Google: 99.95% of Recent ‘Trusted’ DMCA Notices Were Bogus

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
Joined
Oct 29, 2000
Messages
39,903
If you've been following the conversation regarding copyright infringement lately, you know that rights-holders, citing piracy being on the increase, have been arguing that DMCA style takedown notices have been woefully inadequate in stopping the flow of piracy, and are looking to get even greater legal rights to force search providers to preemptively filter results. Google has countered that the DMCA has been very effective in driving piracy sites out of the country, and that the overwhelming majority of reports filed are bogus, never in their index to begin with.

I'd imagine that stories like the one we reported on Monday where 49.5M reports were filed by APDIF do Brasil against links that didn't even exist before they reported them, have a lot to do with this.

It would be a shame if rights-holders successfully force more arduous regulations on search providers for a problem they are fabricating based on their erroneous reports.

“A substantial number of takedown requests submitted to Google are for URLs
that have never been in our search index, and therefore could never have appeared in our search results,” Google states.

“For example, in January 2017, the most prolific submitter submitted notices that Google honored for 16,457,433 URLs. But on further inspection, 16,450,129 (99.97%) of those URLs were not in our search index in the first place.”
 
Last edited:
Jean-Francois Laliberte said:
Maybe if google started charging just 1$ per takedown request, you'd see a sharp drop in takedown notices from all those dmca trolls.
Click to expand...

Pretty much the same issue as with spam.. its soo fast and cheap that it is almost doesn't matter how small your sucess rate it still going to pay out.
 
Jean-Francois Laliberte said:
Maybe if google started charging just 1$ per takedown request, you'd see a sharp drop in takedown notices from all those dmca trolls.
Click to expand...

They need to be allowed to charge an administration/processing fee. Guarantee the entertainment industry flips a lid, throws a ton of cash at lobbyists, and maybe fixes their bots in the mean time.

Even 1 cent would still rack up serious fees.
 
Jean-Francois Laliberte said:
Maybe if google started charging just 1$ per takedown request, you'd see a sharp drop in takedown notices from all those dmca trolls.
Click to expand...
What I wonder is how much does it cost Google (and others) to deal with the take down requests? I'm assuming its automated at this point, but someone has to write the scripts, maintain the service, fix bugs, etc. Seems fair to me this could be passed back to the people requesting the take down.
 
Im in favor of them charging something like a 100$ fee per takedown request. Seeing as this is a legal matter, and legal courts charge processing fees in order to pay for the employees that handle the work (lol actually its to ward off frivolous filiings), Google should do the same. If these requests are legitimate "piracy" complaints, then 100$ charge is a small pittance compared to the "huge" damages piracy causes these companies.
 
Wiffle said:
Im in favor of them charging something like a 100$ fee per takedown request. Seeing as this is a legal matter, and legal courts charge processing fees in order to pay for the employees that handle the work (lol actually its to ward off frivolous filiings), Google should do the same. If these requests are legitimate "piracy" complaints, then 100$ charge is a small pittance compared to the "huge" damages piracy causes these companies.
Click to expand...

If they're going to do that then they might as well just proceed with regular court action against the copyright infringers. Oh wait, maybe they should just do that... you know use the regular legal system that the rest of us regular people have to use and not the special unfair one that was setup especially for them by their bought congressmen.
 
GaryJohnson said:
If they're going to do that then they might as well just proceed with regular court action against the copyright infringers. Oh wait, maybe they should just do that... you know use the regular legal system that the rest of us regular people have to use and not the special unfair one that was setup especially for them by their bought congressmen.
Click to expand...

WHAT!?!?! You mean a lawyer would actually have to submit a filing to the correct federal court which has jurisdiction over the area in which the plaintiff resides or does business along with a prima facie that would likely hold under preliminary hearings, and then court order Google to do a takedown!?!? This is blasphemy!
 
steakman1971 said:
What I wonder is how much does it cost Google (and others) to deal with the take down requests? I'm assuming its automated at this point, but someone has to write the scripts, maintain the service, fix bugs, etc. Seems fair to me this could be passed back to the people requesting the take down.
Click to expand...

it's probably not that automated.. my guess is it receives the request, searches the cache and index database, finds the associated url(s) which is then put into a queue that some one has to check and accept the removal of it, if it doesn't find the url it goes into another list. doing a fully automated system is just asking for trouble with random sites being removed for no reason. so yeah google should be charging the crap out of these companies to do this.
 
