Anatomy Of A Bogus DMCA Scam Run By A Plagiarizing Website

from the back-to-the-future dept

We have been banging the drum for some time now that the way the DMCA has been setup and is put in practice is wide, wide open for fraud and abuse. A huge part of the problem is how content owners police the internet in general, with the overwhelming majority of DMCA notices coming from bots and automated systems. Because of the imperfections of this technology, and our allowance of its use, the end result is that copyright policing on the internet is done with a shotgun rather than a scalpel, leading to all manner of mistakes and collateral damage. But even setting those instances aside, the fact is that DMCAing content on the internet requires so little in the way of verification that there is any true ownership of the content rights in question that bogus DMCA takedowns are the norm, not the exception. And, given how little consequence comes along with issuing a bogus DMCA notice, bad actors are practically encouraged to perform this sort of chicanery.

This leads to all sorts of subterfuge from bad actors looking to fool the people or, more likely, the automated systems policing any of this. One story from Plagiarism Today serves as a nice primer on just how intricate and annoying these nefarious actors behave. Writer Victoria Strauss tells the story of having one of her online articles removed over a DMCA claim. Strauss was understandably confused, as she was absolutely the original writer of the piece, and so she went digging into the details.

The original post, which was published on September 28, 2018, detailed the implosion of Fiery Seas Publishing. She had written the article herself and couldn’t figure out what was infringing about it. However, when she checked out the “Original URL”, it took her to a post on a blog named Comusa and operated by a person known as Bella Andreas. However, the post was dated to September 3, 2018, 25 days before the real original post went live.

Strauss then realized that the plagiarist clearly backdated the post and then filed a DMCA notice to make it look as if she was the infringer. She then went through other posts on the blog (which has been inactive for nearly a year now) and found that every post on the site followed that pattern, copied wholesale from another site and backdated. Strauss further noticed that many of the post dates on her site actually predate the registration of her domain, with some going as far back as 2014 and the domain being registered in 2016.

Worth noting is that "Bella Andreas" has issued at least 10 of these DMCA notices on other publications as well. All appear to have copied the content of others and then backdated the dates of the posts to facilitate the ability to send a DMCA notice.

But... why? Well, this looks to be a slightly new take and method for setting up a "spam site" where there is copied content from other publications. The speculation is that the spammer, whatever their actual name is, is trying to generate some traffic to the site through these spam posts so that it can setup more lucrative online advertising programs on the site at a later date.

All in all, it’s a standard spam blog, complete with misspellings in the tag line and name. It doesn’t have ads or outbound links, but if the site was only launched in December 2020. The operator is likely waiting until it is performing better to add them.

What makes this case unique is the DMCA notices. Why would a spammer want to send DMCA notices against the original authors and draw more attention to themselves? Though it’s impossible to know for certain, there are a few reasons one might.

Those reasons are basically what you'd expect: attempts to get plagiarized posts considered the "original" by search engines like Google so as to drive up traffic and engagement. The bottom line, however, is that this is a systemized approach for abusing the DMCA process to benefit from the work of others. And it's also wildly clear that the current DMCA process and legislation is toothless for dealing with this sort of fraud and abuse.

The DMCA is in desperate need of reform and one of the things that is needed is an effective system to target those that maliciously abuse it. The upcoming Copyright Small Claims Court may provide some help with that, but it remains to be seen how useful and practical it will be in these cases.

It likely won't be useful at all. That Small Claims Court is both a complete mess of its own and will almost certainly open up yet another front for fraudsters to battle on.

The actual fix for this is far simpler. Build some real teeth and consequences into the DMCA process to enforce punishment on those who engage in fraud and abuse. It really should be that simple.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca takedowns, post-dating, takedowns

Khloe Kardashian Streisands A Photo She Wanted Taken Down By Issuing Takedowns

from the far-and-wide dept

The Kardashians are no strangers to Techdirt's pages. Being comprised of family members who are by and large famous for being famous, the Kardashians have been notorious for a heavy-handed approach to policing their own images, often times through spurious claims on intellectual property or publicity rights. So, heading into this story, it should be noted that the default posture of this particular family tends to be the use of IP claims to police anything to do with the family's image on the internet.

