Someone Impersonating An Adult Chat Site Sends DMCA Takedown Service Targets Tons Of Legit Sites, Including Chaturbate Itself [UPDATE]
from the bumptious-interloping dept
UPDATE: Not until after the post went live did I finally hear back from Chaturbate about its bogus DMCA notices. Chaturbate's support claims these notices were performed by an imposter. I'm not ready to take the company at its word, as there are hundreds of DMCA notices to be dug through before anything can be determined further. It does appear some DMCA notices were more finely-targeted (claims sites "stilled content" [?!]) but all of these were issued in a five-day span, suggested a concerted effort by Chaturbate that appears to have misfired, at least initially.
UPDATE #2: After several emails back and forth, it appears someone is using Chaturbate's name to send DMCA takedowns, but it is *not* Chaturbate itself. (Here's what a legit takedown notice performed by Chaturbate's in-house service looks like.) Here's the latest, direct from Chaturbate:
From what we can tell, these notices are likely from one of two possible sources. The first source is some third-party DMCA notice service that has contracted directly with our users. We are in the process of emailing each user on whose behalf one of these bogus notices has been sent, asking them to put us in touch with the takedown service they are using. The other possible source is some user who has taken it upon themselves to make a dent in the community of sites that republishes content that's been recorded from Chaturbate and decided that sending out DMCA notices without authorization was a good way to accomplish that goal. If we get a response from any users that helps us get to the bottom of this, we will let you know.
When more details are available, a follow-up post will be written, hopefully exposing the third party DMCA service impersonating Chaturbate and doing a flatout lousy job protecting someone else's intellectual property.
Portmanteau words are great. It's a highly-efficient way to forcibly join two (possibly unrelated) actions and create a brand new activity. Add to this a decently-fast internet connection and you have Chaturbate, a service that puts people together to do things to themselves separately.
Granted, much of this could be done with other services, including the portmaneau'ed ChatRoulette, but targeted markets are more profitable than floating from chat to chat hoping to escape the "turbate" part of this internet concoction. Chatting is fun. So is masturbation. But not many people enjoy being masturbated at, especially when they're looking to just chat a little. Chaturbate, however, gives people what they want, in as many varieties as they want it.
Good for Chaturbate and its users. Like any other webcam service, Chaturbate wants to keep people from finding the same stuff for free. So it performs its own free, in-house DMCA takedown service. Good news for its clientele, especially those providing the entertainment.
Unfortunately for Chaturbate and its users, an unknown third party has stepped in to do this as badly as inhumanly possible. Over the course of two days in July, Chaturbate someone using Chaturbate's name carpet-bombed Google with DMCA notices -- many of them likely duplicates. Almost nothing has been removed. It may be there are a few illicit streams/recordings somewhere in the stack of webpages, but it's going to take some time to sort them out because of all the garbage added by these takedown efforts.
In addition to targeting its own site Chaturbate itself in its takedown requests...
The third party has also targeted:
- Geographical research
- A book on the Large Hadron Collider
- A Canadian high school basketball coach
- A fundraising effort for curing cystic fibrosis
- The lyrics to a Miley Cyrus song
- A New York State Supreme Court decision
- A UK Mercede-Benz dealer
- The graduates of the University of Rochester
- A Steam forum discussion
- A report on treating Alzheimer's patients
And that's just a few selections from a single DMCA notice. There are dozens more, filled with the same errors. Multiple university websites are targeted, along with several product pages from Amazon and eBay. The only thing that seems to tie these URLs together might be the names mentioned on the pages. "Colin" seems to be one trigger, netting multiple bogus targets in Chaturbate's these takedown notices, including most of the URLs listed above.
If Chaturbate someone is performing searches using performers' names, it's auto-generating a ton of garbage hits that no one at the company is sorting through before passing the takedown notices on to Google. A lack of attention to detail is never a good sign when it comes to the business world. It's even worse when it has the potential to delist legitimate content. And this would be happening en masse if Google were as careless as those issuing takedown notices.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: copyright, dmca, takedowns
Companies: chaturbate
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
One should be plenty
Google should assume that of all the links listed the company at least has the right to it's own site and treat that DMCA claim as accurate and valid and act accordingly.
After all, if anyone is going to know whether or not a particular site/page is infringing clearly it's the person who runs it, so if they want to claim that their site is infringing who is Google to say otherwise? And with multiple infringing pages it's pretty obvious that the site is dedicated to infringement and a haven for copyright infringers on a large scale, so it seems only appropriate to de-list the entire site just to be safe.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: One should be plenty
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Naughty particle physics
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Naughty particle physics
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Naughty particle physics
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Hmmm...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1278322/
Colin, a zero budget movie about a mindless zombie, a tragic character who is doomed from the very start?
