EFF Argues That Automated Bogus DMCA Takedowns Violate The Law And Are Subject To Sanctions
from the yes,-but... dept
Having just been victimized by a bogus DMCA takedown notice that censored our content, I'm certainly aware of ways in which the process needs to improve (a notice-and-notice provision, rather than a notice-and-takedown provision, would be a big, big start). However, as we have detailed here in the past, these automated takedowns are pretty typical—and they're becoming an issue in a particular lawsuit. Hollywood went after Hotfile pretty strongly, but as part of Hotfile's countersuit showed, Warner Bros. in particular seemed to have a habit of issuing takedown orders on content it had no rights to.That's a pretty big concern, no matter what the "intentions" of those breaking the law. Warner Bros.' response takes a pretty cavalier attitude, more or less amounting to "hey, mistakes were made; no biggie" . The specific law on bogus takedowns -- 512(f) of the DMCA -- only says that there's punishment for those who "knowingly materially misrepresent." Warner Bros., of course, insists that just making a mistake does not trip that wire.
The EFF has now jumped in with an amicus brief that argues otherwise. The argument is pretty straightforward: if you're doing automated, or semi-automated takedown notices without reviewing them, the efforts are so careless and negligent that they clearly misrepresent the claims needed for a legitimate DMCA takedown. The filing notes that such automated takedowns are a real problem (even citing our recent experience), and that if such automated takedowns aren't liable for sanctions under 512(f) then that section is effectively meaningless.
Indeed, if Warner were correct, which it is not, Section 512(f) would become largely superfluous. Any company could sidestep accountability for improper takedowns by simply outsourcing the process to a computer. What is worse, copyright owners would have a perverse incentive to dumb-down the process, removing human review so as to avoid the possibility of any form of subjective belief. The tragic consequences for lawful uses are obvious: untold numbers of legal videos would be taken down, whether or not the uses were fair or even licensed.Among other things, the EFF filing highlights the Lentz v. Universal ruling that found that those filing takedowns have to take fair use into account -- and pointing out that you can't take fair use into account if you're automating takedowns.
Imagine the potential for mischief: Let’s say that Warner does not like competition from Universal. It could set a computer to search through Universal’s online presence, with the loosest possible settings, and issue takedown after takedown to Universal’s ISP for spurious claims. Nor is this scenario far-fetched: as noted above, supra at 4-5, anticompetitive uses of the DMCA takedown process are commonplace.
Unfortunately, historically, 512(f) has been a pretty toothless part of the law in response to bogus takedowns. The bar has been way too high. This is partly why we thought the parallel "remedy" that was found in SOPA was also likely to be equally useless. Attempts to make it stronger were rejected because those behind the bill knew it was toothless. Having the court agree with the EFF's position on this would be a huge help in giving those who are victims of bogus takedowns a tool to fight back.
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A suitable remedy
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Re: A suitable remedy
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Freaking Finally!
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Re: Freaking Finally!
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Re: Freaking Finally!
Show those morons some EFF'ing sanity and EFF'ing better laws.
:)
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Re: Freaking Finally!
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If there's far too much content being uploaded to sites like Youtube that it's basically impossible to monitor it all by humans, doesn't that argument also cut both ways? How can a company protect itself across the internet without an automated system? And isn't there always going to be some mistakes made by such a system?
I mean, what's the ratio of bogus takedown requests to valid ones? What's the ratio of legal sharing of a piece of media to infringing uses? The argument that DMCA is broken because of some bogus requests seems suspiciously close to the reasoning that because some uses of a site are infringing, then that site must be taken down.
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Re: Double-Edged Sword.
The individual person/company who uploaded a whatever to your ineptly dubbed 'aggregation site' is the one responsible for it's content--eg the party to be sued for having done something illegal.
Likewise, the individual person/company who send a fraudulent (whatnot) DMCA is the one responsible for it--eg the party to be sued for having done something illegal.
Ta-Da! Logic is easy and fun.
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Re:
This is a reasonable request.
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If it's a deep mix, beat, or whatever then yes, you need a musician to identify it but so what? You're attempting to protect a copyright and, as the RIAA is tirelessly telling us, valuable source of income.
And I'm sure the RIAA has to have access to a few highly trained musicians with great ears and knowledge needed to do that work. :-)
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In addition, if it would take a "highly trained musician" to tell if stuff on YouTube is infringing, how can YouTube be expected to tell?
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Let's use the old Youtube logic: If it's too hard for Youtube to check all the videos uploaded by hand, then the SAME EXACT STANDARD should be used for rights holders making DMCA claims. They should be given the same sort of "too big to check" leeway.
It's hard to justify any other solution.
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Re: Re: Re:
A copyright owner needs only check all uploaded songs against their small subset of works. This lowballed at X total uploads and ~50K copyright works for a pretty large owner.
Do you see the huge difference in scale?
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Heck, simple deal, really: a song / music video, not uploaded by the original source, could be just linked to the original source, if they have an approved version online. End issue.
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Content on youtube etc are uploaded by users who could be held liable in case of infringement. In case of automated takedowns, the list of content is not a summary of what other users have done: rather, it can be attributed to whoever initiates the automated takedowns (i.e. Warner in this case).