But, as readers of this site will recognize, often times these policing attempts have the opposite of the intended effect. This certainly seems to be the case with Khloe Kardashian's recent attempts to rid the internet world of a un-touched photo of her poolside.

The alleged leaked photo pictured Kardashian smiling in a swimsuit. Many previously criticized Kardashian on social media for her attempts to remove it online after it was leaked, suggesting she was contributing to body image issues by hiding the unfiltered photo. In her post, Kardashian said she thought the leaked photo of herself was "beautiful" but she is entitled to want it removed.

"When someone takes a photo of you that isn’t flattering in bad lighting or doesn’t capture your body the way it is after working so hard to get it to this point, you should have every right to ask for it to not be shared - regardless of who you are," she wrote.

That... isn't how copyright law actually works, though. And it was copyright Khloe's team used to issue takedown requests to all kinds of sites, including Reddit and Twitter. According to her team, the photo was shot at a Kardashian residence and was "accidentally uploaded" to the internet by "an assistant." Left unsaid are some important details when it comes to the copyright question. Some reports indicate that the takedown notices were issued by Khloe's grandmother, who reportedly took the photo. When the family assistant uploaded it on accident, it was done so without authorization. A mistake. But once that was done, it's unclear how sharing the post via retweets and social media somehow is a copyright violation subject to a DMCA notice.

But that isn't really the point of this post. Instead, this is a story of a classic Streisand Effect in action. Due in large part to the efforts to disappear the photo, it's now in much wider circulation on the internet, including in posts from news organizations where any takedown request made by the Kardashians would run straight into the First Amendment. And so now the photo Khloe wanted disappeared is all over the place.

After circulating for about two days, the image is likely experiencing the Streisand Effect, where the effort to suppress information — a story, a video or a picture — only amplifies it further.

Now, I am not including the photo in question here for multiple reasons. First, I don't need it to get the point of the post across. Second, in recent comments, Khloe has indicated that part of the reason for her wanting the photo gone is that she has struggled with body image issues in her life and I have enough respect for that to not want to add to it.

But that's kind of the point, right? Other media sources are showing the photo as part of the news coverage of all of this, which is the exact opposite reality that Khloe was attempting to achieve with the aggressive takedowns of the photo elsewhere. Sometimes, it seems, it's a better strategy to simply let a story die rather than amplify it by trying to kill it.

Filed Under: dmca, khloe kardashian, streisand effect, takedowns

TorrentFreak Continues To Get DMCA Takedown Notices Despite Not Hosting Infringing Material

from the this-is-not-the-way dept

It's no secret that TorrentFreak, a mainstay news site covering copyright and filesharing issues, gets more than its fair share of errant DMCA takedowns and other wayward scrutiny. This is almost certainly a function of the site's chosen name, though the sheer volume of mistaken targeting of the site also serves as a useful beacon for just how bad policing copyright has become. If you can't get past a news site having the word "torrent" in its name, then we should probably all admit we're operating at a very silly level of IP enforcement.

And yet it keeps happening. Most recently, TorrentFreak reported on a request made to Google to delist a post the site did on how popular The Mandalorian was with pirates.

Every week we see obvious errors, where sites such as IMDb, Wikipedia, Justice.gov, and NASA are targeted. By now we ignore most of these mistakes but in some instances, we take them personally. That’s also the case for a DMCA takedown request Google received a few days ago. This notice claims to identify several problematic URLs that allegedly infringe the copyrights of Disney’s hit series The Mandalorian.

This is not unexpected, as The Mandalorian was the most pirated TV show of last year, as we reported in late December. However, we didn’t expect to see our article as one of the targeted links in the notice. Apparently, the news that The Mandalorian is widely pirated – which was repeated by dozens of other publications – is seen as copyright infringement? Needless to say, we wholeheartedly disagree. This is not the way.

