Google Says Almost Every Recent 'Trusted' DMCA Notices Were Bogus (torrentfreak.com) 83
Reader AmiMoJo writes: In comments submitted to a U.S. Copyright Office consultation, Google has given the DMCA a vote of support, despite widespread abuse. Noting that the law allows for innovation and agreements with content creators, Google says that 99.95% of URLs it was asked to take down last month didn't even exist in its search indexes. "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."
That's what you get for wording the DMCA that way (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should I check my demands, just carpet bomb them with everything and whatever hits is fine by me.
How about this: Whatever the punishment for not following through with a rightful demand should be meted out for every bogus one made in bad faith.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't have to imagine. I just have to wait for it to get Trump's signature instead.
Those who can't get over it have to wait line (Score:2)
Those who are having trouble getting over it are getting in a line, a British line to be exact. They are being queued. :)
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http://www.pbs.org/pov/bibliob... [pbs.org]
I don't know, 99% isn't too bad. It looks like it is about equal with most of Europe, though some countries are better.
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You assume that stuff outside England is "English".
A story as old as the DMCA. (Score:1)
Got hit with a bogus violation years ago.
A law firm sent out official looking paperwork en masse, to podunk regional ISPs claiming zomg copyright infringement from various IPs.
Turns out, the law firm was unaffiliated with the rights holder of the songs in question (from an artist I've literally never heard); indeed, the law firm was not even an actual law firm. They did have a nice seedy looking form where you could pay $100 to make your violation just magically go away, however.
My ISP wasn't interested in
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Legally defined bad faith is hard to prove. We would need some metric, like number or proportion of bogus requests where bad faith is legally presumed. Of course, if a reasonable person hearing/viewing the target of the takedown knows it isn't the complainant's property, that too should be presumed to be bad faith..
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When 99+ percent of your claims are bogus, it's pretty much a given that you're not acting on good faith.
Just leave the bad faith out if it bothers you. You make a bogus claim, you pay.
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Sure, to you and me it's a given. But it needs to be written into law so we don't get bizarro decisions in court.
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That's why our judges get some leeway when it comes to interpreting laws. Else you get people who search for loopholes and get away with it.
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Stop accepting takedown notices from BSers (Score:5, Insightful)
Google should tweak their algorithm to block takedown requesters who are spamming google with generic requests.
Re:Stop accepting takedown notices from BSers (Score:5, Insightful)
IF Bogus_Takedown > 0
SET Require_Review = True
SET Charge_Fee = True
When their DMCA takedown request processing rate drops from millions per month to a few per day and comes with a bill for the reviewer's time, maybe they'll smarten up.
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That's the beauty of cutting them off from the automated submission system after a very low threshold of bogus submissions (by percentage, quantity, or a combination).
It doesn't matter if they have an ulterior motive, they're shut down and have to pay a premium going forward... which means if they want to keep it up they'll be paying Google to employ extra verifiers and nobody else is affected.
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Sounds more like an example of http://example.com?query=chess... [example.com] not returning a 404 error, and some clown firing off a takedown notice and collecting a bounty from the music publisher.
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Even easier.
Require studios to register for automated submission.
Studio abuses system- kick them out and require manual submission via snail mail.
Studio will either stop abusing, or be stoppped from abusing. Win-win
It seems obvious that... (Score:5, Insightful)
DMCA takedown requests for non-existent URLs, especially at a 99.97% invalid rate, should be evidence that the requestor is not properly verifying their DMCA claims and should:
A) Lose their right to continue to submit 'trusted' DMCA takedown requests
B) Be charged under the DMCA for filing false claims.
But we know that will never happen.
Re:It seems obvious that... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well if companies decided to start charging them because of the number of false claims, this problem would likely fix itself in the span of a couple of weeks. You can bet some company would stomp their feet and take it to court, and the court would likely agree that with the high percentage of false claims that the company has a reasonable expectation to recoup losses from false claims.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It seems obvious that... (Score:5, Insightful)
OK.... So how is it Google's responsibility to remove something from their index that isn't in their index?
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Asking them to not index it?
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1)Is it actually possible to know if a given URL has been indexed? Searching for it isn't sufficient, as it may just not be in your results.
2)It may well be their repsonsibility to blacklist it from future indexing.
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But it may be indexed and just not yet appearing. It takes time for data to propagate through their system. You can have two people search for the same query at the same time and get different results.
Weak/nonexistent punishments for faulty notices (Score:5, Insightful)
If notices had to be signed as accurate by an officer of the company that sent them under threat of perjury, and if it was possible for someone who was affected by a bogus notice to then start the wheels on a process that would see said officer of the company end up doing a few days in jail for that perjury I would think we'd see bogus notices drop to near zero.
But of course that would only happen in a world where the lawmakers actually cared about doing what was right, not what their donors wanted.
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Oh forgot to add:
105th United States Congress: House 55R/45D, Senate 52R/48D. So R was in control of both the House and Senate.
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Won't someone think of the poor strawmen who are being hurt by these malicious facts?
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But the Republicans would have stood up to all that money being shoveled their way right? What color is the sky in the world you inhabit?
