DMCA Copyright Complaint to Google

https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/10275257#

by dbaupp • 12 years ago

248 141 12 years ago

chillingeffects.org

facorreia• 12 years ago

Including:

https://help.github.com/articles/dealing-with-non-fast-forwa...

https://github.com/yahoo/pure

damm• 12 years ago

Some of the urls in there are clearly unrelated; too bad everyone will have to counter notice to restore services.

dbaupp• 12 years ago

This removes a variety of projects from Google search results, including ones from Mozilla (specifically, Rust), Facebook, Yahoo, Netflix, openSUSE, as well as github documentation, e.g.

  - https://github.com/yahoo/pure
  - https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo
  - https://github.com/openSUSE/wicked
  - https://github.com/Netflix/Lipstick
  - https://github.com/facebook/rebound
  - https://help.github.com/articles/dealing-with-non-fast-forward-errors/

(NB. the sender, wickedpictures.com, is NSFW.)

sambo_long• 12 years ago

I wonder if a bunch of these companies might get together and sue the sender of take down for defamation, loss of business, something.

eli2• 12 years ago

Knowingly filing a false takedown is a crime, but it's pretty hard to prove. This isn't really defamation.

Natsu5• 12 years ago

Actually, this was sent by "Takedown Piracy LLC" working on behalf of Wickedpictures. They file DMCA notices by the truckload according to the results I get in Chilling Effect's search, so you can safely assume they're a DMCA notice spammer.

Unfortunately, it does not list the individual lawyer who signed off on this complaint, or I would be tempted to draft a letter to their local bar association pointing out how careless they are, as no reasonable person could mistake Github's documentation for a porno movie.

akusete• 12 years ago

Rule 34.

userbinator3• 12 years ago

Wicked might be paying them to do it, and if they're charging "per infringing URL removed", it makes a lot of sense that they're trying to get as many removed as possible. Wicked might also be a victim in this case.

gee_totes• 12 years ago

I wonder how these pages got picked up. If Wickedpictures is doing some type of Natural Language processing to identify these pages as their content, it would be interesting to analyze the content of these pages and reverse-engineer Wickedpictrue's system.

Then of course, you could package that reverse-engineering work as a service that will insert red-herring comments in source code to set off the automated DMCA takedowns, creating a free semi-private repository on github.

MichaelGG5• 12 years ago

Or if someone you don't like has user-generated content, you go try to get DMCA'd keywords onto their page and watch them drop off search results.

userbinator3• 12 years ago

It looks like everything with "wicked", "pushover", "knockout", "lipstick", and other keywords are being targeted. Clearly the work of an automated process and not a human.

One of the more amusing URLs that caught my attention is a link to a torrent search site with the query being a single, very generic keyword: "girl". Presumably the results of that search include content they want to remove, so it also got hit.

chii• 12 years ago

there really should be a penalty for issuing illegitimate dmca takedowns (beyond some reasonably number - so you don't get scared to do it).

lambda• 12 years ago

Has anyone (Mozilla, Yahoo, SUSE, Netflix, Facebook, Github) filed a counter-notice yet? That's the next step in the DMCA dance; if you file a counter notice, and the accuser does not then file a lawsuit, Google can put back the content.

btown• 12 years ago

Confirmed: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

ghuntley• 12 years ago

Have submitted a counter-complaint (#2-4109000005746) for the following:

