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Hollywood Studios, Big Fans Of Automated DMCAs, Also Very Busy DMCAing IMDB For Some Reason

Copyright

from the automatically-wrong dept

Fri, Sep 7th 2018 12:03pm -

We’ve made the point repeatedly that when people think of the DMCA takedown process being utilized, they likely never consider how it’s actually used in practice. That is to say, the picture in the heads of many is some artist somewhere firing off an email to a service provider upon finding his or her work being pirated. How this typically works, however, is that the whole process is automated, with bots scraping internet content and issuing DMCAs automagically as part of its algorithm. And, considering how often the results include errors, this is a massive problem with speech on the internet.

Hollywood is of course big fans of this automated DMCAing of the internet. After all, real enforcement of their copyrights is a hell of a lot of work and what’s a few innocent websites getting caught up as collateral damage compared with a movie studio’s ability to silence anything it thinks might be infringing? And, yet, often times the errors are so laughable so as to make our point about the dangers in all of this, such as when Hollywood studios go about accidentally sending DMCA notices for content on IMDB.

This works fine, most of the time. But, in common with their human counterparts, these bots aren’t perfect. This was made painfully visible last month when Topple Track had to disable its reporting tool after it triggered a wave of faulty takedown notices.

That was not an isolated incident though. None of these takedown tools are perfect.

Over the past few weeks, we noticed another worrying trend. Suddenly, Google started to receive a lot of DMCA notices for the Internet Movie Database, with the majority of these requests coming from the UK-based reporting agency Entura International.

IMDB, which has been around for nearly three decades, is almost certainly not suddenly in the copyright infringement business. So what happened? Well, on many of the DMCA notices, the notice will include a reference link to the IMDB page for the pirated film or show to give whoever is reviewing the notice a sense of what the work is. But, apparently due to a bug in the software, if there is nothing listed as a “pirate link” in the DMCA notice, the automated notice automatically moves the IMDB reference link into that field. The result is that the notices are going out stating that a film’s IMDB page is the infringing content. This happened to the IMDB page for Amazing Spider-Man 2, for instance.

Now, as TorrentFreak points out, Google has wisely put IMDB on a whitelist that keeps most if not all of these notices from having their otherwise censorious effect. But does anyone really believe that IMDB is the only website that would otherwise have been mistakenly caught up as collateral damage? Of course not. There are likely much smaller, lesser-known sites out there that have fallen victim to this automated fuck up.

If that isn’t a problem for free and open internet speech, it’s hard to imagine what would be.

Filed Under: , ,
Companies: entura international, google, imdb

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Comments on “Hollywood Studios, Big Fans Of Automated DMCAs, Also Very Busy DMCAing IMDB For Some Reason”

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70 Comments
stine (profile) says:

What it really means...

What it really means is that there has to be a monetary penalty and/or a public service and/or a jail time penalty for ‘incorrect’ DMCA requests, even if they’re via Googles in-house system.

Can you imagine every employee of Warner Brothers having to do 10 days of community service after this event: https://hothardware.com/news/warner-bros-targets-its-own-websites-for-takedown-using-googles-anti-piracy-tools

There wouldn’t be a scrap of trash to be found in or around Burbank.

El Goog says:

Re: What it really means...

What it really means is that there has to be a monetary penalty and/or a public service and/or a jail time penalty for ‘incorrect’ DMCA requests,

Great! And for the millions of ACCURATE DMCA
notices, especially for anyone working at sites which average $150,000 a year income, punishment of life at hard labor.

Seriously, though, you are not just wrong, you’re Techdirt wrong! Not going to happen, and it’s JUST a programming error, kid, there’s NO EVIL PLAN here. Sheesh.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: What it really means...

millions of ACCURATE DMCA notices

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!

looks to make sure I read that right, yep

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!

there’s NO EVIL PLAN here

Oh there’s definitely an evil plan here. It’s called legacy entertainment industry abuses copyright in futile attempt to stamp out piracy and squeeze consumers for every last red cent they have. But you wouldn’t know anything about that now would you?

