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So Far, Wordpress Denied 43% of DMCA Takedown Requests in 2015

posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:17PM   
from the making-a-stand dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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.

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Original Submission

• The law on fraudulent takedown requests (Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:07AM

  by stormwyrm (717) on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:07AM (#215156) Journal

  Making a fraudulent DMCA takedown request is supposed to be perjury, according to 17 USC § 512(f) [copyright.gov], but that law just says the following:

  (f) Misrepresentations. - Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section —

  (1) that material or activity is infringing, or

  (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,

  shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.

  Meaning that you have to actually sue these people yourself in order to get damages from someone who has fraudulently made a takedown request. Wordpress themselves seem to have actually done just that and challenged a fraudulent request [venturebeat.com] in court and won, but they failed to track down the jerk who did it and never got their damages. I wonder if these automated requests, many of which are likely fraudulent, might fall under the rubric of barratry or SLAPP?

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  Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.

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