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."
Oh Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
So if my computer just happens to download your copyrighted files by algorithm, it's okay because it was all done by a computer.
Sounds reasonable to me.
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
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I like the idea of randomly generating files that just happen to resemble songs and movies when played back through the proper software.
How would you distinguish them from "real" songs and movies these days?
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Funny)
I was going to say takedown notices, but apparently that won't work.
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People would like the randomly generated files more.
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Interesting)
these are actually feasible for static images.
http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona-lisa/
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I wish I could mod you up because...damn, dat link *ssssssss*
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Interesting)
The "penalty of perjury" language appears to only apply to the question of whether or not the person filing the takedown actually represents the party they claim to represent -- and not whether the file is infringing at all, or even whether or not the file's copyright is held by the party being represented. And, in the lawsuit, Warner Bros. is relying on that to try to avoid getting hit with a perjury claim.
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Interesting)
"I agree... Another loop hole in the laws and someone (big company) is abusing it..."
What in the world makes you think this is a "loophole"?
Loopholes are unintentional gaps in the law. The probability that this was not entirely intentional is pretty close to zero. The DMCA was crafted by lobbyists for the "big content" companies.
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
> Loopholes are unintentional
Not back when I worked for people who worked for lawyers who worked for tax people who worked for lobbyists who worked for specific, very specific, businesses.
They (lawyers and tax people) _drafted_ the loophole language and the lobbyists made sure some congressperson got that sentence or two into the text before the final vote.
The "unintentional" language is what I hear after the fact by those who didn't notice at the time something slipped in.
What would you call a carefully crafted narrow specific exception to a fee or tax or regulation or law, if not a loophole?
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"What would you call a carefully crafted narrow specific exception to a fee or tax or regulation or law, if not a loophole?"
It may be used differently now, but originally -- even before it meant "a hole to shoot arrows through" -- it was a hole in a wall people used for spying. It was a thing that nobody knew about or noticed, and wasn't supposed to be there. This then came to mean an unintentional hole or flaw in the law that lawmakers hadn't noticed.
So in the original legal sense of the word, things that are intentionally put in a law are not "loopholes".
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"Yeah, well, if you want to live in 18-oh-negative, go ahead."
Ignoring history can be very counterproductive and even destructive.
Words have meanings. It pays to know what those meanings are. If you just want to make meanings up whenever and however you want, then the word "meaning" itself becomes meaningless. For example, any contract I might have with you could mean anything I wanted it to. I could decide that the "dollars" I was supposed to pay you actually meant "grains of rice".
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. It's not a loophole, it's a feature.
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actually represents the party they claim to represent
they claim to represent the copyright owner
anyways, it's either breaking a contract(that they had with hotfile for using takedown tool), perjury or fraud(wire fraud) that they committed. fraud is pretty serious business too("In the United States, mail and wire fraud is any fraudulent scheme to intentionally deprive another of property or honest services via mail or wire communication." - so tell me how the fuck it isn't wire fraud if they use takedown to take down shit they don't own.).
blame the fucking jud
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.
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So the users of JDownloader should file a class action lawsuit. Since each of them were inconvenienced, and it may have taken up to an extra few minutes of searching for somewhere else to download it via google, it cost each user like $2. Then use MPAA math, and it cost like $169.96 trillion dollars, and then tack on the 10x malicious penalty, and it'll come out to something like 20 times the world GDP. That sounds about right.
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no, you misunderstand. This has nothing to do with algorithms or computers or anything. They're arguing that if they file bogus takedowns, it's all okay, because fuck you, that's why. It's all very simple.
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
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So by this logic, someone could write a computer program that would randomly file a take down notice against Warnerbros.com [warnerbros.com] and it would be OK, since it was done by a computer algorithm.
.
Seems to me that they should suffer the same kind of damages that they would insist on if someone tried that stunt. Can we say $N,000,000 per instance?
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So you pretty much have to hold some copyrights to be able to do anything, but if you do have them you can go to town.
Easy. Create a simple poem.
A-B-A-B
C-D-C-C
Thanks to the Copyright Act of 1976 [copyright.gov], a work is protected by copyright once the work is in "fixed form," no registration necessary.
DDOS takedowns of all WB properties begins in 3...2...1...
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Except the entire point of TFA is that Warner Bros is claiming it doesn't.
