Microsoft Uses DMCA To Block Many Links To Competing Open Office
from the total-dmca-failure dept
Another day, another example of excessive DMCA takedown actions. The latest is that Microsoft has been issuing DMCA takedowns to Google directing the search engine to remove links to Open Office. Open Office, of course, is the open source competitor to Microsoft, and Microsoft has no copyright-related rights over it. As TorrentFreak points out, this does not appear to be a one-off occurrence. In June, Microsoft filed more than a dozen takedown notices that took down links to Open Office. Again, it is likely that what happened was yet another case of a really broken automated system, but that's no excuse at all. We're talking about flat out censorship, by abusing a legal process, to attack a direct competitor of Microsoft. But, because there's no real punishment for filing completely bogus DMCA notices, Microsoft can get away with this and continue to file identical notices with no real recourse.
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Filed Under: copyright, dmca, notice and takedown, open office
Companies: microsoft
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Ahem. Sorry, I could not resist.
From the snippet TF presents all of those were on known file sharing sites where there is a good quantity of infringing content (along with these obvious examples of non-infringing stuff). It could be that they went the lazy route and set up a system to search for "Office" on those trackers ignoring the fact that there are plenty of legit content that could go with the same name.
If you scroll through the list of links you'll find a lot of interesting anomalies there. Open Office is just the most eye catchy ;)
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apply all of you comment above but apply it to Microsoft Office instead of Open office and then picture the reaction when it was MS Office that was kicked off.
it's always the same story. any excuse can and is used when it's something that shouldn't be removed, but is. if there were punishments for bogus and incorrect take downs, leveling the playing field, those who issue them would be more careful. the only reason it isn't like that is because the various 'legitimate industries' throw so much money into the pockets of corrupt politicians, the scales are and always will be heavily weighted in one direction. we all know what direction that it, dont we!
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Either Microsoft and friends are deliberately targeting free software or they simply are putting absolutely zero effort into their automated DMCA program and simply don't care how much it sucks. (kind of like Windows 8)
If the former is true, which it likely is to some degree (the fact that it has not been fixed implies the tacit approval of the management), Microsoft's actions are highly illegal, and not just under the DMCA. But that's nothing new for them.
The latter is also almost certainly true as well, Microsoft has a long sordid history of releasing broken, poor quality, and usually bug-ridden software, anyone remember Windows ME? This tool is no different, coded by people who don't care for a company that doesn't care either. Seriously if you were an overworked, underpaid, programmer locked in a cubicle, tasked with writing a DMCA tool for the most hated company in the world, would you do a good job?
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Firstly that there's plenty of legit material on these filesharing sites, so we need to carefully apply the appropriate due process.
Secondly, that there isn't any to carefully apply.
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Does your homosexual lover know are you Google's watchdog?
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The lack of noise makes it seem like there is no problem here, only anomalies.
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You are wrong
Google doing something useful by rejecting bogus requests is not the reason the DMCA lacks punishment for bogus takedowns.
The reason is because Hollywood and friends want there to be no punishment so they can use DMCA as a censorship or competitive weapon whenever it suits them.
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Re: You are wrong
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A suitable punishment
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Re: A suitable punishment
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Re: Re: A suitable punishment
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Re: A suitable punishment
NZFACT -(which is 'hollywoods' face in NZ) are going to keep going back to get the fee waived.
End result = It's illegal to download stuff, doi it three times and I loose my internet, but as long as I don't download anything on Universal ( though it seems all claims have been for Rhianna songs) I'm alright.
So yea, in this case a fee works very very well, and the best thing is that because this is a numbers game the fee doesn't have to be set high.
$150 000 sounds really punitive, but NZ's proved that $25 is all it takes.
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YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
Mike is unconcerned with all of Microsoft's prior crimes: leveraging the market, anti-trust, buying out competitors, outright stealing of products -- its actual monopoly is a crime in and of itself: led to crappy products with new version differing only in deliberate incompatiblities.
BUT OH, chance to attack copyright brings him out!
Techdirt's official motto: This isn't surprising.
