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Starz Doesn’t Like News About Leaked TV-Shows, Takes Down TorrentFreak Tweet
- cabaalis 7y agoIsn't there supposed to be an avenue of punishment for knowingly submitting false dmca claims?
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoWhat I read in this (or some other) account is that Twitter is the only party that can sue over a false DMCA claim, which they probably won't do. I really would like to see a party have to pay a processing fee for DMCA claims.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 7y agoI’ve never heard that. Just because the content is hosted on Twitter does not mean it’s up to Twitter. It’s up to the target of the complaint to pursue a lawsuit against the complaining party. I’m not a lawyer but I dealt with this a lot as a service provider. We simply had to follow the law and take the content down or else we would be held liable. The system we had before — the court system — required processing fees simply by the process of filing lawsuits. The DMCA was specifically made so copyright holders can send them in high volume without any review by a judge. They don’t want to be slowed down. That law is working exactly as they intended, even though I strongly disagree with it.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 7y agoOnly if the target wants to pursue a lawsuit, which is obviously very costly. There is no built-in protection and I’ve never seen our government pursue abuse of the DMCA. It’s a grey area, too. The penalties if I remember only apply for knowingly sending fraudulent takedowns. But these people are likely sending what they believe are valid reports and they will argue as such. The DMCA was made for copyright holders so they could do whatever they want within that grey area. They have total control to remove content on the web without any real due process or judicial review.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoI don't think this has anything to do with Twitter. They got a DMCA notice, so they're legally obligated to remove the content unless TorrentFreak sends a counter-notice.
- misterpigs 7y agoI didn't know Twitter dealt with DCMA abuse as well; I've always seen reports about YouTube or Google receiving bogus claims.
- DannyBee 7y agoThey actually are not so required. This is often thought to be true but is very wrong. The only thing that happens if they say no is that they may be held liable later if the content is found to be infringing. So in a case like this, which is nonsense, they could just say "no" without any fear because nobody is going to find it infringing in court. (This will likely surprise people or generate snarky responses, but oh well) Back when we had code.google.com, the DMCA team at Google used to spend a tremendous amount of energy and time evaluating requests to understand whether they were reasonable/made sense, because code.google.com got a lot of baseless requests to remove content. Google said no to a large number of baseless removals. Twitter could do the same here. (in practice i assume the volume becomes completely overwhelming at some point)
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoSure, but the article doesn't seem to argue that this complaint was so obviously frivolous that Twitter should have ignored it. (It doesn't really complain about Twitter at all, only Starz.)
- Scoundreller 7y agoWhy would twitter ignore something that benefits its advertisers? Now they have a convenient excuse for what they did.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 7y ago
- MBCook 7y agoThey also had the EFF tweet about the takedown taken down.
- asdff 7y agoWill they take down this post too?
- fs2 7y agoAs the EFF reports: "Starz has no right to silence TorrentFreak’s news article or block links to it. The article reports that there are people on the Internet infringing copyright, but that is a far cry from being an infringement itself"
- mabbo 7y agoIt seems to be that the repercussions of filing frivolous DMCA takedown notices isn't sufficient. Proof: there's too many instances of abuses like this. What's more, the existing legislation doesn't compensate the real victims- those who posted the content. In short, the law is designed for a different time. Simple, minimal changes are what's needed. Raise the cost of filing invalid DMCAs to a level high enough that companies like Starz are deterred from doing so. And share the compensation with the content creators who are affected, not just the platforms that receive the invalid notices. I don't think we'll ever be able to get rid of the darned things, so we might as well push for DMCAs to at least be closer to fair.
- ezoe 7y agoRequire it to reserve the money for each DMCA takedown request. The amount is equivalent of fair compensation if the request was borgus.
- Someone1234 7y agoIgnoring for a second the difficulties in calculating "fair compensation," that would mean that small creators would need HUGE pots to file a DMCA against larger entities (since damages could be fair higher if you're mistaken against big/powerful/etc entities), and conversely it would still be super cheap to take down obscure creators. In effect this would double down on the existing power imbalance, and allow large entities to continue their abuse practices almost unabated (except against one another).
- crazypyro 7y agoExcept, as it stands today, the system is extremely ripe for abuse by people who can file claims almost without consequence. There are countless examples of YouTube creators losing monetization for frivolous claims, but as the system stands, its guilty before proven innocent, especially for smaller creators....
- pavel_lishin 7y ago
- newswriter99 7y agoWe live in a world where journalism coverage on television shows being torrented are being taken down by corporations abusing laws put in place by decrepit legislators who don't fully comprehend new technology. This cyberpunk timeline kind of sucks.
- asdff 7y agoWe've been living in this world since Metallica vs. Napster.
- return0 7y agoTorrentfreak should pay Starz for using a frame from their unreleased work.
- Intermernet 7y agoThat's not how fair use works. They used a single frame to authenticate the veracity of the claim.
- return0 7y agoThat s how it works in EU now
- L_226 7y agoSerious question: could a hypothetical content host add a clause in their ToS stating that frivolous DMCA takedown notices incur a "processing fee" of $XXXXX? Or, DMCA notices that have been filed as a result of using a non-UI automated tool constitute a violation of ToS and also incur a fee? Asking for a friend.
- colejohnson66 7y agoI wouldn’t do that because then the big players could add a “processing fee” of some large number that keeps the little people from fighting them
- linuxftw 7y agoEnforcement of copyright (if you agree such a thing should even exist) should be an entirely civil matter. There shouldn't be any special protections for the 'platform.' They host the content, they should be liable. This would prevent the consolidation of the internet into the first place.