Music Label Demands Google Delist A Wikipedia Page With Info It Doesn’t Like
from the can't-even-talk-about-downloading dept
In Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) there’s a chapter about the widely-used “notice and takedown” system, and its many abuses. One indicator of how bad things are, and how they are still getting worse, is the number of requests that Google receives to de-list links from its search results. Last year, Google had received more than 5.7 billion takedown requests over the past decade; now that figure has increased to over 6.7 billion in total. In other words, Google alone is receiving a billion takedown requests per year.
It’s hardly news that many of these requests are abusive, and often used to take down perfectly legal material. But a recent takedown request to Google is exceptional in this respect. As TorrentFreak explains, the complaint, made under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), apparently comes from the independent music label “Because Music”, and targets download and conversion software that allows YouTube material to be downloaded as a file.
The claim is that these circumvent YouTube security measures, and thus violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. That in itself is pretty ridiculous, since YouTube doesn’t have any meaningful copy protection in place, as an important recent lawsuit pointed out. But TorrentFreak spotted that amongst the dozens of sites with links to such YouTube “streamripping” software, there is something rather different: Wikipedia’s “Comparison of YouTube downloaders” page.
The takedown request wants a Wikipedia page removed from Google’s search results because it talks about YouTube rippers, and offers a detailed comparison of them. Links to the software are incidental, appearing only at the foot of the page as references. The demand that Google should de-list links to the page in its search results is a thinly disguised but dangerous attack on knowledge. The implicit message is nobody should be allowed to talk about, or even know about things that the copyright world disapproves of. It’s the logical conclusion of Big Content’s view that everything online should be subordinate to its pursuit of total control there.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.
Filed Under: copyright, dmca, dmca takedown, takedowns
Companies: because music, google, wikipedia
Comments on “Music Label Demands Google Delist A Wikipedia Page With Info It Doesn’t Like”
They should be more like Polyvinyl
Polyvinyl Records is a record label here in the US, and one thing that makes them so great is that they actually allow their artists to license their music under creative commons licenses if they so choose, such as Jeff Rosenstock and Anamanaguchi. They also sell their stuff on Bandcamp. How do they make money, though? Simple: They sell vinyl. Also, there are other ways to monetize their music, such as streaming.
It really pisses me off that there are labels out there that are still worried about piracy given how easy it is to access their content legitimately. They should be more like Polyvinyl.
DMCA is as futile as putting your finger in a hole in the dike… Once it’s out on the Internet, someone is going to figure out a way to capture it for their own use. Always. This is why the mad dash to regulate AI is futile.
Re:
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. Hopefully they will kill off the DMCA.
I think it’s worth noting that the DMCA, terrible law that it is, does not actually have takedown provisions for anti-circumvention—only for copyright infringement. There’s also nothing in the law about taking down search results or other things that reference infringement but are not themselves infringement. It was a mistake for Google to ever give in to these demands, even a little bit, because they’re never gonna stop coming. And courts may see this situation as normal and expect others to do things the law does not require.
For the music companies, this is all a continuation of the “home taping is killing music” campaign from 1981. They want the exposure of radio, Youtube, etc., so they’re not gonna do the obvious thing of not putting their music on these platforms. But they’re still not on board with the idea of anyone recording what they hear. They’d stop you from humming it if they could. Don’t give these asscaps money, ever.
Re:
Given the chance, they’d stop you streaming it if they could, which is why they spent a significant amount of money in lawsuits quibbling the whole “making available” and “intermediary liability” thing to make you pay for the fucking data from hearing half a song… file uploaded somewhere.
Joke’s on them, nobody walking on the streets these days would think twice about saving a YouTube playlist or even just searching for the same song again and putting it on repeat and not paying a dime. A situation which they engineered with the whole suing epidemic of the early 2000s.
Re: Re:
“Given the chance, they’d stop you streaming it if they could”
Of course. Everyone still harks back to the “golden age” in the 90s, where people had to buy a full album to get the songs they wanted and people had to buy a new copy of an album for every format. Then came iTunes, where people could pay 99c for the song they wanted instead of $20 for an album. Then streaming, where people rent for way less than that.
They want a return to albums full of filler that you have to own to listen to. But, even in their glory days most people didn’t even do that.
Re: Re: Re:
No, we’d just use home taping. The well-known songs were frequently on the radio, and the music video TV channels, and anyone wanting more obscure stuff had probably heard about it from friends who’d copy it for them. Then by the late ’90s we had MP3s and Napster.
If there was a “golden age” for the music cartel, it was probably the late 1960s to early 1970s, just before cassette recorders became widespread. And when people might’ve been buying the same album in record and 8-track form.
Re: Re: Re:2
Even home taping wasn’t a perfect solution, frankly, with how tapes could still be damaged and recording wasn’t a precise science the way audio clipping and backing files is today. Not that it stopped the RIAA from fighting the newest tech on the block just as hard.
