Revealed: How To Get The IFPI To Issue Bogus DMCA Takedowns On Just About Anything, With No Questions Asked And No Review

from the incredible dept

A few weeks ago, we wrote about how the IFPI (sort of the international RIAA) had bizarrely issued a DMCA takedown on Kim Dotcom's own album off of his own website, Mega. Obviously, the IFPI holds no copyright on Dotcom's album, and the takedown was obviously false. We noted that, while some might believe that this was a deliberate move by the IFPI in its anti-Kim Dotcom crusade, that seemed unlikely. It seemed like pure sloppiness. However, a recent post at TorrentFreak reveals more details about why and how the IFPI sent such a takedown -- and why it happened again just weeks later.

The simple explanation? The IFPI is not even remotely careful in how it builds its list for takedowns. It's scraping links from Pastebin and assuming they're what people say they are, even if they're totally unrelated. Yes, some pranksters have basically been posting links to Dotcom's music on Pastebin, pretending that they're some other songs, and the IFPI is sending takedowns based on that alone.

Eventually we stumbled upon a series of Pastebin pages where the URL of Dotcom’s album is linked to titles of other artists. Several of the artists mentioned in the pastes are the same as the one’s IFPI listed in their DMCA notices, so this would explain the mistakes.

Good investigative work by TorrentFreak. Horrible investigative work by the IFPI. Especially given the seriousness of demanding content be taken offline entirely based on bogus copyright claims.

But this is even more troubling in that it basically means any prankster can probably get the IFPI to start removing... just about anything. If there were real punishments for sending bogus DMCA takedowns, this sort of practice would stop, but since there isn't, the IFPI can just keep doing this, and pranksters can "guide" the IFPI into taking down plenty of legitimate content. It's yet another example of copyright as censorship, rather than having anything to do with legitimate copyright purposes.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, dmca, pastebin, takedowns
Companies: ifpi, mega