Sony Pictures Legal Affairs VP Files Bogus DMCA Notice Because His Salary Is Listed On Wikileaks
from the it's-$330,000-by-the-way dept
Yeah, so the Sony Pictures hack is basically old news at this point. People have gone through it for all the juicy details and it's been out of the news for quite some time. So, apparently, one Sony "legal affairs" exec decided that perhaps he could engage in a little copyfraud to try to hide some info without anyone noticing. As TorrentFreak first noticed, however, Sony Pictures Legal Affairs VP Daniel Yankelevits wasn't particularly subtle in sending a DMCA notice to Google, asking it to delist the Wikileaks page with a search engine for all of the Sony Hack emails. The full DMCA notice is as stupid as it is faulty:
Yankelevits gets almost everything wrong with this bogus takedown. Let's count the ways:
- This is not a legitimate DMCA notice by any means. He does not specify what copyright is being infringed (because none is).
- "It's not right" is not a claim of infringement.
- His salary info ($320,000 possibly rising to $330,000, by the way) is not copyright covered material.
- His clueless request asks for "https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails" to be removed. That's the front page for Wikileaks' archive of all the leaked Sony emails. That means that the actual email wouldn't even have been removed from Google's Index if Google had complied (which it did not).
- Clearly, Yankelevits does not hold the copyright on the email in question, which was not written by him.
- Yankelevits sent the bogus DMCA takedown on behalf of Sony Pictures, despite there clearly being a personal motive behind it. It makes you wonder if Sony Pictures lets any exec just file DMCA notices in its name.
- Yankelevits lists the actual email URL as the "original URL" which makes no sense. The "original URL" is supposed to be where the content was copied from.
But it does give you some enlightenment into how a top lawyer at Sony Pictures actually recognizes that the DMCA is a tool for censorship, yes? Well, that and the caliber of the legal minds working at Sony Pictures in their "dealmaking" division.
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Filed Under: censorship, copyfraud, copyright, daniel yankelevits, dmca, salary info, sony hack, takedown
Companies: google, sony pictures, wikileaks
Reader Comments
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As always, 'Why not?'
If it works, awesome, it cost him five minutes to write up the email and send it off. If it doesn't then he wasted five minutes and that's it.
With absolutely zero penalty for fraudulent DMCA claims the worst he can expect is something like this, where someone gets wind of the request and makes it more public, there is no fine and no real penalty beyond that, and as such no incentive to act any differently.
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Something something kill all the lawyers....
Something something who love people are the luckiest people in the world...
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... well, that would explain a few things.
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Filing a DMCA complaint that argues "my salary is available through a Google search and it isn't right" is not a valid reason why it should be removed.
Never seen something so ridiculous.
Re: Sony VP Executive, executive salaries are required to be reported to the SEC as a matter of federal law.
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Daniel Yankelevits makes $320,000/yr!
I would have never thought to look up Daniel Yankelevits salary in the leaked sony emails but Daniel Yankelevits did and then kindly informed the world that he indeed makes $320,000!
So thank you Daniel Yankelevits for making sure I know that you make $320,000 a year!
Now that I know how much money he makes I am left wondering if Daniel Yankelevits is a fan of Barbra Streisand?
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Re: As always, 'Why not?'
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Re: Daniel Yankelevits makes $320,000/yr!
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Re: As always, 'Why not?'
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Re: Re: As always, 'Why not?'
That public backlash is the only method of holding such abuse accountable shows a fundamental failure on the part of our legal system. Our legal system needs to be adjusted.
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Re: Re: As always, 'Why not?'
Great, so Yankelevitz will be claiming ownership and and submitting DMCA notices on these articles too?
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A way to end DMCA abuse
And . . . during their time in jail, copyfraud DMCA filers are required to listen to all RIAA music that doesn't sell, and all MPAA movies that don't sell.
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Re: Re: As always, 'Why not?'
Or, more likely, you lie. Unfortunately there is no punishment for telling lies. Just be warned it only makes you look bad and reveals what kinda scumbag IP defenders are which, in turn, makes IP laws look bad.
If Google hosted infringing content and didn't comply with the DMCA to remove said content and was found guilty of infringement they will in fact be punished. The punishment is real and it's disproportionate.
Your problem is that if Google removes the infringing content upon request then yes, there will be no punishment for the time it was up for Google because they didn't break the law. There is no punishment for not breaking the law. Just because you have a problem with that doesn't make it a problem.
OTOH, if someone files a bogus takedown request against Google chances are they will receive no punishment at all. First of all intent will have to be proven to impose any meaningful punishment in such a case which is potentially subjective because how do you prove someone intended to do something. and even if they do get punished the punishment will be disproportionately less than the punishment Google would face if it didn't comply with the takedown and was found infringing. That is a problem. The law needs to be adjusted accordingly.
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Wrong approach, but...
But I can guarantee you, there are cases out there of Person A and Person B discussing Person's C very private information that is now being served by Wikileaks. Maybe the address of someone being stalked, discussion of a medical procedure, or other information that could be damaging if widely-- all "shared" without Person C having anything to do with it.
