14 ms·

Did I receive fraudulent DMCA takedowns?

274 points by jstanley 3y ago

KomoD 3y ago
They aren't fraudulent takedowns, the URLs are valid, I checked myself, took a random one of the list and sure enough, an epub started to download.
dmitrygr 3y ago
Please tell me where to donate to help you put someone sending invalid DMCA notices behind bars!
beardog 3y ago
Is legal requests ruining fun the same reason you dropped SMS privacy?
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Mmmm... DMCA spam/extortion seems like a industry just waiting to take off.
- d4mi3n 3y ago
  Waiting to take off? It’s been alive and well for years. A few examples: Bungie suing person responsible for multiple fraudulent Destiny 2 DMCA takedowns, 2022: https://www.vg247.com/bungie-suing-person-responsible-for-fraudulent-destiny-2-dmca-takedowns https://www.vg247.com/bungie-suing-person-responsible-for-fr... Using Youtube takedowns as extortion, 2017: https://www.techdirt.com/2017/10/25/using-youtube-takedowns-as-extortion/ https://www.techdirt.com/2017/10/25/using-youtube-takedowns-... Warner Bros’ False Takedowns Stifle Free Speech, EFF Tells Court, 2013: https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-false-takedowns-stifle-free-speech-eff-tells-court-120306/ https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-false-takedowns-stifle-...
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    I mean in an highly automated way, ala modern call extortion and such.
  - suction 3y ago
    [dead]
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  Someone patent it as a business process and then assign it to a patent troll, let the bottom feeders sort it out.
- ww520 3y ago
  Oh, it's live and well, and compensated very well. Just an example, TwoSetViolins did a live concert of some classical music pieces (no copyright would exist on them at this time and age) and their YouTube video got millions of views. A French music company did a DMCA claim against them and YouTube took down their video and transferred their ad money to the music company. They fought to get their video back. But but the kicker was that the music company got to keep the ad revenue generated during the dispute period, which was most of the money as many event based videos got most of their views from the initial release time frame due to promotion of the events by the video creators. Not sure what the eventual outcome was. As you can see, even if the false claims have failed, the DMCA filers still got a part of the money. The incentive is completely skewed.
  - blooalien 3y ago
    Sad thing is that under pretty much any other circumstances (as in not protected by a broken law) that sort of action would totally be straight-up fraud on the part of the filer (literally stealing ad revenue).
annoyingnoob 3y ago
https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2017/01/using-transparency-fight-takedown-trolls-–-model-dmca https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2017/01/using-transparenc... https://www.dmca.com/FAQ/How-can-I-eliminate-fake-DMCA-Takedown-Notices https://www.dmca.com/FAQ/How-can-I-eliminate-fake-DMCA-Taked...
Dwedit 3y ago
When someone sends a DMCA notice, they state that "under penalty of perjury, they are authorized on behalf of the copyright holder". That is the only part that they can get in trouble for. Whether the work is identified correctly or not is irrelevant.
- jojobas 3y ago
  Depends on your definition of trouble. You can counterclaim that the content you're sharing is in fact fair use or otherwise not infringing, the original claiming party has some time to sue you, and if they don't, you can sue them for damages caused by the takedown. I don't know whether anything can be done about a takedown notice on content that never existed in the first place, perhaps some generic harassment complaint?
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    > and if they don't, you can sue them for damages caused by the takedown. You can counter-sue them regardless of whether or not they sue you. They have made a claim that you are in violation of the law. You are allowed to go to court first to get a "declaratory judgment" that you are not. https://youtu.be/-7H8SZMwz24?t=1320 https://youtu.be/-7H8SZMwz24?t=1320 (30 seconds to watch relevant part)
    - dtgriscom 3y ago
      Would there be damages if their claim was found false? If not, then that's still just legal noise to them (although it could be a step towards something that actually hurts).
      - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        In jurisdictions which allow it, probably some attorney/filing fees.
- theemathas 3y ago
  This youtuber got a fraudulent DMCA notice, and his counter-notice got automatically rejected. The person who sent the notice isn't associated with the devs, and is asking for a $100 ransom to get the channel reinstated. How could this be fixed? Proof that the person sending the notice isn't "authorized on behalf of the copyright holder": https://twitter.com/Lionheart/status/1671349063931838464 https://twitter.com/Lionheart/status/1671349063931838464 Tweet about the automatic rejection of the counter-notice: https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671696220190810113 https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671696220190810113 Tweet about the initial DMCA takedown: https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671323777978736643 https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671323777978736643 Mention of the $100 ransom: https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671332970836140032 https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671332970836140032 Any youtube people on here can help?
nightpool 3y ago
Ultimately, a DMCA notification is a notification that you have infringing content that can in principle be accessed / hosted through your sites. It's effectively a "friendly heads up" from the copyright owner that prevents you from being sued if you can take the content down expeditiously. It's a copyright owner saying "here are some URLs that could be infringing, and they need to be blocked." The author says "you don't know if the hash is already blocked in the web server configuration, or if the server is broken in some way that prevents access to that hash, etc", but that doesn't really matter—if they're already blocked, or inaccessible, then all you need to say is that that's so. Otherwise, it's on you to block them—it doesn't matter if anybody accessed them or not, just that they would be accessible if they're not blocked.
veave 3y ago
Is hardbin.com currently down? It says it "refused to connect." btw isn't that wording wrong? Shouldn't it be that it refused to let me connect?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- scrollaway 3y ago