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Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
Nowhere is any such thing said nor implied.
Known evil actors should not be trolling here.
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Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
> Mike is unconcerned with all of Microsoft's prior crimes.
Nowhere is any such thing said nor implied.
You are trivially wrong and/or lying. Here's first page example with Google search for "microsoft monopoly" which shows definitely that Mike's unconcern with the Microsoft monopoly is at the very least implied:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111021/00401016444/funny-how-microsofts-views-responsibili ty-to-competitors-differ-based-whos-antitrust-hot-seat.shtml
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Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
In other words, your claims don't change anything in the article. At least you've got another misconception to whine about other than the expect "(yet another) anomaly!) or "Google!" or "this isn't important, look over there!" or any of your other usual idiocy.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
What I KNEW was that an explicit quote from Mike hisself wasn't going to sway fanboys who'll just move the goalposts. Nonetheless, I soldier on.
So what part of this don't you see as at the least "implies" unconcern? "We recently mentioned the latest round of Microsoft's antitrust fight, dating back to some of its actions around Windows 95. To be clear, I think the action against Microsoft is pretty silly. It's pretty clear that the market is quite capable of dealing with any perceived Microsoft "monopoly" and routing around it.
Mike's ironic-quoted "monopoly" manifests unconcern to any impartial judge.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
No, I think I'll choose not to reward "boy-who-cried-wolf" behaviour and report the brainless little brat.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
If he's capable of typing a paragraph without launching into his usual idiocy, his points will come across and he won't be reported. Simple.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
No, I'm addressing your words. What you quoted doesn't match what you claimed. I'm sorry you're too dumb to understand that.
"So what part of this don't you see as at the least "implies" unconcern?"
This part:
"We recently mentioned the latest round of Microsoft's antitrust fight, dating back to some of its actions around Windows 95. To be clear, I think the action against Microsoft is pretty silly."
Two sentence, quite clear. The first sentence refers to the antitrust fight and the latest action being taken. The second comments on THIS action, not EVERY action.
Get it? He's not saying "I think ALL action against Microsoft is silly" - which is what you're claiming. He's referring to THIS action. Which is not what you're claiming.
"Mike's ironic-quoted "monopoly" manifests unconcern to any impartial judge."
At the time the article was a written, Microsoft was no longer a monopoly in that market.
I'm sorry the English language is so hard for you to parse and understand, but what you've quoted doesn't imply what you think it does.
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Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
I said no such unconcern is stated or implied.
You then quote something that demonstrates the very concern you claim does not exist.
Nonetheless, it is irrelevant and distracts from the DMCA issue -- which is exactly what your paymasters want.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
You said Mike is unconcerned with Microsoft's crimes.
I said no such unconcern is stated or implied.
You are only engaging in lying semantics after I provided an exact and explicit example of Mike's unconcern with what HE ironic-quotes as "monopoly".
Perfect example of Techdirt. I'm done with you lying kids and your semantic games on this topic.
Mike's fanboy-trolls imitate him by taking no position except the pejorative.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
You obviously fail at reading comprehension but its actually nice to see you try and argue your point, better than the usual stunned silence.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
Lying SEMANTICS!
Means using words! Words hard!
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Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
its actual monopoly is a crime in and of itself
False. Monopolies are not crimes in and of themselves. See: http://www.girardgibbs.com/antitrust-monopoly/
You can't even get simple FACTS right. It's even worse when you try to draw implications/extrapolations from things other people say.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
> its actual monopoly is a crime in and of itself
False. Monopolies are not crimes in and of themselves.
TRUE. Certainly so for Microsoft. Older body of law and public opinion -- before corporations were "persons" which is manifestly wrong -- regards BIG AS BAD, and that's the RIGHT way to view it.
I'm sure you believe that corporations are "persons", but they're just legal fictions which should always be closely regulated, not allowed to run wild as at present; it's a major source of societal ills.
