fake takedowns – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Bungie Sues Does Over ‘Destiny’ DMCA Takedowns, Slams YouTube’s DMCA Process

from the to-the-woodshed dept

In our somewhat limited discussions about video game publisher Bungie, our remarks about the company certainly haven’t always been positive. And perhaps that colored my thinking when I recently wrote about a DMCA takedown blitz occurring among the Destiny community, with all kinds of uploads from fans being on the receiving end of takedowns on YouTube. But Bungie insisted it wasn’t them, a claim bolstered by the fact that some of Bungie’s own official videos on its channel also got hit with takedowns. Still, the statement from the company about all of this left some room for interpretation, with Bungie indicating that these takedowns weren’t happening at “the request” of Bungie, leading plenty of folks to assume this was an automated copyright enforcement bot or a 3rd party enforcement agency going rogue.

Well, I think we can safely put that theory to rest now. Bungie has not only sued 10 “John Does” over all of this, but also used its filing to take YouTube’s DMCA takedown process to the woodshed and absolutely beat the shit out of it. The filing starts off with a description of just what happened here: new Gmail accounts created to fraudulently impersonate Bungie enforcers of copyright, strikes coming from those newly created Gmail accounts, as well as a deep campaign by those accounts to claim that the actual legit Gmail accounts used for enforcement of Bungie copyrights were the fraudulent ones.

And then the filing goes in on YouTube’s process:

Doe Defendants were able to do this because of a hole in YouTube’s DMCA-process security, which allows any person to claim to be representing any rights holder in the world for purposes of issuing a DMCA takedown.

In other words, as far as YouTube is concerned, any person, anywhere in the world, can issue takedown notices on behalf of any rights holder, anywhere. A disgruntled infringer or a competitive content producer, for example, can issue takedown notices purportedly on behalf of Disney, or Fox, or Universal—or even Google itself. All they need to do is: (1) fill out the video removal form… (2) have a Google account—including, upon information and belief, one created that same day and with fake information; and (3) fill out information and click verification buttons fraudulently certifying that they have the right to submit the takedown request, with no verification done by YouTube.

Welcome to the team, Bungie. Here at Techdirt, we’ve been shouting to the world about how wide open the DMCA notice and takedown process is to fraud and abuse for years. Nice of you folks to finally catch up.

The filing then goes into great detail about the harm this has caused Bungie. To the company’s credit, the filing details Bungie’s fairly lenient policy on what fans can share and upload when it comes to footage of the company’s products. Still, Bungie has also utilized a third party, CSC, to takedown some videos featuring music from its games. This fraudulent blitz appears to have occurred after those CSC takedowns. The filing also notes the deluge of negative press and public response due to these takedowns.

Between March 2 and March 16, CSC initiated and completed 41 DMCA takedowns of YouTube videos on Bungie’s behalf. All of them “related to music from Destiny 2’s original soundtracks,” the lawsuit said.

The YouTubers whose videos were taken down included the Doe defendants, the lawsuit said. “Beginning on or about March 17, 2022, Doe Defendants began submitting unauthorized DMCA takedown notices to YouTube for videos that allegedly infringed Bungie’s copyrights,” the complaint said. “Upon information and belief, Doe Defendants created fake [name]csc@gmail.com Google accounts in order to submit the Fraudulent Takedown Notices.” In the notices, the defendants “identified themselves as ‘Bungie, Inc.'” or “as Bungie’s authorized agents.”

Oddly, at least one bit of communication from someone claiming to be sending false takedown notices said they did it intending to get caught so as to spotlight how shitty YouTube’s DMCA policy is.

I was directly affected by false takedowns from “David Thomson” several months ago, and many others were issued false takedowns by this person over the past several years. I believed with enough attention, Bungie might have been prompted to step in. The first few channels that were hit by takedowns didn’t seem to grab anyone’s attention, so I had to escalate the matter.

Bungie, for its part, is simply not playing around with this. The company is asking for $150k per fraudulent takedown notice sent and is seeking to unmask the ten John Does it has filed against.

So, while this is all very strange, it is clear these takedowns weren’t Bungie’s doing. It’s also very clear that everyone hates YouTube’s DMCA takedown process.