  Connecting is a two-way verb, like “discuss”, “interact”, “shake hands”, etc.
- jjulius 3y ago
  >Is hardbin.com currently down? The author answers this question in the article.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  Quoted from the article: > "I have now taken hardbin.com down completely because dealing with this sort of thing makes it less fun to run and more like hard work, but I do still have a copy of the log files."
nitwit005 3y ago
I'd assume a dumb script. All the filenames in the first file end with "annas-archive.(extension)". Perhaps some search or lookup feature of Anna's archive generates URLs, and they assumed all URLs were genuine? A lot of this stuff seems to be very blindly done. Companies have taken down their own content.
- faangsticle 3y ago
  Why hasn't there been any blow-back?
  - tiedieconderoga 3y ago
    From whom? Your average voter neither knows nor cares about the DMCA. We've all got things to do, people to see, and computing is just one industry/hobby. Influential companies prefer predictable systems. They are thrilled that they can wash their hands of liability for their users' unvetted uploads. Having the removal process boiled down to a simple form they can dedicate an inbox to is icing on the cake. Rightsholders are happy, because they can commit perjury with impunity in pursuit of defending their IP. Legislators don't care, because their constituents are happy and their voters don't care. Where would the blowback come from?
- nitwit005 3y ago
  Now that I'm home, and have time to poke around, I see that it may just be confusion about the domain. Looked up an ISBN on Anna's archive, and I see: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzaceadernoyib7mknhbdtnrdem56o2egzvkwmuykkv4zaxvmovi37qd4?filename=atlas-and-synopsis-of-lever-s-histopathology-of-e--annas-archive.pdf https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzaceadernoyib7mknhbdt... Which is exactly the same as the given link, except for the domain: https://hardbin.com/ipfs/bafykbzaceadernoyib7mknhbdtnrdem56o2egzvkwmuykkv4zaxvmovi37qd4?filename=atlas-and-synopsis-of-lever-s-histopathology-of-e--annas-archive.pdf https://hardbin.com/ipfs/bafykbzaceadernoyib7mknhbdtnrdem56o... Perhaps cloudflare, or their ipfs servce, confused their script somehow.
causality0 3y ago
Of course you did. Most DMCA takedowns are fraudulent.
not2b 3y ago
If someone sends you a DMCA takedown request for URLs that aren't even valid, then you can reply that you've complied with their request and taken the (nonexistent) material down: you are no longer serving content from those URLs because you never were. I think that what's going on here is incompetence, not fraud.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
  Yeah, and then the sender writes back to complain about the 1 address that was real. If this person is a paralegal, complain to the law firm. If the law firm doesn't respond, complain to the bar.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    Does the bar regulate paralegals?
    - unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
      If the paralegal works for a lawyer, yes.
- klabb3 3y ago
  > I think that what's going on here is incompetence, not fraud. There’s a middle ground: sabotage. DMCA complaints have asymmetric incentives. You can, afaik, send a near-infinite number of (generated, duplicated, likely-to-not-exist) complaints at the cost of an email. As a host, you are obligated to comply with each individual report. Automating the process of decoding arbitrary emails, mapping to content you have and verifying that it’s copyrighted is extremely hard if not impossible, so you end up with a manual defense against an automated attack. This can obviously be exploited for purposes of sabotage. Imagine sending bulk emails to the police reporting all people you don’t like for all crimes you can think of, without any risk. Or if you could call mayday on the sea, get other ships to reroute and risk their lives, with no consequences.
Tao3300 3y ago
I'm all for making a violent public example of people who do this. No one in government is incentivised to fix DMCA, and they'd ruin you if you tried.
cheald 3y ago
I would be halfway willing to bet that some genius asked ChatGPT "please provide me with a list of URLs where my book is being illegally shared", or something similar, and then started firing off emails.
- slang800 3y ago
  These are actual hashes for books that exist somewhere on the IPFS network. You can get a lot of them to resolve. They've just never been requested from the site the DMCA notices are being sent to. It's more likely that someone downloaded an IPFS hash list from LibGen and started sending emails generated from that.
breeezzy 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SnorkelTan 3y ago
the dmca takedown services are awful. They just do exact text match on titles of videos and submit dmca requests on behalf of the content owner. If you embed a video widget from the content owners official YouTube page on your blog for example and quote the title, often these services will still send a dmca request. Even if you respond and say the complaint is invalid some services will still ban you for receiving too many requests. Source: built a crappy content farm with video embeds. Received avalanche of requests. It’s hard to cry about my case in particular since it was just a dumb content farm. But ops post is another example of this terrible software and legal process having wider implications.
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
  So what you're saying is, I need to set up an IPFS gateway and populate it with lots of videos that I hold the copyright for, which happen to have names that match commonly-pirated movies? I wonder if they bother to download them to check? Hours and hours of bars and tone...
  - SnorkelTan 3y ago
    Unlikely they download them. Video embeds ads not copyright infringement as far as I understand since they give the tube site permission to display their work and broadly show it wherever they want. Still got dmcas.
komali2 3y ago
> Law Enforcement - I.C.E Referrals Maybe it's more the "customs" side of this department that this referral is going to, but it also sounds to me like trying to wield the sledgehammer of an ICE officer showing up to an immigrant's door, a notoriously evil strategy employed by all sorts of businesses and government agencies to get what they want. The DMCA abuse is disgusting, the ICE threat is evil.
- from 3y ago
  They are likely referring to Homeland Security Investigations, a division within ICE which is basically like a parallel FBI that handles white collar/CSAM/high level drug stuff. Usually not immigration related unless its related to migrant smuggling or visa fraud.