That One Guy (profile) says:

Re: What it really means...

Yeah, if the law was actually meant to be fair and protect creators there would be some sort of penalty for filing bogus DMCA claims as that impacts innocent creators, yet would you look at that, not a single penalty to be found, such that companies feel free to send out as many notices as they can with not a single worry about who it might hit.

Put an actual penalty in the law and enforce it and stories like this would all but dry up. Until that happen however there is no reason not to hit as many sites as possible, whether deliberately or negligently, and as such stories like this will continue to crop up on a regular basis.

El Goog says:

All heil -- er, I mean HAIL Google's infallible algorithms!

"Google has been bombarding me with ads for Russian mail order brides. I clicked the no-thank-you buttons to no avail. Only change is that I then got ads for overweight Russian mail order brides. So I took to the settings panel and unchecked the box that "offered" tailored (huh?) ads. It did not take much time for Google to serve up its revenge: now I am bombarded with ads for gay dating sites and services."

https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/3587458

Amusing too isn’t it? … No? Why not? — Oh, right, this is Techdirt.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: All heil -- er, I mean HAIL Google's infallible algorithms!

Google has been bombarding me with ads for Russian mail order brides

Then maybe stop searching for Russian mail order brides and clear your cookies?

Amusing too isn’t it?

It’s amusing that you would trust some random person on the internet who has no evidence to back up his claims. Kind of sounds like someone else we all know. Oh wait, was that you that made that comment? Ooops.

El Goog says:

All heil -- er, I mean HAIL Google's infallible algorithms!

Will you only ever be satisfied by Google coverage on Techdirt if the site calls for a heads-on-pikes treatment of Alphabet’s top executives?

As above, made BEFORE reading yours I advocate "punishment of life at hard labor."

Now, answered, so will you quit NAGGING me, kid?

James Burkhardt (profile) says:

Re: Re:

Well, it hasn’t had enough use to make the Oxford English Dictionary with this meaning, certainly. And given that first amendment scolarship is not a large group, it likely never will. (interestingly, Censorious comes from a different root then Censor). I am unsurprised however that journalists, bloggers, and other first amendment proponents use the word regularly to describe anti-free speech activity.

James Burkhardt (profile) says:

Re: Citation needed

So, which company? Without citation, your commentary is the equivalent of that kid whose brother’s friend got Mew from under the truck.

And do they require you to waive any right to sue them if the material is taken down, or to waive their right to sue them entirely, or to waive your right to sue anyone? I’d love to see the language. I figure the language is much less restrictive, but it might be porrly drafted, or as intentionally damaging as you suggest. Again, I’d love to know the company to do some research.

Scary Devil Monastery (profile) says:

Re: Thankfully

Ironically, going from the OP there’s actually nothing to actually prevent using official IMDB number listings in lieu of magnet links in order to get a torrent client to identify a file.

Wouldn’t scale well once you got duplicates but it would be an interesting experiment to pull in order to see whether IMDB would suddenly get shut down by a million auto-generated DMCA takedown demands.

John85851 (profile) says:

Give them what they want

I say if the movie studios want their IMDB page taken down, then do it.
Then IMDB and Google should put up a page saying “Information about ‘Star Wars IX’ is not available due to a takedown notice by Disney.”
Then see how long it takes for the cast and crew (and hundreds of people who worked on the movie) to get rightly upset that their listing on IMDB has suddenly been taken down as if it were a pirating site, simply because the studio’s for-hire takedown service couldn’t/ wouldn’t get it right.
Sure, the cast and crew might get angry with Google for taking the page down, but the takedown was a legal notice from Disney, so everyone should complain to them.
And if the cast and crew of multi-million dollar movies start complaining that the studios are taking down legitimate sites, then maybe we’ll see some changes to the takedown system.

