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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, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:10AM
Isn't it perjury to submit a fraudulent takedown?
Apparently it's not, in effect, through the legal contortion that the lawyer issuing the takedown merely has to have a good-faith belief (and apparently automated search results constitute “good faith”) that his/her client owns the copyright of the work in question. As to the strict question of perjury, if one can prove the issuing lawyer didn't have a good-faith belief, in theory (!), it would be perjury, but I'm not aware of any takedowns that have resulted in actual charges of perjury.
Were web sheriff and friends to send my hosting service a takedown, would the FBI arrest them?
Nope. In fact, if one's web hosting service doesn't put an effort into these things, one would find that one would be in the position of actually needing to prove one's innocence. The hosting service, once issued a takedown, is in the position of either providing proof it's invalid (which they may not readily have) or simply complying. (I assume you personally wouldn't select such a hosting service.)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 31 2015, @08:53AM
Most hosting services, yes would instantly comply. But none of the hosting services I have ever used would do that.
Instead they would forward the takedown notice to me. They would only take down the specific, allegedly-offending URI if I did not respond soon enough.
They have a "safe harbor" if I agree to be the respondent in the copyright holder's civil lawsuit, but for that to apply I have to agree to the copyright holder's choice of venue, which would be way the Hell out in the middle of nowhere, and a huge PITA for me to travel to.
I'm down with that. I had DeCSS on my site for over ten years - the real one, not the one that removes stylesheets from markup.
Never got a takedown.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 01 2015, @04:33AM
if I agree to be the respondent in the copyright holder's civil lawsuit, but for that to apply I have to agree to the copyright holder's choice of venue, which would be way the Hell out in the middle of nowhere, and a huge PITA for me to travel to.
I assume Eastern Texas?
Which hosting provider do you use?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 01 2015, @06:02AM
WebCom, which was acquired by Verio, Seagull Networks which is no longer in hosting but does online marketing, and http://prq.se/ [prq.se]
prgmr.com is the best for a Xen VPS if you really know what you're doing. They comply with takedowns but only if their user does not activate their safe harbor. If we demonstrate that we are not really infringing they will ignore the DMCA however the owner described the very worst threat to his livelihood in his entire life was "The Fake Shoe Police".
WebCom was blackholed by the entire nation of Germany because they hosted a notorious Holocaust revisionist. Every single one of us staff was the most ardently-dedicated, patchouli-aromaed, barefoot vegan left-wing hippy.
Germany knocked out tens of thousands of other domains because they blocked our servers IP but even so we continued to host him.
Ernst Zündel. The US and Canada worked together to spirit him back home to Germany where he was prosecuted.
Periquito AB of Sweden only hosts physical servers but also offers very low-end shell accounts from which you can host a single website. They are somewhat pricey because of their in-house legal staff, dedicated to fighting takedown demands. They will host absolutely anything that is legal in Sweden, and provide anonymous hosting in that you can pay by money order - perhaps bitcoin by now - and are down with PGP email with their users.
Seagull Networks was a very good host for modestly technical users, as I was when I hosted with them in that I was a coder but didn't know much about *NIX or many of the internet protocols.
I once wrote an essay called "Earn High by Playing It Clean" that was inspired by a Black Hat SEO who posted to WebmasterWorld that he earned $25,000.00 per month in AdSense clicks so he could feed his hungry children. He and I chatted back and forth a little then someone inquired as to whether it was possible to earn high by playing it clean; my response was the first draft of my essay.
I marked it up for my website, it made front page at Kuro5hin, a webmasterworld admin violated their own TOS by agreeing to point out my k5 story to that thread. One of the webmastered called it "A beautiful contribution".
So I posted the link to alt.www.webmaster then forgot about it until a few days later when Seagull's sole proprietor emailed me the abuse mail he received.
"Hey Mike - what's this about?"
An antispam... uh... "activist" who liked to call himself "viper" duked it out with me for days on end while I proceeded to spam alt.www.webmaster with - and I am not fucking kidding - three hundred fifty other links and without viper ever catching on.
After that I always included viper's email addy in the "To:" of damn near any email I ever sent to anybody.
I was puzzled that after a little while I could not find him anymore. Perhaps he decided to crawl out from under his rock.
I don't know specifically about BudgetDedicated's stand on the DMCA however they are in The Netherlands which has copyright but the DMCA does not have jurisdiction there. However they are very ardently committed to Open Source and so give me free hosting. Based on other conversations I've had with them, even if Dutch copyright law applied I expect they would fight it tooth and nail.
I expect there are lots of other hosts like these but I wouldn't be speaking from personal experience.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]