false takedowns – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "false takedowns"

Amazon Takes On Three Shady Retailers, Suing Them For Abusing The DMCA Process

from the probably-judgment-proof-but-still-a-useful-deterrent dept

DMCA abuse is never going to go away. Plenty of IP protection firms send out unvetted takedown notices in bulk, resulting in the targeting of non-infringers by takedown demands. To maintain their safe harbor protections, entities hosting third-party content tend to side with those sending the notices. For platforms hosting millions or billions of uploads, not a whole lot of vetting happens on the receiving end either.

Then there’s the deliberate abuse of the DMCA process. A lot of this abuse is linked to sketch “reputation management” firms. Clients, who want embarrassing information about them erased from search listings and the internet beyond, pay these companies to do their dirty SEO work for them.

One of many shady tools in the chest is the bogus DMCA notice issued under the false claim that a negative article is actually copyright infringement. It works this way. The offending article is copy-pasted into a “new” article at a news-ish sounding site. Said article is then backdated to appear to have been published before the article being targeted. A DMCA notice is issued, citing this bogus publication date. A few clicks later and the non-infringing article is taken down or delisted, resulting in a slightly cleaner reputation.

The same thing is going on at Amazon, but it appears to be shady merchants hoping to eliminate their competition, as Mitchell Clark reports for The Verge.

Amazon has filed three lawsuits against groups that it claims were abusing its takedown system by filing thousands of illegitimate copyright complaints against other products in a bid to get people to buy their merchandise instead. In an announcement on Thursday, the company calls the lawsuits a “new offensive against bad actors.”

The lawsuits are nearly identical. They all run 18 pages and feature identical tales of DMCA abuse utilizing copy-pasted images and text being bogusly portrayed as original content created by the DMCA takedown notice abusers. Here they are for your enjoyment(??): v. DHUOG [PDF], v. SIDESK [PDF], and v. VIVCIC [PDF].

Each one more identical than the next. Except for SIDESK. While the other two deal with a relative handful of false infringement claims (less than 600 between the two), bogus takedowns and methodical IP fraud appear to be Sidesk’s primary business. I mean, it’s literally the founding principles.

The trademark application that Sidesk used to gain entry to Amazon Brand Registry was fraudulent. The USPTO had terminated the trademark application for the Sidesk mark on December 10, 2021, but Sidesk still relied on this trademark application when applying to Amazon Brand Registry on December 16, 2021.

Having discovered the faux foot Sidesk used to get in Amazon’s door, the online retail behemoth went looking for more. And found plenty of it.

The Sidesk trademark application lists an individual purportedly named Shan Zhu as the attorney of record who filed the application on the trademark owner’s behalf. An investigation by the USPTO, however, found that the application for the Sidesk mark was in fact filed by officers, employees, or agents of an organization named Shenzhen Huanyee Intellectual Property Co., Ltd., and its Executive Director, Yusha Zhang (collectively, “Huanyee”).

Hey, multi-nationals gonna multi-national. Surely, Amazon can respect that. However, Huanyee apparently has no respect for US intellectual property law, something that saw it earn some pushback from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. If nothing else, you’ve got to admire the shear breadth of the grift.

After the USPTO’s investigation of the trademark application for the Sidesk mark and over 15,800 other trademark applications submitted by Huanyee, the Commissioner for Trademarks, David Gooder, issued a sanctions order against Huanyee for filing over 15,800 trademark applications using false, fictitious, or fraudulent domicile information and/or credentials.

Every last one of these registrations was terminated by the USPTO. One of those terminated was the one Sidesk used to secure a spot on Amazon’s Brand Registry.

Amazon is seeking injunctions against these three named accounts and any Does associated with the IP-abusing businesses. It’s also seeking damages, but it seems unlikely it will uncover the real people behind the (apparently bogus) businesses abusing the DMCA process for fun and profit. And even if it does, it seems unlikely these, um, entrepreneurs will have the liquidity to cover the tab.