Re:Oh Okay (Score:4, Insightful)
One point of TFA is that WB is claiming "being wrong about whether it infringes isn't perjury as long as we believed in good faith that it infringed, and we had faith in our computer program," and they're right. The part of the takedown saying "we represent Warner Brothers" is subject to perjury, but the rest of it is subject to 'good faith' rules. And bad faith is hard to prove unless you can find a "smoking gun" type memo or email. (Notably, the case where an actual human filed a takedown request directly is going to a jury because the judge feels that the filer could well have known the material didn't infringe on WB's stuff.)
The other point of the TFA is that while Warner Brothers is right about the law, this whole situation illustrates that the law sucks because it's slanted as hell, which I agree with fully.
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Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is that the studio lawyers are gloating in the legal documents. One of the first rules of the court is: NEVER PISS OFF THE JUDGE.
You need to understand the judge's background. Judge Williams spent her first four years prosecuting money laundering and trying to break up drug cartels whose lawyers did the kind of legal garbage like WB is doing. Then she spent fifteen years defending people who were accused of bank fraud, where she was in charge of defending people, managing a group of about 100 other legal experts and helping them see through corporate and government loopholes.
She has spent almost all of her career trying to stop the corporations and the governments from abusing legal loopholes. This is one of her first cases as a judge, and even though she is going to try to be unbiased, her 30 years of experience in fighting exactly what the movie studios are doing is certainly going to be significant.
This judge knows the tricks. She has spent three decades fighting against exactly this sort of thing. Now she is a judge and it is her first big case.
Now understanding all that background, the judge has already dismissed the core of the lawsuit, the copyright infringement case. She spent 30 years fighting drug cartel financial lawyers and their loopholes, and when she sees the plaintiffs (Disney, 20th Century Fox, Universal, Columbia Pictures, and WB) I'm sure she still reads "cartel".
No, the movie cartel knows they're not going to fare well in the trial. If you read the docket on Justia you will see that they started out with broad accusations and claims and Hotfile was trying to block terms like "piracy" and "theft", and as the judge dismissed large swaths the studios became more and more defensive, and now they are doing everything they can to prevent the jury from learning the truth. Now it is the studios begging for words like "perjury" and "fraud" to not come out in trial.
My guess is that near the end of 2014, after the jury hears everything but before a penalty is assigned, the movie cartel will suddenly settle the lawsuit with undisclosed millions going to Hotfile in order to avoid a punishment.
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 ;-)
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I've gotten DMCA notices when I've torrented older stuff, like movies from the 70's even.
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Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Interesting)
You should check with other users on your ISP. In most cases the ISP has a policy saying you'll be cut off after so many complaints but in reality it's nearly impossible to enforce. In many places, if your ISP is the only company in the area they are very likely legally required to provide you service as long as you're paying your bill. We honestly treated it like the customers WiFi had been compromised and someone had done this from outside their home. Our letters even reflected this to the customer. If they got a LOT of complaints (like thousands) we'd even call them, concerned, because clearly their network had been hacked by some terrible software pirates. They'd play along, and the complaints would go away. Remember, your ISP is usually on your side in these cases. You clearly pay for the service so you can do this thing... and the copyright holders don't pay anything... and they're forcing you to pay staff to do something that actually drives customers away from your service. Many people, after getting a complaint, will call in and reduce the speed of their service. We had stats on this. You're getting thousands of complaints per day that if you send on to your customers have, lets say, a 20% chance of causing them to reduce their services or cancel service all together. Or in your case use a VPN and waste a lot of your bandwidth. It's ALL bad for the ISP. They hate the complaints even more than you do.
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They use blanket filters. So think about it like this, if you download anything "star wars" for example, you're probably going to get a notice. Because they are constantly releasing star wars stuff. If you picked some obscure movie it'd be a lot less likely. Also, there are notices that come from shifty lawers claiming to represent copyright owners that are really just trying to extort a settlements out of people. They usually try going after embarrassing stuff like "Naughty Anal Nuns" or whatever. They'd u
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Your ISP didn't cut you off after several notices?
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I don't understand why companies make so much effort to accommodate 1000s of takedown requests per day. Just rate limit them to one a day. What are they going to do? Force you to employ more people and spend more time dealing with their requests?
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Service providers lose their "safe harbor" if they don't respond to take down notices. Without safe harbor, they can be sued for their customers' infringement.
