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April 2021
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TorrentFreak Continues To Get DMCA Takedown Notices Despite Not Hosting Infringing Material

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It's no secret that TorrentFreak, a mainstay news site covering copyright and filesharing issues, gets more than its fair share of errant DMCA takedowns and other wayward scrutiny. This is almost certainly a function of the site's chosen name, though the sheer volume of mistaken targeting of the site also serves as a useful beacon for just how bad policing copyright has become. If you can't get past a news site having the word "torrent" in its name, then we should probably all admit we're operating at a very silly level of IP enforcement.And yet it keeps happening. Most recently, TorrentFreak reported on a request made to Google to delist a post the site did on how popular The Mandalorian was with pirates.

Every week we see obvious errors, where sites such as IMDb, Wikipedia, Justice.gov, and NASA are targeted. By now we ignore most of these mistakes but in some instances, we take them personally. That’s also the case for a DMCA takedown request Google received a few days ago. This notice claims to identify several problematic URLs that allegedly infringe the copyrights of Disney’s hit series The Mandalorian.This is not unexpected, as The Mandalorian was the most pirated TV show of last year, as we reported in late December. However, we didn’t expect to see our article as one of the targeted links in the notice. Apparently, the news that The Mandalorian is widely pirated – which was repeated by dozens of other publications – is seen as copyright infringement? Needless to say, we wholeheartedly disagree. This is not the way.
A couple of things we should absolutely point out. First, at the time of this post being written, Google has not delisted the post from search results. Also, and this genuinely surprised me, Disney was not the the party requesting the post be delisted, despite the show being a flagship on Disney+. Instead, the requesting entity is something called GFM Film. TorrentFreak was unable to pin down precisely who that company is or where it's from, as there looks to be several potential candidates found via web search.All of which is only really interesting in terms of finding out who is responsible for this screw up. Because, again, TorrentFreak is a news site that does not host a single bit of infringing digital material. The policing of copyright is full of this sort of collateral damage and that doesn't seem to be a problem anyone seriously wants to tackle.

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posted at: 12:01am on 08-Apr-2021
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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Content Moderation Case Study: NASA Footage Taken Down By YouTube Moderation (2012)

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Summary: NASA's historic landing of a mobile rover on the surface of Mars created many newsworthy moments. Unfortunately, it also generated some embarrassing takedowns of NASA's own footage by YouTube's copyright flagging system, ContentID.

NASA uploaded its own footage of the landing -- footage that was public domain given that it was a work created by the U.S. government. US copyright law says that any work created by the US government cannot be granted a copyright. It is, instead, in the public domain, and can be used by anyone without restriction. Unfortunately, the use of this public domain footage in news broadcasts created by Scripps (owner of multiple TV stations as well as a significant ABC stakeholder) put a chain of events in motion that ultimately saw NASA's footage taken down by YouTube.The problem was YouTube's ContentID. Once Scripps uploaded its footage, ContentID bots began crawling the site seeking matches. ContentID is structured in such a way that it believes that if content is uploaded by a private entity, that entity has a legitimate copyright over it -- even if the content is in the public domain, shareable freely by all. Shortly thereafter, NASA footage began disappearing while Scripps' broadcasts utilizing NASA footage stayed live.This unfortunate outcome is common enough NASA reps are used to having to contact YouTube to get their own public domain uploads restored.Decisions to be made by YouTube:
  • Should this collateral damage to footage uploaded by government agencies continue to be an acceptable outcome of automated moderation?
  • Should YouTube consider a "three strikes" system that punishes false copyright claims, rather than just those wrongly targeted by ContentID matches?
  • Should YouTube require more input and detail from copyright claimants in order to head off errors like these?
  • How should ContentID deal with material that is in the public domain?
Questions and policy implications to consider:
  • Does erring on the side of copyright holders (even when the rightsholders are wrong) decrease the chance of YouTube being involved in copyright litigation?
  • Is it possible to backstop newsworthy events involving government agencies (and their recordings) with more human moderators? Or is it impossible to decide what's newsworthy or not given the immense amount of footage uploaded to the site every day?
  • Is overblocking -- including public domain works -- a reasonable price to pay to avoid infringement?
Resolution: While these sorts of mistaken takedowns are less frequent, they still occur. The most recent removal of NASA footage from YouTube was the result of a (likely automated) copyright claim by National Geographic, which had incorporated NASA's recordings into its own production. Given YouTube's dominant position in the video marketplace -- which has resulted in it processing thousands of hours of uploads every day -- it seems unlikely a solution that pleases every competing stakeholder will ever arrive.Originally published to the Trust & Safety Foundation website.

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posted at: 12:01am on 08-Apr-2021
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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