Seems strangely fitting.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Naughty particle physics
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Or that is what a copyright maximalist or troll with any consistency should drop by like a seagull to say.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Naughty particle physics
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Naughty particle physics
3.(physics) The smallest possible, and therefore indivisible, unit of a given quantity or quantifiable phenomenon. [from 20th c.]
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quantum#Noun
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Naughty particle physics
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Naughty particle physics
[ link to this | view in thread ]
OMG! Some over-ambitious Linux weenie wrote a lousy script! Do away with all DMCA takedowns and all copyright!
(Tried to get in at 7:16 Pacific; somewhat improved since...)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
I thought filing a false DMCA notice was actually a crime (perjury). Is that true? The article doesn't seem to mention it.
Well... the actual language says that the "on penalty of perjury language" really only applies to whether or not the person sending the notice represents the copyright holder. Some have argued it can be read to apply to the entire message, but it's not entirely clear if that is truly the case.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: OMG! Some over-ambitious Linux weenie wrote a lousy script! Do away with all DMCA takedowns and all copyright!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: This isn't false, though! It's for apparently genuine content on (currently) non-existent URLs.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
* This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
---
OMG! Some over-ambitious Linux weenie wrote a lousy script! Do away with all DMCA takedowns and all copyright!
Every day, Hackscribus, the Roman god of re-writers, sends just enough of the special trivialum that Techdirt feeds on through the Cloaca Internetum.
(Tried to get in at 7:16 Pacific; somewhat improved since...)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: OMG! Some over-ambitious Linux weenie wrote a lousy script! Do away with all DMCA takedowns and all copyright!
What's this new "scooter" bit, um, skateboard? Has the tone of "Dark Helmet, but least he's not calling persons an "ignorant motherfucker" as here:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110621/16071614792/misconceptions-free-abound-why-do-brains- stop-zero.shtml#c1869
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: OMG! Some over-ambitious Linux weenie wrote a lousy script! Do away with all DMCA takedowns and all copyright!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Naughty particle physics
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: * This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: * This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Naughty particle physics
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Exactly, the company they hired for the job was pretending that they had expertise in identifying infringing content. It's what happens when you go for lowest bidder.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: * This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
That sounds an awful lot like every other blog on the internet. Just because you disagree with the majority on any given site doesn't give you the right to disparage it on that site with impunity. But go ahead and whine about not being heard in a sea of dissenting voices. It's your time to waste.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: * This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
https://xkcd.com/1357/
[ link to this | view in thread ]
"stilled" is.. past tense of steal?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
A fee for submitting incorrect links & a waiver of liability of recipients who get 1000 shit links & demand payment before they will bother processing any more from them.
Mistakes will happen, and a $20 fee is a small price to pay... unless you are carpet bombing in the stupidest way possible... then stupid should hurt.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
It all makes sense now when you see the patterns
Unfortunately the New York Supreme Court wasn't able to keep several graduates at Rochester from performing an Alzheimer's study on the people at chaturbate so they forgot to stop the release of this effort which is why we have so many false DMCA hits to deal with today.
.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re:
Doesn't matter if it is if courts refuse to enforce it.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Naughty particle physics
That reminds me of this gag scene from the Dilbert animated series (might be considered NSFW?)
He was talking about his soap.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Oh most people around here seem to understand that the perjury clause is very limited, that's the problem.
With it only applying to a very minor section(and never enforced even then), the law has effectively no penalty clause in it for abuse such that people can use and abuse the law to their black heart's content and not receive so much as a slap on the wrist for doing so.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Naughty particle physics
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: * This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: OMG! Some over-ambitious Linux weenie wrote a lousy script! Do away with all DMCA takedowns and all copyright!
So, then, you agree with what most of us have been saying for years, that the DMCA is an insufficient tool to deal with copyright infringment? That automated takedowns are a terrible thing because they can be performed en masse with no repercussions, despite the very real danger of damage to innocent 3rd parties? That a process needs to be put into place to protect both parties while ensuring that some random person can't cause havoc by carpet bombing the internet with requests?
Ah, no, you're still willing to try and attack this site even on issues you would find you actually agree with them on. Never mind, we return you to your daily childish rant in progress...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: This isn't false, though! It's for apparently genuine content on (currently) non-existent URLs.
"This isn't false, though!"
It is false. They are claiming copyright infringement on URLs where the content in question does not appear. Well, apart from the ones on their own site where it's actually meant to appear.
"It's for apparently genuine content on (currently) non-existent URLs."
No, the URLs exist. They just don't have the content the notices claim is present. The content hosted on those links is also genuine, and nothing to do with Chaturbate.
You still need to read and understand the article before trying to get creative with subject lines.
[ link to this | view in thread ]