Maybe it's a pure hypothetical. In those cases, what is the appropriate remedy? I no more want all my personal information spilled on the internet than I want the NSA to vacuum it up. Should anything be done in egregious cases?
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Re: Re: Re: As always, 'Why not?'
If there was meaningful punishment for bogus takedown requests then there would be fewer bogus takedowns. That would free service provider resources from having to process all these bogus takedown requests so that they can spend those resources stopping actual infringement.
If IP extremists actually cared about stopping infringement their first complaint would be to fix the one sided penalty structure to ensure that those that file bogus takedowns are sufficiently deterred from doing so and that they will sufficiently compensate service providers for any resources spent processing any invalid request. But IP extremists don't care at all about stopping infringement, they just want to stop competition altogether.
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Re: Wrong approach, but...
Of course, none of that has anything to do with this story, as this lawyer is abusing the DMCA to remove information he doesn't want public. The DMCA is about copyright, (hint: it's right there in the name), not privacy. The DMCA takedown procedure was not intended to be a tool for the removal of any information you want removed. It's not the EU's Right to be Forgotten. Whether or not you think the US needs such a law is irrelevant; such a law would not be related to the DMCA, and abuses of the DMCA need to be punished.
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Re: Re: As always, 'Why not?'
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Re: Wrong approach, but...
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I seem to recall a couple cases where one part of Sony issued take-downs on content uploaded by another part of Sony (*I could be thinking of a different company... memory's failing quick lately)
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I doubt very seriously he has a list of anomalies. In his world, there are no anomalies until one is pointed out to him, which he dismisses as an anomaly and then promptly forgets about (since actually remembering it would mean that he was losing the battle, and he is being paid big bucks not to lose the battle.)
Our list of anomalies are growing, but his will continue to remain as a pointer to null until someone pays him enough to start keeping a list.
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Re: Re: As always, 'Why not?'
Not one single person has had their perfectly legal speech censored or otherwise impeded due to copyright infringement, either their own or someone else's.
Not one person has been faced with lawsuits or threat of them from a copyright troll using the fact that copyright infringement penalties can be in the five or six digits range to scare even the innocent into settling rather than defending themself in court.
Nope, you're absolutely correct, there isn't any penalty whatsoever for 'true infringement', completely unlike the very real and consistently applied penalties for filing fraudulent DMCA claims.
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anyone can bother dig up Sony's filed reports of his salary and compare them to the numbers he admitted of actually receiving?
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This is where your salary went, giving this jacktard an increased bonus so he can throw an international temper tantrum. I don't own any of your latest products or content and have no desire to purchase, pirate or otherwise own any of it. Don't whine to me, and especially don't bother siccing your lawyers on me. It'll waste more of your allegedly depleted resources and the whole planet will laugh even harder at you.
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Well that and that their lawyers and IT guys are of the same caliber or maybe even the same people considering how many times Sony has been successfully hacked in the last few years and still haven't improved their security.
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Re: Re: Wrong approach, but...
"Ninth Amendment - Unenumerated Rights. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
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Re: Re: Re: Re: As always, 'Why not?'
The law already has ridiculous penalties for copyright infringement, so I'm curious as to what more you want it to be able to do. Track every action, online or off to make sure that people don't download and/or upload infringing works? Something equally absurd?
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"Sure he spraypainted the side of your house, but what are you complaining about, you can paint over it."
Meanwhile of course the content in question is almost certain to have already been taken down unless the one who posted it is also the one who hosts it and they're willing to risk even harsher penalties should the case not go their way, as the law is utterly one-sided in providing incentive to remove something based upon nothing more than accusation, with no reason to keep something up.
The fact that you can contest a bogus DMCA claim does not in any way lessen the fact that making a bogus DMCA claim has no penalty whatsoever, and given how one-sided the law is even bogus claims are likely to lead to the removal(temporary or permanent) of the content in question.
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Re: As always, 'Why not?'
Except in this case, he's drawn attention to the e-mail by filing a bogus complaint, and now we're all wondering: Did he get that $10K raise?
Streisand effect. Nobody cared about his salary until he tried to get it hidden. Now everybody knows about his salary.
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Re: Re:
Or is that a $320,000 LOSS every year?
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Re: Re: As always, 'Why not?'
Ignore a DMCA claim on something and the case goes bad for whoever posted it? You(the service/host the content is on) lose your legal shield and can be held liable for it, which means you have a very serious legal incentive to operate under a 'shoot first, ask questions only if pressed' mindset.
File a clearly bogus DMCA claim? No legal penalty whatsoever, the only penalty is if something like this happens, with the request, and the data claimed against made even more widely known.
Only one side has a legal incentive/penalty involved, the other can do as they will without a care in the world.
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Oops
You think that was the mistake, but it wasn't. As I'm sure he would tell you if you asked, he meant to leave off the "/sony/emails" part and only takedown "https://wikileaks.org/". Oops.
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