Just because corporations have bought politicians and lawyers to make statutes and rulings in their favor doesn't change the fact that monopoly is a crime in and of itself.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
So what does that make the pesky government-sanctioned monopoly we call ‘copyright’?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
You're wrong on the facts here. It is not illegal to have a monopoly in the US. Microsoft was never convicted or legally charged with having a monopoly. They were accused of something that actually is illegal: abusing a monopoly position.
Now, if you want to argue that a monopoly is a Bad Thing, I'll agree with you 100%! But good/bad and legal/illegal are two distinct things. Lots of Bad Things are totally legal, and lots of Good Things are not.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
Monopolies are NOT crimes in and of themselves.
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Also irony is lost on OOTB, give him a break though, hes only a 12 year old girl.
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Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
What proof do you have to back up this claim?
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Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
> Mike is unconcerned with all of Microsoft's prior crimes
What proof do you have to back up this claim?
Just Mike's own text! (Admittedly, unreliable: still, indicative.) -- READ my above response to "DannyB".
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Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
lol wut?
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Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
Untrue. A monopoly is NOT a "crime in and of itself." Here's a short (meaning you might actually be able to absorb and understand it) description of the actual law.
Do you think anyone, anywhere, ever takes you seriously? Really, nearly everything you say is provably false.
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Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
Monopoly is a crime in and of itself.
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Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
Damn Blue. Maybe you need a go a size larger with your tinfoil hat. I think it might now be cutting off the circulation to your brain.
I mean really, if we are basing other people's humanity upon their screen names, you'd lose big time. "Out of the Blue" is only a turn of phrase, not even a life-form, right?
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Re: Re: Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
That said, opinion itself does not matter when we're talking about crimes. Having a monopoly is not a crime. Abusing a monopoly position can be, but just having a monopoly is not a crime.
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Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
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Re: YOT, BY A KNOWN EVIL ACTOR!
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This should be treated like filing a false police report
That means throw some people at Microsoft in jail or fine them, whatever the punishment for filing a false police report over a dozen times is.
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Censorship?
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Re: Censorship?
PS: Darn those default submit buttons!
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If I were Microsoft I wouldn't want it to be seen that an open-source program could do a better job than our shitty and bug-ridden programming.
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I merely understand their motivation, as you correctly explained it.
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This may sound off the topic but...
We all know that these automated, non-human review searches have an extremely big flaw....not to be political, and this is for a reference only, we have the IRS scandal to thank for a great example as to why automated key word searches are a terrible way to make any sort of decision whether legal or determining non-profit status.
That being sId, Microsoft uses a third party company that lazily uses such automation. As much as they gripe and pick at Google (though I think Bill and Melissa Gates sort of have a point about the lack of altruistic goals...I'll explain if asked), I don't think it fully their fault that this crap happens.
Microsoft's issue is that they are using a lazy company. I myself have come across this. When I got my first apartment, my patents had to sign on as credit holders because I never used a credit card in my life to that point. Now, while they did the background checks on all of us. The company that owned my aspiring living quarters used a third party to do the background check. My poor father, who was in a second bout of cancer at the time, who was forced into early retirement due to said cancer, turned out to be a sex offender according to the check. It turns out that the company that did the background check...used no other unique identifiers other than his first and last name...we had to resend everything and had the local police department do the second background check.
So what am I getting at? While I do blame Microsoft for their stupidity in their own right for the chicanery (save aforementioned altruistic criticism from Bill Gates), I can't help but notice the third party automation company they chose to do these searches.
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Re: This may sound off the topic but...
It isn't, not even close.
If you hire a company to do something in your stead, and they screw it up, then it's their fault. If you continue to use their services after that though, even though you know that they are terrible at what you're hiring them for, then both parties share the blame equally.
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Re: Re: This may sound off the topic but...
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Re: This may sound off the topic but...
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DMCA notices are not "filed".
Not that it matters particularly much to this topic, but it's the kind of subtle error that slowly builds up confusion in readers who are not law fiends.
DMCA takedowns already contain too much implied weight on their own. There's no need for people to think they are actual pleadings.
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The DMCA is bad enough, but in the UK they have something even worse, IP blocking.
