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Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals
- hrmwhat 14y agoAnd that's why I don't contribute anything online
- PeterisP 14y agoWell, that should be fixable - if this is an actual DMCA takedown (instead of a simple complaint), then it does come with a mandatory requirement to be 'under penalty of perjury'. Intentional misuse can thus be persecuted, and may get even criminal penalties. Of course, it's a big question whether they will try to fight it in courts and if DMCA perjury jurisdiction can effectively reach the accused company in India.
- pyre 14y agoIf the perjury jurisdiction can't reach India, then maybe the DMCA notice shouldn't reach the USA. At the very least, it would be a good example case to bring up with your Congress-critter about changing the DMCA.
- belorn 14y agoThat would imply that US originated DMCA notices shouldn't reach outside the US.
- joejohnson 14y agoYeah, maybe they shouldn't.
- pyre 14y agoIf the penalties for abusing the DMCA can't reach outside of the US, then why should the benefits?
- marvin 14y agoI think this was tongue-in-cheek; many in the US (including official people) treat the DMCA as if it was an international law. At the very least, this behavior exists on general copyright issues.
- belorn 14y agoYes. DMCA had for example a real impact on the TPB case in Sweden. Any work that would start implying that DMCA notices should stop at the border, would run into the lobbyists. (I guess I should consider Poe's law a bit more in the future.)
- PeterisP 14y agoWell, US originated DMCA notices already don't reach outside the US. If I'm outside US jurisdiction (i.e., I'm not there, won't be there and I'm not a company with a branch or sales in USA), then DMCA doesn't apply to me. They might send a notice accidentally, but they generally don't bother since they can be safely ignored and usually are. The local laws do apply, so USA tried to bundle DMCA-style provisions in some international trade agreements; but in general there are a bunch of things (such as breaking DRM or selling jailbreak kits) that are restricted by DMCA but explicitly legal in many countries.
- dangrossman 14y agoIt's much simpler than that. To be protected by the safe harbor provision of the DMCA, a service provider must not only promptly disable access to material upon receipt of a notice, they must also promptly re-enable access to that material upon receipt of a counternotice. The original author need only send these notices and the blog posts must be put back up if WordPress wants to be protected from being sued itself for distributing the material. In most cases, this entails nothing more than 2 minutes to copy and paste an e-mail from a readily available template, simply adding in your name and URLs of the content you attest you have permission to publish. The DMCA errs on the side of leaving alleged infringing material online, not the other way around. To force something down, you have to go to court and get a judgement. The perjury statement is actually weaker than it seems. The wording you see in a lot of copy-and-paste notice templates is stronger than is required by the act. You only have to attest under penalty of perjury that you are authorized to act on behalf of the holder of a copyright, not that the contents of your claim are true.
- drucken 14y ago"To get content removed, copyright holder Bob need only claim a good-faith belief that neither he nor the law has authorized the use. Bob is not subject to penalties for perjury. In contrast, to get access to content re-enabled, Alice must claim a good faith belief under penalty of perjury that the material was mistakenly taken down. This allows for copyright holders to send out take-down notices without incurring much liability; to get the sites back up, the recipients might need to expend considerably more resources. Section 510(f) makes the sender of an invalid claim liable for the damages resulting from the content’s improper removal, including legal fees, but that remedy is not always practical. Furthermore, ISP’s tend to remove allegedly offending material immediately, while there is a 10-14 day delay before the ISP re-enables access in response to a counter-notice. For example, if a website advertised an upcoming labor protest outside BlameCo, BlameCo could send a DMCA notice to the site's ISP alleging copyright infringement of their name or logo a week before the protest. The site would then be disabled; even if the site's owners immediately filed a counter-notice, access would not be re-enabled until after the protest, too late to be useful." [1] The behavior described above is consistent with many ISPs, Google and Youtube, for example. In fact, with Youtube's stated policy [2] it is not even clear that without consent from the original "copyright holder" that they will restore content (though from DMCA terms alone they are theoretically legally obliged). Wordpress's stated policy [3] is more direct but no less frustrating for victims of malicious takedown notices. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#Ineffective_Counter-Notice_Procedure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L... [2]: http://www.youtube.com/yt/copyright/counter-notification.html http://www.youtube.com/yt/copyright/counter-notification.htm... [3]: http://en.support.wordpress.com/content-theft-what-to-do/ http://en.support.wordpress.com/content-theft-what-to-do/
- agilord 14y agoI start to wonder: what can we do to actively prevent such things to happen? E.g. someone can copy a blog content, set the date back by a few months, publish it, and submit the DMCA takedown. Even if it reaches the court, who and how will decide who the original author was?