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The DMCA makes it legally required to make a "reasonable" effort. It's very wishy washy and the ISPs have no idea what to do.
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We had several organizations that sent us so much bogus info that we ended up blocking their domain.
That raises an interesting question:
Are you required to take takedown notices via email? Given the glut of garbage, bogus information, and so forth, coupled with the fact that take down requests are a legal obligation
I almost wonder if you could have required they be sent by registered, traceable, mail or courier.
It shouldn't be your job to filter someone elses raw automated garbage, even if you have an oblig
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That would cost the ISP more money. Now you have to open piles of mail... all the while you know the media industry would automate that mail process in no time.
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all the while you know the media industry would automate that mail process in no time
They'd still pay $5.00+ per notice sent. That ought to motivate them to eliminate duplicates, and bogus nonsense. It would be be millions of dollars a year.
Your right of course, that getting the documents in paper might still be an extra cost for the ISP.
Is charging a handling fee for eaach takedown request you handle prohibited? I don't mind paying someone to open the mail and process it, if I'm paid $5 per item. Go ahead
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...
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 ;-)
I know how to fix it. Charge to process DMCA notices. Say a small fee for correct info and a large fee for incorrect info. Or just a fee for any incorrect DMCA notices/links given.
Soon the companies will start hiring people to check the DMCA notices they send out, if they are being charge a fee for incorrect notices.
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It's simple, you punish people for screwing up.
Make producers responsible for bogus takedowns.
Oh, right, they're the elite that actually own the system?
Then just bend over and take it.
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don't bend over and take it.
buy a vpn service.
fuck them RIGHT BACK.
its fun!
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The way I read the article, it would be illegal to send a takedown notice in the name of Warner brothers if you don't actually represent Warner Brothers. However if you do represent Warner Brothers, it's fine to send takedown notices about absolutely anything regardless of whether Warner Brothers holds the copyright.
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The DMCA doesn't mandate a service provider take anything down on request. It mandates they take anything down on request, or else assume some liability for the infringement.
That means that when you are paying $50 a month for web hosting, you are not a sufficiently valued customer for the provider to risk liability. But when you are paying $tons-o-cash, or run your own servers, then any DMCA takedowns will be shrugged off.
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So if my computer just happens to download your copyrighted files by algorithm, it's okay because it was all done by a computer.
Sounds reasonable to me.
There's an app for that: http://sickbeard.com/ [sickbeard.com]
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What, usenet? It's already practically dead anyways, or at least it isn't what it used to be. And not talking about something isn't enough to protect it.
But that no longer matters, I've been using both sickbeard and couchpotato for well over a year now with just transmission, nzbtomedia, and tpb. I don't even use private trackers. Worst case scenario TPB goes down (good luck with that) but even if it did, something tells me tor is underutilized in this department (drug websites are even more hated by the go
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something tells me tor is underutilized in this department
As it is, bittorrent won't work correctly over tor (tor's anonymization is (theoretically) one way, unless you're leaking your identity to everyone) Best you can do is be the leeching node that nobody can connect to and get whatever exit nodes you are using at the time hammered with everyone trying to connect to "you" for that one last little piece. People do it, but if everyone did it, nobody would be able to get anything.
What's needed is to rewri
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny how "on a computer" works wonders for government (no expectation of privacy) and corporations (ditto plus magic patents) but has the opposite effect on common individuals, where downloading by script (violation of TOU, not even actually stealing) may well land you in more trouble than, say, jacking a car.
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So what if Hotfile put Terms Of Use on their automated takedown API to say it can only be used under some list of circumstances which prevent bogus takedowns? Then they could sue Warner under whatever-the-USA-computer-misuse-act-is instead of the DMCA. Maybe they could even specify some charge per bogus takedown in the TOU.
Re:Oh Okay (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, if done by a computer it must be OK. Alternatively, if not OK, they should agree to a 80,000x multiplier for cost vs penalty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_v._Thomas was initially $1.92M for 24 songs or $80K/song which is a $1 on iTunes). Lets say IT and legal fees for a single request are $1000. So a single bogus take-down request should cost the label $80M. Sounds about right using RIAA math.
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Yup yup!
Just think of the poor starving lawyers!
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If I write an algorithm that does the same thing, then I am home free.
