takedowns – Techdirt (original) (raw)
Elon Rehires Lawyers In Brazil, Removes Accounts He Insisted He Wouldn’t Remove
from the was-there-no-strategy? dept
Elon Musk fought the Brazilian law, and it looks like the Brazilian law won.
After making a big show of how he was supposedly standing up for free speech, Elon caved yet again. Just as happened back in April when he first refused to comply with court orders from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian news org Folha reports that ExTwitter has (1) rehired a law firm in Brazil (though hasn’t yet designated a “legal representative” for the purpose of being a potential hostage) and (2) begun taking down accounts that it was ordered to remove (translated via Google Translate):
X (formerly Twitter) began complying with court orders from the Federal Supreme Court (STF) on Wednesday night (18) and took down accounts that Minister Alexandre de Moraes ordered to be suspended.
This week, the company rehired the Pinheiro Neto law firm to represent it before the Court. The firm had been dismissed last week. The STF says it will only recognize the new lawyers after X appoints a legal representative in the country.
This all comes right after the mess where ExTwitter switched its CDN provider, leading to the site briefly becoming available again in Brazil. According to Bloomberg, de Moraes appeared none too pleased about this and ordered another fine on the company:
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has been sparring with Musk for months, ordered a daily fine of 5 million reais ($922,250) against the social media site and accused it of attempting to “disobey” judicial orders.
An order published Thursday instructs the nation’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, to ban X access through network providers such as Cloudflare, Fastly and EdgeUno, which were “created to circumvent the judicial decision to block the platform in national territory.”
From everything I’ve heard, it really does appear that the Cloudflare thing was unintentional and just happened because ExTwitter was in the process of moving from Fastly to Cloudflare for CDN services. This was for a variety of reasons and not to avoid the ban in Brazil. ExTwitter put out a statement saying it was unintentional as well:
You can say that the company is lying, but that wouldn’t make much sense. Elon has had zero problems antagonizing and attacking de Moraes and the Brazilian government, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to lie about this. Especially if it is true that they had already begun the process of rehiring the law firm and banning some accounts.
Cloudflare quickly announced that it would segregate ExTwitter and make sure Brazilian traffic didn’t reach it. Anyone would have had to know this was the likely result if it really was intentional.
So, all of this sounds like Elon potentially realizing that he did his “oh, look at me, I’m a free speech absolutist” schtick, it caused ExTwitter to lose a large chunk of its userbase, and now he’s back to playing ball again. Because, like so much that he’s done since taking over Twitter, he had no actual plan to deal with these kinds of demands from countries.
Filed Under: alexandre de moraes, brazil, content moderation, elon musk, hostage employees, legal representative, takedowns
Companies: twitter, x
CrowdStrike DMCA’d A Parody Site In Wake Of Update Outage
from the great-plan-people dept
As you will no doubt be aware, on July 19th cybersecurity company CrowdStrike did an oopsie in an update it pushed to its Falcon Sensor software that took down millions of computers around the world. The result was chaos, with everything from hospitals to airlines to banks impacted by computers and servers that went into bootloops. A rollback was performed, which fixed some of the problem, but there were still millions of machines in the public that suddenly became BSOD paperweights until a slightly more complicated fix was implemented by end users themselves. Financial damage as a result has been estimated at roughly $10 billion, while CrowdStrike’s stock fell by double digits. I heard one analyst on CNBC remark that the company’s lawyers wouldn’t be making it to the beach this summer, and maybe next summer either, so inundated with lawsuits would the company be.
The point is that CrowdStrike had a very, very bad time. And when a company is having a very bad time like this, they tend to go immediately into damage control. The most important part of that damage control, as anyone in crises PR will tell you, is to be open and honest about the mistake, help to correct the mistake, and generally try to be as forthcoming and understanding of the outrage the mistake produced as possible.
Or, if you’re CrowdStrike, you sic a third party on a parody website making fun of your mistake, issuing a DMCA over a trademark claim. That’s exactly what the company did to clownstrike.lol, an obvious parody site that made use of CrowdStrike’s logo, altered to include a clownish getup. David Senk created the site partly as a laugh, but also as someone who is critical of over-centralization within the technology industry.
Setting up the parody site at clownstrike.lol on July 24, Senk’s site design is simple. It shows the CrowdStrike logo fading into a cartoon clown, with circus music blasting throughout the transition. For the first 48 hours of its existence, the site used an unaltered version of CrowdStrike’s Falcon logo, which is used for its cybersecurity platform, but Senk later added a rainbow propeller hat to the falcon’s head.