I might agree with you if the automated systems simply aggregated takedown requests from other sources, but in that case those other sources should be held liable in case of spurious takedowns.
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Re:
Not quite. The argument about sites that allow users to post content (not necessarily "aggregation sites") includes a few factors that don't apply to content producers.
The main one that applies here is not simply volume alone, but also that it is very difficult for third-party sites to be able to tell if content is infringing or not even when a human looks at it. Combine that with volume and it makes it impossible for sites to safely have user-supplied content at all. Combine that fact with the fact that this law is placing a burden on these sites that is close to, if not, unfair to them, and you have a strong reason to give greater leeway to those sites.
Copyright holders have an easier time of it. They only care about a subset of the total content, so the burden is lower for them. They presumably know who their licensees are, so can more easily tell if the content might be infringing, and, lastly, it's ethically their problem in the first place, so they should bear the burden.
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If they can use automated software to mistakenly take down Web sites, can't I use automated software mistakenly download their files?
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Even with a magic system that knew all copyrighted content, having an aggregator look through all the possible infringing items and comparing them to all copyrighted content is theoretically next to impossible.
Copyright owners need only search for the (relatively) few works they own and take down those. That's a significantly easier problem to solve.
Anyway, asking another industry to do YOUR job would be laughed at in any other case besides copyright monitoring. Copyright owners need to pay for their own monitoring, not demand Google to pay the bill.
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At the rate these companies send out notices, after the first round, they probably won't be able to send anymore for a decade.
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Unintentional or automated takedowns I think are a different game. Just like what DMCA permits ("oops"), I think that there should be an equal level of acceptance of error on the other side. Content owners are seemingly responsible to police the entire internet, and you cannot blame them for trying to automate at least part of that endless task.
EFF really needs to start understanding that there are issues for everyone involved, on both sides of the situation.
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Re: Punishment
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Re: Re: Punishment
The rest of your post makes no sense. Already the content producers face incredible difficulties and costs with DMCA, and now you are suggesting that their risk of error should punish them so greatly that they wouldn't want to even try?
Why not just abolish copyright and get it over with?
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Re: Re: Re: Punishment
What "incredible difficulties and risks" do content licensors (They're not "producers". Artists are "producers".) face?
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Re: Re: Re: Punishment
It's not any better, and i invite you to go after the individual that uploaded that content, not the 3rd party platform it was placed on.
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And you seem to be making a line between intentional and unintentional/automated. The way the law is currently, the takedowns fall in the realm of intentional, automated, and anti-competitive.
I do agree with one thing, you cannot blame them for committing this shitty practice when they face almost no legal repercussions for it (and taking into consideration that they think it is good business practice, which probably couldn't be farther from the truth).
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Even if we ignore that non-trivial detail, in order to get an equal level of acceptance of error on both sides, there should be an opportunity to file a counter-notice before the content is taken down. This would prevent the irreparable harm that has already been suffered by multiple parties in response to false DMCA takedowns.
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Are you serious? Not this sh!t again. Sure, let's just nuke Google because a Family Guy snippet was posted to YouTube. Wow.
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"oh we are sorry, car theft is just so rampant we setup an automated system to repossess cars. It makes mistakes sometimes. We are very sorry about that, your car is out back, it might be a bit dinged up now though, we are so sorry about that"
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Piracy forces automated option
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Re: Piracy forces automated option
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RE Estimated Vs Actual
I have yet to see any actual, proven loss of income due to infringement, yet have read many stories of actual loss in the pursuit of the alleged loss.
Aren't facts supposed to have more weight then guess' in court??
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Re: RE Estimated Vs Actual
Facts have weight in court, but clearly the fact that piracy is widespread, and that entire business models are predicated on it won't make the case any easier for you piracy apologists to make.
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Re: Re: RE Estimated Vs Actual
I agree.
Studios have been stealing from artists for decades!
Make them stop!
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We need both: Notice-Takedown and Notice-Notice
It seems we need second option for right holders, Notice-Notice. The Notice-Notice system would be relatively toothless for the issuer, think of it as safe-harbor. However, failure to comply with a valid notice should have or increase penalty for the recipient.
This should not replace Notice-Takedown, but complement it. For Notice-Takedown we should greatly increase the penalty for the issuer.
By having both Notice-Takedown and Notice-Notice it would allow rights holders to build automated systems with Notice-Notice with little liability. However, they would retain the
Notice-Takedown rights with greatly increased liability.
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Re: We need both: Notice-Takedown and Notice-Notice
The keyword is indeed penalty for misusing. Notice-Notice should also get a limiter: if one notice was sent and challenged the automated system should not be allowed to resend it. The only way would be the takedown process and this would force the copyright holder to review the content to avoid penalties for sending bogus takedown notices.
Of course, we need copyright laws reviewed to include broader and clearer fair use and public domain text and it must clearly mention remixes, reuse and non-commercial use.
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Was the content identified infringing, but not the IP of the company?
If it was infringing material, did the rightful owner complain about the takedown notice?
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Re:
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What's good for the goose...
The entertainment industry is big on technicalities of the law. Reap the whirlwind bitches!
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Automated upload
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Re: Automated upload
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