# curl https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/10275257 | grep github

     https://help.github.com/articles/dealing-with-non-fast-forward-errors/
     https://github.com/Zizzamia/ng-tasty
     https://github.com/zen-kernel/zen-kernel
     https://github.com/yahoo/pure/releases/
     https://github.com/yahoo/pure
     https://github.com/YabataDesign/afterglow-theme
     https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew
     https://github.com/wearefractal/glob-watcher
     https://github.com/wanderlust/wanderlust
     https://github.com/thombergs/wicked-charts
     https://github.com/Thibauth/python-pushover
     https://github.com/tcnksm/vagrant-pushover
     https://github.com/substack/pushover
     https://github.com/SteveSanderson/knockout-es5
     https://github.com/sps/pushover4j
     https://github.com/sensu/sensu-community-plugins/blob/master/handlers/notification/pushover.rb
     https://github.com/schneems/wicked/wiki/Testing-Wicked-with-RSpec
     https://github.com/schneems/wicked
     https://github.com/satyr/coco
     https://github.com/satyr
     https://github.com/sampsyo/beets/issues/546
     https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo
     https://github.com/rniemeyer/knockout-delegatedEvents
     https://github.com/rniemeyer/knockout-amd-helpers
     https://github.com/qbit/node-pushover
     https://github.com/openSUSE/wicked/issues/432
     https://github.com/openSUSE/wicked
     https://github.com/Nuku/Flexible-Survival/blob/master/Stripes/Candy
     https://github.com/Netflix/Lipstick
     https://github.com/nemomobile/lipstick
     https://github.com/mrmrs/colors
     https://github.com/mirage
     https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf/issues/78
     https://github.com/LubosD/darling
     https://github.com/laprice/pushover
     https://github.com/kryap/php-pushover
     https://github.com/krisselden/broccoli-sane-watcher
     https://github.com/Knockout-Contrib/Knockout-Validation
     https://github.com/knockout/knockout
     https://github.com/knockout
     https://github.com/kirang20/wgxp-java-rosa
     https://github.com/jreese/znc-push/blob/master/doc/pushover.md
     https://github.com/jnwatts/pushover.sh
     https://github.com/jfinkels/flask-restless/
     https://github.com/jasonlewis/resource-watcher
     https://github.com/huxi/lilith
     https://github.com/hannorein/rebound
     https://github.com/gregghz/Watcher
     https://github.com/feuerbach/tasty
     https://github.com/facebook/rebound-js
     https://github.com/facebook/rebound
     https://github.com/erniebrodeur/pushover
     https://github.com/entertailion/Fling/blob/master/README.md
     https://github.com/enkydu/raspi_runner
     https://github.com/dyaa/Laravel-pushover
     https://github.com/danesparza/Pushover.NET
     https://github.com/crazed
     https://github.com/callmenick/css-loaders-spinners-2/tree/master/js
     https://github.com/callmenick/css-loaders-spinners-2
     https://github.com/allure-framework/allure-core
     https://github.com/abrt/satyr

Thanks for reaching out to us!

We have received your legal request. We receive many such complaints each day; your message is in our queue, and we'll get to it as quickly as our workload permits.

Due to the large volume of requests that we experience, please note that we will only be able to provide you with a response if we determine your request may be a valid and actionable legal complaint, and we may respond with questions or requests for clarification. For more information on Google's Terms of Service, please visit http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS

Regards,

The Google Team

shakethemonkey2• 12 years ago

Google should raise the bar for those who abuse the DMCA system like this. Maybe require submissions to be in writing, and notarized.

sfeng• 12 years ago

There's a very specific procedure they have to follow outlined in the DMCA law.

nissehulth• 12 years ago

Are they going to accept that counter-complaint, coming from a third party? (yes, I should probably read up on DMCA procedures)

ctoshok• 12 years ago

GitHub doesn't :( I filed one for the craftbukkit takedown a while back, and got a polite response saying it has to be the content owner.

adamnemecek• 12 years ago

What an eclectic collection of projects.

j42• 12 years ago

Looking at common keywords among the URL's, it appears as though they are merely taking a movie database, googling titles, and submitting complaints for anything containing said title/keyword in the URL (e.g. Pushover, Knockout, Wicked, etc.).

Shady, manipulative, and particularly troubling when the DMCA protocol is "shoot-first" and there is absolutely no oversight or review.

Some kind of punitive penalty for false complaints and a few precedents are needed to put these copyright trolls in their place...

nathan7• 12 years ago

Also among them: https://github.com/facebook/rebound-js https://github.com/facebook/rebound

personjerry• 12 years ago

How the hell does https://help.github.com/articles/dealing-with-non-fast-forwa... relate to their movies?

Why are they allowed to take down sites so obviously unrelated?

I imagine it's pretty easy to use this sort of takedown in a malicious manner to remove competitors' sites, surely there is some defense mechanism against this?

vacri• 12 years ago

It's got 'fast-forward' in the title, so presumably their scraper added it to the pile, because 'fast-forward' is a term used in video.

Why are they allowed to take down sites so obviously unrelated?

