DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

It’s all copyright all the time for this week’s WNR, and there’s even a bit of “Panama Papers” discussion to jump on that particular bandwagon.

WordPress is sick of having to deal with bad DMCA requests

We have a trio of copyright related news this week, one quite ridiculous, while the other two seems far too sensible for something copyright related.

So the real question is, should I start with the ridiculous one, or the two more sensible ones? Hmm, I think I’ll go with sensible first, leaving the froth inducing, fist shaking one til the end, to get you all worked up ready for the upcoming week. I know, I can be a real d*ck sometimes.

Once again, it’s up to a tech company to come up with some sensible suggestions for changes to existing copyright law, this time it’s the company behind WordPress, Automattic, suggesting it’s time to introduce penalties for those that submit invalid DMCA takedown requests.

It’s a well known fact that DMCA takedowns are often abused, sometimes intentionally to cause harm to be competitor, but most of the time, because of lazy copyright holders not bothering to check their machine generated submissions more carefully (just last week, there was a story suggesting a third of all DMCA requests sent to Google are “questionable” at best). But right now, there are no penalties for this, while there are plenty at stake if service providers do not act on the requests in time (even if it’s obviously invalid).

This is why Automattic wants statutory damages to be introduced for blatant misuse of takedowns, as well as the use of legal bonds to ensure copyright holders are made accountable for their actions. A very reasonable request that will no doubt be ignored because it’s not biased enough (or biased at all) towards rightsholders.

Over in Europe, common sense appears to be coming back to copyright law as well, with the European Court of Justice’s advocate general making the audacious suggestion that linking isn’t the same as uploading. While the advice is limited to one particular case, it could still have a major impact on how copyright liability is viewed in Europe. The advisory suggests that if a piece of copyrighted content is already publicly available, then linking to it is not the same as “making it available”, because someone else has already done it. This isn’t to say that the linking party isn’t guilty of facilitating the discovery of pirated content, but it’s just not copyright infringement.

Of course, the advisory also makes it clear that the intention and purpose of the site should also be taken into consideration. While sites like The Pirate Bay also merely “link” to pirated content and not host it, the site’s main purpose is clearly tilted towards the copyright infringement side, but a personal blog or a news website who links to copyrighted content would be treated differently, according to the advice.

Anti-piracy company wants to employ tactics similar to ones used by ransomware operators

So now onto the ridiculous. Controversial and not-very-profitable-lately anti-piracy monetization firm Rightscorp has a new plan to defeat piracy and make a quick buck – hijack the web browser of suspected pirates! The company wants to work with ISPs to send copyright infringement and “settlement” notices directly to people’s browsers. And if they ignore it like they ignore Rightscorp’s emails and don’t pay up, then Rightscorp wants their web browsers to be locked until the payment clears. So nothing like ransomware, which locks up people’s computers or web browsers to elicit a payment.

The relationship between ISPs and Rightscorp have not been great so far, so it’s hard to see any ISPs jumping on the “let’s make our paying customers really angry” bandwagon, even if Rightscorp may promise revenue sharing (which they’re not). Rightscorp’s big selling point to ISPs? Do this and you’ll reduce your liability, Rightscorp says, but ISPs can already do this if they have a reasonable and enforceable repeat offender policy, leaving browser hijacks to sketchy ransomware operators.

In minor copyright news, the much talked about Panama Papers (click here if you don’t know what it is) has some surprising copyright links too, it appears. The fate of Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, whose name has appeared in the papers and suggests an attempt by him and his wife to hide assets in offshore accounts, could mean a rather surprising victory for the country’s Pirate Party, which (even before this latest scandal) is actually polling as the most popular political party in Iceland. While Gunnlaugsson has taken temporarily leave (and not resigned as first thought), an autumn election is set to take place, and if the Pirate Party can continue to poll well until then, it could be a very interesting election to say the least.

