Warner Bros. Admits To Issuing Bogus Takedowns 199
An anonymous reader sends this quote from TechDirt:
"One of the bizarre side notes to Hollywood's big lawsuit against the cyberlocker Hotfile was a countersuit against Warner Bros. by Hotfile, for using the easy takedown tool that Hotfile had provided, to take down a variety of content that was (a) non-infringing and (b) had nothing to do with Warner Bros. at all (i.e., the company did not hold the copyright on those files). In that case, WB admitted that it filed a bunch of false takedowns, but said it was no big deal because it was all done by a computer. Of course, it then came out that at least one work was taken down by a WB employee, and that employee had done so on purpose, annoyed that JDownloader could help possible infringers download more quickly."
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Informative)
you're not understanding. The summary is wrong. Warner Brothers can send takedown notices at will. The only thing that's illegal is to claim you're a content owner when you're not. You could send all the takedown notices you wanted to warner brothers. But the fact of the matter is they do not host enough content for this to be a problem for them.
What they are trying to do with these weak laws and automated systems is make life very difficult for file hosting services. If they inundate them with takedowns it ends up being too expensive to actually check them. So they put up automated systems like this, which the media houses exploit to hurt these services. As far as WB is concerned, the only reason Hotbox exists is to pirate their content, so they feel justified in what they are doing.
A few years ago I work for a moderately large (fortune 500) ISP and actually handled infringement complaints against their customers. Basically the Recording and Movie industry hired companies to traul torrent sites and send takedown notices to everyone that connected to files that matched their filters. They actually didn't bother with older releases, they only really cared about things they had recently released. But still, the shear volume of complaints was impossible to deal with. Thousands per day. Many of which were duplicates. I ended up spending most of my time writing scripts to weed out the junk. We also had no idea if the complaint came from a copyright owner... no way to check... Castro could have sent them for all I know. Even if we could verify the person that sent the email, how would we know they owned the copyright? It was impossible. On this we just had to trust them per the law. Then, after I'd weed out all the garbage, I'd have to find out which customer had the DHCP lease on that IP at the time of the complaint. Sometimes it was clear... We'd get multiple complaints over a 1 to 5 day period for the same customer for the same file... they were likely hosting the movie/cd. But many times the IP hadn't been leased out... or wouldn't even be in our network! We had several organizations that sent us so much bogus info that we ended up blocking their domain.
I really dont have answers regarding how to make all of this better. Short of just doing away with copyright. The fact that the easy media transfer genie is out of the bottle really should just put the media industry on notice... their time is short, there is no way they can legislate this problem away and the whole "lets just flood them with takedown notices to annoy them" will only work for so long as well. Eventually ISP's just end up ignoring the complaints and those of us handling them move on to get paid a lot more doing things a lot more interesting ;-)
Re:Oh Okay (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not seeing the loophole here...
No? Look at that last phrase:
(1) "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and"
(2) "under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
Notice how the only thing subject to perjury is whether or not the complaining party is authorized to act. What is not subject to perjury is the statement that the information in the notification is accurate. In other words, as long as they are authorized to act on one claim, they can fish for all sorts of things. For example, Disney thinks you may have copied Cinderella, so they hire WeazelCorp to file complaints. Weazelcorp can file notifications against you for Star Trek (Paramount), Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs II (Sony), and The Hobbit (Time Warner). They can make a statement that the notification is accurate even if they know full well it is bogus, because there's no penalty for a false list.