Company That Issued Bogus Takedown Says It Was All A Mistake, Apologizes

from the could-do-better dept

So, yesterday, as you may have heard, we wrote about how a totally bogus DMCA takedown notice, coming from an "anti-piracy" firm called Armovore, deleted a key Techdirt blog post about SOPA/PIPA from Google's search results. That post apparently got some attention within Google, who kicked off an expedited review and reinstated our site and a few others. Soon after that, we got a couple emails from folks at Armovore, and they also posted some comments to the site, in which they apologized, and said that it was an "early" version of the technology. To their credit, they "accept full responsibility for the mistake" and insist that while that takedown was an automated keyword-based effort, they now only do manual takedowns. They even apologized that multiple people reached out to apologize.

Of course, the apology still involved a few statements that suggested they were upset we even wrote the story, saying it was too "one-sided." The first email from the company also suggested that we shouldn't be annoyed any more since the story was added back to Google (ignoring that it wasn't for a month). They also say they haven't made any money ("aside from a single donation") and the founder said via email: "I don't feel comfortable charging anyone for an unfinished product." That's interesting, because apparently while he doesn't feel comfortable charging, he didn't seem to have much of a problem issuing a whole bunch of bogus takedowns with it, apparently without manual review, despite signing a letter that promises, under penalty of perjury, that the takedowns are accurate.

All that said, everyone makes mistakes, and even though this one was pretty egregious and involved our own content on a key post being taken out of Google for over a month, we'll accept their apology and move on. I think it would be smart and reasonable for whoever is behind Armovore to make a public donation to Public Citizen and EFF, but that's up to them to decide.

I'll also note that our situation was obviously nowhere near as bad as the various domains that have been incorrectly seized and shut down by ICE with no due process, at the request of the RIAA and the MPAA... and those sites have yet to receive any apology. And, in some cases, the sites are still being held by the government, despite a requirement that the government either give the domains back or file for forfeiture (it's done neither). Those sites deserve an apology from the RIAA, the MPAA, ICE and the DOJ and haven't received any.

Finally, what this incident really shows is just how incredibly easy it is to suppress speech under today's copyright laws. Just the fact that an automated system was able to do this should be ringing alarm bells from here to DC and back about some pretty serious problems with today's DMCA takedown process that is a shoot first, ask questions later kind of operation (as we've now seen first hand). Not only should this be a clear warning that we should not be expanding such powers via something like SOPA or PIPA, where the penalties are much, much greater, but that we should revisit the whole idea of a system that allows content to be taken completely offline prior to any chance for those falsely accused to respond. We shouldn't be expanding copyright law, we should be rolling it back to prevent abuses like this, even if they are "mistakes." A system that allows mistakes like this is a broken system.

Filed Under: apologies, censorship, copyright, dmca, sopa, takedown
Companies: armovore, google, techdirt

Key Techdirt SOPA/PIPA Post Censored By Bogus DMCA Takedown Notice

from the dmca-abuse dept

We've talked a lot about how copyright law and the DMCA can be abused to take down legitimate, non-infringing content, interfering with one's free speech rights. And we're always brushed off by copyright maximalists, who insist that any complaints about taking down legitimate speech are overblown.

So isn't it interesting that we've just discovered that our own key anti-SOPA blog post and discussion... have been blocked thanks to a bogus DMCA takedown?

Last November, in the heat of the SOPA fight, I wrote a blog post, where I tried to pull together a bunch of the different reasons why SOPA and PIPA were really bad ideas. It was a very popular post for us, and I heard directly from many people that it was quite helpful in getting them to understand the real problems of these two bills.

Well, as I just discovered, that post cannot be found directly via Google any more.

I actually discovered this entirely by accident. I was looking for a totally different old Techdirt post, and was scrolling through Google results, when I saw a note at the bottom of the Google page saying that results had been removed due to a DMCA takedown: You see that warning every so often, and I have to admit that I came really close to just ignoring it. But then I remembered that the search I was doing was using the site:techdirt.com parameter, so any such notice must mean that a Techdirt page had been blocked by a DMCA takedown. That seemed surprising. So I clicked through and found this DMCA takedown notice -- and there at entry 253 is the URL for our post. The takedown comes from a company named Armovore, who apparently is one of those "anti-piracy" firms that sends DMCA notices out on behalf of others. In this case, it sent out the DMCA notice on behalf of Paper Street Cash -- which is a porn company I've never heard of prior to this. They're claiming that the takedown is about content from a site called TeamSkeet.

If you're scratching your head, you're not the only one. There's clearly nothing infringing in our post. I just wasted too much time going through all 300+ comments on that post and I don't see anything that includes any porn or even links to any porn as far as I can tell. Instead, it seems that Armovore and Paper Street Cash sent a clearly bogus DMCA takedown notice, which served the purpose of censoring our key blog post in the SOPA fight. And they did it on January 20th... the day that SOPA was officially shelved.

There are some other oddities in that list as well, including TorrentFreak's article about how ICE took down 84,000 websites illegally by seizing the mooo.com domain and saying that all 84,000 of those sites were involved in child porn.

In other words, two separate articles that have been key to the discussion concerning abuses of copyright law... both taken out of Google's index due to a bogus DMCA takedown. Hmm....

While many of the other links do appear to go to sites that may offer up infringing content, just looking at the URLs alone make you wonder what most of them have to do with Paper Street Cash or TeamSkeet. Some of the links talk about top Christian albums. One is to some Dave Matthews songs. Another is to Wiz Khalifa music. There's another one that appears to be a link to downloads of the TV show Prison Break. Obviously those things may be infringing, but the notice itself only talks about TeamSkeet, and if Armovore doesn't represent those other artists, it may have broken the law in pretending to.

Then there's a really bizarre one. Entry 533 on the list is... TeamSkeet's own website. I don't know how much Armovore charges Paper Street Cash, but they deserve a refund.

Most importantly, though, our page clearly is not infringing. This is a 100% bogus DMCA takedown -- something we only discovered by complete accident over a month later -- hiding one of our key articles in an important fight about abusing copyright law to take down free speech. Seems like a perfect example of how copyright can be -- and is -- abused to suppress free speech.

In the meantime, we'll be exploring our options for responding to this obviously bogus takedown from both Armovore and Paper Street Cash.

Update: After "further review," Google has reinstated our story to its index....

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, dmca, pipa, search results, sopa, takedowns
Companies: armovore, paper street cash, techdirt