Every week copyright holders send out millions of takedown notices to websites all across the Internet. While the majority of these claims are legitimate, a healthy percentage are not. These “errors” can cause serious harm to the public, but the senders are never held responsible for their mistakes. Perhaps it’s time to punish repeat senders of bogus takedown notices?
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Should Bogus Copyright Takedown Senders Be Punished? | TorrentFreak
- In recent months the number of takedown requests sent out by copyright holders hasincreased dramatically, and we’re now at a point where it’s starting to turn the Internet into a big mess.
- Just to give an idea of the scope of the issue, Google previously noted that 37% of all DMCA notices they receive are not valid copyright claims.
- The effects of these “errors” are often without any real harm, and in many cases the public doesn’t even notice. Actually, they can be quite entertaining when they lead to self-censorship. When Microsoft asks Google to censor Bing for example, or when Warner wants to takedown the IMDb page of their own movie.
- Tens of thousands of YouTube videos are pulled every week by mistake, live streaming events such as that the Hugo awards are killed because of false claims, websites such as TorrentFreak are censored in error and even Presidential campaigns are interrupted by bogus claims.
- Unfortunately, these ‘incidents’ sometimes cause serious damage. Earlier this week a Mediafire userlost access to her filesbecause of a bogus notice. Or what about theDajaz1andRojadirectawebsites that lost their domain names because of copyright infringement claims that didn’t stand up?
Bogus copyright notices should be treated with the same severity as copyright infringement. If it’s a criminal offense punishable by huge fines that have nothing to do with the damage caused, so should bogus notices. Sadly, I can’t take this to court even though I should.
Posted September 27, 2012 at 7:49pm in copyright infringement bogus claim dmca intellectual property internet online
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