Because they can: DMCA.

Natsu5• 12 years ago

How the hell does https://help.github.com/articles/dealing-with-non-fast-forwa.... relate to their movies?

It doesn't. This outfit, per Chilling Effect's search, pumps out notices by the hundreds. Most likely they use some script or tool to grab a bunch of URLs from various Google searches, then dump them into a form letter. I'm not sure if anyone was supposed to weed out the obviously bogus output, but I think we can all see that nothing of the sort happened.

They churn these out fast enough that nobody is actually paying any real attention to what they're doing from what I've seen.

instakill• 12 years ago

Github has a legal team. They should sue.

crazysim2• 12 years ago

I posted this in #rust because I was having trouble with rustc and targets. Thanks for posting this!

crazysim2• 12 years ago

I must say though. This was unnoticed for a week if I first reported this!

https://botbot.me/mozilla/rust/2015-01-07/?msg=28933399&page...

kibwen• 12 years ago

Thanks for reporting it! The proper Mozilla folk seem to be taking action at this point.

lukesandberg2• 12 years ago

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...

That page shows all the dmca requests to google that target github.com. Wicked pictures shows up in a number of requests but they are by no means the only copyright holder issuing requests.

You can click through to the request pages and get links to chilling effects and it will also tell you which URLs were requested that were _not_ taken down. ChillingEffects just reports on the requests, not the actions.

Buge• 12 years ago

So Google removed them all except 3? That seems pretty bad.

intortus• 12 years ago

If companies didn't remove targets of takedown requests immediately and without scrutiny, then user content on the internet would not be able to exist.

lukesandberg2• 12 years ago

This is most likely due to a script screwing up. A lot of these companies retain companies that specialize in filing these requests (see: www.google/com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/faq/ for some more details.

My limited understanding is that these companies just use google search apis to try to find search results matching keywords. Then they file requests for every matching url. This is how obviously wrong requests show up.

There are also cases where requests appear to be malicious, but there are really no consequences since you (iirc) have to prove bad faith which is next to impossible and since everything is being adjudicated via third parties, there is really no incentive.

Scaevolus• 12 years ago

Proving bad faith or that someone "knowingly materially misrepresents... that material or activity is infringing" when it's completely automated sounds very difficult.

Zancarius3• 12 years ago

One has to wonder if that's part of the intent.

"Oh, haha, sorry about that. Our automated tool screwed the pooch on that one. We promise we'll do better next time."

kruczek• 12 years ago

Then why is it allowed to be automated? Why we don't require a few sentences of explanation for each of submitted URLs, explaining how each of them infringes copyright.

bossmojoman• 12 years ago

I hear that https://help.github.com/articles/dealing-with-non-fast-forwa... is pretty hot.

ExpiredLink• 12 years ago

hard core - it contains push, pull, fetch and even merge. NSFW!

Beltiras2• 12 years ago

Most sexy of all: rebase. You can go back and do things differently the second time around.

Doji2• 12 years ago

This chillingeffects site is quite fascinating. There seem to be a _lot_ of instances of completely mistaken and reckless DMCA takedowns. Here's a particularly absurd one:

https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/1148744

I'm not sure a single URL in that list is actually infringing. The only thing they seem to have in common is the name "Adam".

mcantelon• 12 years ago

So one could file a bogus takedown for a competitor's website, etc. Ugh.

markbao3• 12 years ago

It's very unlikely that Google would follow through on an obviously wrong takedown unless if the competitor was actually infringing copyright.

EDIT: Well, yes, they did do that here. My bad. My original point was that Competitor A submitting a wanton DMCA takedown against Competitor B wouldn't fly past Google's radar.

markbao3• 12 years ago

Presumably, Takedown Piracy LLC and their client would have to have signed the Sworn Statements on Google's DMCA page [0]:

    I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted 
    materials described above as allegedly infringing is not 
    authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

    The information in this notification is accurate and I 
    swear, under penalty of perjury, that I am the copyright 
    owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an 
    exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Is there any recourse or punishment for falsely submitting a DMCA takedown request for content that is actually not under their copyright?

[0] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?rd=1

wmil• 12 years ago

You actually can take them to court over false notices.

But that takes time and money most projects don't have.