That being said, this still works as a deterrent. Knowing Amazon’s team is keeping an eye (actually, more than 24,000 human eyes, according to statements made in these lawsuits) on potential DMCA abuse will nudge a few fraudsters towards honesty… or at least taking their so-called business elsewhere.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, dmca abuse, false takedowns, takedowns
Companies: amazon, dhuog, huanyee, sidesk, vivcic

Bungie Unmasks One Of The ‘Does’ It Sued For Fraudulent YouTube Takedowns

from the oops dept

Back in March of this year, we discussed a somewhat odd story involving a bunch of DMCA takedowns for YouTube videos that included fan-content mixed with Destiny 2 music or footage. DMCA takedowns aren’t themselves strange, but in this case the makers of the game, Bungie Inc., publicly stated that it was aware of the takedowns but insisted it wasn’t them or their enforcement partner, CSC. Some of Bungie’s own official content had also been hit with claims, bolstering its defense somewhat, though it certainly isn’t unheard of for official content to accidentally get DMCA’d. Further solidifying that this wasn’t actually Bungie or CSC, however, occurred when Bungie went ahead and filed a lawsuit against 10 John Does over all of this.

Well, at least one of those Does has now been unmasked, as YouTube assisted Bungie by providing his IP address. That would be Nicholas Minor, who goes as Lord Nazo on YouTube. Bungie has amended its lawsuit naming him specifically, though it is unclear if Bungie is accusing Minor of filing all of the fraudulent takedowns. Ironically, it appears that Minor took these actions after becoming angry that Bungie and CSC took down his YouTube videos that contained Destiny 2 game music.

Lord Nazo, real name Nicholas Minor, apparently sought revenge on the development studio after CSC Global, which works in conjunction with Bungie as a brand protector, issued a number of takedown notices to him for uploading the Destiny soundtracks to his channel. The videos were uploaded in December 2021, and removed by YouTube a month later.

As reported by The Game Post, Minor allegedly created two fake Gmail accounts under the pseudonyms Jeremy Wiland and Damien Reynolds, posing as employees of CSC. He then used the accounts to issue DMCA strikes against popular Destiny YouTubers such as My Name Is Byf and Promethean, and additionally against Bungie’s own YouTube channel.

More is alleged, including that Minor used those accounts to contact Bungie directly and threaten them somewhat vaguely. For its part, Bungie is asking for a whopping $7.6 million as a result of all of this. Based on the filing for the suit, Bungie looks like it knows what it’s talking about.

Now let’s discuss briefly how this will all get talked about. If Minor did what the complaint alleges, he’s likely to be in a heap of trouble. Bungie will look like a hero here, helped by the fact that its own stance on fan-created videos is fairly lenient.

But what few will talk about is a point that Bungie actually made at the outset of all of this: YouTube’s DMCA takedown process sucks and is absolutely begging to be abused. Minor may have been found out, assuming the complaint is correct, but how many times does that not happen? How many times, in the name of promiscuous enforcement of copyrights, have such fraudulent claims at a lower level never been given this attention? We see this all the time and nobody seems to want to do anything about it.

That’s the real problem here. A broken enforcement system that is ripe for abuse.

Filed Under: content id, copyright, copyright abuse, dmca, false takedowns, lord nazo, nicholas minor
Companies: bungie, youtube

Totally Bogus DMCA Takedowns From Giant Publishers Completely Nuke Book Review Blog Off The Internet

from the but-piracy-is-the-problem? dept

Just as we’re in the midst of a Greenhouse series all about SOPA, copyright industry lobbyists, and former copyright industry lawyers now running the Copyright Office are conspiring to make copyright law worse and to favor Hollywood and give the big giant legacy copyright companies more control and power over the internet.

And, yet, we pay almost no attention to how they massively abuse the power they already have under copyright law to silence people. The latest example is the book review blog, Fantasy Book Critic. I’d link to it, but as I’m writing this all you now see is a message that says “Sorry, the blog at fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com has been removed.”