“I put the site up initially just to be silly,” Senk told Ars, noting that he’s a bit “old-school” and has “always loved parody sites” (like this one).
It was all fun and games, but on July 31, Senk received a DMCA notice from Cloudflare’s trust and safety team, which was then hosting the parody site. The notice informed Senk that CSC Digital Brand Services’ global anti-fraud team, on behalf of CrowdStrike, was requesting the immediate removal of the CrowdStrike logo from the parody site, or else Senk risked Cloudflare taking down the whole site.
Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here, because there’s a ton that went wrong here. CrowdStrike has made some mention that there were several nefarious actors on the internet that were setting up websites making use of its logo in an attempt to take advantage of the outage. It was to combat that, according to the company, that led it to contract with CSC to issue these takedowns.
“As part of our proactive fraud management activities, CrowdStrike’s anti-fraud partners have issued more than 500 takedown notices in the last two weeks to help prevent bad actors from exploiting current events,” CrowdStrike’s statement said. “These actions are taken to help protect customers and the industry from phishing sites and malicious activity. While parody sites are not the intended target of these efforts, it’s possible for such sites to be inadvertently impacted. We will review the process and, where appropriate, evolve ongoing anti-fraud activities.”
But that is an excuse, not a valid justification. CSC is CrowdStrike’s contractor that issued a faulty DMCA notice on a parody site. It’s actions are essentially CrowdStrike’s actions and the company ought to remain far more focused on not fucking up a sizable percentage of the world rather than this sort of thing.
Also, a DMCA takedown notice for… trademark infringement? That isn’t the proper mechanism for trademark violations at all. DMCA notices are for copyright.
Corynne McSherry, a copyright expert and legal director of the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that even using an unaltered logo can fall under fair use.
“There’s plenty of ways in which you could use a logo, and it would still be clear parody and perfectly lawful,” McSherry said, while noting that “courts have confirmed that” CrowdStrike was obligated to consider that claiming the use is illegal, “because fair uses are, by definition, legal.”
Perhaps the biggest issue with CrowdStrike “inadvertently” targeting parody sites with DMCA takedown notices, McSherry said, is that the DMCA should not be used for trademark infringement disputes.
“It is not an appropriate use of the DMCA,” McSherry said. Further, CrowdStrike saying “that it’s inadvertent says it was a mistake. But what that also means is: we weren’t being careful before we used this process. That’s another problem.”
And then there’s Cloudflare’s process for all of this. It is notable that Senk very clearly understands more about his rights than the average person. As such, he immediately filed a counternotice… which was ignored. Instead, Cloudflare sent a second warning notice to Senk over the site, which Senk also counterclaimed. But, because he uses his Cloudflare account as part of his larger business, he elected to move the site to an overseas provider so as to not risk his account.
Despite his bad experience, Senk told Ars that because Cloudflare is “too big to ignore,” he plans to continue using the company’s services for his other professional work. One reason why he promptly moved ClownStrike off of Cloudflare was out of fear that the bogus takedown might terminate his account, which he uses to assist many clients who use Cloudflare. Senk suggested that Cloudflare owes its customers more consideration in these cases.
“Corporations, like Cloudflare, are so terrified of being sued, they’d rather forward bogus requests and take down legal content than apply any judgment and common sense to the requests,” Senk told Ars. “This is partly caused by the incredible centralization of these same tech giants; however, it should not excuse the behavior. If anything, they should be held to a higher standard because they are ‘giants.'”
It’s hard to disagree with any of that, honestly. The way the DMCA process is implemented is typically heavily in favor of the complaint as opposed to the content in question. And that’s even when the communication channels for counternotices work, as they clearly did not in this instance. Far too much collateral damage is incurred when companies like CrowdStrike carpet-bomb websites over its logos, incorrectly mind you, without taking into account the potential for fair use rights and the like.
As for CrowdStrike, maybe spend a bit more time shoring up your process for rolling out updates and you won’t have to accidentally take out parody sites making fun of you.
Filed Under: copyright, parody, takedowns, trademark
Companies: cloudflare, crowdstrike, csc
Warner Bros. Takes Down LOTR Fan Film From 2009, Apologizes, Puts It Back Up
from the ready-fire-aim dept
Way back in 2009, we discussed a very impressive fan film called The Hunt for Gollum. While the film was made by dedicated fans of the Lord of the Rings films and was non-commercial in nature, we openly speculated both what the copyright implications of the film and whether there would be any risk of a takedown or lawsuit over it. We noted at the time that that seemed unlikely, given that the person leading the project reached out to Tolkien Enterprises and was granted approval for the film, so long as it remained a non-profit project. The film has been celebrated by LoTR fans for the past fifteen years.
