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| Chilling Effects Clearinghouse > DMCA Notices > Weather Reports > DMCA Takedown Notice Extravaganza! | 
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|  DMCA Takedown Notice Extravaganza!Adam Holland, February 07, 2013 Abstract: It has been a wild week or so in the DMCA takedown world. There has been so much going on recently in the takedown world that it seemed to make more sense to do a round-up of related stories. "Three strikes" or "six strikes" laws have been in the news a lot recently. Regular Chilling Effects readers are probably familiar with these laws. First made famous by France's HADOPI law , but later put into place in New Zealand and the UK, and on track for going live in the USA very soon, they are intended to be a sort of compromise, wherein copyright violators (i.e. people who, without permission, download things that are still copyrighted) get a series of warnings and penalties, at the culmination of which, their Internet access is cut off.
"The Center for Copyright Information (CCI) is an American organization created by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)". Second, despite some claimed successes, it isn't clear that the laws work, in the sense of combating "piracy". There are serious potential data security issues that have put a temporary hold on enforcing the French law, (although it didn't ultimately stop them) the lawsuits against downloaders either never materialize, are pointless to bring except perhaps as setting an example, given that the plaintiffs win , but had to spend $250,000 to get a penalty payment of $616, or are leading to some probably foreseeable negative social consequences for the accused.
On top of all that, the company hired by CCI to monitor online activity,MarkMonitor, "which has developed a program designed to flag users who share copyrighted material on the peer-to-peer filesharing service BitTorrent.," has already been embarrassed in the course of its current monitoring activity, when, hired by HBO to enforce HBO's copyrighted material online, , it asked Google to remove around 4 million links, links that included the official HBO sites. Whoops. This kind of transcendently inaccurate error become all the more worrisome in light of stories like this one, wherein the entirety of a website's content on a particular topic was copied without permission and posted to a new site. The site in question, Retraction Watch, tracks the withdrawal or retraction of published academic papers. The copied content all had to do with one particular researcher, Anil Potti, who has been the subject of close scrutiny recently for falsifying aspects of his CV. The wholesale copying without attribution would be bad enough. But then the copiers, a site in India [with a UK-based owner, and possibly falsified content], filed a DMCA notice complaining that the originals violated their (that is, the copier's) rights. Given the "no questions asked" nature of the DMCA process, the original posts were immediately removed, although they are back up now after an outcry. The folks at Popehat have commented on the issue, and reference the Streisand Effect, seemingly intimating that that the filing of the takedown notice was not simply a foreigner trying to free ride re: content and take economic advantage, but rather someone, perhaps someone connected with Potti, using the DMCA as a tool for censorship of unfavorable opinions, but succeeding only in exacerbating the situation, from the perspective of negative publicity. Does hiring a reputation manager ever turn out well? After all of that, the news that Activision has filed a takedown complaint against the Government of North Korea for using material from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in a propaganda video seems almost tame.
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