If Github has the cash sitting around they could sick their lawyers on them for some laughs.

zitterbewegung• 12 years ago

One of those projects seem to be related to rust and I don't think mozilla is a bit player.

vpeters25• 12 years ago

A lawyer could make quite a bundle by taking these lawsuits on commission, ambulance chasing / patent troll style.

After securing power of attorney from actual owner, mail form letters requesting immediate withdrawal of dmca and payment of a "small settlement" for the damages caused by it.

Heck, maybe the EFF could get a bunch of junior lawyers on this, it would likely pay by itself.

dsl• 12 years ago

Sure, you can take that tiny little shell holding company for all its worth...

SwellJoe• 12 years ago

If enough of those tiny little shell companies get wrung out to bankruptcy, there won't be any left to act as fronts for this kind of unethical, and illegal, behavior. And, if they are acting on behalf of other companies, that would likely come out in the court proceedings...which could allow taking the suit up the chain to the actual parties who instigated it. One would hope, anyway, though IP law in the US behaves in deeply irrational ways sometimes.

click170• 12 years ago

Wow, this is awesome, thank you! It would have taken a half hour to come up with such an extensive list of torrent sites, and here they've done all the hard work for me! Merry Christmas to me!

Side note - I'm surprised they've included some pages which do not contain copyrighted work though, they may be exposing themselves on that one.

kngspook• 12 years ago

As I was scrolling through the list, that was my thought too... "Hey, check out all these porn sites I didn't know about!"

Then I realized their master plan: they're protecting their business model by (1) making it harder for us to do our work since it's harder for us to find the software libraries/tools we need, and (2) by providing us with a list of porn sites they fill up the time we would've otherwise spent coding.

viraptor• 12 years ago

Some are pretty terrible though. At the bottom of the list there's a link to "the rocki whore picture show". Why would anyone want to create that in the first place? (apart from satisfying the "there's porn version of it on the internet" rule)

hellbanner• 12 years ago

https://github.com/schneems/wicked/wiki/Testing-Wicked-with-... was removed.. is Google automating these??

saraid216• 12 years ago

Automating stuff is sort of Google's mantra.

declan• 12 years ago

If you send bogus DMCA takedown notices, and this qualifies as one, there can be legal consequences. The DMCA requires:

"A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."

Whoops! This particular list of "infringing" URLs wasn't actually, well, accurate. The problem for whoever sent this bogus takedown (Wicked Pictures or its agent) is that now they can be held liable.

In a case brought by EFF in response to an earlier bogus takedown from Diebold, a federal judge in California held that Diebold could be "liable for damages" -- even though Diebold had by that point withdrawn the takedown request and promised not to send another.

DMCA 512 section (f) says that someone sending bogus takedowns "shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees..." In the Diebold case, Diebold eventually paid EFF something like $125K in lawyer fees.

Note that this situation probably won't get that far. That's because the DMCA doesn't require Google or any other provider to comply with bogus takedown notices. And Google happens to have some smart attorneys (at least one ex-EFF lawyer, in fact) on its payroll who are well aware of that fact.

teddyh3• 12 years ago

Note that this situation probably won't get that far. That's because the DMCA doesn't require Google or any other provider to comply with bogus takedown notices. And Google happens to have some smart attorneys (at least one ex-EFF lawyer, in fact) on its payroll who are well aware of that fact.

Google removed all URLs except 3:

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...

In other words, Google is not the EFF.

magicalist• 12 years ago

Considering that they get requests for something like 8 million URLs to be removed every week, your ire seems a bit misdirected.

Safe harbor has enabled the modern web in many ways, but the DMCA takedown process is still heavily, heavily weighted toward the claimants.

It looks more like the URLs not taken down were mostly malformed or duplicates of earlier claims and they took action on the rest. Purposefully not acting on DMCA complaints due to obviously bogus takedown notices doesn't happen very often because you generally have to be really sure of what you're doing. Hard to do that when you have 8 million URLs to sift through to find the problematic ones.

otterley4• 12 years ago

The "under penalty of perjury" phrase modifies the second clause, not the first. In other words, it's not perjury if the information in the notice is inaccurate -- it's perjury if you falsely claim you are authorized to act on behalf of the grieving party.