srj 3y ago
Several tech companies send transparency data of take down requests to www.lumendatabase.org. You can get a sense of scale and pattern.
- shmde 3y ago
  Lumendatabase.org is my go-to for the porn links which have been removed from the search results. Thanks Google !
advael 3y ago
I am sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but the DMCA is just such an egregiously bad law. Its main use cases are this kind of consequence-free fraudulent terrorism and the much worse draconian de facto state enforcement of extremely customer-hostile business models. It needs to be nuked from orbit
- hnick 3y ago
  I think its main use case is safe harbour. Without the DMCA, if I posted something infringing copyright, Hacker News would be liable as the service provider. DMCA shifts the blame to me, but the publisher has to comply with takedown requests. I think overall this is a good thing for an internet that hosts user-created content, which includes comments, but they could definitely tidy up the implementation. As it stands you are allowed to reject the claim if you think you are in the right, and the company should restore the disputed content if you do so - but some like YouTube operate above and beyond the DMCA and seemingly intentionally blur the lines a lot so people blame the DMCA and not their custom process.
  - atahanacar 3y ago
    Here is how my country does safe harbor: If you are a website like Hacker News that publishes user-generated data, you are considered a "hosting provider". Hosting providers have no responsibility to check or enforce legality of the user generated content as long as they log the IP addresses of the users for at least 1 year. This in my opinion is a much neater solution than DMCA. Citing from the related law: >ARTICLE 2 >e) Access Provider means real persons or legal entities that provide access to Internet for its users, >f) Content Provider means real persons or legal entities that create, amend or provide all kinds of information or data presented to users on the Internet, ... >m) Hosting Provider means real or legal entities that provide or operate systems that host services and content, ... >ARTICLE 5 >(1) Hosting provider is not obligated to check the content it provides or to investigate whether it is an illegal activity. >(2) Hosting provider is obliged to remove the content that is against to law if it is notified according to Articles 8 and 9 of this Law. >(3) Hosting provider is obliged to keep traffic information for the services it provides for a period of not less than one year and not more than two years, to be determined in the regulation, and to ensure the accuracy, integrity and privacy of this information. ... >ARTICLE 8 >(2) The decision to block access is given by the judge in the case of the investigation and by the court in the case of prosecution. In case of any delay in the investigation, the public prosecutor may also decide to remove the content and/or to block access. In this case, the public prosecutor’s decision shall be submitted to the judge’s approval within twenty-four hours, and the judge shall make his decision within twenty-four hours at the latest. If the decision is not approved within this period, the measure shall be removed immediately by the public prosecutor. >(3) A copy of the decision to remove the content and/or to block access given by the judge, the court or the public prosecutor shall be sent to the Authority for the further action. >(4) The decision to remove the content and/or block access to publications whose content constitutes the crimes stated in the first paragraph shall be given ex officio by the President. This decision shall be notified to the relevant content, hosting and access provider and is asked to carry out its requirements.
yooo000 3y ago
I frequently receive cease and desist notices from "legal entities" demanding I stop selling the officially authorized clothing brands on one of my sites...I ignore them. Nothing ever happens. It's a competitor, or competitors, trying real hard to take over my search engine rankings by trying to shut my site down. These DMCA requests are the same thing - basically bullying or scare tactics. Real legal requests, etc. come in the form of physical paperwork, signed and sometimes notarized.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Can they go directly to e.g. Google and have your site delisted even if it's fraudulent, and if so, does Google inform you of this?
  - ducklingquack 3y ago
    Yes and yes. Whenever a DMCA takedown notice is filed with Google the allegedly infringing URL is quickly removed from the SERP. Google will notify you (and the public) in following ways: 1. Publishing the request on lumendatabase.org 2. Informing you through the Search Console (which has a delay of a few days) 3. Publishing the removal on Google Transparency Report website 4. Publishing a note at the bottom of the SERP mentioning that a website was not featured on the results due to a DMCA takedown notice with a link to lumendatabase Google takes the ”I trust you bro” stance and delists your URL until (if ever) you file a DMCA counter notification which can be done through Google (can look up the link if you need it).
    - chayesfss 3y ago
      [dead]
    - ixwt 3y ago
      I don't necessarily think it's "I trust you bro", I think it's more "Section 230 requires us to delist any content immediately until a counter claim is filed to maintain safe harbor protections". But I'm not a lawyer. Just listened and read a lot about this kind of content.
bighoki2885000 3y ago
[dead]
ronsor 3y ago
I think the DMCA could be fixed simply by allowing website operators to charge a reasonable processing fee for takedowns
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  This would turn website operators into copyright bounty hunters.
- SnorkelTan 3y ago
  My thought as well. A refundable processing fee for uncontested take downs would eliminate 90% of the problem.
jaimex2 3y ago
Is there any legal requirement that you need to receive emails? I'd block the provider's forwarding you anything. Make people jump through hoops/captchas to contact. If they legitimately need to get in touch they can, they just need to be a smart human.
- SnorkelTan 3y ago
  ID verification of submitter s similar to crypto/adult sites.
gorgoiler 3y ago