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All patent applications are signed under penalty of perjury. However, the US Patent and Trademark office disbanded its enforcement department in 1974. So, you can perjure yourself on a patent application with impunity.
Unless it's testimony in a criminal case, or the perjury trap in front of a grand jury, or something they want to prosecute like lying on your tax form, the Federal government is in general lassiez faire about perjury, or even encouraging of it with their reluctance to prosecute, especially pe
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Exactly my point. I knew they were technically already perjury but it doesn't mean anything if it is never enforced.
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When were the standards set higher?
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by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Thursday February 23, 2017 @02:17PM (#53919283) Homepage
When were the standards set higher?
Before 2002-11-14 [slashdot.org]?
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;^)
Nice to know I've had an impact.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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When submitting that many million requests, the odds that that high a percentage are legitimate but not in the index is pretty low.
My bet is that the submitter just used an algorithm to generate possible names just in case, rather than actually find real infringers. For example, you know that www.questionablesite.com tends to host some content you don't like, so you do this:
- www.knownquestionablesite.com/bignamemovie.html
- www.knownquestionablesite.com/b1gnam3m0v13.html
- www.knownquestionablesite.com/big_n
Bogus URLs (Score:2)
Yup it's basically that [torrentfreak.com].
With the additional peculiarity that here, "www.knownquestionablesite.com" will spit a valid page with suggestions, no matter what you throw as a name afterward (even if "big.name.move.html" isn't in their database, it would still give a list of not necessarily related download links).
So they are not exactly issuing DMCA about links that don't even exist (these URLs do not return 404s), only DMCA about links that are not in google database (random links that elict a random answer fro
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If infringing content is usually hidden behind robots.txt blocks, then this makes a fair amount of sense.
I suspect it would mean that in order to find the infringing content, the people making the takedown requests are likely violating the robots.txt. I doubt that's enforceable, unfortunately.
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Some sites generate pages for every URL you try to access on their domain. site.com/movie-name.html is auto-generated when someone tries to access it and not stored anywhere. Google's bot recognizes this and doesn't bother listing the page, but the dumb DMCA bots are apparently not so smart.
That's why sites with zero actual content can attract hundreds of millions of DMCA notices. I do wonder if they are honeypots designed to waste the bot's time or testbeds for anti-DMCA-bot technologies.
Solution: suspend "trusted" status (Score:1)
When you (Google) detect that a medium- or high-volume submitter has "obvious flaws" in more than a very small percentage of its submissions, suspend their "trusted sender" status until the flaws are fixed.
Ditto if more than a small percentage of a medium- or high-volume submitter's requests get overturned or "overturned by default" by an un-challenged counter-notice.
For low-volume submitters, the "kick out" threshold would need to be much higher, something like "5 bad submissions out of the last 10 or 10 b
Costing to the RIAA vrs Ignoring? (Score:4, Insightful)
When I RTFA, it seems like there are 100s of millions of DCMA requests going out each year - 35 million in the "latter half of September 2016"?
Even if "detection" (I don't know how good their detection process is if 99%+ of the claims are not found by Google) filing costs came out to a dollar per then I would think the cost to the industry would be $250+ million.
Looking at Warner Music revenues (the first company I could think of: https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]), I would think that the cost of filing all these claims amounts to around 5% or so of total revenue.
Two things came to mind thinking about this:
1. The music company accountants should be going apeshit over the cost of this program and the damage to the company's bottom line.
2. There's a whole bunch of money to be made creating an application for generating DCMA demands that reduces the number of DCMA requests (and the total cost of the requests) by 10x or more.
Re:Costing to the RIAA vrs Ignoring? (Score:4, Insightful)
You grossly overestimate the cost per notice. To the rights holder the cost is basically zero. the automated system that google set up gets automated complaints generated by an automated system at the company submitting the complaints. There was a one time setup fee for developing the system, and it can run indefinitely in a closet somewhere unmonitored for decades.
Do you really think there'd be this many takedown requests if if cost actual money to process them?
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Well, the copyright holder first has to determine whether the content is actually infr-- (snicker, choke, guffaw)
Sorry, I just couldn't get that whole sentence out while keeping a straight face.
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Well, the copyright holder first has to determine whether the content is actually infr-- (snicker, choke, guffaw)
No, the copyright owner has to check that the content would be infringing if it was the content that they think it is. For example if there are two songs with the same title, and you own the rights to one of them, it is not illegal to send a notice for a song with that title - as long as you own the one that you think it is, even if you're wrong.
Ban that idiot (Score:2)
Numbers = $ (Score:2)
Someone charges by the numbers for those take down notices. Someone at the media conglomerates got fleeced.
What is bogus? (Score:1)
The question I have is: what makes a notice "bogus"? It could mean at least any of the following: the URL never returned any useful content (returns a 404 or similar); the URL used to return content, but does not currently; the domain is not responding; the URL is not indexed by Google; the URL returns content, but none that contains a whiff of the copyrighted material; or other possibilities.
If the only thing "bogus" is that the URL is not indexed by Google (but does impermissibly contain copyrighted