Why? Because two of the largest publishing companies in the world, Penguin Random House and HarperCollins, hired a ridiculously incompetent service provider called “Link-Busters” which specializes in bullshit automated DMCA takedowns for the publishing industry. Link-Busters’ website looks like basically all of these sketchy, unreliable services, promising to “protect IP” and (even more ridiculously) “turn piracy into profits.”

The company also claims on its website that “you can be assured your work will be protected to the fullest extent,” and also: “According to multiple independent metrics, Link-Busters quarantines and/or eliminates more pirated content than other anti-piracy services.” Of course, it’s easy to get more things taken down if you don’t give a shit as to whether or not it’s actually infringing. And apparently, that is Link-Busters’ secret sauce: sending bogus DMCA takedowns for things like book review websites.

On Monday, Link-Busters, on behalf of Penguin Random House and HarperCollins sent over 50 bullshit takedown notices to Google, claiming that various reviews on Fantasy Book Critic were actually infringing copies of the books they were reviewing. Each notice listed many, many blog posts on the site. This is just a small sample of four such notices.

The actual notices do contain some links to websites that appear to have pirated copies of some books available, but also lots of links to Fantasy Book Critic’s reviews. The whole thing just seems incredibly sloppy by Link-Busters. Some of the “allegedly infringing” books in some of these notices didn’t even include links to allegedly infringing pages.

And then some show the only allegedly “infringing” links being… Fantasy Book Critic’s reviews:

That link, which again, does not exist any more, can be seen on the Internet Archive where you see that not only is it clearly a review, and not piracy, but it directly links visitors to places where they can buy the book. Turning piracy into profits, huh? By taking down review sites pushing people to places where they can buy the book?

Of course, the real problem here is that there are no consequences whatsoever for Link-Busters or Penguin Random House or HarperCollins. While the DMCA has Section 512(f), which is supposed to punish false notifiers, in practice it is a dead letter. This means, Link-Busters can spam Google with wild abandon with blatantly false DMCA notices and face zero consequences. But, more importantly, publishing giants like Penguin Random House and HarperCollins (which are currently suing libraries for offering lendable ebooks), can get away with this abuse of the law over and over again.

Fantasy Book Critic was reduced to begging on Twitter for Google to look more closely at Link-Busters bogus notifications and to restore their blog. They even contacted Link-Busters which admitted that they fucked up (though, perhaps they should have checked before sending these bogus notices?)

(7/n) As a result of this massive amount of wrong #DMCA notices, @Google Blogger removed the blog for the breach of TOS (Terms of Service) immediately. We contacted the service (@linkbusters), & they acknowledged their mistake, and promised to send a retraction notice to @Google.

— Fantasy Book Critic (@FantasyBookCrit) January 19, 2022

Either way, among the many, many reasons why we opposed SOPA was the recognition that this kind of thing happens all the time, and the “remedies” under SOPA were that entire websites would get blocked at the DNS level under mere accusations of copyright infringement. In this case, it’s slightly different because Google (under a different part of the DMCA) is required to shut down “repeat infringer” accounts, and so here it took down the entire blog that was hosted on Google’s blogspot. The punishment under SOPA would have been even more draconian — blocking all access to the blog at the DNS level entirely.

So, as Penguin Random House and HarperCollins and their lobbying arm — lead by the former director of the Copyright Office, Maria Pallante — are currently trying to convince Congress to make copyright law even more in their favor and to shut down digital libraries, perhaps we should be looking at moving copyright in the other direction, so that these “mistakes” can’t happen any more. Perhaps copyright law shouldn’t allow the shutting down of a website based on totally bogus accusations from an automated spammer hired by the largest publishers in the world, where no one cares about what they might actually be taking down?

The problem is not piracy. The problem is copyright law enabling actual censorship — using the power of the law to silence speech.