Fast forward to the present. Warner Bros. recently announced a new film, which has the working title of Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. I’ll tell you what happened next, but you’ve probably already guessed.
A day after announcing that the tentatively titled Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum was scheduled for a 2026 release, Warner Bros. immediately moved to block a beloved 2009 unauthorized fan film with the exact same name on YouTube.
“Video unavailable,” the video hosted on Independent Online Cinema’s YouTube channel temporarily said. “This video contains content from Warner Bros. Entertainment, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.”
“That’s so lame,” one Reddit user wrote, dissing Warner Bros. as “greedy f**ks” that “can’t help but hoard every penny, like Smaug. The video already had 13 million views and was peacefully existing for all these years.”
Not exactly the best way to ingratiate LoTR fans to this new film, Warner Bros.
Now, to its credit, the studio very quickly reversed the takedown on all of this and the film is once again back up on YouTube. Nobody has confirmed at this time if the takedown notice was manually sent as a result of a WB lawyer somewhere, or whether there was some sort of automatic takedown that was triggered due to the similarity in the film’s names. Either way, it’s bad. Warner Bros. should know the ecosystem in which it is playing and this fan-film is very much a known quantity. Even a mistaken takedown is a bad look.
Either way, nobody from the common internet person up to the Ivy League understands why studios do this sort of thing.
In 2019, the Harvard Business Review noted that “until recently, companies have largely tolerated individuals who seek to bring their fictional worlds to life, on the theory that going after one’s fans is not good for business.”
“Overreaching by companies can threaten creativity, competition, fan goodwill, and, more fundamentally, the freedom to play and ‘geek out’ about the stories we love,” HBR warned.
At least one Redditor agreed with this viewpoint, posting, “I will never understand moves like this. Literally no one will pass on watching the movie because some fan film exists. Same with gaming companies that take down every fan project (Nintendo obviously). I‘ve read before, that it is to protect the IP, but other companies encourage that stuff and don’t lose the IP.”
Again, Warner Bros. acted quickly and reinstated the film. But I really don’t have much interest in showering an arson with praise just because they stuck around to help put the fire out.
It would be nice if, instead, studios would just realize that fan projects like this not only don’t do any harm to the studios, but actually help foster a wider fandom for those films such that it makes them even more attractive to fans.
Filed Under: copyright, fair use, fan films, hunt for gollum, lord of the rings, takedowns
Companies: warner bros. discovery
Site That Listed Information About 3rd Party Pokémon Fan-Games Shuts Down Under Threat
from the fuck-the-fans dept
The battle The Pokémon Co. decided to wage against its own best fans in the form of DMCA takedowns on video game mods and fan-created content has now escalated into a full-blown war. This has all the hallmarks of Nintendo’s anti-emulation war from a few years ago, except this probably makes even less sense than did that whole thing. As of late, The Pokémon Co. has been on a DMCA blitz for all kinds of content, including mere video content from nearly a decade ago showing mods injecting Pokémon content into 3rd party games. If you’re wondering why the company is bothering with any of this, given the prevalence of these sorts of mods for all kinds of content out there, well, welcome to the damned club.
And yet the war continues. And the latest victim in all of this is Relic Castle, a site that has been shut down under threat from the Pokémon people, even though the site doesn’t host any actual infringing content directly. Instead, the site was designed to be a discussion forum about Pokémon fan-made games, and where some of those discussions included links to other websites where those fan-games were hosted.
Relic Castle was set up in 2014 as an online forum where people could talk about Pokémon fan games, and could also share links to download these games from third-party websites. Relic Castle never hosted any of these files directly; instead, fan games using a mix of new and old assets were often downloaded from places like Mediafire and Google Drive. The forums were just a convenient hub for links and gave the community a place to discuss Pokémon fan games. However, it’s all gone now.
On March 21, the Relic Castle Twitter account posted a message stating that the site had been shut down “following a DMCA takedown notice.” Relic Castle did not confirm who sent the notice.