MichaelGG5• 12 years ago

So I'm thinking if I want to boost my rankings, all I have to do is file a DMCA notice on my competitor's sites?

Certainly someone has to be doing this, somewhere. At worst, sneak your target URLs into a long list of torrents. How much is bumping off a few competing search results worth?

jasonlotito• 12 years ago

Well, not quite, at least by my reading. It says specifically:

"that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."

In other words they are acting on behalf of the owner of the owners of the content being infringed (the content located at the URLs).

If the content at the URLs is NOT owned by Wicked, than they are claiming to represent the owner of the content at those locations, when they are in fact not.

bartosaurus• 12 years ago

Someone should write a script to just DMCA anyone that trolls legitimate projects and use the rules against these asshats.

vinhboy• 12 years ago

This whole DMCA reporting business is pretty interesting

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...

This husband wife team is racking up some huge censorship numbers.

lstamour• 12 years ago

Nobody's pointed it out, so I'll say I'm really surprised wet-boew was picked up in all this -- it's from the Government of Canada, and what they've done to try and advance web accessibility, etc. http://wet-boew.github.io/v4.0-ci/index-en.html#about

The name is not ... the greatest, though. Maybe they should have called it "Boilerplate, eh?" ;)

calvinr• 12 years ago

Yeah we aren't the best at coming up with names, we love acronyms and they always have to be bilingual.

So Web Experience Toolkit - Boîte à outils de l’expérience Web

I'm pretty sure it was named by a committee.

r109• 12 years ago

There should be harsh penalties against wrongfully filed DMCA's, did they Google Search a keyword then blanket filed a ton of URL's?

bvanslyke• 12 years ago

Wow, I'm not familiar with this film studio, but this is a terrible move on their part. I don't go to the movies much anyway, but I'm gonna try to avoid paying for any of their films, and I urge everyone who cares about an open internet to do the same.

chris_wot• 12 years ago

These movies don't get released to the cinemas. Well, not NORMAL cinemas :)

contrahax• 12 years ago

One of my projects is on this list. #95 - https://github.com/wearefractal/glob-watcher

Just a small Javascript module I wrote to power gulpjs (http://gulpjs.com). This system is totally broken.

lechevalierd3on• 12 years ago

Why do we even waste time and effort for just porn...

chrismcb• 12 years ago

Because money.

beedogs• 12 years ago

Why on earth do search engines even respond to DMCA complaints? This is madness.

caractacus• 12 years ago

Because it's the law?

kbart• 12 years ago

Is there any tool to put back URLs from chillingeffects.org back to Google search results? Should not be that hard to make one (i.e. Firefox plugin).

leni536• 12 years ago

The problem is that you lose ranking information. These are just a bunch of URLs unsorted (or maybe lexicographically sorted) in a file. It would be quite hard to seamlessly include the URLs.

AFAIK ddg does not take down search results based on DMCA notices but I'm not sure about that.

anon4• 12 years ago

It's getting to the point where you can just scrape chillingeffects.org to find all the hottest torrent sites hosting actual content.

Beltiras2• 12 years ago

Here's the counter to the DMCA (as it relates to Google Search): Browser app which parses the linked DMCA complaint and lists the probable URLs in the complaint, related to the search being performed.

nailer• 12 years ago

May be NSFW, depending on your workplace.

TranquilMarmot• 12 years ago

I almost looked up `Wicked Pictures` while at work, but (thankfully) stopped once I read a few of those URLs and realized... yeah, that's not something I want to be going to at work.

rebelde• 12 years ago

For the record, I had reported something similar to HN a few months ago about education.github.com.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7940883 https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/1724976

bmh_ca• 12 years ago

A letter I wrote them (as a collaborator on Knockout, one of the referred-to repositories):

https://github.com/knockout/knockout/issues/1674#issuecommen...

DanBC• 12 years ago

I'm surprised that one of the disruptive groups has not written a couple of bots that do mass DMCA takedown across a wide range of providers and content. Sure, it's illegal but that hasn't stopped them before. It feels like an easy way to create havoc.

tdaltonc• 12 years ago

Google's legal department might be a fun place for a machine learning expert to spend some time teaching machines to detect bogus DMCA takedowns.

DMCA Copyright Complaint to Google

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