Also listed in the Panama Papers are two former Megaupload employees. The two used the services of the law firm at the centre of the scandal, Mossack Fonseca, to start an offshore company. According to the two, Dutch programmer Bram Van der Kolk and Slovak designer Julius Bencko, the company was started to work on a project unrelated to Megaupload, but kept hidden because Mega’s Kim Dotcom did not like employees to work on their own projects. But according to Dotcom, the two were actually working on an unauthorised project that used Mega’s source code and would have been in competition with the now defunct file uploading service, which explains why they wanted to keep things secret. Interesting, but not particular important right now given the fate of almost all file uploaders, unauthorised clones or otherwise, since the Mega takedown.

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That’s it for the week, thanks for reading. I don’t know how you’ll be spending your next week, but I shall be locking myself in a darkened room watching The Force Awakens Blu-ray on an endless loop, with an occasional break to watch the newly released teaser trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (AT-ATs!). Good times ahead! See you next week.

Hello all! You might have noticed I didn’t really bother posting anything for April Fools. The problem with April Fools articles is that if you make it too obvious, then it’s just silly, but if you make it too believable, then you open yourself up to a defamation lawsuit (especially if your site’s main points of discussions involves the litigation happy peoples of the MPAA, the RIAA and other anti-piracy groups). Plus, the real news that I post these days are absurd enough already, and when it comes to our overly biased copyright law, we are all being made a fool all of the time.

Oh right, the real news, which wasn’t very forthcoming this week …

More DMCA takedowns does not equal less pirated downloads

Two copyright stories, but very much related. With rights groups submission millions upon millions of links for piracy takedown, it was only a matter of time before they realised how futile it all is. The BPI, Britain’s RIAA, was this week’s chosen candidate to speak out against the current copyright regime, saying the whack-a-mole must be modified in their favour.

What they want is “take down, stay down”, something I’ve covered before here and with increasing frequency recently I might add. So instead of rights holder identifying the link that needs to be taken down, they only want to identify the piece of content that they want removed, and then it’s up to Google or whomever to do the actual search and destroy. So the whack-a-mole becomes one where the player simply points at the mole and says “mole bad, destroy mole”, and then Google becomes the one that then plays the endless game of whack-a-mole. So no surprise that Google doesn’t want to do it.

Google also rightly point out that despite all the brouhaha over search engines, only 16% of traffic to piracy sites actually come from major search engines. The rest comes from people typing the piracy site’s URL into their browsers, bypassing search engines completely. Don’t be fooled, rights holders are fully aware that Google has never been the main problem. The focus on Google is really just the thin end of the wedge, because Google is a well known company and a very visible target. Once they can get Google to do their bidding, they may very well turn their sights to ISPs and even browser makers, to force them too to play the game of copyright whack-a-mole.

How long before browser makers are asked to block access to piracy sites?

There’s also another very good reason why Google and others should resist the calls for “take down, stay down” – it’s going to be hugely inaccurate. A new study has found that nearly one third of all takedown requests received by Google are “questionable”, but despite this, many are approved and action is taken anyway. This means there are a lot of legitimate sites that have been targeted, or at the very least, the takedown request should never have been made in the first place.

This high rate of false positives occur because rights-holders employ anti-piracy companies to do the hard work, and these companies often just use a bot to crawl the web and find URLs to de-list. The quality and accuracy of these bots can be questionable, since human intervention and verification is rare. And then when they submit these URLs to Google, Google also have their own bots to process these requests, erring on the side of rights-holders and making it the job of the affected site to clear their name in cases of mistaken identity. So with not a human in sight in the whole process, it’s little wonder as to why things can get very inaccurate very quickly. Except with “take down, stay down”, there will be even less verification and more legal pressure on Google and others to take down URLs as quickly and as liberally as possible.

Again, all of this presents a clear strategy from rights-holders to shift the legal responsibility of piracy to other parties, from search engines, to ISPs to eventually browser makers, and even makers of computer software and hardware. This must be resisted because it’s dangerous, and also because it’s not going to work. Those intent on pirating stuff will continue to do so, no matter how much censorship, how many filters and site blocks and lawsuits are used to stop them. And those that can’t afford to buy stuff still won’t, even if it getting pirated stuff because too hard for them. It’s a fool’s errand, which I guess is kind of appropriate given what this week means.

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And that’s all we have this week. Not a very fun edition, I must admit, but hopefully there will be more of that next week. Until then, have a great one!