I’m trying to imagine a world in which it wasn’t The Pokémon Co. that issued this DMCA takedown notice, but I’m simply not creative enough to get there. While I’ll reiterate again that Relic Castle did not host any infringing material itself, here we see the downstream effects of the Grokster ruling, in which a site can potentially be liable for copyright infringement if it is deemed to have taken any affirmative steps to induce or encourage infringement. That makes a site that would otherwise plainly be hosting nothing more than protected speech suddenly liable for the actions its users take if they include posting links to infringing content where the site is seen as encouraging such behavior.
And lost in all of this is one simple fact: the folks who make up the usership of Relic Castle are by and large huge Pokémon fans! You don’t become a member of a Pokémon fan-game site if you aren’t absolutely into Pokémon. And you aren’t absolutely into Pokémon if you haven’t spent some amount of money on some amount of legitimate Pokémon products somewhere. In other words, the Pokémon Co. found a forum site where fans were discussing one of the many aspects of their fandom… and shut that shit down. Fun, as it turns out, isn’t something the company appreciates you having.
And while we don’t know for sure at the time of this writing that the company is the one behind the DMCA takedown, the trendline from the company is certainly suggestive.
This is just the latest salvo in the war against Pokémon mods and fan content. Recently, a seven-year-old YouTube video featuring modded Pokémon in Call of Duty was taken down, too. Some fear The Pokémon Company and Nintendo—spurred by the success of Palworld aka Pokémon with Guns—might be cracking down on content that might have been able to fly under the radar before. For now, we don’t know who ordered Relic Castle to be shut down, but for Pokémon content creators and modders, it doesn’t matter. Things are looking riskier than ever for them.
Put another way, it’s never been riskier for some of Pokémon’s biggest fans to know if expressing their fandom will get them in trouble. Is that really what the company wants?
Filed Under: copyright, dmca, fan games, relic castle, takedowns
Companies: pokemon company
Italy’s Piracy Shield Blocks Innocent Web Sites And Makes It Hard For Them To Appeal
from the what's-42.4-million-innocent-domains-among-friends? dept
Italy’s newly-installed Piracy Shield system, put in place by the country’s national telecoms regulator, Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (Authority for Communications Guarantees, AGCOM), is already failing in significant ways. One issue became evident in February, when the VPN provider AirVPN announced that it would no longer accept users resident in Italy because of the “burdensome” requirements of the new system. Shortly afterwards, TorrentFreak published a story about the system crashing under the weight of requests to block just a few hundred IP addresses. Since there are now around two billion copyright claims being made every year against YouTube material, it’s unlikely that Piracy Shield will be able to cope once takedown requests start ramping up, as they surely will.
That’s a future problem, but something that has already been encountered concerns one of the world’s largest and most important content delivery networks (CDN), Cloudflare. CDNs have a key function in the Internet’s ecology. They host and deliver digital material to users around the globe, using their large-scale infrastructure to provide this quickly and efficiently on behalf of Web site owners. Blocking CDN addresses is reckless: it risks affecting thousands or even millions of sites, and compromises some of the basic plumbing of the Internet. And yet according to a post on TorrentFreak, that is precisely what Piracy Shield has now done:
Around 16:13 on Saturday [24 February], an IP address within Cloudflare’s AS13335, which currently accounts for 42,243,794 domains according to IPInfo, was targeted for blocking [by Piracy Shield]. Ownership of IP address 188.114.97.7 can be linked to Cloudflare in a few seconds, and doubled checked in a few seconds more.
The service that rightsholders wanted to block was not the IP address’s sole user. There’s a significant chance of that being the case whenever Cloudflare IPs enter the equation; blocking this IP always risked taking out the target plus all other sites using it.
The TorrentFreak article lists a few of the evidently innocent sites that were indeed blocked by Piracy Shield, and notes:
Around five hours after the blockade was put in place, reports suggest that the order compelling ISPs to block Cloudflare simply vanished from the Piracy Shield system. Details are thin, but there is strong opinion that the deletion may represent a violation of the rules, if not the law.
That lack of transparency about what appears to be a major overblocking is part of a larger problem, which affects those who are wrongfully cut off. As TorrentFreak writes, AGCOM’s “rigorous complaint procedure” for Piracy Shield “effectively doesn’t exist”:
information about blocks that should be published to facilitate correction of blunders, is not being published, also in violation of the regulations.
That matters, because appeals against Piracy Shield’s blocks can only be made within five working days of their publication. As a result, the lack of information about erroneous blocks makes it almost impossible for those affected to appeal in time:
That raises the prospect of a blocked innocent third party having to a) proactively discover that their connectivity has been limited b) isolate the problem to Italy c) discover the existence of AGCOM d) learn Italian and e) find the blocking order relating to them.
