Starz Goes on Twitter Meta-Censorship Spree To Cover Up TV-Show Leaks (torrentfreak.com)

American entertainment giant Starz is continuing to remove tweets that link to a TorrentFreak news report about leaked TV-shows. From a report: Last week we posted a news article documenting how several TV-show episodes had leaked online before their official release. Due to the leaks, complete seasons of unreleased TV-shows such as "The Spanish Princess," "Ramy," and "The Red Line," surfaced on pirate sites. In most cases, there were visible signs revealing that the leaks were sourced from promotional screeners. The leaks also hit Starz, as three then-unreleased episodes from its TV series "American Gods" appeared online as well. The American entertainment company was obviously not happy with that, but its response was rather unconventional.

Soon after the news was published, Starz issued a takedown request through The Social Element Agency, requesting Twitter to remove our tweet to our own article. Twitter was quick to comply and removed the tweet that supposedly infringed Starz copyrights. We disagreed. The article in question never linked to any infringing material. It did include a screenshot from a leaked episode, showing the screener watermarks, but those watermarks were central to the story, as we explained in a follow-up piece. The good news is that many legal scholars, journalists, and lawyers agree with our stance. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for example, responded that Starz has no right to silence TorrentFreak and also shared that opinion on Twitter, where many others chimed in as well. That's when things started to spiral out of control. Starz takedown efforts only encouraged more people to share the original story about the leaks, which is a classic example of the 'Streisand Effect'. However, Starz didn't budge and issued takedown notices against those tweets as well.

Comments

Why is twitter lending itself to this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't this Capitalist American Company have morals of their own or so... right, forget I asked.

Re:Why is twitter lending itself to this?

[DickBreath]

Capitalists understand that morals are a valuable resource, and as such have marketable value to be sold to the highest bidder.

Re:Why is twitter lending itself to this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because being bougie is taking advantage of someone and is therefor fucking evil.

The “Starz effect”...

[Sebby]

Take the Streisand effect, and multiply it by six!

This issue is so easy to mitigate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anytime an episode gets leaked, simply re-edit and add a couple more minutes of footage, taking up time that would have been given to promos. Those who watched the leaked version will still have to watch the broadcast version, and it might even help sell more spots.

Leaks or Marketing

[alvinrod]

I wonder if this was a "leak" or if this was done intentionally as marketing. Up until this moment I wasn't aware that the show existed. Advertising costs a good amount of money, but why pay for that when you can just leak a little bit of content and then run around screaming about it in the exact kind of way that is guaranteed to draw attention to yourself?

Can the Streisand Effect be harnessed to achieve greater awareness?

Re:Leaks or Marketing

[the_skywise]

That's a pretty complex (and random) system you're thinking of.
If anything I'd say it's more likely that torrentfreak is in bed with Starz - posting the article on Starz' behalf, then Starz gets it taken down, then Torrentleak "blows the whistle".
Anything else is depending on sheer random luck that someone notices and writes a story on it and then hope that the story gains traction. Your ad dollars are better spent on something with concrete results.
I mean, taking that out to its logical conclusion - did the EFF leak the videos so Torrentleak would write the article so Starz would clamp down so EFF could get that sweet sweet outrage funding?

No - I think Starz' "social compliance security team" did their job so that Twitters' "patent and ethics supervisory team" did their job and Torrentleak got burned wrongly because of the short sightedness of both. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity - the old adage which is even more true today.

Re:Leaks or Marketing

[DRJlaw]

If anything I'd say it's more likely that torrentfreak is in bed with Starz - posting the article on Starz' behalf, then Starz gets it taken down, then Torrentleak "blows the whistle".

It's even more likely that you are in bed with torrentfreak and Starz. Then you go on Slashdot and whip up the conspiracy theory outrage machine to spread the word amongst those who can't be bothered to RTFA while pocketing your filthy, filthy lucre.

After all, in bed it's the more the merrier...

Re:Leaks or Marketing

[alvinrod]

Someone certainly could have been paid as a part of that. If you assume that Starz did this for marketing purposes, there's no reason that they can't grease a few palms for far less money than it would take to run a full ad campaign. There are plenty of other examples of companies trying to clamp down on stuff in an idiotic (and ultimately pointless) way that tend to get lampooned, so it's not hard to imagine that intentionally engaging in that kind of buffoonery would elicit a similar, and organic response. If it's failing to achieve the desired effect, you can always pay for coverage.

I have no evidence that Starz has done anything beyond acting the in the typical and foolhardy manner that large media companies tend towards, but having heard nothing of any of these properties, I can't help but wonder if someone has determined that you can get a lot of free publicity through something like this. It's especially effective because it gets around ad blocking.