A couple of things we should absolutely point out. First, at the time of this post being written, Google has not delisted the post from search results. Also, and this genuinely surprised me, Disney was not the the party requesting the post be delisted, despite the show being a flagship on Disney+. Instead, the requesting entity is something called GFM Film. TorrentFreak was unable to pin down precisely who that company is or where it's from, as there looks to be several potential candidates found via web search.

All of which is only really interesting in terms of finding out who is responsible for this screw up. Because, again, TorrentFreak is a news site that does not host a single bit of infringing digital material. The policing of copyright is full of this sort of collateral damage and that doesn't seem to be a problem anyone seriously wants to tackle.

Filed Under: articles, dmca, speech, takedowns, the mandalorian
Companies: torrentfreak

Activision Once Again Abuses DMCA To Try To Bury Leak Of New 'CoD' Content

from the this-again? dept

Back in February of 2020, we wrote about several odd attempts by Activision to use the DMCA takedown process to try to bury leaks of content in its Call of Duty game franchise. It all started with the company attempting to first take down Reddit posts that showed leaked cover art for Call of Duty: Warzone, before Activision then attempted to have Reddit unmask the poster of the image in an attempt to track down where the leak came from. While Activision certainly isn't the first company that has attempted to bury leaks using DMCA notices, it was a fairly high profile attempt, which, of course, just meant that the Streisand Effect took over and suddenly tons of people were seeing the image in media outlets reporting on the matter, such as at Techdirt.

One would think the lesson learned from that episode would be that trying to unboil an egg like this through the DMCA process was futile. Instead, it seems that Activision thought the lesson was that it should go after media outlets. Recently, content for an upcoming map addition to Warzone leaked and VideoGamesChronicle (VGC) reported on it.

VGC can confirm that the work-in-progress live-action spot, which was first shared by Twitter account On Thin Ice, is authentic and shows snippets of the new 1980s Warzone map which we understand will replace the current Verdansk at the end of the season, with an in-game event marking the transition on April 22.

It appears that the new map will be an evolution of Verdansk, rather than an entirely new design. The leaked footage shows Cold War-era landmarks replacing Verdansk’s own points of interest, including an in-construction Stadium and an aqueduct replacing the Dam. Airport, TV Station and Downtown can also be spotted with a 1980s makeover.

So, content leaks, VGC reports on it. That's about as straight a journalistic enterprise as there can be. And, yet, Activision went into its DMCA takedown mode, targeting not only the original leaked footage of the new map, but also the sites and social media accounts for outlets reporting on it.

While there's been no official confirmation from Activision, the publisher has been cracking down on the leak: at least one video has been taken down from YouTube, and news site Charlie Intel says it has received a DMCA notice from Activision.

And the Twitter account for VGC itself was targeted and locked due to Activision's actions.

It is one thing to target leaked footage itself. It's entirely another to get hosts and platforms to take down journalistic content over that same leak. Once the genie is out of the bottle, to compound metaphors, it is flatly an abuse of the DMCA to target speech protected by the First Amendment over it.

And beyond that admittedly major component... what precisely is the point of all this? Once again we have a situation where Activision is supercharging the public's knowledge of a leak it supposedly wants to suppress with actions that, at best, aren't proper and at worst make it look like a massive corporate bully. Perhaps some will believe that this is some sort of marketing ploy and that Activision's real goal with all of this is to get posts like this written.

But between Activision's past behavior and Occam's Razor... I think not.

Filed Under: call of duty, censorship, copyright, dmca, reviews, takedowns, warzone
Companies: activision

DMCA Complaint Claims Copyright On The Word 'Outstanding', Wants Entries From Top Dictionaries De-Listed From Google

from the just-wait-for-upload-filters dept

Techdirt readers are by now all too familiar with how broken the DMCA takedown system is. But a recent post on TorrentFreak introduces us to some interesting new examples. It concerns the software review site ThinkMobiles. Apparently, it's a company registered in Ukraine, and many of its authors seem to come from the region -- and nothing wrong with that. As TorrentFreak notes, ThinkMobiles is very protective of its articles. The Lumen database, which collects and analyzes requests to remove material from the Web, has 376 results for the company, representing many hundreds of potential takedowns. But TorrentFreak spotted that some of the most recent ones are particularly unusual:

ThinkMobiles doesn't restrict its searches to long phrases. It also identifies shorter combinations of words, including "Verdict: we highly recommend it" and "and click export." Needless to say, this is causing issues.