I find it unpleasant that Gandi forwarded the DMCA letters to the author. (Gandi is the registrar for hardbin.com.) I’ve never liked how the DMCA turns private companies into policemen. If they’re going to tattle to hardbin.com’s mom, why stop there? Why not send the DMCA takedown to IANA too? And also to the authorities in France where (I think) Gandi are based? Similarly, just as Gandi passed the DMCA letter on to the author, so too should he pass on the DMCA letter to whoever posted the IPFS content. I would suggest (tongue in cheek) having a link on hardbin.com where users can regularly check to see if their content has been issued a DMCA notice. Now hardbin.com can’t be liable any more — like Gandi, they’ve been a good private cop and passed the notice on, down the chain!
- account42 3y ago
  If hardbin.com has whois protection enabled then Gandi is acting as the contact point because their address will be in the relevant fields.
lja 3y ago
There is a lot of DMCA hate in these comments. I run a DMCA take down service where we remove revenge porn for people that are victimized by it. DMCA is the only tool we have to take these images down so as much as there are holes and gaps in that law, it's not all bad.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  DMCA is a corrupt, offensive attack on consumer rights. Just because it can be used for laudable purposes doesn't change that.
  - lja 3y ago
    Not saying it makes DMCA perfect, just wanted everyone here to know there are some really awesome, clever uses of DMCA that people use for good and if we torch the DMCA we should make sure we don't leave those folks out in the cold.
    - crvdgc 3y ago
      Thanks for sharing the use case. However using it to defend the entire DMCA sounds like a false dichotomy. Surely there's a way to make rules only for those "awesome" uses, so that they don't have to be "clever" uses. C stands for Copyright and it's mainly used that way in practice.
      - lja 3y ago
        Totally agree with everything you said, I just want to remind people that half of the story of DMCA is that we have really poor controls over our privacy and ironically DMCA is one of our only tools. It does have many, many broken aspects.
    - mcv 3y ago
      I applaud you for using the DMCA for good. You're doing good work, and please keep doing that. That doesn't mean that the DMCA can't also be used for evil, though. It would be nice if it could only be used for good, but maybe that's impossible. It may also be possible to replace it with something more specifically tailored to take down revenge porn. I certainly think revenge porn is far more serious than a mere copyright violation.
chwa982 3y ago
[dead]
jeroenhd 3y ago
Just once I would like one of these DMCA clowns to try to hit someone with the time and money to do something about this. Get that perjury judgement, don't settle for anything less.
thinkingemote 3y ago
IPFS, I'm unfamilar with it - does a gateway have the ability to host anything from IPFS if it's requested to be pinned? Would the hash of the content be the same wherever it is being served? If the service was running could these books have appeared on the gateway? If yes, it looks like they are sending notices to every gateway they can find assuming that the content could be hosted there as it might or might not and they dont check. is it a kind of demanding adding something to a blocklist pre-emptively?
innodb1 3y ago
weather its legal or illegal they have achieved their objective.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I think this person, Gareth Young, has at some point worked for Covington (one of those LinkedIn scrapers seems to have caught their profile: https://www.arounddeal.com/p/gareth-young/m6oymuxsnd/ https://www.arounddeal.com/p/gareth-young/m6oymuxsnd/ but those sites are usually trash so who knows when this was still relevant). Here's an article from 2014 mentioning the same person: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/63357-the-piracy-problem.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/child... and a listing which puts Gareth with Covington & Burlap in 2018: https://www.resultsbase.net/event/4529/results/2491300 https://www.resultsbase.net/event/4529/results/2491300 These people seem to have a history of bullshit takedowns: http://www.gregthatcher.com/Financial/THATCHER_TO_HOWARD_00910320130823171232.pdf http://www.gregthatcher.com/Financial/THATCHER_TO_HOWARD_009... The ciu-online domain is hosted by https://www.ravensbay.co.uk/ https://www.ravensbay.co.uk/ which "developed a high performance database system to automatically track infringements and issue notices to website owners and other parties who are publishing their client’s intellectual property" and "maintain and develop automated web crawlers to search the internet for possible infringements and analyse the page content to identify actionable cases". Based on the status of various URLs in the IPFS.io and Cloudflare IPFS gateway, I'm guessing these people are searching IPFS for copyright violations and forwarding takedowns to any IPFS gateway they can find. The timeouts the author has experienced may simple be because there is no server online that has the file pinned anymore. Grabbing the file from a random NFT IPFS host, it does seem like most of these links do indeed return copyrighted material. Does one need to visit an IPFS relay to file a DMCA takedown? I would expect so, but the DMCA does allow anyone with good intentions to take down copyright (you only need to really believe that you have a claim on a DMCA takedown, an actual legal basis is only relevant after a counter filing).
jokethrowaway 3y ago
Yes. If you want to go on a fun legal adventure, sue them. I used to run a legit DMCA takedown business and tons of competitors would just mass spam anything even remotely matching because their tech was trash. Our software instead was accessing every infringing link before sending a request and requiring some human approval. Most likely (I never worked with IPFS so no idea about it) they found those links linked by someone on some other page and believed the information on those links - or they just wanted to shut you down. In practice, almost no-one wants to go through the hassle of actually suing you (especially if you're a 13 year old from another jurisdiction who makes 1k per month in ads on warez -what money can they expect to get from you?) so it's either a very large customer with money to waste (think Zumba Fitness big) or it's just an empty threat. Unfortunately DMCA law is insanely bad as it's forcing compliance from small actors or you're risking legal action - but what can you expect from a government lobbied by copyright owners. I run some website with user uploaded content right now - and I've implemented an automated takedown form which waits less than 24hrs from each takedown request and then automatically remove the content automatically.
geocrasher 3y ago
Somebody else mentioned it, but I'm going to reinforce it: You need to respond to the DMCA complaint and say the following: All of the URLS in this DMCA complaint are offline. Done. Move on with your life.