tp (profile) says:

If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

We should obviously trust the entertainment industry DCMA notices. If their internet scanning tools are finding that the material in IMDB is screenshots cloned from the movies, with correct actor names, and bad review scores for the movie, obviously it needs to be taken away, removed from the google search engine. Obviously IMDB cannot handle these DCMA notices themselves, so best trick is to send those notices to google – a well known hub for pirated content. The real trick is to push enough notices to google that they have trouble handling them in the required deadline, allowing entertainment industry to sue google for copyright infringement in their google search pages. If their web page content is clearly ripped from copyright owners spread to the world, without paying required licenses, they should obviously be sued. This evil plan just requires 2 million DCMA notices be sent to them, so that there exists proof that the search engine has more pirated content than any other site on the planet. Given that they are also scanning the net for updates to their web page, these scraping tools need to be made illegal first.

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

Go ahead, find pirated material on IMDB.

Why do you think that the laws allow us to scour the net, looking for pirated content? If the site is known for pirated content, we need to stop using the site, instead of trying to take the benefit of the illegal activity. It doesnt matter where the information about the site’s illegality comes from – entertainment industry has as valid claim for their own internet property than any other player in the market. If there’s claims of site illegality, end users need to trust those claims and stop using the illegal services. In the end, only the legal services will flourish.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re: If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

If there’s claims of site illegality, end users need to trust those claims and stop using the illegal services.

Even if those claims are wrong?

Seriously, there is no pirated content on IMDB. Not even the entertainment industry is saying that. Just you.

In the end, only the legal services will flourish.

Because piracy has died with Captain Blackbeard. Reality check, piracy is alive and well. That will never change.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:2 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

> If there’s claims of site illegality, end users need to trust those claims and stop using the illegal services.

> Even if those claims are wrong?

You haven’t performed proper check for pirated content, since only copyright owner can do a proper check. This is why end users need to trust what copyright owners are communicating to the world. Inability to determine accurately whether content is pirated must be one of the top5 reasons to pirate the content. Pirates claims are as follows: “Even entertainment industry itself cannot determine if they own the content, and they keep sending DCMA notices against their own web sites”. It turns out the copyright owners is still the best player for detecting if their content is being disseminated illegally around the world. Thus end users need to trust copyright owners for this piece of information.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:3 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

since only copyright owner can do a proper check. This is why end users need to trust what copyright owners

And they can never be accidentally mistaken or deliberately lie?

Also this is insulting to the entire human race. There are very clear rules as to what is copyright infringement and what is not. You don’t have to be the owner to do a "proper check". e.g. music by Beethoven. Or are you going to say we have to check with Beethoven to make sure we aren’t infringing his copyrights?

Inability to determine accurately whether content is pirated must be one of the top5 reasons to pirate the content.

No, people pirate despite knowing they are pirating content.

Pirates claims are as follows: "Even entertainment industry itself cannot determine if they own the content, and they keep sending DCMA notices against their own web sites".

Because they do. What’s your point?

It turns out the copyright owners is still the best player for detecting if their content is being disseminated illegally around the world. Thus end users need to trust copyright owners for this piece of information.

Circular reasoning, insulting to basic human intelligence, and assumes copyright owners are perfect, never make mistakes, or deliberately lie.

Want to try again?

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:4 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

You don’t have to be the owner to do a “proper check”.

Proper copyright check requires examining substantial similarity between two separate copyrighted wprks. I.e. you need to choose a product coming from copyright owner, and another version of the same product from the pirate site.

Given that only copyright owner can sue the people who violated his copyrights, there’s no incentive for anyone else in the world to do a copyright check for those two exact products.

This means the proper copyright check can only be performed once you’ve chosen the products to be examined, and thus only copyright owner can do the check.

