DMCA Notices Gone Wrong

This kind of thing irritates me – I can certainly sympathize with Hollywood’s concern about piracy because when you spend a lot of money making a product to sell, it really burns to see people taking it out from under your nose for free … but why can’t they be a little bit more honorable in the ways that they go about trying to deal all of it?!

Movie Studios Ask Google To Censor Their Own Films, Facebook and Wikipedia
http://torrentfreak.com/movie-studios-ask-google-to-censor-their-own-films-facebook-and-wikipedia-121203/

Whether it’s frivolous lawsuits or an inane bill like SOPA or blanket DMCA notices without taking the time to actually do any research, these are the kinds of things that lose my sympathy when the studios flail about piracy costing them $47 mega bajillion dollars every year. Most DMCA notices these days come from companies that “specialize” in takedowns for their clients, but if these folks can’t tell the difference between Wikipedia and an actual file sharing service, then it begs the question of why the system doesn’t have penalties for illegitimate DMCA notices to help combat these types of abuse from the other side yet. Everything to date is written in favor exclusively of copyright owners, but clearly we have enough examples now that maybe some protections need to be built in for the other side that actually has to process these types of requests.

If Google has to process DMCA notices in a timely manner to maintain its Safe Harbor under the DMCA, then the agents submitting these requests should be subject to financial penalties for every bogus and/or stupid entry that Google and other providers then have to spend time dealing with on account of their laziness.

What would the actual penalty be??? Well, the MPAA seems to think that $250,000 per film is a good penalty for violations…

P.S. Of course, probably the most comical of all is the idea that people are actually paying these copies to request removal of their files from the likes of Google … which nothing against Google, but let’s be honest, the big fish involved with piracy don’t use search engines any more than they use public BitTorrent trackers or even sites like MegaUpload. No one uses those to download stuff illegally unless they’re just being lazy or they feel like getting caught… 🙄

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