274 points by jstanley 3y ago

They aren't fraudulent takedowns, the URLs are valid, I checked myself, took a random one of the list and sure enough, an epub started to download.

dmitrygr 3y ago

Please tell me where to donate to help you put someone sending invalid DMCA notices behind bars!

beardog 3y ago

Is legal requests ruining fun the same reason you dropped SMS privacy?

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Mmmm... DMCA spam/extortion seems like a industry just waiting to take off.

d4mi3n 3y ago
Waiting to take off? It’s been alive and well for years. A few examples: Bungie suing person responsible for multiple fraudulent Destiny 2 DMCA takedowns, 2022: https://www.vg247.com/bungie-suing-person-responsible-for-fraudulent-destiny-2-dmca-takedowns https://www.vg247.com/bungie-suing-person-responsible-for-fr... Using Youtube takedowns as extortion, 2017: https://www.techdirt.com/2017/10/25/using-youtube-takedowns-as-extortion/ https://www.techdirt.com/2017/10/25/using-youtube-takedowns-... Warner Bros’ False Takedowns Stifle Free Speech, EFF Tells Court, 2013: https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-false-takedowns-stifle-free-speech-eff-tells-court-120306/ https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-false-takedowns-stifle-...
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  I mean in an highly automated way, ala modern call extortion and such.
- suction 3y ago
  [dead]
EdwardDiego 3y ago
Someone patent it as a business process and then assign it to a patent troll, let the bottom feeders sort it out.
ww520 3y ago
Oh, it's live and well, and compensated very well. Just an example, TwoSetViolins did a live concert of some classical music pieces (no copyright would exist on them at this time and age) and their YouTube video got millions of views. A French music company did a DMCA claim against them and YouTube took down their video and transferred their ad money to the music company. They fought to get their video back. But but the kicker was that the music company got to keep the ad revenue generated during the dispute period, which was most of the money as many event based videos got most of their views from the initial release time frame due to promotion of the events by the video creators. Not sure what the eventual outcome was. As you can see, even if the false claims have failed, the DMCA filers still got a part of the money. The incentive is completely skewed.
- blooalien 3y ago
  Sad thing is that under pretty much any other circumstances (as in not protected by a broken law) that sort of action would totally be straight-up fraud on the part of the filer (literally stealing ad revenue).

annoyingnoob 3y ago

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2017/01/using-transparency-fight-takedown-trolls-–-model-dmca https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2017/01/using-transparenc... https://www.dmca.com/FAQ/How-can-I-eliminate-fake-DMCA-Takedown-Notices https://www.dmca.com/FAQ/How-can-I-eliminate-fake-DMCA-Taked...

Dwedit 3y ago

When someone sends a DMCA notice, they state that "under penalty of perjury, they are authorized on behalf of the copyright holder". That is the only part that they can get in trouble for. Whether the work is identified correctly or not is irrelevant.

jojobas 3y ago
Depends on your definition of trouble. You can counterclaim that the content you're sharing is in fact fair use or otherwise not infringing, the original claiming party has some time to sue you, and if they don't, you can sue them for damages caused by the takedown. I don't know whether anything can be done about a takedown notice on content that never existed in the first place, perhaps some generic harassment complaint?
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > and if they don't, you can sue them for damages caused by the takedown. You can counter-sue them regardless of whether or not they sue you. They have made a claim that you are in violation of the law. You are allowed to go to court first to get a "declaratory judgment" that you are not. https://youtu.be/-7H8SZMwz24?t=1320 https://youtu.be/-7H8SZMwz24?t=1320 (30 seconds to watch relevant part)
  - dtgriscom 3y ago
    Would there be damages if their claim was found false? If not, then that's still just legal noise to them (although it could be a step towards something that actually hurts).
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      In jurisdictions which allow it, probably some attorney/filing fees.
theemathas 3y ago
This youtuber got a fraudulent DMCA notice, and his counter-notice got automatically rejected. The person who sent the notice isn't associated with the devs, and is asking for a $100 ransom to get the channel reinstated. How could this be fixed? Proof that the person sending the notice isn't "authorized on behalf of the copyright holder": https://twitter.com/Lionheart/status/1671349063931838464 https://twitter.com/Lionheart/status/1671349063931838464 Tweet about the automatic rejection of the counter-notice: https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671696220190810113 https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671696220190810113 Tweet about the initial DMCA takedown: https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671323777978736643 https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671323777978736643 Mention of the $100 ransom: https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671332970836140032 https://twitter.com/Azrial_Vanity/status/1671332970836140032 Any youtube people on here can help?

nightpool 3y ago

Ultimately, a DMCA notification is a notification that you have infringing content that can in principle be accessed / hosted through your sites. It's effectively a "friendly heads up" from the copyright owner that prevents you from being sued if you can take the content down expeditiously. It's a copyright owner saying "here are some URLs that could be infringing, and they need to be blocked." The author says "you don't know if the hash is already blocked in the web server configuration, or if the server is broken in some way that prevents access to that hash, etc", but that doesn't really matter—if they're already blocked, or inaccessible, then all you need to say is that that's so. Otherwise, it's on you to block them—it doesn't matter if anybody accessed them or not, just that they would be accessible if they're not blocked.

veave 3y ago

Is hardbin.com currently down? It says it "refused to connect." btw isn't that wording wrong? Shouldn't it be that it refused to let me connect?