The "and click export" takedown notice, for example, lists URLs from Adobe.com, Google.com, and Microsoft.com, that have absolutely nothing to do with the software review site.

These are common phrases used by just about every review site out there; no originality of expression is involved. It gets worse:

One notice even claims 'copyright' on the word "outstanding," asking Google to remove the URLs of sites operating popular dictionaries including Cambridge and Merriam Webster.

It's hard to know how a takedown was issued for a single word. Even if your mother tongue is Ukrainian, there's surely no way you could believe the word "outstanding" was a unique creation worthy of copyright protection. Perhaps there is some automated system involved, but even so, it's difficult to see why a single word would be chosen in this way. The details of why this happened don't really matter. The larger point is that these ridiculous takedown requests were made. Fortunately, Google rejected them. But as the TorrentFreak post points out, it might have missed them. In addition, sites that just implement takedown notices automatically would have blocked links unjustifiably.

Given the way the EU's upload filters are shaping up, that's likely to be the case there too. Since even small sites will be obliged to filter material, there's no way they can check things as meticulously as Google or other well-funded companies. As a result, once the EU upload filters are mandatory we can expect to see all kinds of abusive requests to block material being complied with, perhaps even for single words.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, dictionaries, dmca, filters, outstanding, takedowns, upload filters
Companies: thinkmobiles

Nintendo Hates You: Gaming Giant Lobs A DMCA Nuke At Hundreds Of Fan Games

from the nintendon't dept

Nintendo has built quite a reputation for itself as an intellectual property protectionist, going much further than most other game publishers to exert strict control over all of its IP. While this control is deployed in a wide-ranging manner, one of the most visible, common, and consequential avenues for this protectionism comes in the form of Nintendo getting all manner of fan-made creations taken down. These games, almost universally created by huge Nintendo fans as labors of love, are nearly always the subject of DMCA takedowns. Think for just a moment what that means: Nintendo is disallowing, on the regular, the expression of fandom by its own customers.

Every time I have written a post about some individual game being erased in this manner, rather than Nintendo exploring how to officially endorse these fan-made creations so as to protect its IP while still promoting its own fans, it's left me scratching my head. But now that Nintendo has managed to get hundreds of fan-games taken down in one fell swoop, well, it seems the company has decided to take this war on its own fans to another level.

Hundreds of non-commercial Nintendo fangames have been removed from the popular game publishing community Game Jolt after the platform complied with several DMCA takedown requests. Many of the affected games have dedicated fanbases including many die-hard Nintendo fans, some of whom now seem eager to revolt.

A few days ago, Nintendo’s legal department sent DMCA notices to the game publishing community Game Jolt. The site, where hobbyists and indie developers share their creations for free, was notified that hundreds of fangames infringed Nintendo’s trademarks.

Now, GameJolt does advertise on its site, leading Nintendo's DMCA notice to warn that the site was profiting from this infringement. As a result, the site took 379 games down. But it's worth noting both that uploaders appear to have an option to turn off ads on their games' pages and that the developers and fans for these games are absolutely livid about Nintendo's actions. One developer summed it up nicely and then went on to point out why this attempt at enforcement by Nintendo probably won't even work.

“They’ll get no sympathy from me, this isn’t the first time they’ve pulled a stunt like this. They’ve made it clear they hate their fans and repeat it time and time again never learning from it.”

The developer will continue to work on his “Five Nights At Team HQ series” but fears that it will be targeted eventually. That doesn’t stop the developer though, and he encourages others to simply flood the Internet with copies.

“Nintendo if you think taking down everyone’s games will help your image and get people to buy more of your games then you’re sorely mistaken! I’ll keep making and reuploading fan games even if you try to take them down, so DEAL WITH IT! All people who have copies of the fangames that were taken down take them and reupload them all over the internet so they stay up no matter what!”