No wonder, then that:
some ISPs, having seen the mess, have decided to unblock some IP addresses without permission from those who initiated the mess, thus contravening the rules themselves.
In other words, not only is the Piracy Shield system wrongly blocking innocent sites, and making it hard for them to appeal against such blocks, but its inability to follow the law correctly is causing ISPs to ignore its rulings, rendering the system pointless.
This combination of incompetence and ineffectiveness brings to mind an earlier failed attempt to stop people sharing unauthorized copies. It’s still early days, but there are already indications that Italy’s Piracy Shield could well turn out to be a copyright fiasco on the same level as France’s Hadopi system, discussed in detail in Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free).
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: agcom, copyright, due process, italy, piracy shield, takedowns
Companies: cloudflare
YouTube Still Blocking Access To Steamboat Willie On Behalf Of Disney In Some Countries
from the a-public-domain,-if-you-can-keep-it dept
As you well know, the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain in the US, meaning you can use a version of that Mickey (or any other newly public domain work) in our Gaming Like It’s 1928 Public Domain Game Jam. Also, we’re already seeing some of the expected effort to put down low quality stakes, including the inevitable Mickey Mouse horror film and Mickey Mouse horror video game.
While unsurprising and easy, in the meantime we’re also seeing lots of folks uploading the original Steamboat Willie in a variety of places. You can find lots of versions uploaded to YouTube. But just because Mickey is public domain in the US, that does not mean that Big Mouse will simply stop the copyright claiming.
Matt Lee uploaded his own copy only to quickly get notified that the video was being blocked in certain countries (as a side note, Bluesky content is now public, so you can see the posts on Bluesky without an account).
I figured I’d check it out via the magic of VPN travel. I could still view his upload from Germany, but when I bounced over to Poland, I got the following:
I’ve seen some commentary suggesting that Steamboat Willie is not yet in the public domain in the EU, which might explain this, but it’s not clear to me if this is true. The EU is supposed to apply the “rule of the shorter term,’ respecting the entrance into the public domain in other countries if the work originated in those countries, though as that article notes, a German court decided that an 1892 treaty between the US and Germany pre-empted that obligation.
But, still, assuming Poland does respect the rule of the shorter term, it seems like Steamboat Willie should be free there as well.
It’s also not clear what triggered this. It might just be YouTube’s ContentID autoflagging stuff, and no one bothered to update the system to recognize that Steamboat Willie is in the public domain. Or, maybe Disney hasn’t updated things on its end (or perhaps it only did so in the US).
Either way, in a global era, all of this seems pretty silly anyway. I mean, given that the intent of copyright law was to give a creator the incentive to create in the first place, and the initial 56 years the US gave Disney seemed like enough at the time, it’s absolutely ridiculous that we’re still even in this spot. Mickey should have been freed decades ago.
But, for now, it seems to be taking some time to work that public domain-ness through the system.
Filed Under: autoflag, contentid, copyright, germany, global copyright, mickey mouse, poland, public domain, rule of the shorter term, steamboat willie, takedowns
Companies: disney, google, youtube
Brian May With An Awesome Response To Reports Of Queen Videos Getting Copyright Strikes
from the all-hail-the-queen dept
Copyright strikes on hosted video content happens all the time. There are tons of strikes issued in error, plenty that are purely fraud and abuse, and a bunch that may have been done in good faith but completely fail to recognize if and when specific content would be protected by fair use. What doesn’t happen nearly often enough when these strikes occur is to have the content producer, on who’s behalf the strike was issued, get directly involved in the defense of those receiving the strike.
And so it’s worth pointing out when such things happen. And it’s especially worthwhile to point out when the artist doing this isn’t some member of the internet generation that grew up with a different view on content, copyright, and the like. Enter Brian May, famed guitarist of the band Queen, who has apparently been paying attention to several videos of Queen getting copyright flagged and isn’t happy about it.
On Monday, the guitarist shared a screenshot of a fan’s post, claiming she received a strike from Universal and YouTube over videos she posted from a Queen concert on the platform.
“Hi guys, it looks like Universal and YouTube are now coming for everyone who posts concert videos of Queen and Adam [Lambert]. I got a strike and deleted most of my concert videos. If you get multiple strikes you may lose your channel. Be careful!,” she wrote, according to May’s screenshot.