deleted 3y ago
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scrollaway 3y ago
Connecting is a two-way verb, like “discuss”, “interact”, “shake hands”, etc.
jjulius 3y ago
>Is hardbin.com currently down? The author answers this question in the article.
HWR_14 3y ago
Quoted from the article: > "I have now taken hardbin.com down completely because dealing with this sort of thing makes it less fun to run and more like hard work, but I do still have a copy of the log files."

nitwit005 3y ago

I'd assume a dumb script. All the filenames in the first file end with "annas-archive.(extension)". Perhaps some search or lookup feature of Anna's archive generates URLs, and they assumed all URLs were genuine? A lot of this stuff seems to be very blindly done. Companies have taken down their own content.

faangsticle 3y ago
Why hasn't there been any blow-back?
- tiedieconderoga 3y ago
  From whom? Your average voter neither knows nor cares about the DMCA. We've all got things to do, people to see, and computing is just one industry/hobby. Influential companies prefer predictable systems. They are thrilled that they can wash their hands of liability for their users' unvetted uploads. Having the removal process boiled down to a simple form they can dedicate an inbox to is icing on the cake. Rightsholders are happy, because they can commit perjury with impunity in pursuit of defending their IP. Legislators don't care, because their constituents are happy and their voters don't care. Where would the blowback come from?
nitwit005 3y ago
Now that I'm home, and have time to poke around, I see that it may just be confusion about the domain. Looked up an ISBN on Anna's archive, and I see: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzaceadernoyib7mknhbdtnrdem56o2egzvkwmuykkv4zaxvmovi37qd4?filename=atlas-and-synopsis-of-lever-s-histopathology-of-e--annas-archive.pdf https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzaceadernoyib7mknhbdt... Which is exactly the same as the given link, except for the domain: https://hardbin.com/ipfs/bafykbzaceadernoyib7mknhbdtnrdem56o2egzvkwmuykkv4zaxvmovi37qd4?filename=atlas-and-synopsis-of-lever-s-histopathology-of-e--annas-archive.pdf https://hardbin.com/ipfs/bafykbzaceadernoyib7mknhbdtnrdem56o... Perhaps cloudflare, or their ipfs servce, confused their script somehow.

causality0 3y ago

Of course you did. Most DMCA takedowns are fraudulent.

not2b 3y ago

If someone sends you a DMCA takedown request for URLs that aren't even valid, then you can reply that you've complied with their request and taken the (nonexistent) material down: you are no longer serving content from those URLs because you never were. I think that what's going on here is incompetence, not fraud.

deleted 3y ago
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unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
Yeah, and then the sender writes back to complain about the 1 address that was real. If this person is a paralegal, complain to the law firm. If the law firm doesn't respond, complain to the bar.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  Does the bar regulate paralegals?
  - unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
    If the paralegal works for a lawyer, yes.
klabb3 3y ago
> I think that what's going on here is incompetence, not fraud. There’s a middle ground: sabotage. DMCA complaints have asymmetric incentives. You can, afaik, send a near-infinite number of (generated, duplicated, likely-to-not-exist) complaints at the cost of an email. As a host, you are obligated to comply with each individual report. Automating the process of decoding arbitrary emails, mapping to content you have and verifying that it’s copyrighted is extremely hard if not impossible, so you end up with a manual defense against an automated attack. This can obviously be exploited for purposes of sabotage. Imagine sending bulk emails to the police reporting all people you don’t like for all crimes you can think of, without any risk. Or if you could call mayday on the sea, get other ships to reroute and risk their lives, with no consequences.

Tao3300 3y ago

I'm all for making a violent public example of people who do this. No one in government is incentivised to fix DMCA, and they'd ruin you if you tried.

cheald 3y ago

I would be halfway willing to bet that some genius asked ChatGPT "please provide me with a list of URLs where my book is being illegally shared", or something similar, and then started firing off emails.

slang800 3y ago
These are actual hashes for books that exist somewhere on the IPFS network. You can get a lot of them to resolve. They've just never been requested from the site the DMCA notices are being sent to. It's more likely that someone downloaded an IPFS hash list from LibGen and started sending emails generated from that.

breeezzy 3y ago

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SnorkelTan 3y ago

the dmca takedown services are awful. They just do exact text match on titles of videos and submit dmca requests on behalf of the content owner. If you embed a video widget from the content owners official YouTube page on your blog for example and quote the title, often these services will still send a dmca request. Even if you respond and say the complaint is invalid some services will still ban you for receiving too many requests. Source: built a crappy content farm with video embeds. Received avalanche of requests. It’s hard to cry about my case in particular since it was just a dumb content farm. But ops post is another example of this terrible software and legal process having wider implications.

Gordonjcp 3y ago
So what you're saying is, I need to set up an IPFS gateway and populate it with lots of videos that I hold the copyright for, which happen to have names that match commonly-pirated movies? I wonder if they bother to download them to check? Hours and hours of bars and tone...
- SnorkelTan 3y ago
  Unlikely they download them. Video embeds ads not copyright infringement as far as I understand since they give the tube site permission to display their work and broadly show it wherever they want. Still got dmcas.

komali2 3y ago

> Law Enforcement - I.C.E Referrals Maybe it's more the "customs" side of this department that this referral is going to, but it also sounds to me like trying to wield the sledgehammer of an ICE officer showing up to an immigrant's door, a notoriously evil strategy employed by all sorts of businesses and government agencies to get what they want. The DMCA abuse is disgusting, the ICE threat is evil.

from 3y ago
They are likely referring to Homeland Security Investigations, a division within ICE which is basically like a parallel FBI that handles white collar/CSAM/high level drug stuff. Usually not immigration related unless its related to migrant smuggling or visa fraud.

