Starz, meet the Streisand Effect. Cable telly giant apologizes for demented DMCA Twitter takedown spree US premium cable company Starz has apologized for a DMCA takedown tornado that saw it demand not only that a news article about piracy be torn offline – but also any tweets that mentioned it. The article was posted last week on news site TorrentFreak and noted that a large number of unaired episodes from various TV shows – …
Actually there is a downside. Twitter (so I presume the others too?) give you so many strikes and you're out. If you abuse DCMA takedowns more than, I think, 6 times they lose the ability on that platform.
This has been the cause of some quite public grovelling, because companies needed to get individuals to cancel their complaint on/via the service in question. In some cases it must have been "final strike" because people were offered quite a bit of actual money to cancel their complaint, when the company knows they would lose when the complaint/appeal eventually gets reviewed.
> Maybe they'd think think a little more carefully next time?
Why would they? Heavy-handed, indiscriminate attack is the very essence of bullying. Scare the pants off the people, so they won't even think of doing something which displeases you.
Who cares if at some point you need to emit some half-heartedly apology along the lines of "we are sorry our honest attempts to fight heinous crime were misunderstood by some petty minds"...
I imagine bob reads a story about Joey Lee Bailey and posts a comment denouncing White Russians.
The point's about 30 feet over that way, bob. Aim carefully and try again.
IIRC (and IANAL) the notice is filed under penalty of perjury, which makes the penalty potentially hefty. However the early rulings on this set a rather high bar before a penalty would be imposed. If they knew or should have known that the thing they were trying to take down was fair use there would be no penalty. If you could prove actual malice you might be able to get a sanction applied.
"The best explanation would be that The Social Element automated its takedown requests so that any mention of the original article was also targeted."
If this is the case, it really puts a lot of their own marketing messages into a light that is rather different than they wanted. For instance, their website proudly proclaims:
"People respond to people. Brands are driven, created and led by people. We help bring out that human side to ensure brands present themselves as people, not products and services."
...which, even if that were accurate, would be incredibly objectionable. Brands are not people, and shouldn't be pretending to be people. That's just hijacking natural human social interactions in order to sell you more shit.
Surely the logical extrapolation will be for the US to stop defining humans as 'people', thus leaving corporations as the only legal residents of the United States. After all, they already have most of the power just by bribing lobbying politicians, so really it would just be legitimising the current order.
"According to US law, corporations are people"
Except that this isn't actually true. For certain specific things, corporations are treated as legal entities that have some of the rights of people (for instance, they have the ability to enter into contracts), but the law actually does make a clear distinction between people and corporations.
Corporations keep trotting out this "corporations are people" nonsense because it benefits them to have real people confused on the point, but it isn't actually so.
Wikipedia's writeup on this is actually pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
Fruhlinger's novel The Enthusiast is a decent portrayal of how these sorts of marketing organizations work. There's some relevant material in Holiday's Trust Me, I'm Lying too.
When they came for Twitter, I did nothing, because Twitter is vacuous.
When they came for Facebook, I did nothing, because Facebook is evil.
When they came for Google+, I ... wait, is Google+ even still around?
When they came for the Reg forums, we downvoted like crazy it didn't help.
better still - force them to have a paper trail in any "takedown" process [subject to audits], an appeals process (along with notifications), and to make backups of everything they wipe out... and public apologies whenever THEY ARE WRONG.
the administrative and compliance costs ALONE would be a thorn in their side for DECADES...
/me thinks of a 'Tw[a,i]tter Appellate Court" and "lawyers" paid in bitcoin...
So many companies just take DMCA requests at face value that this sort of thing happens frequently
Until there are finacial comebacks - fines for incorrect requests (that increase exponentially with further "erroroneous"* takedown requests) then this will keep happening.
These things only tend to make news when "popular" sites or people get hot by DMCA abuse, don't tend to hear about it when its teh "little people" hit
* Many people think the over zealous takedowns are not done in error but are deliberately targeting everything, just because there is no penalty
By all accounts American Gods has become total arse this season.
Probably because the source material was a single book with a finite story arc. Instead of filming that and being done with it, they'll string it out until they get cancelled and hope they get an episode or two to wrap it all up.
See also, Handmaid's Tale, The Man in the High Castle etc. Flog that dead horse. Flog it some more.
