Total Wipes Blames Trying To Take Down Every Page With The Word 'Download' On 'A Bug'
from the no-doubts-about-it dept
So, we just had a story about German-based Total Wipes issuing a series of increasingly bizarre takedown notices, including one that tried to claim that basically any website with the URL "download" was infringing (including the URLs of tons of popular software, from Skype to Open Office to Evernote). The company has now responded to the takedowns, insisting that it's all no big deal because it was all just a software bug. "No doubts about it," the company says:Due to several technical servers problems on the first February week (from the 2nd to the 8th) our script sent hundreds DMCA to hundreds domains not related at all with any copyrights of our contents. Taking a look at https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/10420406 is pretty clear that for a few hours only the word "download" has been used by the script and that caused several illegal and wrong DMCA requests. It was our fault, no doubts about it. The DMCA is a serious issue and it must be carefully managed. Google rejected most of these DMCA but we totally understand the damage of it for small and medium companies that have to remove and manage them manually. It was a bug just on that week and this is not our daily routine, 99% of our found/removed links are about people that steal music and make moneys illegally. However, our Anti-piracy system has been taken down a week ago in order to add more improvements and avoiding further trouble about the DMCA sending.Of course, that would be slightly more plausible if Total Wipes hadn't done something similar just a few months ago, trying to take down every URL with the word "coffee" in it. Given that, the "it's just a bug" excuse doesn't seem particularly believable.
However, even if we take Total Wipes at its word, that this is not the company's "daily routine," this still demonstrates how problematic any system for automatically issuing takedowns is for concepts such as free speech. If you're issuing DMCA takedowns you are, by default, stifling speech. You can argue that it's acceptable if that "speech" is nothing more than infringing on someone else's work -- and there's a reasonable argument to be made there. But it is immensely problematic when you combine the default "take this down!" nature of the DMCA with the automated efforts to issue such notices. It becomes not a tool to stop infringement, but rather a widespread tool of censorship, thanks to a broken copyright law.
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Filed Under: bug, censorship, copyright, dmca, takedown
Companies: total wipes
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Me too, but (taking their "this is just a bug" statement at face value) that such an obvious and easy-to-spot bug made it past their quality control systems indicates a catastrophic failure by the company. One that they can't just wave off as "only a bug". This is a systemic failure that should be causing everyone at the company to be running around like their hair was on fire.
Unless, of course, it was intentional.
(they do internal code reviews and appropriate testing prior to release, right? Right? Apparently not.)
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My guess the "more than just a bug" is their way of working. I imagine it this way:
Monday morning: min wage employe arrives to enter new search terms, coffee break, weekend.
Back to work on next monday boss gets an email "Oops".
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Why would they have a dev sitting around watching the logs when they can just work on other projects or optimise the process to allow more claims to be filed?
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A bug. Sure.
Quite the bug. To me it sounds not as much like some bug has stopped their program from working properly, but rather that some bug has been writing their program in the first place.
Perhaps they should stop hiring invertebrates apart from the periplanetae americanae in top management.
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They have no reason to be better.
They can always claim big/oopsie/dog ate my code if someone actually notices... in the meantime all sorts people are having to deal with their pages gone and filing a counter notice (which is WAY more complex than sending a bogus claim) and hope that the don't double down on the bogus complaint (cause THAT never happens... like with a birdsong).
If they had to pay a penalty for each bogus claim & then file notices to fix what they broke then it might get better. There honestly needs to be a 'crying wolf' clause in the DMCA. If you send X bogus claims, you get a timeout.
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Doubling down can be done by software, while looking at and making a decision takes a human...guess which is likely to be most popular for at least the first response to a counter notice.
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Anyone want to take bets on Techdirt supporting that kind of equality?
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As such, sure, I'd love to see some equally ruinous penalties for those abusing the DMCA system like demonstrated here.
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FIFY
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...and ONLY with financial penalties comparable to the ACTUAL losses incurred by the act of infringement. Not $100,000 per song just because.
That's more like it. If the attacks were both correctly targeted and proportionate to the act, we wouldn't be having these conversations.
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Filing a false DMCA notice, on the other hand, is always harmful. Either the recipient's free speech is being infringed upon, or you're trying to steal their money. (cough contentID cough) There you have it, false DMCAs are far worse than instances of infringing.
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There is an exception to that, of course - cases where copyright, licencing or other factors cause the song not to be available via legal means for streaming or download. The solution to this is making the song legally available, not trying to sue anyone who lets others hear your music, but sadly we're still at the "we only want to do that if the artists can instantly retire from the royalties" stage with many of these fools.
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Copyright infringement is very difficult to identify but false DMCA takedown requests are extremely easy to spot (Google even publishes how many false notices it receives from various companies which is taken care of by its (semi)automated system).
Why should penalties exist for something that is complicated to spot over something that is trivial to spot?
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"Illegal"?
It seems to me that one of these days, someone's going to employ a large botnet (already illegal) to mass-issue takedowns on everything in existence. I think this would show up the idiocy of the current system, that more often than not trusts an unverified third party over a verified customer.
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Re: "Illegal"?
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Penalties
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Let's start the next instance.
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/s obviously
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Google
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Re: Google
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Incompetence
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Given this continual bug as they claim in the software sounds very akin to why the copyright trolls don't really want to reveal their 'trademarked' process to find infringers. Likely it works on the same level.
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Oh, so it's OK then?
So why then isn't that same courtesy extended to the general public, or anyone who stands accused by people like this? Why do they get a pass when the book is thrown fully at Joe Public?
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Computers breaking the law
Barring the fact that a script was used to target content - which is another discussion in of itself - maybe now we'll find out what happens when a computer breaks the law without human intervention.
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Total Wipes
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Re: Total AssWipes
You've instituted a process, where everyone can demand to have taken down everyone elses content with impunity. So why would you want to discern whether the request came from a foreign company?
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