Filed Under: 512(f), copyright, dmca, dmca 512, fake takedowns, takedowns
Companies: bungie, bungie studios

Mystery Over Fake Section 1201 Takedown Claims Sent By 'Video Industry Association of America' Deepens

from the no-such-agency dept

It was only a week or so ago that we discussed the latest example of the type of fake DMCA notices that Google gets to delist certain URLs from search results. In this instance, a couple of factors made these DMCA notices even more problematic than usual. For starters, they claim to be coming from the U.S. Copyright Office, which very much does not send in DMCA notices like this. On top of that, the notices claim they are being sent by the U.S. Copyright Office on behalf of the Video Industry Association of America which, as I noted in my original post, doesn’t seem to actually exist. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these are notices for Section 1201 claims, which deal with anti-circumvention aspects of copyright law, that target mostly stream-ripping sites and sites that cover or guide legit uses of those sites. Notably, Google does not have an appeal process for 1201 notices, leaving anyone who got delisted basically screwed.

Well, now the mystery somewhat deepens. The Section 1201 DMCA notices have continued to flood Google, but now they are being supposedly sent directly by the Video Industry Association of America, with whoever is sending these dropping the pretense that they’re coming from the US Copyright Office. But that isn’t actually clearing much up other than to highlight, again, that the organization doesn’t actually exist and is coming from Russia.

A mysterious group called the ‘Video Industry Association of America’ is trying to wipe the homepages of dozens of reputable sites from Google search. The targets, which stand accused of violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention policy, include Verizon, Pinterest, and Engadget. Google says that it’s aware of these fraudulent notices but, thus far, they are not without damage.

The ‘American’ organization starts one request off in Russian and finds it hard to construct proper English sentences. In another notice, it complains of sites and apps that circumvent the copyright protection of streaming services, while classifying these as “software cracks.” Things get even more problematic when we look at the URLs that are reported. While these include tools such as DVDFab and YouTube-rippers, which some rightsholders see as problematic, various legitimate sites are targeted as well.

So what’s going on here? Well, it seems that whoever is behind these DMCA notices is taking shotgun approach to them. Anything that has to do with providing or informing the public on matters of stream-ripping, legit or otherwise, are being targeted. Plenty of other tech news organizations have been targeted as well, such as Engadget and CNET. Most of the takedown requests have gone ignored by Google, but several have not. Many smaller tech sites have been delisted as a result of all this.

For at least one of the sites, Google has acknowledged that the delist request was not legit, but also said there is no current appeals process.

Fossbytes reported the issue to Google, which informed the site that there is no official counter-notification process for these anti-circumvention takedowns. As such, the URLs remain deindexed for now.

“There is no formal counter notification process available under US law for circumvention, so we have not reinstated these URLs,” Google replied, requesting a detailed explanation from the site.

Meaning the onus is still on the victims of this crap to get themselves re-listed. And, once TorrentFreak got its hands on a copy of the takedown request, it illuminates how blatantly fraudulent all of this is.

This reveals some interesting details that are not available in the Lumen database, including the name, email address, and geolocation of the ‘Video Industry Association of America’ representative.

As can be seen above, the sender is actually located in Russia and identifies itself as “Wolf Fang,” which isn’t a typical name, not even in Russia. The email address, which we won’t publish, comes from Gmail and references another animal’s fangs.

Again, what’s going on here? Is this some coordinated Russian effort to delist a bunch of prominent or otherwise American news sites? Not likely. Instead, this is more likely a form of the kind of fraud-based attack we’ve seen from overseas sites that abuse the DMCA process in order to take down both its competitors and references to competitors wherever possible.

For now, it remains a mystery who’s behind these notices. It wouldn’t surprise us if the “Video Industry Association of America’ is actually a direct competitor of the stream-ripping and DRM circumvention tools that are reported.

This is a strategy we have seen several times in the past. A competitor targets URLs from competing apps and sites, so their own site will end up higher in Google’s search results.

In other words, the only real good these bullshit DMCA notices are doing is to further highlight the wide open avenues for fraud and abuse in our current DMCA takedown process.

Filed Under: copyfraud, dmca, dmca 1201, dmca 512, fake takedowns, russia
Companies: google, video industry association of america