Filed Under: book reviews, copyright, copyright as censorship, dmca, false takedowns, fantasy book critic, reviews, takedowns
Companies: google, harpercollins, link-busters, penguin random house

Sega DMCAs SteamDB Despite That Site Not Hosting Any Pirated Material

from the ready-fire-aim dept

Sega has something of a flip-floppy history when it comes to how restrictive the company chooses to be with intellectual property generally and DMCA takedowns more specifically. The company notably went DMCA happy back in 2012, for instance, over a bunch of fan videos on YouTube for Shining Force, all because it had a planned release for a PSP version of the title. In 2013, the company actually half-apologized for doing so, promising to be more lenient with what it allows, though there were caveats expressed as well. Fast forward to 2016 and Sega quite gleefully poked some fun at its rival, Nintendo, for its DMCA blitzes, instead encouraging fans to make and create cool and fun stuff with some of its IP.

Well, here we are in 2021, and Sega once again is in the news, in this case for a DMCA takedown sent to the SteamDB site.

As SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik shared on Twitter Monday, Sega’s lawyers asked that the site and its host take down a page for Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The takedown request alleges that SteamDB is distributing or linking to pirated copies of the game, even though a quick glance at an archived version shows that’s not true.

That page, like every other on SteamDB, simply compiles historical data on pricing, concurrent players, and other statistics from Steam’s own API and public store pages. While there is a link to install the game near the top, that link directs users to Steam itself, which will attempt to install a legitimate copy if the user owns it.

Just so everyone is clear, SteamDB has literally nothing to do with piracy of games. Instead, SteamDB compiles a ton of interesting statistics about games on Valve’s Steam platform. Oh, and SteamDB also pushes visitors looking at game statistics to the totally legit place to buy them on Steam. Unfortunately, due to the either automated way some publishers police piracy of their games, or due to an ill-informed legal team tasked with issuing DMCA notices, SteamDB gets the occasional DMCA takedown request. It’s yet another example of how hard policing this sort of thing is, where the actual publishers of these games are doing a ready-fire-aim DMCA approach. In this case, the SteamDB page for Yakuza: Like a Dragon was taken down, though it appears that was rectified afterwards.

Sega has provided the following statement to Ars Technica: “Earlier this week, one of our games was incorrectly flagged on SteamDB. We utilize anti-piracy software to protect our games at a large scale, but sometimes it makes mistakes. Sega will continue to fine-tune these systems to avoid this in the future and we appreciate SteamDB cooperating with us to resolve the issue quickly.”

It’s not terrible as far as apologies go for this sort of thing, but there is something unfulfilling about a message of: “Hey, you were collateral damage, too bad, so sad.” Mistakes like this aren’t world-ending, certainly, but they are a nuisance for innocent parties to endure simply because policing copyright infringement at scale is apparently an impossible task.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, false takedowns, pavel djundik, steamdb, takedown
Companies: sega, valve

Google Report: 99.95 Percent Of DMCA Takedown Notices Are Bot-Generated Bullshit Buckshot

from the overplaying-their-hand dept

Google, being the search giant that it is, has been banging the drum for some time about the silly way the DMCA has been abused by those that wield it like a cudgel. Here at Techdirt, we too have described the many ways that the well-intentioned DMCA and the way its implemented by service providers has deviated from its intended purpose. Still, the vast majority of our stories discuss deliberate attempts by human beings to silence critics and competition using the takedown process. Google, on the other hand, has been far more focused on statistics for DMCA takedown notices that show wanton disregard for what it was supposed to be used for entirely. That makes sense of course, as the abuse of the takedown process is a burden on the search company. In that first link, for instance, Google noted that more than half the takedown notices it was receiving in 2009 were mere attempts by one business targeting a competitor, while over a third of the notices contained nothing in the way of a valid copyright dispute.

But if those numbers were striking in 2009, Google’s latest comment to the Copyright Office (see our own comment here) on what’s happening in the DMCA 512 notice-and-takedown world shows some stats for takedown notices received through its Trusted Copyright Removal Program… and makes the whole ordeal look completely silly.