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just to punish WB, I'm going to seek out 100 films by them, download them and seed them.
FUCK YOU, WB.
fuck you to hell.
you wanna fight? bring it!
I didn't have sex with your wife (Score:5, Funny)
My wiener did. So, we're good, right?
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My wiener did. So, we're good, right?
Bestiality is illegal, mkay?
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To Slashdot Mod Point holders: An ironic comparisson used to express outrage over a topic is NOT off-topic.
They did it to me... (Score:5, Interesting)
They're totally guilty as charged. They attempted to take down a video that (kinda) had some of their content. The problem was, it was a lecture about fair use AND the topic was about a song that should have been a fair use of their content. The band had been sued by Island back in the early 90's and there were lots of issues with the way the whole thing went down.
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They're totally guilty as charged. They attempted to take down a video that (kinda) had some of their content. The problem was, it was a lecture about fair use AND the topic was about a song that should have been a fair use of their content. The band had been sued by Island back in the early 90's and there were lots of issues with the way the whole thing went down.
Please don't say you think that wasn't deliberate?* "Fair use" is a curse word to these rats, of course they'll fight it any which way they can!
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see them going after libraries next, as they are evil dens of knowledge sharing...why, most people can even get the media they want from a library for free! Oh, the horror...think they'll need to go have a lie down...
*...okay, have to knock off the double negatives for a while, starting to make my own head spin...
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Did they ever find what they were looking for?
Not good at all (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not good at all (Score:5, Insightful)
But if Google returns search results, done by a computer, that might (but not even necessarily) lead to infringing material, it's a national emergency.
HEY! they're infringing on my business method pat (Score:4, Funny)
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PERJURY, with a computer!
You should get a patent on that.
Perjury? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't making a false statement under the DMCA essentially like perjury? And if it is, why isn't someone being charged criminally?
It's gotten to the point where these companies ignore the letter (and intent) of the law at will, and with no penalty.
If your computer system is identifying incorrect stuff, your computer system is faulty. If your humans are illegally issuing take downs for stuff you don't own, that's a criminal act.
And don't tell me it's a civil matter, because the *AAs have gotten enforcement of this ramped up to a federal crime.
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Isn't making a false statement under the DMCA essentially like perjury?
Only some components of the notice of claimed infringement are under penalty of perjury. Others aren't. Please see parkinglot777's comment [slashdot.org].
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Yeah, I subsequently saw posts to that effect.
So, essentially they've managed to get themselves a completely one-sided law where if we infringe, they'll ruin our lives ... and if they cheat and lie absolutely nothing happens.
Charming, the corporations have won, and have no penalty associated with their bad behavior.
Didn't I see a new story about hitmen taking Bitcoin recently? ;-)
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Not when the benefactors of the laws are the ones writing them.
And since private industry has been writing the text of laws for lawmakers to rubber-stamp for several years now -- welcome to the future.
This is also how a lot of 'treaties' are written these days -- private industry tells government what they require, and the government (having been duly bought and paid for by lobbyists) obliges.
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Isn't making a false statement under the DMCA essentially like perjury? And if it is, why isn't someone being charged criminally?
It's gotten to the point where these companies ignore the letter (and intent) of the law at will, and with no penalty.
If your computer system is identifying incorrect stuff, your computer system is faulty. If your humans are illegally issuing take downs for stuff you don't own, that's a criminal act.
And don't tell me it's a civil matter, because the *AAs have gotten enforcement of this ramped up to a federal crime.
Filing a false notice/complaint, or a false counter notice (either or both) is also covered in the DMCA. Both hold large penalties. Both have the potential (depending on the circumstances) of it also being a criminal matter.
Both are areas where there have been few companies or people who have asked for those provisions to be upheld. :-(
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Why? From TFA:
The "penalty of perjury" language appears to only apply to the question of whether or not the person filing the takedown actually represents the party they claim to represent -- and not whether the file is infringing at all, or even whether or not the file's copyright is held by the party being represented. And, in the lawsuit, Warner Bros. is relying on that to try to avoid getting hit with a perjury claim. Basically, the company is saying: sure, sure, we lied and pulled down content we had no right to pull down, but the law is so laughably weak and in our favor that screw you all, it doesn't matter what we take down.
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...
Isn't making a false statement under the DMCA essentially like perjury? And if it is, why isn't someone being charged criminally?