For the RIAA, the early 90s was about as good as you could get as far as leveraging the casual consumer could go. You could still drive a narrative that unofficial or pirate sources were rife with danger and poor quality compared to the stuff obtained from proper channels, probably being hawked by a shady-looking guy in a back alley. These days, not so much. The bogeyman of malware is not nearly as threatening as antipiracy fanatics hoped it was; in fact a code of rippers is to release things better than the original by stripping away all the shit that slows your devices down. With every generation being more tech-savvy than the last, avoiding the pitfalls of pirate sources is easily trivialized by every enterprising millennial and Gen Z user – who then become a source for their techphobic parents and relatives, and know that they can simply move onto other friendlier sources within hours once one head of the pirate hydra gets cut down.
The RIAA and MPA haven’t just lost the battle on the technology front, they’ve lost the battle for hearts and minds as well. Which they might not have, had they not fucked their own reputation by going after children. Who then went on to raise children with absolutely no problem with streaming.
Re: Re: Re:2
Nah. Sales were definitely at a height during the 90s, and while people did make their own tapes, plenty of people bought the same album when it came out in a different format. Most people only bought a couple of albums a year, but people were still buying the songs you heard on the radio or MTV even if you weren’t buying them personally.
The main effect the internet had was that the labels could see the same sharing that had been going on since at least the cassette was invented, and people could get access to non-major label songs as easily as the cartel owned stuff.
Anyone look at the bottom of that notice? Happen to catch the fact that “No copyrighted URLs were submitted”?
Leads me to wonder, just how does one get a copyright on a URL? And what happens when an a̶b̶u̶s̶e̶r̶ submitter somehow finds and actually includes a copyrighted URL, wouldn’t that just lead to the Mother Of All Copyright Wars (hat tip to Hassan Rouhan for that one), for many obvious reasons?
sumgai
It’s up to Google to grow a pair and tell Because Records to go get stuffed, and that should be operating procedure for all websites. If you had ANYTHING stolen from a loaf of bread to a car to a song, call the police if you’re so convinced beyond any reasonable doubt. Otherwise,
“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”
I have a mailbox. It has a locked door in it that I use a key on to get my mail. As I am the rightful recipient of anything deposited into that box, how I access it is not particularly relevant. If I lose my key but am still the rightful recipient, it would not be illegal for me to use lockpicks to access my mailbox – even though that circumvents a security feature. Likewise, making my own key to replace a lost one is not illegal, even though it too circumvents a security feature. Because it is my mailbox.
Obviously, accessing mailboxes that are not mine that way would be illegal, but not mine, because it is mine.
The idea that it might become illegal for me to do so if the lock were electronic instead if mechanical is utter insanity.
Re: Your mailbox is nothing like youtube
So what is your point?
Re: Re:
Your mailbox is nothing like YouTube in the same way that a CD is nothing like a car.
Re: Re: Re:
Yet the metaphor of automobile theft to the theft of music and movies has been used by copyright proponents for twenty years, so by forcing these guys to live according to their own rhetoric, we should know that we would have more leverage than they would want us to know. We should be able to dismiss their claims or absorb a small fee for the sake of preserving information.
Re: Re: Re:2
Indeed. If our analogies should be dismissed on grounds that they’re shitty, then the copyright lobby has long since lost the right to throw stones from within their castle of glass.
Re: Re: Re:3
Further, if the lobby considers it theft, then there must be preservationists willing to risk their freedom and money to see our culture be preserved. Self-sacrifice is the one thing that they really can’t defend against.
Re:
But Bergman…
What if the Republican Party wants the USPS and related courier services to stop sending mail to your mailbox because you get letters from minorities?
Because this is similar to what the fucking label wants to do.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
The USPS is a private company and should be able to do what they want.
Re: Re: Re:
Whoosh
Re: Re: Re:
Everybody point and laugh at the anonymous right-wing idiot who doesn’t understand what a common carrier is.
Re: Re: Re:
The UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE is part of the government, bucko.
Leaving aside common carrier stuff, what the label is doing is to deny people access to harmless information. It’s a little different from the Republican Party wanting to stop A GOVERNMENT SERVICE from DOING ITS JOB to a certain person simply because they receive mail from minorities, but has the same effect.
Google gets over 18.3 million takedown requests per day
So dividing 6.7 billion by 365, Google gets over 18.3 million takedown requests per day.
Re:
Which is why most are handled automatically, if someone could handle 10 an hour that about 800 a shift. Allowing for holidays, weekends and sickness, that’s 40,000 people to handle them manually, before you add in managers and support staff. Add in looking at the link and other sanity checks and you could triple or quadruple the number of people needed.
For the copyright industry to actually check any claims they are making would require somewhere north of 200,000 trained people, so its not happening and the shit show of automatic generation and take down will continue.
DCMA
This all started with the $1.00 surcharge on Cassette tapes
Those “reaction” videos you see obviously have software that can record YT videos, so I don’t see the issue here.
Why don’t they go to Wikipedia themselves and just delete what they don’t like?
Re:
Corporations vandalizing wikipages?
Now that’s something that’ll go down well…
(It won’t. Wikipedia already fucking hates corporate shills and extremely biased editors EDITING the pages to the point that they have POLICIES for the former and policies to handle conflicts that arise from editors screaming bias.)