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Copyright Holders Have to 'Resend' Millions of Pirate Bay Takedown Notices:
After several weeks of absence, The Pirate Bay became accessible again through its main .org domain last weekend.
At first sight the site looked more or less the same but there are some significant changes, both under the hood and in appearance.
Many users immediately noticed that the site doesn't work well with several ad blockers. Whether this is a bug or a feature is the question, but it was both frustrating and annoying for some.
[...] With the new Pirate Bay design also comes a new URL structure. Instead of the old torrent pages that were accessible through thepiratebay.org/torrent/12345, the format has now changed to thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=12345.
Other URLs, including categories, the top lists, and user pages, all updated as well. To give another example, the 100 most-active torrents on the site can now be accessed from thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=top100:all, instead of the old thepiratebay.org/top/all.
For users, this isn't a problem. All old links simply redirect to new ones. However, for copyright holders, it's an outright disaster as it means that they will have to resend all their takedown notices.
[...] Looking at Google's transparency report we see that copyright holders have asked the search engine to remove more than five million URLs. Pretty much all of these notices have been rendered useless.
For example, this 2012 takedown notice from Paramount Pictures removed the link to The Pirate Bay's top 100 video torrents. However, after the update, the same page reappeared under a new URL. Another consideration is that Google is just one search engine, so the same applies to other search engines too.
Previously:
(2020-04-11) Pirate Bay No Longer Uses Cloudflare, Visitors Sent to 'Black Hole'
(2020-04-09) Anti-Piracy Copyright Lawyer Decides to Abuse Trademarks to Shut Down Pirates
(2020-04-07) Movie Company Boss Urges U.S. Senators to Make "Streaming Piracy" a Felony
(2020-03-26) Supreme Court Rules States are Not Liable for Copyright Violations
(2020-03-23) The Invisible Man, Emma, and The Hunt Hit Pirate Sites after Rushed Video on Demand Releases
(Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Monday April 20 2020, @04:20PM (1 child)
Yup, it makes copyright enforcement more expensive. For the claimants and for the site operators.
The cheapest thing for Pirate Bay to do is blindly accept all DMCA requests, but change the URL pattern regularly. No cost to handle responses, no long term impact.
It's not cheap for claimants, though. It doesn't need to be physical mail for it to be costly to monitor a site the size of TPB, to manage relationships with all the search providers, to maintain a database of infringing URLs and proof of their infringement.
Neither is it cheap for the search providers, having to manage the requests without impacting their own service. Google can't just blindly accept all DMCA requests, because that would make it too easy for rogue organizations (including hackers) to disrupt their service. They have to have some ongoing review.
All the while, TPB is accumulating a firehose of DMCA requests, some of which will inevitably be invalid. At some point in the future, some intrepid users may write an algorithm to find provably false requests, allowing TPB to dispute them and create even more headaches for claimants. Hell, if I didn't have so much else to do, I might do it myself. Poking that bear sounds fun.
Always remember: bored hackers may have no organization, but they will always have more raw resources than the powers that be.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday April 20 2020, @06:38PM
That is an interesting idea, perhaps add a bit or so to the id number for the link that just increases on a set basis as in once a week or so it just counts up invalidating all the links and requests without for that matter changing much of the function of the site. That could be fun.