srj 3y ago

Several tech companies send transparency data of take down requests to www.lumendatabase.org. You can get a sense of scale and pattern.

shmde 3y ago
Lumendatabase.org is my go-to for the porn links which have been removed from the search results. Thanks Google !

advael 3y ago

I am sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but the DMCA is just such an egregiously bad law. Its main use cases are this kind of consequence-free fraudulent terrorism and the much worse draconian de facto state enforcement of extremely customer-hostile business models. It needs to be nuked from orbit

hnick 3y ago
I think its main use case is safe harbour. Without the DMCA, if I posted something infringing copyright, Hacker News would be liable as the service provider. DMCA shifts the blame to me, but the publisher has to comply with takedown requests. I think overall this is a good thing for an internet that hosts user-created content, which includes comments, but they could definitely tidy up the implementation. As it stands you are allowed to reject the claim if you think you are in the right, and the company should restore the disputed content if you do so - but some like YouTube operate above and beyond the DMCA and seemingly intentionally blur the lines a lot so people blame the DMCA and not their custom process.
- atahanacar 3y ago
  Here is how my country does safe harbor: If you are a website like Hacker News that publishes user-generated data, you are considered a "hosting provider". Hosting providers have no responsibility to check or enforce legality of the user generated content as long as they log the IP addresses of the users for at least 1 year. This in my opinion is a much neater solution than DMCA. Citing from the related law: >ARTICLE 2 >e) Access Provider means real persons or legal entities that provide access to Internet for its users, >f) Content Provider means real persons or legal entities that create, amend or provide all kinds of information or data presented to users on the Internet, ... >m) Hosting Provider means real or legal entities that provide or operate systems that host services and content, ... >ARTICLE 5 >(1) Hosting provider is not obligated to check the content it provides or to investigate whether it is an illegal activity. >(2) Hosting provider is obliged to remove the content that is against to law if it is notified according to Articles 8 and 9 of this Law. >(3) Hosting provider is obliged to keep traffic information for the services it provides for a period of not less than one year and not more than two years, to be determined in the regulation, and to ensure the accuracy, integrity and privacy of this information. ... >ARTICLE 8 >(2) The decision to block access is given by the judge in the case of the investigation and by the court in the case of prosecution. In case of any delay in the investigation, the public prosecutor may also decide to remove the content and/or to block access. In this case, the public prosecutor’s decision shall be submitted to the judge’s approval within twenty-four hours, and the judge shall make his decision within twenty-four hours at the latest. If the decision is not approved within this period, the measure shall be removed immediately by the public prosecutor. >(3) A copy of the decision to remove the content and/or to block access given by the judge, the court or the public prosecutor shall be sent to the Authority for the further action. >(4) The decision to remove the content and/or block access to publications whose content constitutes the crimes stated in the first paragraph shall be given ex officio by the President. This decision shall be notified to the relevant content, hosting and access provider and is asked to carry out its requirements.

yooo000 3y ago

I frequently receive cease and desist notices from "legal entities" demanding I stop selling the officially authorized clothing brands on one of my sites...I ignore them. Nothing ever happens. It's a competitor, or competitors, trying real hard to take over my search engine rankings by trying to shut my site down. These DMCA requests are the same thing - basically bullying or scare tactics. Real legal requests, etc. come in the form of physical paperwork, signed and sometimes notarized.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Can they go directly to e.g. Google and have your site delisted even if it's fraudulent, and if so, does Google inform you of this?
- ducklingquack 3y ago
  Yes and yes. Whenever a DMCA takedown notice is filed with Google the allegedly infringing URL is quickly removed from the SERP. Google will notify you (and the public) in following ways: 1. Publishing the request on lumendatabase.org 2. Informing you through the Search Console (which has a delay of a few days) 3. Publishing the removal on Google Transparency Report website 4. Publishing a note at the bottom of the SERP mentioning that a website was not featured on the results due to a DMCA takedown notice with a link to lumendatabase Google takes the ”I trust you bro” stance and delists your URL until (if ever) you file a DMCA counter notification which can be done through Google (can look up the link if you need it).
  - chayesfss 3y ago
    [dead]
  - ixwt 3y ago
    I don't necessarily think it's "I trust you bro", I think it's more "Section 230 requires us to delist any content immediately until a counter claim is filed to maintain safe harbor protections". But I'm not a lawyer. Just listened and read a lot about this kind of content.

bighoki2885000 3y ago

[dead]

ronsor 3y ago

I think the DMCA could be fixed simply by allowing website operators to charge a reasonable processing fee for takedowns

tenebrisalietum 3y ago
This would turn website operators into copyright bounty hunters.
SnorkelTan 3y ago
My thought as well. A refundable processing fee for uncontested take downs would eliminate 90% of the problem.

jaimex2 3y ago

Is there any legal requirement that you need to receive emails? I'd block the provider's forwarding you anything. Make people jump through hoops/captchas to contact. If they legitimately need to get in touch they can, they just need to be a smart human.

