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: There are oh so many things wrong with this -- many of which you'd think a "legal affairs" VP at a giant entertainment company would know about before sending it. But, to be fair, Yankelevits appears to be more of a contracts / "dealmaker" legal exec, rather than an intellectual property expert. But, still...

Yankelevits gets almost everything wrong with this bogus takedown. Let's count the ways:

1. This is not a legitimate DMCA notice by any means. He does not specify what copyright is being infringed (because none is).
2. "It's not right" is not a claim of infringement.
3. His salary info ($320,000 possibly rising to $330,000, by the way) is not copyright covered material.
4. 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).
5. Clearly, Yankelevits does not hold the copyright on the email in question, which was not written by him.
6. 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.
7. 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.

So, here we have a Sony Pictures legal exec filing a DMCA notice so stupid that it fails to make a copyright claim, fails to list the infringing work, and instead points to the email he really wants taken down as the "original" work, and demands a different URL (which doesn't have the info he's trying to hide) get taken down -- and it's all because he doesn't want his salary posted, because "it's not right" which is, you know, not how copyright law works, at all.

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.

Filed Under: censorship, copyfraud, copyright, daniel yankelevits, dmca, salary info, sony hack, takedown
Companies: google, sony pictures, wikileaks