May responded within his Instagram post and pointed a couple of things out. First, that this wasn’t the only instance he’s seen a story like this. Second, that it sure as hell wasn’t done at the behest of anyone in the band. And, finally, that he isn’t happy about it and is at least going to try to do something about it.
It’s great to see an artist come out and actually rail against this sort of extreme copyright enforcement. The kind of sharing of videos from live events that we’re talking about here are simply not some kind of threat to the band, their labels, or any licensing societies either might be working with. In fact, historically bootleg tapes and videos have been seen by more forward-thinking folks as an absolute boon to these bands in terms of generating more interest in their concerts and recorded music. It sure sounds like May gets that.
But the other side of this is that May is taking the time to actually pay attention to his own fans and treating them in a human and awesome way. It would be quite easy for him to ignore all of this, or even go out of his way to make sure he doesn’t come across these issues. He appears to be doing the exact opposite by going and actively looking for this sort of thing, or at least not trying to hide it from his view. That shows a level of care by the artist for his fans that isn’t nearly as prevalent as we’d like.
So cheers and Merry Christmas to Brian May.
Filed Under: automated takedowns, brian may, copyright, copyright strikes, dmca, queen, takedowns
Copyright Bot Can’t Tell The Difference Between Star Trek Ship And Adult Film Actress
from the porn-star-trek dept
Given that the overwhelming majority of DMCA takedown notices are generated by copyright bots that are only moderately good at their job, at best, perhaps it’s not terribly surprising that these bots keep finding new and interesting ways to cause collateral damage unintentionally. From publishers taking down YouTubers because of an oopsie to Viacom DMCAing its own Star Trek Comic-con panel thinking it was infringing content, the point is that these bots kinda suck.
And speaking of Star Trek, this story involves that franchise, in a roundabout way. See, that franchise being what it is and has been for some time, there are a ton of fan sites and blogs out there that cover and discuss every aspect of the shows throughout the years. One of them was a Tumblr site, called _“_Mapping La Sirena.” If you’re a fan of Star Trek: Picard, you will know that’s the name of the main starship in that series. But if you’re a copyright enforcer for a certain industry, the bots you’ve set up for yourself apparently aren’t programmed with Star Trek fandom.
Transparency.automattic reports Tumblr has received numerous DMCA takedown notices from DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc, a third-party copyright monitoring service used frequently by content creators to prevent infringement of their original work. And these complaints occurred all because of the name La Sirena which also happens to be the name of an adult content creator, La Sirena 69 who is one of Piracy Prevention’s customers.
In one copyright claim over 90 Tumblr posts were targeted by the monitoring service because of the keyword match to “la sirena.” But instead of Automattic being alerted to La Sirena 69’s potentially infringed content, the company reported many of mappinglasirena.tumblr.com’s original posts.
Pure collateral damage. While not intentional per se, this is obviously still a problem. One of two things has to be the case: either we stop allowing copyright enforcement to be farmed out to a bunch of dumb bots that suck at their jobs or we insist that the bots stop sucking, which ain’t going to happen anytime soon. What cannot be allowed to happen is to shrug this sort of thing off as an innocent accident and oh well, too bad, so sad for the impact on the speech rights of the innocent.
There was nothing that remotely infringed La Sirena 69’s content. Everything about the complaints and takedown notices was wrong. And we’ve been at this long enough at this point that we know the enforcement bots are so bad that they can’t tell the difference between an adult content actress and a fucking spaceship. With that knowledge, allowing the status quo to continue is a choice, and not a good one.
And the team at Automattic wasn’t happy about the reports as they manually investigate each notice of copyright infringement which takes a lot of time. The company suggests DMCA Piracy Prevention do a little more investigating of their own prior to making a copyright claim. A quick look at mappinglasirena’s tumblr site would have proven that the blog was discussing a speed freighter not their client’s customer.
So much wasted time and effort. The only other remedy would be to have the DMCA takedown notice rejection process also farmed out to bots that equally suck at their jobs. Then we can just let the robots fight and get back to studying our starships.
Filed Under: copyright, dmca, dmca abuse, la sirena, star trek, takedowns
Companies: automattic, dmca privacy prevention
Twenty Five Years Of The DMCA: Some Good, But Mostly Bad
from the notice-this,-but-don't-take-it-down dept
Somehow I missed this (and I’m surprised it didn’t get much attention) but last month was the 25th anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) being signed into law. I only spotted it because The Register just had an article looking back at 25 years of the DMCA.