All is not lost — end users can evaluate services based on slightly different criteria — whether there is any copyright infringement in the service. Since law requires that services are completely free of copyright infringement, the end user’s resposibility is to stop using the service once copyright infringement is found. This however isn’t a “proper copyright check”.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:5 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

Proper copyright check requires examining substantial similarity between two separate copyrighted wprks.

So what you’re saying is the average human being is too stupid to tell the difference between a movie they bought legally from Walmart, and the same movie they illegally downloaded from a pirate site. Shove off.

there’s no incentive for anyone else in the world to do a copyright check for those two exact products

There’s plenty, you just don’t want to admit it. One of which would be avoiding fines and jail time.

This means the proper copyright check can only be performed once you’ve chosen the products to be examined, and thus only copyright owner can do the check.

…Right.

end users can evaluate services based on slightly different criteria — whether there is any copyright infringement in the service.

That would require them to do a "proper copyright check" now, wouldn’t it?

This however isn’t a "proper copyright check".

I’m going to regret this, I know it, but, how is it not a proper check? Isn’t the only way to check to compare the two? And isn’t that exactly what a copyright owner does? And if they are similar enough that a user can’t tell the difference, then doesn’t that meet the threshold of copyright infringement?

Stop trolling.

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:6 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

how is it not a proper check?

Well, while end users are browsing some service, they might regularly see copyright infringing material, but since they have not seen that material before, they don’t have enough information who the original author is, and under what conditions the product is normally distributed around the world. Thus the evaluation fails if the user is watching the product for the first time. This check thus cannot accurately detect copyright infringing material from legal stuff.

> Isn’t the only way to check to compare the two?

No, there are at least the following different ways:
1) product comparision check
2) effort calculation
3) sales channel check
4) product packaging check
5) company reputation check
6) market dynamics check
7) money flow check
8) adverticement check
9) copyright notice check
10) dcma notice check
11) customer profile check
12) patent ownership check
13) popularity check

You can invent new ways if you like, as long as they can find illegal players in the market.

Any of these can detect which players are legimate companies who want to sell products and who are illegally
pushing copyright infringing material

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:7 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

So yep, you’re saying humans are too stupid to do the checks themselves. (Which is funny because then you say only a human can do “proper check”) All while creating bunch of bogus “checks” that don’t actually exist, or wouldn’t actually tell you whether it’s infringing or not.

Shove off.

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:8 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

All while creating bunch of bogus “checks” that don’t actually exist, or wouldn’t actually tell you whether it’s infringing or not.

I just mentioned their existence, so obviously they exist.

It’s just that “ability to invent your own checks” requires
some safety from the legal area:
1) you need to prove your check can accurately detect
problems in substantial similarity check
2) you need to apply your own check properly and consistently
3) you can’t jump from one check to another during the evaluation
4) you can however use multiple ways to check for violations
5) mentioning the tests you ran to detect the illegal activity always helps

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

You really think Google is hosting IMDB, or that a paltry 2 million DMCA notices is going to bring Google down?

2 million notices send to google’s direction is already a plenty of proof that google’s service is illegal. There’s evil plan like this:
1) keep sending DCMA notices to google
2) keep a counter how many notices went to google
3) build a fair internet scanning tool
4) once the counter of found pirated content increases above certain treshold, sue the bastards
5) use the amount of DCMA notices and counter amount as a proof that the site is hub for pirated content
6) include only top100 internet sites to the scanning and filter out people who don’t have necessary amount of money
7) ask for damage awards in the millions of dollars
8) job done

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re: If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

2 million notices send to google’s direction is already a plenty of proof that google’s service is illegal.

  1. You stated in your first post they aren’t receiving this many, now you are saying they are. Which is it?
  2. It’s proof of nothing other than people sending DMCA notices. Those DMCA notices could all be lies for all we know without actually verifying them.
  3. Even if they were all valid, that still wouldn’t prove Google search to be illegal. That’s like saying the sexual predator list is illegal because it is a list of people who do illegal things.