Instead of filming that and being done with it, they'll string it out until they get cancelled
Neil Gaiman has apprently been closely involved in the series, and one would hope that he won't allow that to happen (he has already effectively said the same about the upcoming adaptation of Good Omens - it will end where the book ends and not get any sequels).
By all accounts American Gods has become total arse this season.
Personally, I gave up after the first episode. Dreadfully melodramatic and heavy-handed - both the screenplay and directing badly misconceived the characters (Shadow, anyway) and pacing of the novel. Pretty much every departure they took from the source material was a mistake. I was rather disappointed; I've read the novel a few times and listened to the audiobook on trips, so I was hoping for a reasonably faithful, nuanced treatment.
I find Bryan Fuller a real crapshoot. I thought Dead Like Me was reliably good and often brilliant. The bit of Wonderfalls I saw had promise. Hannibal was far too impressed with itself (the writers' room could have benefited from reading Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil), but it was slick and measured and tried some interesting things. Pushing Daisies was so sugary I had to visit the dentist after every episode.
IANAL (sadly, then I'd be RICH!)
With the 'tightening up' of the rules on copyright, can anyone complain about copyright breach, or just the copyright holder?
If the former we can have serious fun. Every time a politician stands up and makes a speech, we demand a take-down of everything that quotes them, unless they have a signed GDPR waiver. Or attend speeches by Farage (with ear-plugs) and stand in the front row, and then demand takedown of any photo that includes you. Oh, the fun potential.
I'm not a lawyer, but...
USC 17 § 501.b specifically gives the owner the right to pursue:
The legal or beneficial owner of an exclusive right under a copyright is entitled, subject to the requirements of section 411, to institute an action for any infringement of that particular right committed while he or she is the owner of it.
Subsequent paragraphs extend standing to some other parties for particular cases, but they mostly apply to retransmission. So AIUI, no, non-owners generally don't have standing.
And that controls who can issue a DMCA takedown notice for a work. Per USC 17 § 512.c.3.A.i, a takedown notice is only valid if it includes:
A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed
Since using such a signature in a context like this requires appropriate authorization from the owner of that signature (otherwise it's fraud), there's a transitive restriction back to the ("legal or beneficial") owner of the work.
Starz won't need to worry, because people you know - perhaps even yourself - will continue watching Starz content. Sure, they may see a dip briefly in their viewership stats, but that's a little ripple in a big ocean.
Lets take a leaf from rabid liberals here in the US: if you really want to teach them, boycott everything they produce AND companies that advertise on their channels. Demand your cable/satellite provider remove Starz from your lineup. If it says it was even related to Starz and it's on a different channel, boycott that channel until they remove it.
As a podcaster that pushes out our live stream through youtube I am all to familiar with takedowns.
It's worse when the robots decide I have infringed.
The actual process of getting a design reversed is a proper ball ache.
The way the system works is guilty until proved otherwise.
It is a joke at best and a proper jack booted at worst.
The whole DMCA law is so flawed that it's laughable. It allows for rampant abuse without any consequences. It's time that abuse of copyright is levelled at content producers as well as those infringing it.
I mean it's not like these articles, the response and the whole 'striesand' effect has made tens or hundreds of thousands of people aware of a show that they can find online with a simple search of any of the thousands of torrent sites... Oh dear... oh dear indeed.
For lots of reasons, this is not viable for company communications and such like.
But maybe .. Just maybe, it may be time to get pen, paper, envelope and stamp back out of retirement for personal use.
That way we could communicate with people that we actually know.
I also wonder if that could force a much narrower 'Government Interception' regime.
An admission of 'Well no, I don't really want to open every letter within the UK, but how about steaming open the correspondence for this particular address?' could work well.
Just as an afterthought, Apple may promise not to track us ( Yes, I am a sheeple), But I find that once I start gurgleMaps on my device, the only way I can close the stupid thing is by doing a restart of the device. I wonder how much gurgle paid for that little thing.
It could be that paying for some services (email and such like) we could start to protect ourselves from the like of google, Facebook, and the noxious debt generators like MasterCard, visa and so on.
Now here is a question.
My understanding is that any shop that offers credit/debit card facilities, have to either:
a) Pay a charge of about 3% (ish) on any transaction, and ..
b) Charge exactly the same price to cash payers.
If that is true (and I am not *quite* certain it is ) then it would seem that for every purchase I make in dear old blighty, a percentage is being funneled of to dear old Trumps pocket? Am I correct in this assumption?
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