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Copyright corruption

A week or so ago I read a rather funny story on the news wires.

Apparently, Warner Brothers had issued complaint to Google about a site that contained its intellectual property. In most cases when this happens, Google is quick to pull the offending site from its index. In this case however, they refused to comply.

Why?

Because the site WB was complaining about was its own site!

Yes, many copyright owners have outsourced the infringement-detection, complaint and prosecution roles and those companies undertaking such activities on behalf of the owner quite often simply rely on crappy programs running dodgy algorithms.

In the case in question, the software obviously didn't have a "whitelist" of sites that were authorised to carry the "offending" content.

Perhaps Google has its own whitelist which meant that WB didn't end up being highly embarrassed by the snafu but that whitelist will only be very small so it's not surprising that we have another story of a ludicrously false copyright strike hitting the news this morning.

Now I'm sure that everyone reading this column knows what Ubuntu Linux is.

You probably also know what an ISO file represents.

With that in mind, you'll probably be as gobsmacked as me to learn that the bounty-hunters working for Paramount Studios issued a takedown notice for a torrent link that contained an Ubuntu ISO file and which, under no stretch of the imagination, could be mistaken for the "Transformers" movie they allege it was.

Take a read of this report and review the evidence for your self.

Google however, simply went ahead and acted on the DMCA takedown request without checking to see if it was valid.

Is that fair?

Of course not.

Then again, as we know from bitter experience, Google's YouTube service regularly files its own false copyright strikes by way of the "Content ID" system used to check each and every upload for copyright infringements. This techdirt story is a perfect example of that.

So Google goes out of their way to protect the nice people at WB from getting egg on their face but, at least on the face of it, don't give a shirt about an Ubuntu ISO being falsely submitted.

Or is this whole story a bit of a beat-up?

I haven't seen anywhere that someone has actually checked to see whether the allegedly innocent link actually is what it claims to be. After all, what better way to "hide" a pirated movie than to give it a bogus, innocent name so that (hopefully) the copyright bounty-hunters won't spot it?

I also notice that the takedown notice calls this an "allegedly infringing URL" -- which indicates to me that they are placing the burden of verification on Google. If it's okay to "allege" that a URL is infringing and if there's no penalty for doing so, I would suggest that the DMCA system is so fatally flawed as to be useless.

Any individual or company with a gripe against another could simply (and repeatedly) file DMCA takedown notices against their website and, since Google seems not to check and appears happy to act on mere "allegations", the results would be disastrous.

However, I guess this is what happens when the very raison d'etre for copyright is abused and corrupted by the profit motive of large corporations.

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