Hows that sound? Seems fair to me.
It's not the "DCMA"; it's the "DMCA", also known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
There should be a comma before the word "but" in the first (run-on) sentence.
And it's not "I myself has seen"; it should be "I myself have seen".
Even blogs need editors.
from INSIDE THE HOUSE!
Best Slashdot Co
I checked out that site, and it's clearly infringing on Universal Pictures' recent film "You Have Successfully Installed Apache".
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
I think Google should start charging them for false requests. $1 each and I bet sooner or later they are going to start having a human check them before sending the take down requests.
Be seeing you...
Apologies to Walt Kelly
We have met the enemy (Pogo)
Letter To Iran
It absolutely does and every free country on earth recognises this. That is exactly why all the disparate laws with so many differences you deceptively lump together as "intellectual property " do have one thing in common : they all have limitations that make them temporary. The mechanism of expiration vary widely but they all expire. No physical property rights expire. You can inherited land for unlimited generations. But copyright and patents have time limits, trademarks have to be renewed and are lost if they become generic. These expiration are exactly because they are, all, censorship and the trade off is only worth while if that censorship is temporary.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Does you yourself has cheezburger?
What this implies is that the contractor that Universal employs to send takedown notices has an illegal copy of Jurassic World on their own system!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Out of every million requests you are going to have some obvious mistakes. That's human nature. But it's a huge problem when companies just "throw a bunch of requests at the wall and see what sticks" without much cost to them for invalid requests.
Google and others who receive large volumes of requests should have some procedure to weed out those who send too many requests where the sender obviously didn't do his "due diligence" or worse, is trying to game the system.
Hopefully they can work out a voluntary system with the high-volume DMCA-takedown-notice requesters where the requester agrees in advance to pay "liquidated damages" (aka a "Google fine") for every rejected request and where they accept that they will be put into a "slow processing lane" if their rate of such requests gets too high.
If Google etc. can't come to a voluntary agreement with a particular high-volume sender and that sender's rate of invalid requests gets too high, Google, etc. should take the requester to court to get an order prohibiting the requester from sending any future request without an affidavit declaring that they have done "due diligence." If they don't sign the oath, it won't be a valid request. If they do sign it and didn't do the due diligence, they will be found in contempt of court and face criminal perjury charges.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
We all agree that it's a bot being used to detect references to Universal Picture's works... but the purpose? Not to stop piracy, but to eliminate search results from competing with United's own marketing. While the IMDB link is obviously unintentional, it is also most likely the top result.
Basically, they're knocking out anything that competes in searches, regardless of actual pirated content.
If those damn actors, directors, and writers would just stop making movies then we wouldn't have this problem.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Ha ha ha .. boy are you naive.
See the DMCA was written in such a way as to shield the people filing the requests. When they wrote the law (and, yes, it was corporate lobbyists who wrote it) they gave themselves a get out of jail free card ... so while they are effectively making a sworn statement, all they have to do is say they genuinely believed it was infringing and all is forgiven.
The DMCA is badly written because it was designed to let corporations do anything they want without consequences.
Talking about adding a voluntary system whereby they are held to some level of accountability? Not gonna happen.
Because the people who were on the corporate payroll to pass the laws in the first place only care about what the corporations have told them to do.
Welcome to a world in which governments are basically working to advance corporate interests above all else.
Crap like this is kind of the inevitable outcome of that, and the copyright lobby have bought themselves the keys to the kingdom.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Google, etc. should take the requester to court to get an order prohibiting the requester from sending any future request without an affidavit declaring that they have done "due diligence."
Each notice of claimed infringement under OCILLA is supposed to already include such an affidavit. Universal's former parent company has already been in trouble for this.
Actually, who's hurt if Google delists the movie's IMDB page? Heck, Google should just delist every page about every Universal Pictures title in current release. See how fast Universal finds the problems with their automated takedown notices when all their titles—all their theater listings—disgoogle at once.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
Where do we get that copyright is granted for a limited time? Gee, I don't know maybe from here: Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
That is only because Weird Al always asks for permission to parody a song, he is not required to.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
About 10 months ago, I found my high school graduation video cassette from 1987, so I picked up a used VCR and ripped it and put it up on youtube for family to view. Last month, I uploading another video and noticed that a DMCA claim had been placed on my graduation video, but the "copyright holder" would allow the video to remain, they were just going to monetize it. My graduation video was shot by my brother and had our high school band playing Pomp and Circumstance, which is in the public domain. There is no way this is under copyright, so I looked them up and the "song" that I was allegedly violating the copyright of. It turns out that the "copyright holder" was a crappy English DJ duo who had appropriated Pomp and Circumstance in one of their soccer fight songs. The funny part is that my video is 28 years old, their song is about a year old.
I countered their claim with all the info above and the claim was removed.
I realize this was probably a simple signature match, but it only goes to show how broken this system is. I didn't actually received an email about the DMCA claim. There are only 2 emails in my inbox containing the video title, one was when I published it and the other was when the copyright claim was removed, so they don't appear to even be notifying people when a claim is made, at least in the case where the "copyright holder" decides to monetize rather than take the video down, and that is even more nefarious in my opinion. I wasn't monetizing my video, and it has less than 50 views, but if I had been monetizing it and had a larger audience, they would have been stealing from me without my even knowing it. I only noticed the original claim when I uploaded another video to youtube.
Given the frequency of mistakes that slip through around here, that probably has been "edited" already.