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Abusing the DMCA's Notice-and-Takedown Provisions
Posted by Ernest Miller on Thursday, October 03 @ 01:24:37 EDT Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Prof. Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) has penned a column for FOXNews concerning legal abuses in mechanical law enforcement (Stop, in the Name of 'Bots). Traffic cameras rigged to increase ticket revenues, computer-ignorant child porn stings, and the notice-and-takedown provisions of the DMCA are ridiculed. I particularly like the reference to an amicus brief in the RIAA v. Verizon case (Motion for Leave to File and Brief Amicus Curaie of United States Internet Service Provider Association in Support of Respondent [PDF]). Reynolds quotes the following from the brief, which shows how "diligent" members of the RIAA are:
The lists [of allegedly infringing materials] have not even been culled to eliminate items that should never have been included in the first place. While most of the works identified in Exhibit 1 appear to be songs featuring George Harrison, the notice also demands removal of a file labeled, in part, "John Lennon, Yoko Ono And George Harrison Interview.mp3." The notice further objects to a file entitled "Portrait of mrs. harrison Williams 1943.jpg." It even claims infringement by distribution of a file whose appalling title includes phrases such as "Nude Preteens and Young Teens Naked ... Brian is 14 and Harrison is 8."
It is highly unlikely that a single company owns the copyright both to George Harrison's songs and to child porn materials. The most likely explanation is that the list was generated by a "bot" that had been programmed to search for all files with the name "harrison" in them -- and that the results of its search were incorporated without a glance into the copyright owner's §512(c) notification.
Basically, copyright holders are abusing (surprise!) the DMCA by sending out huge lists of allegedly infringing materials to ISPs and requiring them to be removed whether the materials actually infringe or not. Why shouldn't they? It would be very difficult under the law to punish the copyright holder for doing so.
 
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The quoted text is not in the .pdf file - where is attachment B? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, October 03 @ 14:30:46 EDT
Hi -

Thanks for the above story and link. It looks to me, after a bit of digging, that Glenn's quote is actually from attachment B to the amici curiae. It doesn't appear to be in the main .pdf file you link to at the EFF, and that file mentions an appendix containing a list of the files the RIAA mentioned in its notice and takedown request.

Any chance you could use your legal superpowers to locate an electronic version of the full appendix? It would be nice to have a full citation of how poorly the bots are human-checked.

Thanks,
Henry


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