Given how central to various internet debates the DMCA was for the first decade of the 2000s, it’s kind of amazing how little attention it has received over the past few years, as more and more attention has shifted away from the DMCA and towards other aspects of internet policy, from Section 230 of the CDA to new attempts to regulate the internet like KOSA or the Earn It Act.
But, the DMCA is still a really important law, and its history is important as well. While many people know that the DMCA was passed to get the US in compliance with the 1996 World Intellectual Property Act, the reality is more nefarious and problematic. Bruce Lehman, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and USPTO boss under President Bill Clinton, effectively created the concept of the DMCA in the early 90s, and was unable to get Congress to pass it.
As he (somewhat gleefully) admitted at a conference 10 years ago (on the 15th anniversary), he deliberately then went to Geneva to engineer the WIPO Copyright Treaty to force the US Congress to endorse his DMCA concept. This sort of policy laundering through international treaties has become important, especially on the copyright front, even as it raises serious questions about sovereignty.
In the early 2000s, the internet freedom crowd universally hated the idea of the DMCA and called for it to be revoked. However, as time has gone by, it’s become clear that while the DMCA is mostly problematic, there are a few elements that have been helpful to the internet (hint: they’re the parts that the legacy copyright industry is still trying desperately to change).
The DMCA had two major components that people talk about: 1201 and 512. There were other parts of the law, but they were kind of meaningless unless you’re interested in vessel hull designs and stuff.
512 is the part that probably is most well known and gets talked about most often. It’s the part with the “safe harbors” that say that if you host user generated content and have a registered DMCA agent with the Copyright Office, if a copyright holder finds an infringing work on your platform, they can send a takedown notice to get it taken down, and if you then take it down (the uploader can counternotice), then you can’t be held liable for the alleged infringement.
This setup has a few pros, but many cons. On the plus side, it made it safe for websites to allow people to post all kinds of content without (much) fear of a copyright lawsuit. To some extent, it helped make it possible for social media and other user-generated content sites to exist. On the minus side, though, it basically became a tool for mass censorship. Because it was basically the only law around that was structured in a way that put tremendous pressure on websites to remove content upon merely a notice, the DMCA takedown process has been regularly abused to remove (or attempt to remove) all kinds of non-infringing content.
I still think that the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown provisions create a huge 1st Amendment problem, in that they put tremendous government pressure on websites to remove content based entirely on the say-so of whoever wants the content removed, and not based on an official adjudication by a court as to whether or not something is actually infringing. In practice that has meant a ton of overblocking.
For what it’s worth, the boundaries of 512’s safe harbors were also somewhat unclear, which has resulted in a bunch of litigation about just how much it actually protects, including the famous case filed by Viacom against YouTube, which YouTube eventually won (though, hilariously, at one point Viacom was forced to admit that about 100 of the videos it was suing over, it had uploaded itself). That case helped to establish that the 512 safe harbors really did protect sites like YouTube.
Of course, in the years since, the copyright industry has continued to sue, and they continue to act like the DMCA actually requires universal licensing, even though it literally does not.
It still seems that it would have been much clearer, smarter, better, and more in-line with the 1st Amendment, if we didn’t have a separate DMCA safe harbor (which requires sites to meet certain conditions, and abide by takedown demands to retain the safe harbor), and just included copyright law under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 currently exempts intellectual property law, which is why the copyright claims fall under the DMCA safe harbors, rather than 230’s broad immunity. But if copyright claims were covered by 230, it would be much clearer that websites are protected.
So, to a large extent, 512 has been problematic, in that it has enabled the vast suppression of protected speech, and has also resulted in a ton of lawsuits over its boundaries. But, for the most part, the lawsuits have been decided in ways that protect the internet and speech. And, getting rid of 512 would probably make things much worse (unless Section 230 was changed to cover copyright, which seems unlikely to happen). On top of that, most proposed changes to 512 would inevitably make it much, much worse.
Then there’s Section 1201. That’s the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA, and seems to be almost entirely evil. This is the DRM part of the law, that basically said doing anything related to getting around “technical protection measures,” was itself copyright infringement, even if the reason you were getting around the “TPM” had nothing whatsoever to do with copyright infringement.
This has resulted in all sorts of nonsense, and serves no real purpose other than to enable companies to abuse the law to enable lock-in and remove consumer rights. The weak triennial review process, by which the Librarian of Congress agrees to exempts certain technologies from 1201 has gotten better over time, but has not fixed the fundamental problems of 1201, which is inherently a law that says you can’t modify products you actually own.