- dangrossman 14y agoThe original author will submit a counternotice and their content will be put back online. If the copier wants to take their bogus case to court, a judge will decide based on the evidence presented. Google cache, Archive.org, server access logs, code repository commit histories, e-mails or whatever else you can find could be presented as evidence of the publication date. In the meantime, the service provider must assume the content is published legally if they want safe harbor protection from bogus lawsuits of their own. I can't think of a better system, honestly.
- dredmorbius 14y ago> The original author will submit a counternotice and their content will be put back online. With a statutorily mandated 10 day delay. Such are the DMCA's take-down procedures.
- dangrossman 14y agoYes, as has been mentioned several times. The act balances the interests of all the parties -- the delay may hurt, but it provides actual victims of copyright infringement the time to go to court and get a preliminary injunction to prevent further damages. If the notice was fraudulent and there was no infringement, the filer is liable for damages and attorneys fees of the accused should they wish to sue and recover them. Whatever loss those 10 days offline caused are recoverable damages.
- opminion 14y agoA digital timestamping service http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper.htm http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper.htm
- javajosh 14y agoI asked this question regarding a recent thread where the site owner claimed to have gotten ripped off, and received no responses. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5166902 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5166902
- ender7 14y agohttp://archive.org/web/web.php http://archive.org/web/web.php is a very common tool for such things.
- javajosh 14y agoI'm a little unclear about how this solves the problem. Why can't a copyright violator request that their site be backed up, perhaps even before the original? Or are you suggesting that site owners upload to the wayback machine as part of the deployment process?
- incision 14y agoAre there no "digital notary" services? Off the top of my head, such a service would allow you to submit a block of text or perhaps a link which the service would regularly check and hash / mirror. I'm thinking this would be straightforward to create, but hard to become established as an authoritative source. EDIT: I see archive.org is a popular way to go about something like this.
- opminion 14y agohttp://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper.htm http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper.htm
- elliottcarlson 14y agoarchive.org is awesome - however there is one thing that bothers me about the indexing service, and I am not sure how it could be improved. The problem is that if a site currently has a robots.txt blocking indexing, the whole history of that site disappears with it. On the one hand, this makes sense - what if some webmaster forgot to prevent indexing and then adds it, with the original intention to not share any of the sites work. On the other hand, this prevents me from finding a site I worked on 15 years ago, because the current domain has it blocked.
- aw3c2 14y agoI am sure IA would be helpful if old data is needed in a court.
- rdtsc 14y agoIt would have to come with an unbreakable chain of authentication. Otherwise, those that steal the content, would just submit it first, under their own or a made up name. Then it would make it harder to actually prove it is your content if you didn't first put it there.
- lilsunnybee 14y agoThey couldn't steal it first if the work was submitted before publishing.
- dweekly 14y agoHey, so a common thread here seems to be enforceability of false DMCA notices and how it's a pity there's no penalty. There are penalties. Check out 17 USC 512(f): http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 (f) Misrepresentations.— Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1) that material or activity is infringing, or (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it. I was the plaintiff in OPG v. Diebold, which was the first US federal lawsuit to establish the enforceability: we won. You can't just issue spurious, false DMCA notices without opening yourself up to large damages, such as the ones that Diebold had to pay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPG_v._Diebold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPG_v._Diebold
- tibbon 14y agoSo this post on Ars is interesting- because it seems to involve a non-US company sending DMCA takedown notices, which triggers a US Law, but if you try to find the non-US company and sue them then going after them might be very hard (even if you win, because recovering damages might be impossible). So essentially, they can use US law against a site, but have little change of repercussion? If they have invalid WHOIS information, isn't that ground for them losing their domain? Or I could be reading this incorrectly.