...
And don't tell me it's a civil matter, because the *AAs have gotten enforcement of this ramped up to a federal crime.
The only crime that matters is annoying someone with power.
Who with power was annoyed by WB lying?
See? No crime.
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Even if there was a sound civil case against them, the reason the government rarely files charges against big corporations is that it would be a net loss of money even if the government won. Forget about a criminal case, the bar is way too high. Rich C*Os don't go to prison unless you really f up like the guys at Enron. (Jeffrey Skilling went to my high sch
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Isn't making a false statement under the DMCA essentially like perjury?
From what I understand, the law is stacked in favor of the so-called "rights holders". The claim that they are making under the threat of perjury is not that they own the rights to the work that they are claiming, it is that they are representing who they say they are.
That makes it legal for them to say "we represent Warner and we are demanding the takedown of Nailin' Palin because it infringes our rights." It's legal for them to say that even though Warner does not actually own the copyright to Nailin' P
Re:Perjury? Sort of. (Score:3)
Which raises the question, when did they find out the program kicked out false positives and did they continue to use it after that? IANAL, but if they used a program they knew wou
Thanks for justifying my torrenting! (Score:3, Insightful)
Some days, I feel almost bad for torrenting. But then I see something like this and go back to my gleeful piracy.
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Arrr...
(my way of agreeing with you!)
And yet most people here likely enjoy the movies (Score:5, Insightful)
Just remember the next time you fork over $12 for a movie ticket, who are you supporting with that money.
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Easy fix (Score:3)
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14th Amendment (Score:3)
Section 1:
If corporations are people, then all corporations and individuals have a Constitutional right to equal protection under the law.
In short, if the corporations can do it, so can individual citizens; just cite the court case and the 14th Amendment as precedent.
PERSPECTIVE (Score:5, Interesting)
Point Missed (Score:2)
O Rly? (Score:3)
and? (Score:2)
Let me guess - nothing will come of this. Because large corporations are above the law. Do something similar as a private individual, and you'll be bancrupted by legal proceedings.
Nice world we're living in. Wouldn't really be much of a shame if something happened to it, not anymore.
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Above the law? They practically make the law.
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buuuyyyyyy....buuuuuuyyyyyyyyyyyy .....buuyyyyyyyyy....(*say "buy" like a sheep ...wail or whatever. Instead of "Bahhhhh" - it's "buyyyyy")
Please step away from your weed slowly. Been hitting that stuff kinda hard, huh?
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Perhaps the barley's in control?
Re:The score so far (Score:5, Funny)
Uh, excuse me, sir. It was $75 TRILLION. Not mere Billions. Google it: RIAA $75 TRILLION.
Oh, wait, but this is about movies rather than music. Nevermind. It's all okay then.
This may be more than the global GDP, but music is worth it. If you FEEELTHY pirates can't pay $75 trillion because there's not enough wealth on the planet, then you shouldn't listen to the music. Better yet, all music should be locked up where nobody can ever hear it again -- to protect the artists.
Re:The score so far (Score:5, Insightful)
I know, right?
I mean, I could have people over to my house and play music for them -- and I would be denying studio executives their huge compensation and causing the artists to have to eat their own feet in order to survive.
I could be really subversive and have people over to watch movies, and I would be robbing the studios blind.
My god, I need to go to my nearest Copyright Re-education facility and atone for my sins.
All I can say is it's a good thing we've got just and rational laws like the DMCA protecting us from people like me.
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Shit, did I just admit to looking at cheap porn?
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I just googled it, as requested, and the second entry was "No, The RIAA Is Not Asking For $72 Trillion From Limewire (Bad Reporters, Bad)"
Re:The score so far (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a friend who has been in several not so famous bands. We worked together back when napster was still a place people went to get music.
His comment at the time was "if I found out someone had put my bands music up online for people to download, why I would hunt him down and shake his hand".
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Somewhat surprised they still get away with it, and also somewhat surprised there hasn't been a rash of killings of *AA members and studio execs just to get them out of the gene pool.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd guess the potential killers have higher moral standards than the execs, and don't want to inflict the mental pain / sorrow on the not-guilty family members. Sadly this means the morally bankrupt studio execs can't be expunged from the gene pool.
That and there's a huge line of contenders to replace the execs anyway, all with moral compasses permanently set to "screw everyone except me".