A significant portion of the recent increases in DMCA submission volumes for Google Search stem from notices that appear to be duplicative, unnecessary, or mistaken. As we explained at the San Francisco Roundtable, a substantial number of takedown requests submitted to Google are for URLs that have never been in our search index, and therefore could never have appeared in our search results. 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. Nor is this problem limited to one submitter: in total, 99.95% of all URLs processed from our Trusted Copyright Removal Program in January 2017 were not in our index.

Now, because Google is Google, the company doesn’t generally have a great deal of sympathy hoisted upon it by the public, never mind by copyright protectionists. But, come on, this is simply nuts. When the number of claims coming through the system that don’t even pertain to listed results by Google can be logically rounded up to 100%, that’s putting a burden on a company for no valid reason whatsoever. Even if you hate Google, or distrust it, it should be plain as day that it’s unfair for it to have to wade through all this muck just to appease the entertainment industries.

And, it’s important to note that this isn’t all of the notices received, but just those coming through the Trusted Copyright Removal system — meaning that these are organizations that supposedly are supposed to have at least some credibility not to be submitting totally bogus notices. But, apparently, they don’t actually give a damn.

The problem, as you may have already guessed, is that most of these claims are being generated through automated systems designed to shotgun-blast DMCA notices with reckless abandon.

These numbers of simply staggering with only a tiny number of millions of requests reflecting actual pages in the search index. Rather, 99.95% of the processed URLs from Google’s trusted submitter program are machine-generated URLs that do not involve actual pages in the search index. Given that data, Google notes that claims that the large number of requests correlates to infringing content on the Internet is incorrect:

Nor is the large number of takedown requests to Google a good proxy even for the volume of infringing material available on the Internet. Many of these submissions appear to be generated by merely scrambling the words in a search query and appending that to a URL, so that each query makes a different URL that nonetheless leads to the same page of results.

The claim by the entertainment industry that one can see what a problem piracy is by looking at the sheer volume of DMCA notices sent to search engines shall hereby be declared dead, having been buried by the industry’s fellow takedown-notice-filers. That claim never made much sense, but these stats sever any link between takedown notice numbers and actual piracy completely. And there needs to be a remedy for this, whether its punishment upon the abusers or rules for how notices can be filed. Because these numbers are ridiculous.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, copyright office, dmca, dmca 512, false takedowns, free speech, notice and takedown, takedowns
Companies: google

Another Day, Another Anomaly: Paramount Issues DMCA Takedown On Ubuntu Linux Torrent

from the but-stopping-copyright-infringement-is-easy? dept

The legacy copyright industries keep insisting that it’s “easy” to recognize when something is infringing and thus it’s “easy” to stop copyright infringement. They’re very, very wrong on both counts for a variety of reasons. We could go into the details for why, but it’s easier to just let them show us themselves. Not too long ago we wrote about Warner Bros. issuing DMCA takedown notices on its own sites (and also Amazon and IMDB links for its movies), and now TorrentFreak alerts us to Paramount issuing a DMCA takedown on a torrent of Ubuntu, the popular version of Linux that many people use all the time.

It’s kind of a weird request, and it’s not at all clear why it’s included in this takedown notice, which is for a variety of movies. In the section on the movie Transformers: Age of Extinction, Paramount (filed by notoriously clueless IP Echelon), it includes a link to a torrent of an Ubuntu iso.

So, once again, we have a major Hollywood entertainment entity — which has been insisting for years that Google and others should “just know” when something is infringing and take it down and block all future infringements — who can’t even properly identify the content that it’s claiming to hold the copyright over. And, again, copyright is context specific, meaning that the absolute best party to understand if there’s infringement is the copyright holder, rather than some random third party. But in just a week or so, we’ve seen examples of how two of the biggest studios in Hollywood can’t even figure out their own takedown notices properly. How can they possibly expect others to do so for them — and why should we trust them when they ask for a “notice and staydown” system that will inevitably take down (and keep down) tons of non-infringing material?