The rest of your post is what, satire? I’m not sure.

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:2 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

> 2 million notices send to google’s direction is already a plenty of proof that google’s service is illegal.

> You stated in your first post they aren’t receiving this many, now you are saying they are. Which is it?

Article in question claimed that entertainment industry is sending DCMA notices about IMDB to google. It’s not my claim.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:3 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

Article in question claimed that entertainment industry is sending DCMA notices about IMDB to google. It’s not my claim.

I’m not questioning that. I’m questioning why you think Google won’t be able to respond to 2 million DMCA notices, and therefore be sued out of existence. The article in question only said the notices were sent. It never stated how many. You’re the one who picked the 2 million number out of a hat, and I quote:

This evil plan just requires 2 million DCMA notices be sent to them,

Also, spelling man, it’s DMCA, not DCMA.

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:4 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

I’m questioning why you think Google won’t be able to respond to 2 million DMCA notices, and therefore be sued out of existence.

Here’s important pieces of information for you:
1) single person can create approximately maximum of 100 products in 5 years timeframe
2) all products provided in the service must be
a) either created by the publisher
b) or properly licensed from the copyright owner
3) given that 5 years of work requires significant money
to be paid to the copyright owners, significant money flow is required from the service to the owners

Given these facts, here’s a theorem which holds:
1) Existence of large number of products in a service is a proof of one of the following:
a) either there’s illegal copyright infringement
b) or the service pays significant amount of money to the authors
c) or it is user-defined content site and needs to follow DMCA and respond to DMCA notices

Now the only trick is to count the amount of DMCA notices they’re receiving, and comparing it to the level of activity in the site.

> You’re the one who picked the 2 million number out of a hat

Since google search can be arguably have significant non-infringing uses around the world, it requires stronger proof of illegal activity happening in the service. This is why 2 million number is suitable for google search, since their non-infringing use scope is of global nature. Thus to succeed in suing google search, entertainment industry needs to have proof of significant illegal activity happening in the service.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:5 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

You still haven’t answered my question of why you think Google wouldn’t be able to timely respond to an arbitrary number of 2 million DMCA notices. And yes, the number is arbitrary because you just picked it out of a hat.

The entire rest of your post is just so much hot steaming garbage. None of it is correct.

Especially not this:

single person can create approximately maximum of 100 products in 5 years timeframe

Tell that to every single Youtuber who puts out hundreds of videos EVERY YEAR. Or commision based artists who complete hundreds of requests every year. Or what about comic writers, web designers, software programmers, the list goes on and on.

Get help, you need it.

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:6 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

Tell that to every single Youtuber who puts out hundreds of videos EVERY YEAR.

Yes, you just need to look at the theorem and see what it says. If there’s large number of products, they are just relying in the copyright infringement part of the equation. This is why those children who sing happy birthday on youtube video gets sued for copyright infringement. They just created too many products without any recards of the copyright aspect.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:9 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

The copyright industry has always been the holder of a minor fraction of copyrighted works, and are finding out just how much creativity exists outside their control because people can publish their works on various Internet platforms. That industry does not have an automatic right to exist, as they are realizing when they look at the floods of self published works. Trying to dam that flood only exposes them to total destruction when their hurriedly erected dams burst.

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:10 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

The copyright industry has always been the holder of a minor fraction of copyrighted works

you shouldnt compare single interest group against the whole world. This pattern results in an evil “moon walk problem”. The claim is that a moon walk is impossible for single interest group. This claim is true, even though we know that there exists humans who have walked in the moon. The interest group just need to do it without nasa’s help, and thus it is impossible problem for them to solve. Comparing against the whole world always results in absurd stuff.

In fact, copyright has been designed so that it reduces this particular problem.

> That industry does not have an automatic right to exist, as they are realizing when they look at the floods of self published works.