And that already appears to be happening. Some developers are taking their fan games to other platforms and reuploading them there. Other developers are actually reuploading their games back to GameJolt, but without advertising on them, in the hopes that banner ads were somehow the lynchpin that caused Nintendo to target their particular games.

Nintendo has remained silent on the matter as of the time of this writing, but readers here will know its reputation well enough to know that removing advertisements won't stop the takedowns. Nintendo hates fan-made creations, see, and has taken down plenty of games that were completely devoid of any commercial aspects.

The only thing that will stop the company from treating its biggest fans so poorly, it seems, is if those fans suddenly begin disappearing like the games they created.

Filed Under: dmca, fangames, fans, takedowns
Companies: nintendo

Nintendo Hates You: DMCA Takedowns Of Game Music Continue While Nintendo Offers No Legit Way To Listen

from the mine-mine-mine dept

Well, it's been a measurable amount of time, so we have yet another example of Nintendo doing the Nintendo, which is best described as depriving its fans of ways to celebrate their fandom via intellectual property enforcement while also offering no alternative route for said fans. Whether it's stripping some of the creative fun out of its Animal Kingdom game, nuking fan-made games of Nintendo properties like some kind of IP-version of Missile Command, or just generally being as IP protectionist as possible, it seems that Nintendo chooses restrictive enforcement over creative methods for granting fans permission to be fans at every turn.

You will recall that Nintendo is currently embroiled in a controversy, having first disallowed a Smash Bros. tournament that had to go remote over the use of a mod that made remote tournaments possible with the game, followed by rescinding the broadcast ability of a Splatoon 2 tournament almost certainly just because several teams chose team-names that were protests of its Smash tournament actions. The backlash over those actions have been fairly universal, which may explain why Nintendo is now retreating to older, more familiar methods for pissing people off: DMCAing music from its beloved games.

Now, they’ve come under fire yet again for taking down YouTube videos with music from Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Mario Kart Wii. It’s nothing new. Nintendo has been doing it for years, and they’re well within their rights to.  

GilvaSunner is a YouTuber known for uploading soundtracks from video games, mostly Nintendo. Understandably, he’s had many videos taken down over the years due to copyright claims. In 2019, he posted a tweet that said, “Game over.” It includes a screenshot with emails from YouTube telling him that some videos had been blocked due to copyright claims. However, he didn’t specifically mention it was Nintendo.

Now, more than a year later, he followed up on his initial tweet with an update. More videos have been taken down over copyright claims. He specifically mentioned it was Nintendo JP, although it cannot be seen in the screenshots.

He's not the only one, of course. Again, I will point out that Nintendo absolutely can do this. It's within their rights. But they don't have to. There are plenty of methods by which it could offer an inexpensive license for people to portray its game music if it wanted to. Or, given that this is copyright and not trademark law we're talking about, Nintendo could simply ignore all of this, as they selectively have throughout the years. The post goes on to note that reactions to these takedowns among Nintendo fans are mixed, which is understandable.

But it seems like fans are also finally beginning to ask the right questions.

Either way, the consensus is that this whole predicament has a simple solution. Nintendo needs to make the music from their game soundtracks more readily available and in a legal way.

“Please put your soundtracks on Spotify and/or other music streaming services,” said GilvaSunner. “Others have already seen the light, when will you?” It’s a sentiment that others share.

And thus we have the crux of how Nintendo does the Nintendo. The company patrols and controls its intellectual property with a fervor normally reserved for cult followers, but refuses to offer the legitimate -- and lucrative! -- methods for fans to enjoy that intellectual property.

Nintendo, whatever else I might want to say about the company, makes great products. And great art! Being restrictive on the IP side while also being restrictive over where that art is enjoyed is immensely frustrating, both to me and the real, true fans of the company's work.

Filed Under: dmca, fan made games, mario kart wii, ocarina of time, streaming, super mario 64, takedowns, youtubers
Companies: nintendo, youtube