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theft by filing these DCMA's.
wasn't it Lasercomb America, Inc. v. Reynolds that said copyright misuse can be construed as violations of anti trust law
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It's not "the" competitor. In fact, the entire Open Office open source developer community jumped ship to LibreOffice once Oracle bought out Sun.
IBM and users who haven't been following the news are really the only entities still interested in Open Office at this point.
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That's not entirely true. I am neither IBM nor uninformed, but I still use OpenOffice, simply the reasons to switch to LibreOffice are not yet sufficient to overcome my lethargy.
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Aug 15th, 2013 @ 10:28am
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Sue Them
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But Open Office is still there if you want it.
'Techdirt' say's "It's not censorship if we can still read it"
So which is it? You can't have it both ways.
And then in the comments we've got folks saying that there's nothing wrong with a monopoly because it's not against any law.
But 'techdirt' says copyright is wrong because it's a monopoly and noone should have a monopoly on anything (especially if it's something I want for free).
So again, which is it?
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Re:
Those two things are not contradicting each other. First, that an act of censorship doesn't get all channels the speech goes through makes it no less censorship.
The argument people make here about hiding comments isn't that you can still read the comments somewhere else, it's that you can still read the comments right here.
Also, it's not abusive or even shady to hide comments on a site that you own and operate. The OP is talking about a case of hiding things on sites Microsoft doesn't own and operate. So the comparison is apples and oranges in any case.
Oh? Who said that? What saw (and said myself) was that it's not a crime because it's not against the law. That's a far cry from saying that there's nothing wrong with it.
No writer on Techdirt has said anything remotely resembling this. You're just making stuff up. There are a handful of commenters that take this point of view, but it's far from clear they represent the majority view -- and no commenter represents "Techdirt" anyway. They represent themselves.
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No difference, Open Office hasn't moved, it's still were it was.
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Revenue is a non-starter normally, it's brushed off as made up figures and so much bullshit, and there's other ways to make money and on and on.
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Guerilla DMCA
After all, if there is no consequence to filing a BS DMCA takedown notice, why not start a campaign to remove say, all of Microsoft's ads, or Verison, or AT&T, or Ford, or well.. you get the picture.
Maybe, if a few million of these things get used to slap the big-boy's stuff off the web, the lawmakers will start to consider putting some consequences on the activity.
... or is it a necessity that in order to file a DMCA takedown one must also be a "member" of a large corporate entity??
Just a thought...
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Thanks M$, for the reminder while I'm poking around today.
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MS Office - $200.00 +
OR $99.00 a year.
Open Office - Free.
Just do the math, lol
Open office can generate a good looking document or spreadsheet, fits my needs just fine. For the price - heck, it's even quicker to just download it and run it - no annoying MS activation BS either.
Where's the upside to your product M$?
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Monopoly Not a Crime in Itself
A case in point. CH Products long had a monopoly on the manufacture of 3.5 inch floppy disks (and very well may still). Nobody cared because 3.5 inch floppy disks had been obsolete for quite some time, and were very cheap. CH Products would sell the floppies to various other companies who would in turn label and resell them to the public. The monopoly on 3.5 inch floppies only existed because nobody else bothered to make them, not because any anti-competitive behavior was going on.
A second case is Microsoft itself. The company from an economic viewpoint may never have technically been a monopoly. However, from a legal standpoint that means nothing. Microsoft was able to leverage its market position to get computer OEM's to agree to sell their operating system exclusively, and refusing to sell competing systems like OS/2 or BeOS, even in small quantities. It was engaging in anti-competitive behavior like this that was illegal, not being a monopoly in the first place. If Microsoft didn't try to block potential competitors from gaining a significant foothold in the market by creating exclusive contracts with OEM's, then they would not have done anything illegal even if they had the same market share.
It can be easily argued that since anyone else could have made floppies (just like anyone else could make an operating system), CH Products didn't technically have a monopoly even at virtually one hundred percent market share. However, that doesn't change the fact that it's engaging in anti-competitive behavior that is illegal, not having a monopoly market share.
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cancel a timeshare contract
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