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This week WordPress released the latest edition of its recurring transparency report, revealing 43 percent of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down requests it received have been rejected in the first six months of 2015. It's the lowest six-month period shown in the report, though it only dates back to 2014. However, WordPress said this headline figure would be even higher if it "counted suspended sites as rejected notices." That change in calculation would bump the WordPress DMCA denial rate to 67 percent between January 1 and June 30, 2015.
In total, the publishing platform received 4,679 DMCA takedown requests as of June 30, identifying 12 percent of those as "abusive." The top three organizations submitting these requests were Web Sheriff, Audiolock, and InternetSecurities. "Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by third party take down services, many of whom use automated bots to identify copyrighted content and generate take-down notices," WordPress noted. The company wrote at length about this practice in April, both explaining and condemning the general procedure.
"These kind of automated systems scour the Web, firing off take-down notifications where unauthorized uses of material are found—so humans don't have to," WordPress wrote. "Sounds great in theory, but it doesn't always work out as smoothly in practice. Much akin to some nightmare scenario from the Terminator, sometimes the bots turn on their creators."
Computers fighting computers, with only human casualties. Sounds like a jurisprudential version of this.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:58AM
These 3rd party automated services appear to work on the principle of swarming so many takedown notices that humans can't process them all so you must simply automate and as a practical matter allow their bot to directly remove content from your site.
The only answer is to reject the premise. Ban automated submission, put a strong captcha in place, randomize the submission form by moving the fields and the descriptions often enough to make any automation easy to spot and ban; Force THEM to pay for the humans to process the complaints. Follow that up with a firm policy against false claims, something like three obviously bogus machine generated complaints and the entity gets a ninety day exclusion where no reports will be accepted by them unless notarized and delivered via postal mail. Bogus legal complaints on paper have existing recourse in the court system in most states, use them.