I still think that on the whole, the DMCA has been mostly negative, but the safe harbors have at least served to make at least parts of the internet good, enabling many of the online services we all enjoy today to exist (even if the lawsuits killed a few companies along the way). I also think that any attempt to open it up today would almost certainly result in something way, way, way worse.
However, I do wish that as more and more lawmakers (not just in the US, but around the world), keep moving towards DMCA-like approaches to other kinds of content, that they would actually take a look at just how disastrous the notice-and-takedown provisions of the DMCA have been for protected speech, and how widely abused they are to take down valuable, protected speech.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, bruce lehman, copyright, dmca, dmca 1201, dmca 512, free speech, notice and takedown, platforms, speech suppression, takedowns, user generated content
Museum Collection Of Historical TV Culture At Risk Due To Copyright Takedowns
from the can't-allow-history-to-be-preserved dept
Although copyright is mainly thought of as concerning books, music and films, it applies to other kinds of creativity in a fixed form. That includes apparently trivial material such as early commercial television programs. These are important cultural artefacts, but unlike books, music or films, there are very few formal schemes for collecting and conserving them. This has led to members of the public undertaking the preservation of TV programs on an ad hoc, unofficial basis. It’s great that they are doing so, but the informal nature of their collections means that they are exposed to serious threats from copyright, as the recent experience of The Museum of Classic Chicago Television makes clear. The Museum explains why it exists:
The Museum of Classic Chicago Television (FuzzyMemoriesTV) is constantly searching out vintage material on old videotapes saved in basements or attics, or sold at flea markets, garage sales, estate sales and everywhere in between. Some of it would be completely lost to history if it were not for our efforts. The local TV stations have, for the most part, regrettably done a poor job at preserving their history. Tapes were very expensive 25-30 years ago and there also was a lack of vision on the importance of preserving this material back then. If the material does not exist on a studio master tape, what is to be done? Do we simply disregard the thousands of off-air recordings that still exist holding precious “lost” material? We believe this would be a tragic mistake.
Dozens of TV professionals and private individuals have donated to the museum their personal copies of old TV programmes made in the 1970s and 1980s, many of which include rare and otherwise unavailable TV advertisements that were shown as part of the broadcasts. In addition to the main Museum of Classic Chicago Television site, there is also a YouTube channel with videos. However, as TorrentFreak recounts, the entire channel was under threat because of copyright takedown requests:
In a series of emails starting Friday and continuing over the weekend, [the museum’s president and lead curator] Klein began by explaining his team’s predicament, one that TorrentFreak has heard time and again over the past few years. Acting on behalf of a copyright owner, in this case Sony, India-based anti-piracy company Markscan hit the MCCTv channel with a flurry of copyright claims. If these cannot be resolved, the entire project may disappear.
One issue is that Klein was unable to contact Markscan to resolve the problem directly. He is quoted by TorrentFreak as saying: “I just need to reach a live human being to try to resolve this without copyright strikes. I am willing to remove the material manually to get the strikes reversed.”
Once the copyright enforcement machine is engaged, it can be hard to stop. As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) recounts, there are effectively no penalties for unreasonable or even outright false claims. The playing field is tipped entirely in the favour of the copyright world, and anyone that is targeted using one of the takedown mechanisms is unlikely to be able to do much to contest them, unless they have good lawyers and deep pockets. Fortunately, in this case, an Ars Technica article on the issue reported that:
Sony’s copyright office emailed Klein after this article was published, saying it would “inform MarkScan to request retractions for the notices issued in response to the 27 full-length episode postings of Bewitched” in exchange for “assurances from you that you or the Fuzzy Memories TV Channel will not post or re-post any infringing versions from Bewitched or other content owned or distributed by SPE [Sony Pictures Entertainment] companies.”
That “concession” by Sony highlights the main problem here: the fact that a group of public-spirited individuals trying to preserve unique digital artefacts must live with the constant threat of copyright companies taking action against them. Moreover, there is also the likelihood that some of their holdings will have to be deleted as a result of those legal threats, despite the material’s possible cultural value or the fact that it is the only surviving copy. No one wins in this situation, but the purity of copyright must be preserved at all costs, it seems.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally posted to WalledCulture.
Filed Under: copyright, fuzzy memories tv, museums, preservation, takedowns
Companies: markscan, museum of classic chicago television, sony