- heyadayo 14y agoYou better have legal fees awarded to you as part of the damages, or have pro bono representation... a $100k damages award isn't going to pay for the $1-$2mm in costs to litigate a federal suit. For all practical purposes the 512f has proven to be a pretty pointless tool for holding large corporation accountable.
- dweekly 14y ago
- tokenadult 14y agoThis shows the power of Retraction Watch, http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/ http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/ a site that I think I learned about from another user's comment here on HN, to update the reputations of "researchers" who have had to retract many published journal articles. All the more reason, I think, to regularly read Retraction Watch to find out what is going on. The Retraction Watch site's own reporting http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/wordpress-removes-anil-potti-posts-from-retraction-watch-in-error-after-false-dmca-copyright-claim/ http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/wordpress-re... on what Ars Technica passes on in the submitted article is quite interesting, and an example of the carefully nuanced writing on Retraction Watch.
- thechut 14y agoNobody here has made what I thought to be the biggest point in this article. The reputation management company... Given the situation and the details mentioned in the article. It seems the reputation management company is hiring people to re-post content and send DMCAs. What other explanation is there for why somebody would rip off blog posts. Obviously this sort of thing would be a last resort for the reputation management company. But in some cases, there may be no other way to remove / push down the unwanted content. I would bet this is a common tactic of reputation management companies. Can anybody here confirm or offer insight about how these companies work?
- wging 14y ago>Can anybody here confirm or offer insight about how these companies work? Twitter: https://twitter.com/anilpottimd https://twitter.com/anilpottimd Website: http://web.archive.org/web/20120318184249/http://www.anilpotti.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120318184249/http://www.anilpot... Other website: http://web.archive.org/web/20120309072714/http://www.anilpottiblog.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120309072714/http://www.anilpot... Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anil_Potti&diff=478282377&oldid=478281064 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anil_Potti&dif... That's how.
- monochromatic 14y agoThe same thing occurred to me as a possibility, but saying that "it seems they are doin this" is way stronger than what we can conclude from this article. Do you have any evidence beyond "hey, this could happen"?
- thechut 14y agoNo, there really isn't hard proof which is why I'm assuming ars didn't jump to that conclusion. To me what points to it the most is why would somebody rip off those RetractionWatch articles in India. It seems that something other than trying to increase ad revenue is going on here.
- monochromatic 14y ago
- mikeleeorg 14y agoHow easy is it to file a DMCA takedown notice? I would think there's some due diligence on the part of DMCA to verify the claim first. At least, I hope so.
- dredmorbius 14y agoGoogle for an example of the DMCA form or boilerplate (the language is in the law). Find the registered agent address for a site. Send an email. Done.
- protomyth 14y agoIf we have to keep this thing, I dearly wish the party filing the request would have to show some proof or at least be in the US. this guilty before innocent crap is a pain. On a sadder note, looks like the alumni association is going to receive a letter from me.
- ComputerGuru 14y agoIs anyone else having a problem with Google no longer acknowledging responses to false/faulty/inaccurate DMCA takedown requests? We used to receive 3 or 4 a year, and Google was good about getting us relisted when we explained the error to them. I had two DMCAs from Google last month, and they still haven't gotten back to me about my request for relisting....
- SagelyGuru 14y agoOh, come on, wake up! Don't you see yet that this is exactly what the DMCA notices and similar have been designed to do? It is a tool to silence the inconvenient whistleblowers.
- fencepost 14y agoOne somewhat late comment: based on what I saw in other discussions of this, the domain registration of the site in India is basically all false information - one starting point might be to see what can be done about getting that domain registration cancelled. The Indian registry does have a policy that registrants must provide accurate information.