Anti-Piracy Firm Sends Out Wave of Takedown Notices For Using the Word 'Pixels'

An anonymous reader writes: Columbia Pictures recently released a movie called Pixels to widespread ambivalence. As part of the movie industry's standard intellectual property defense strategy, it hired anti-piracy firm Entura International to try to police infringing downloads. The firm went at the task with vigor, hitting Vimeo with DMCA takedown notices for anything with the word "Pixels" in it. As you might expect, this disrupted a number of independent filmmakers and organizations who did nothing wrong, and in most cases picked a name for their video long before the new movie came out. Even worse, it's incumbent upon the owners of the targeted videos to prove that their content does not infringe upon Columbia's. Even if they get it restored, simply being targeted counts against them in Vimeo's eyes. And of course, Entura is unwilling to help.

Comments

Let's hope

[Anonymous Coward]

The The don't hire the same outfit...

Re:Seems simple enough to reverse this strategy

[Anne Thwacks]

Please see a doctor. Even with ear plugs, you ought to hear that wooshing sound.

Re:Seems simple enough to reverse this strategy

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

We would like to make clear on behalf of our client, Anonymous Coward, that the mistranscription of "Colombia" as "Columbia" was purely an inadvertent administrative error, which was subsequently acted upon by computer without further human interaction. Therefore as Anonymous Coward is in fact the copyright holder of the work "first ten word draft of script for documentary 'Colombia'", the perjury penalties under the DMCA do not apply. Have a nice day.

With best regards,
The Lawyers

Re:Solution

[Overzeetop]

No, the sociopath would hunt down and torture the family members of the employees. What we found was the vigilante.