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Google Says Almost Every Recent 'Trusted' DMCA Notices Were Bogus (torrentfreak.com)
Reader AmiMoJo writes: In comments submitted to a U.S. Copyright Office consultation, Google has given the DMCA a vote of support, despite widespread abuse. Noting that the law allows for innovation and agreements with content creators, Google says that 99.95% of URLs it was asked to take down last month didn't even exist in its search indexes. "For example, in January 2017, the most prolific submitter submitted notices that Google honored for 16,457,433 URLs. But on further inspection, 16,450,129 (99.97%) of those URLs were not in our search index in the first place."
Why should I check my demands, just carpet bomb them with everything and whatever hits is fine by me.
How about this: Whatever the punishment for not following through with a rightful demand should be meted out for every bogus one made in bad faith.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Google should tweak their algorithm to block takedown requesters who are spamming google with generic requests.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
DMCA takedown requests for non-existent URLs, especially at a 99.97% invalid rate, should be evidence that the requestor is not properly verifying their DMCA claims and should:
A) Lose their right to continue to submit 'trusted' DMCA takedown requests
B) Be charged under the DMCA for filing false claims.
But we know that will never happen.
If notices had to be signed as accurate by an officer of the company that sent them under threat of perjury, and if it was possible for someone who was affected by a bogus notice to then start the wheels on a process that would see said officer of the company end up doing a few days in jail for that perjury I would think we'd see bogus notices drop to near zero.
But of course that would only happen in a world where the lawmakers actually cared about doing what was right, not what their donors wanted.
I don't have to imagine. I just have to wait for it to get Trump's signature instead.
When were the standards set higher?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Nothing. But the URLs are not non-existent, just not indexed by Google, probably due to a robots.txt blocking access to the sites concerned.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
When I RTFA, it seems like there are 100s of millions of DCMA requests going out each year - 35 million in the "latter half of September 2016"?
Even if "detection" (I don't know how good their detection process is if 99%+ of the claims are not found by Google) filing costs came out to a dollar per then I would think the cost to the industry would be $250+ million.
Looking at Warner Music revenues (the first company I could think of: https://www.statista.com/stati...), I would think that the cost of filing all these claims amounts to around 5% or so of total revenue.
Two things came to mind thinking about this:
1. The music company accountants should be going apeshit over the cost of this program and the damage to the company's bottom line.
2. There's a whole bunch of money to be made creating an application for generating DCMA demands that reduces the number of DCMA requests (and the total cost of the requests) by 10x or more.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
When submitting that many million requests, the odds that that high a percentage are legitimate but not in the index is pretty low.
My bet is that the submitter just used an algorithm to generate possible names just in case, rather than actually find real infringers. For example, you know that www.questionablesite.com tends to host some content you don't like, so you do this:
- www.knownquestionablesite.com/bignamemovie.html
- www.knownquestionablesite.com/b1gnam3m0v13.html
- www.knownquestionablesite.com/big_name_movie.html
- www.knownquestionablesite.com/big-name-movie.html
- www.knownquestionablesite.com/big.name.movie.html
- etc
Now you don't know if they were even going to host your movie, but instead of checking, you just spam DMCA takedown requests because they're free and there's no downside if the site doesn't exist.
Legally defined bad faith is hard to prove. We would need some metric, like number or proportion of bogus requests where bad faith is legally presumed. Of course, if a reasonable person hearing/viewing the target of the takedown knows it isn't the complainant's property, that too should be presumed to be bad faith..