Re:Leaks or Marketing

[Kjella]

I'm not really buying it because all shows have die hard fans that absolutely must know what happens next, it would be taunting paying customers to pirate from torrents. If you've done it once, the threshold to do it again is much lower because you've installed the torrent client, found the pirate site, taken the risk of a copyright strike and convinced yourself it's acceptable. I can kinda see it with music because it's so cheap and the volume so vast it's about who makes noise. But broadcast production quality TV shows cost too much to simply hand them out like free candy and hope people buy more, even the low budget crappy ones.

Re:Leaks or Marketing

[gDLL]

it is FAR, FAR more dangerous to attribute to stupidity what is in fact malice.

No it isn't.

The reverse is true.

Re:Leaks or Marketing

[Registered Coward v2]

I think Starz' "social compliance security team" did their job so that Twitters' "patent and ethics supervisory team" did their job and Torrentleak got burned wrongly because of the short sightedness of both. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity - the old adage which is even more true today.

What was the downside for Starz? Twitter is more likely to take down the tweets (the path of least resistance) than fight the request; if the request is not valid they can leave fighting it up to the person who tweeted it. Most are unlikely to do that and Twitter saves time and money. Sure, a request is a legal document and Starz could be accused of making a false statement; but I have no doubt a decent lawyer colod argue it was made in a good faith belief the tweet violated Starz copyright. Is torrentfreak going to pay to litigate where copyright's boundaries are and argue against Starz? I doubt it. So in the end Starz wins.

As for the Streisand effect, I doubt much od Starz audience cares about DCNA takedown requests and just wants to see their shows.

Re:Leaks or Marketing

[the_skywise]

Obviously you are a Starz paid flunky who knows they leaked the videos themselves to get torrentfreak to tweet about it so they could get them bumped from Twitter so slashdot would write an article that I would respond to just so YOU could come on here and take me down!
Well I hope its WORTH IT!

Re:Leaks or Marketing

[the_skywise]

From a legal standpoint (IANAL) I think the lawyers are just trying to justify their salaries and also that there's some precedence that a leak of this nature is somewhat defendable (if not, at least, necessary on the part of Starz) to show a judge that they aggressively defend their copyrighted works so as not to be slighted in other more egregious cases.
Totally agree with you that it's a punitive action on the part of Starz (or Starz' lawyers) that would probably not hold up in court but can't be defended without $$$ and time that TorrentFreak would rather not deal with.
Since we're on a conspiracy theory kick - it might even be that Starz was just looking for a way to silence just TorrentFreak as part of their "war on piracy".

Re: Leaks or Marketing

[astrofurter]

"Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity - the old adage"

Hanlon's Razor is obsolete. Consider instead using the Silicon Valley Razor:

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice."

Re: Leaks or Marketing

[the_skywise]

Is that like the 5 cent Razor club?

Maybe stop sending out complete episodes

[KalvinB]

There's really no reason that promotional material would be the full series or even a full episode.

Chop off the last 10 minutes of each episode so there's no value in it outside of what it is intended for: general review. The ending of an episode is the big reveal anyway that isn't supposed to be spoiled.

Not that piracy matters anyway. Fans will wait for episodes to air.

Ah, yes, Starz

[elrous0]

The one studio whose content remained stubbornly in poor quality SD on Netflix long after everyone else had moved over to HD.

Deletion or just moderation?

[tepples]

Since when are comments deleted? Last I checked, only one comment had ever been deleted from Slashdot, and that was in response to a formal notice of claimed infringement from Religious Technology Center, the publishing arm of Scientology. (This is the same sort of notice that the agency retained by Starz has been sending to Twitter.) Unless I'm missing something fundamental, most comments you claim are "deleted" have only been moderated down to score -1. As long as Slashdot isn't in "offline mode" due to server overload, you can change the score threshold if you want to read everything, including the Score:-1 comments.

Re: Deletion or just moderation?

[astrofurter]

Yup, I've seen comments deleted as well. Yes, they were wallotext anti-semitic diatribes that were part of a crapflooding campaign. But still, they were deleted, not just modded down.

An era has ended for Slashdot, and the internet is a poorer place because of it.

Finally

[ThurstonMoore]

I have a reason to create a twitter account.

Twitter Takedown =/= Silencing

[jaa101]

The good news is that many legal scholars, journalists, and lawyers agree with our stance. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for example, responded that Starz has no right to silence TorrentFreak

Twitter can take down anything they like, independent of what the EFF et al. say. Maybe Starz advertises on Twitter. Maybe Twitter just thinks that annoying Stars will cause them more trouble than complying with their request. TorrentFreak is not silenced and is free to speak out in many other ways, just as Twitter is free to control content on their own platform. There's no law that platforms have to dishonour take-down requests because they're invalid.

Re:Twitter has MORALS?

[micheas]

They boxed them up to make sure they are never used and diminish in value.