Whether the industry exists or not, is not a relevant question. The people inside that industry continues to exists, even if their business solution fails. And those people keep creating solutions which are not liked in the internet platforms. It is only when those people get retired that the effect of that industry and their practises will stop from existing. So basically this “automatic” right to exist applies to individual humans. Assuming you’re not planning on mass murder, the copyright industry continues to exist for long time to come and they’re still teaching new people to follow their evil practises.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:7 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

Yeah, except for the point that:

– Warner lost the copyright to Happy Birthday and now it’s public domain
– Children who sing Happy Birthday generally weren’t touched by Warner, surprisingly enough, because Warner would get an even bigger PR shitstorm
– Beyond Warner quietly collecting several million dollars from performance rights organizations no private individual was ever sued for Happy Birthday

Oh, right… this is the part where you scream that the entire public domain, Happy Birthday needs to be purged so newer birthday songs can enter the market…

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:8 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

  • Warner lost the copyright to Happy Birthday and now it’s public domain

    Even if this were true, it doesnt remove the fact that the real problem is that the kids tried to create a bigger product than what they’re capable of properly creating.

    If their videos are full of someone elses copyrighted works, it’s clearly broken product. This is true, eevn if it later turns out that the songs in question entered public domain and the kids got lucky this time.

    Proper fix for the problem is to teach these people when they should reconsider their decision to create a product. IF they’re bleeding for publicity and they’re jealous of someone elses money coming from cool home videos, they still shouldnt start creating that stuff until they have learned copyright properly.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:9 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

the kids tried to create a bigger product than what they’re capable of properly creating

Yeah, if you’re this triggered over a fucking birthday song maybe you should go petition the government about it.

And ask them to give you that mansion while they’re at it. Maybe let us know how progress on that front is coming along. We’ll wait.

Don’t count on us holding our breath for that though!

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:10 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

> the kids tried to create a bigger product than what they’re capable of properly creating

> Yeah, if you’re this triggered over a fucking birthday song maybe you should go petition the government about it.

This can ruin the kids life. If he can create viral videos gaining 3 million hits on youtube at age 3, his next project need to be somehow bigger. This increasing of the project size never ends and everyone who gained “success” at early age are completely broken. Soon they have 250 million products in their requirement lists. And this pattern is completely scary.

(I can’t even create a sucky mansion)

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:11 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

Yeah, about your self-righteous petition on the kid’s behalf?

None of that has to do with copyright.

Absolutely none of it.

But since you brought it up, here’s a little news for you. Early child stars burn out no matter what industry or field they’re in. That’s life. Copyright does absolutely nothing to protect that.

And if you think a child singing “happy birthday” is enough to get him 3 million hits on YouTube, you have no idea what a viral video is.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:7 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

And this just goes to show what a massive moron you are. Because if you have ever looked at any of those videos on Youtube, (or you know, not ignored all the other examples I put forth of artists who create hundreds of new original works every year) you would see that your pathetic theorem is false.

And so I say: GOOD DAY SIR!

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

If their internet scanning tools are finding that the material in IMDB is screenshots cloned from the movies, with correct actor names, and bad review scores for the movie, obviously it needs to be taken away, removed from the google search engine.

Actually it does nor need to be removed, because excerpt from a work are perfectly legal for the purposes of criticism, and it does not matter whether they are good, bad or indifferent.

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

Actually it does nor need to be removed, because excerpt from a work are perfectly legal for the purposes of criticism,

This is only recarding copyright laws. There’s also trademark infringement etc. It’s illegal to use images of famous sport celebrities in your website for adverticements without paying money to the celebrity. This same reasoning applies to the names of the actors in IMDB.

tp (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 If IMDB is hosting pirated material?

Nor is it illegal to post an image on the site of said actors, since they are public figures.

Sport celebrities are taking 100k rewards for appearing in some company adverticements. How is this money reward handled in this case? Are all companies required to pay this money when they display image or name of the celebrity, or is there some class of companies where this isn’t required?

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