Wiffle said:
Im in favor of them charging something like a 100$ fee per takedown request. Seeing as this is a legal matter, and legal courts charge processing fees in order to pay for the employees that handle the work (lol actually its to ward off frivolous filiings), Google should do the same. If these requests are legitimate "piracy" complaints, then 100$ charge is a small pittance compared to the "huge" damages piracy causes these companies.
Click to expand...

Exactly this.

Could you imagine how much the government would be charging if the government had to handle each request?
The court/administrative fees on a traffic ticket is usually much more than the actual ticket fine here in California.

If the movie industry was actually losing billions to piracy, and these take down notices where real and made a difference, then they should be willing to pay for the costs to comply with the notice.
 
So in other words, better that 2000 non-infringing sites get taken down than 1 piracy site be allowed to stay up? Except for all the ones that do anyway?
 
dgingeri said:
This is what you get from government trying to poke their noses into things where they don't belong.
Click to expand...
Uh the music and movie industry pushed HARD for the DMCA. From what I remember they wrote and lobbied for it extensively.

Recent attempts to reform the DMCA to favor consumers have been blocked by those 2 industry groups and the reforms they want are absolutely ridiculous. They essentially want to be able to spy on you non-stop from what I remember about the last major attempt by them to "reform" the DMCA.

Anyways here is a decent story about some of their hypocrisy on the DMCA:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...-that-we-wrote-to-build-useful-services.shtml
 
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if Google was complicit with this. I have been reading a LOT of shady shit about Google lately, to the point where I no longer want them involved in my browsing habits and invading my privacy. The tradeoff for convenience has ceased to be worth it. It's ironic, though - just a month after the internet handoff from America to foreign powers, suddenly Twitter, Facebook, Google, MS and Apple are all getting in on this censorship shit where they don't outright ban you necessarily, but instead put you into a small "internet ghetto" where you can shout among a few likeminded people, without realizing the masses will not be seeing the information. I don't want Twitter deciding for me what tweets I see. I don't want google to auto-filter out valid news sites because they don't align with Google politically. So this is what China's internet censorship feels like....
 
Jean-Francois Laliberte said:
Maybe if google started charging just 1$ per takedown request, you'd see a sharp drop in takedown notices from all those dmca trolls.
Click to expand...

I was thinking more like a $10 service charge to cover Google personnel, heat, lights, etc., used to support handle these requests and maintain the systems used to track, verify and ultimately take them down.

It would be no more outside the norm of a company charging $25 for a failed check fee or your bank charging you another $5-15 for an overdraft. It's all in how much you want to value the bits that are flipped now days.
 
mesyn191 said:
Uh the music and movie industry pushed HARD for the DMCA. From what I remember they wrote and lobbied for it extensively.

Recent attempts to reform the DMCA to favor consumers have been blocked by those 2 industry groups and the reforms they want are absolutely ridiculous. They essentially want to be able to spy on you non-stop from what I remember about the last major attempt by them to "reform" the DMCA.

Anyways here is a decent story about some of their hypocrisy on the DMCA:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...-that-we-wrote-to-build-useful-services.shtml
Click to expand...

Yeah, I know. This is government heavy handedness at its best, and pushed by the rich elitists. The entire music and movie industries have pushed this. Government should not even be involved in what is a decidedly market situation. If the industries involved in this would actually listen to the markets and follow what the customers are telling them, they wouldn't have these problems, and wouldn't need government "help". The rich bastards running things just can't get their heads out of their asses long enough to actually listen.
 
nutzo said:
Exactly this.

Could you imagine how much the government would be charging if the government had to handle each request?
The court/administrative fees on a traffic ticket is usually much more than the actual ticket fine here in California.

If the movie industry was actually losing billions to piracy, and these take down notices where real and made a difference, then they should be willing to pay for the costs to comply with the notice.
Click to expand...

Agreed, considering they think each share is worth millions, they should be more than willing to pay $100 bucks for each take down.
 
dgingeri said:
Yeah, I know.
Click to expand...
If you know that private industry was the driving force behind the DMCA then how can you place all the blame on the govt?

Yes ideally the govt. shouldn't have passed the DMCA but that particular shit show required 2 to tango so to speak and without the RIAA/MPAA it never would've existed either.
 
Jean-Francois Laliberte said:
Maybe if google started charging just 1$ per takedown request...
Click to expand...
Wiffle said:
Im in favor of them charging something like a 100$ fee per takedown request. ...
Click to expand...
I'd be more moderate and suggest a suitable fee ($10-100) charged for every bogus request.
Valid requests should be treated free of charge for the plaintiff.

The suggestion from Google to perform pre-emptive bans on reported bogus URLs that don't yet exist seems very wrong though!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top