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, false takedowns, linux, takedowns, torrents, ubuntu
Companies: paramount

A Glimpse Of The Future Under SOPA: Warner Bros. Admits It Filed Many False Takedown Notices

from the is-this-what-we-want? dept

While entertainment industry execs still continue to pretend that it’s obvious when things are infringing, they continually ignore the very real concerns raised by many of us about SOPA/PROTECT IP/ICE seizures. The concern isn’t about taking down the infringing content. It’s about the overreach of these efforts, and how it can and will be used to take down other, legal content. This is not some hypothetical scenario. We hear about bogus DMCA notices being issued all the time, and now we have a perfect example of what a future under SOPA would be like, as Warner Bros. has admitted in court that it issued a bunch of takedowns for content it had no copyright over — including over some software that it just didn’t like.

As you may recall, Warner Bros. was among those who sued the cyberlocker Hotfile for infringement. Hotfile hit back, pointing out that it had worked with Warner Bros., and even created a tool to make it easier to issue takedowns. And Warner Bros.’s response was to takedown tons of content that it had no right to. In responding to these countercharges, Warner Bros. flat out admits that it did exactly that. It says that sometimes it just did basic keyword matching, which caught all sorts of other content it had no right to, admitting that it never checked the actual file to make sure it was infringing.

Warner admits that, as one component of its takedown process, Warner utilizes automated software to assist in locating files on the Internet believed to contain unauthorized Warner content. Warner admits that it scans and issues takedowns for The Box (2009), a movie in which Warner owns the copyrights. Warner admits that its records indicate that URLs containing the phrases ?The Box That Changed Britain? and ?Cancer Step Outsider of the Box? were requested for takedown through use of the SRA tool.

It also issued a takedown over some open source software, simply because a Warner Bros. employee didn’t like it (the software was a download manager that the WB employee thought could be used to infringe.) It also admits that it took down some software that it distributed, but over which it had no copyrights and no rights to issue a takedown.

Even more hilarious, is that Warner Bros., in its response to the Hotfile countercharges, seems to suggest that it’s preposterous to think that it should have to actually check to make sure files are actually infringing… even as it appears to be making the argument that service providers should do exactly that:

Warner further admits that, given the volume and pace of new infringements on Hotfile, Warner could not practically download and view the contents of each file prior to requesting that it be taken down through use of the SRA tool.

And yet, we’re regularly told that YouTube should be responsible for checking the content of every video uploaded. Among the other mistaken downloads were the text of a Harry Potter book, which may be infringing, but Warner only has the copyright on the movies, not the books.

After all of this, Warner Bros. tries to brush this off by saying it doesn’t really matter, since most (though not all) of the content it took down was infringing anyway, so I guess it thinks it was doing other copyright holders a favor. Of course, that’s not how the law works. The fact is, some copyright holders want to give their works away for free, and don’t need or want some Hollywood giant taking it down for them.

Either way, this once again undermines so many of the arguments of the copyright players:

1. That it’s “easy” or “obvious” to determine what is and what is not infringing. Since Warner Bros., (like Viacom before it) can’t seem to get this right themselves, why do they continue to insist that it’s so easy.
2. That it’s “easy” or “obvious” for service providers to monitor and stop infringement directly. If even the copyright holders themselves — who have less content to review and more knowledge of what’s actually infringing — can’t get it right, why do they claim that service providers can do this?
3. That laws like SOPA won’t be used to take down non-infringing speech. Once again, the evidence shows that they did exactly that. It’s just that under SOPA, Warner Bros. would have been able to completely kill off Hotfile prior to its ability to make its case in court.

Think of this as a preview of what we’d get under SOPA, with companies like Warner Bros. and Viacom, with their history of bogus takedowns, continuing to do so, but rather than just blocking content they have no rights over, they’d actively shut down sites and companies. In what world does that make sense?

Filed Under: copyright, false takedowns, sopa, takedowns
Companies: hotfile, warner bros.