SnorkelTan 3y ago
ID verification of submitter s similar to crypto/adult sites.

gorgoiler 3y ago

I find it unpleasant that Gandi forwarded the DMCA letters to the author. (Gandi is the registrar for hardbin.com.) I’ve never liked how the DMCA turns private companies into policemen. If they’re going to tattle to hardbin.com’s mom, why stop there? Why not send the DMCA takedown to IANA too? And also to the authorities in France where (I think) Gandi are based? Similarly, just as Gandi passed the DMCA letter on to the author, so too should he pass on the DMCA letter to whoever posted the IPFS content. I would suggest (tongue in cheek) having a link on hardbin.com where users can regularly check to see if their content has been issued a DMCA notice. Now hardbin.com can’t be liable any more — like Gandi, they’ve been a good private cop and passed the notice on, down the chain!

account42 3y ago
If hardbin.com has whois protection enabled then Gandi is acting as the contact point because their address will be in the relevant fields.

lja 3y ago

There is a lot of DMCA hate in these comments. I run a DMCA take down service where we remove revenge porn for people that are victimized by it. DMCA is the only tool we have to take these images down so as much as there are holes and gaps in that law, it's not all bad.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
DMCA is a corrupt, offensive attack on consumer rights. Just because it can be used for laudable purposes doesn't change that.
- lja 3y ago
  Not saying it makes DMCA perfect, just wanted everyone here to know there are some really awesome, clever uses of DMCA that people use for good and if we torch the DMCA we should make sure we don't leave those folks out in the cold.
  - crvdgc 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing the use case. However using it to defend the entire DMCA sounds like a false dichotomy. Surely there's a way to make rules only for those "awesome" uses, so that they don't have to be "clever" uses. C stands for Copyright and it's mainly used that way in practice.
    - lja 3y ago
      Totally agree with everything you said, I just want to remind people that half of the story of DMCA is that we have really poor controls over our privacy and ironically DMCA is one of our only tools. It does have many, many broken aspects.
  - mcv 3y ago
    I applaud you for using the DMCA for good. You're doing good work, and please keep doing that. That doesn't mean that the DMCA can't also be used for evil, though. It would be nice if it could only be used for good, but maybe that's impossible. It may also be possible to replace it with something more specifically tailored to take down revenge porn. I certainly think revenge porn is far more serious than a mere copyright violation.

chwa982 3y ago

[dead]

jeroenhd 3y ago

Just once I would like one of these DMCA clowns to try to hit someone with the time and money to do something about this. Get that perjury judgement, don't settle for anything less.

thinkingemote 3y ago

IPFS, I'm unfamilar with it - does a gateway have the ability to host anything from IPFS if it's requested to be pinned? Would the hash of the content be the same wherever it is being served? If the service was running could these books have appeared on the gateway? If yes, it looks like they are sending notices to every gateway they can find assuming that the content could be hosted there as it might or might not and they dont check. is it a kind of demanding adding something to a blocklist pre-emptively?

innodb1 3y ago

weather its legal or illegal they have achieved their objective.

jeroenhd 3y ago

I think this person, Gareth Young, has at some point worked for Covington (one of those LinkedIn scrapers seems to have caught their profile: https://www.arounddeal.com/p/gareth-young/m6oymuxsnd/ https://www.arounddeal.com/p/gareth-young/m6oymuxsnd/ but those sites are usually trash so who knows when this was still relevant). Here's an article from 2014 mentioning the same person: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/63357-the-piracy-problem.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/child... and a listing which puts Gareth with Covington & Burlap in 2018: https://www.resultsbase.net/event/4529/results/2491300 https://www.resultsbase.net/event/4529/results/2491300 These people seem to have a history of bullshit takedowns: http://www.gregthatcher.com/Financial/THATCHER_TO_HOWARD_00910320130823171232.pdf http://www.gregthatcher.com/Financial/THATCHER_TO_HOWARD_009... The ciu-online domain is hosted by https://www.ravensbay.co.uk/ https://www.ravensbay.co.uk/ which "developed a high performance database system to automatically track infringements and issue notices to website owners and other parties who are publishing their client’s intellectual property" and "maintain and develop automated web crawlers to search the internet for possible infringements and analyse the page content to identify actionable cases". Based on the status of various URLs in the IPFS.io and Cloudflare IPFS gateway, I'm guessing these people are searching IPFS for copyright violations and forwarding takedowns to any IPFS gateway they can find. The timeouts the author has experienced may simple be because there is no server online that has the file pinned anymore. Grabbing the file from a random NFT IPFS host, it does seem like most of these links do indeed return copyrighted material. Does one need to visit an IPFS relay to file a DMCA takedown? I would expect so, but the DMCA does allow anyone with good intentions to take down copyright (you only need to really believe that you have a claim on a DMCA takedown, an actual legal basis is only relevant after a counter filing).

jokethrowaway 3y ago

Yes. If you want to go on a fun legal adventure, sue them. I used to run a legit DMCA takedown business and tons of competitors would just mass spam anything even remotely matching because their tech was trash. Our software instead was accessing every infringing link before sending a request and requiring some human approval. Most likely (I never worked with IPFS so no idea about it) they found those links linked by someone on some other page and believed the information on those links - or they just wanted to shut you down. In practice, almost no-one wants to go through the hassle of actually suing you (especially if you're a 13 year old from another jurisdiction who makes 1k per month in ads on warez -what money can they expect to get from you?) so it's either a very large customer with money to waste (think Zumba Fitness big) or it's just an empty threat. Unfortunately DMCA law is insanely bad as it's forcing compliance from small actors or you're risking legal action - but what can you expect from a government lobbied by copyright owners. I run some website with user uploaded content right now - and I've implemented an automated takedown form which waits less than 24hrs from each takedown request and then automatically remove the content automatically.

geocrasher 3y ago

Somebody else mentioned it, but I'm going to reinforce it: You need to respond to the DMCA complaint and say the following: All of the URLS in this DMCA complaint are offline. Done. Move on with your life.