
Starz Doesn’t Like News About Leaked TV-Shows, Takes Down TorrentFreak Tweet - J253
https://torrentfreak.com/starz-doesnt-like-news-about-leaked-tv-shows-takes-down-torrentfreak-tweet-190411/
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mabbo
It seems to be that the repercussions of filing frivolous DMCA takedown
notices isn't sufficient. Proof: there's too many instances of abuses like
this. What's more, the existing legislation doesn't compensate the real
victims- those who posted the content. In short, the law is designed for a
different time.

Simple, minimal changes are what's needed. Raise the cost of filing invalid
DMCAs to a level high enough that companies like Starz are deterred from doing
so. And share the compensation with the content creators who are affected, not
just the platforms that receive the invalid notices.

I don't think we'll ever be able to get rid of the darned things, so we might
as well push for DMCAs to at least be closer to fair.

~~~
ezoe
Require it to reserve the money for each DMCA takedown request. The amount is
equivalent of fair compensation if the request was borgus.

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Someone1234
Ignoring for a second the difficulties in calculating "fair compensation,"
that would mean that small creators would need HUGE pots to file a DMCA
against larger entities (since damages could be fair higher if you're mistaken
against big/powerful/etc entities), and conversely it would still be super
cheap to take down obscure creators.

In effect this would double down on the existing power imbalance, and allow
large entities to continue their abuse practices almost unabated (except
against one another).

~~~
crazypyro
Except, as it stands today, the system is extremely ripe for abuse by people
who can file claims almost without consequence.

There are countless examples of YouTube creators losing monetization for
frivolous claims, but as the system stands, its guilty before proven innocent,
especially for smaller creators....

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Someone1234
YouTube's take-down system has nothing to do with the DMCA. While you can file
a DMCA against YouTube, the biggest problems have been a result of YT's own
take-down/copyright/strike system that is of their own creation (and has no
legal punishment for abuse, since it isn't built on the legal system at all).

DMCA abuse does occur. But YouTube is the exception, rather than the rule,
since they're largely not DMCA.

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newswriter99
We live in a world where journalism coverage on television shows being
torrented are being taken down by corporations abusing laws put in place by
decrepit legislators who don't fully comprehend new technology.

This cyberpunk timeline kind of sucks.

~~~
asdff
We've been living in this world since Metallica vs. Napster.

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MBCook
They also had the EFF tweet about the takedown taken down.

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asdff
Will they take down this post too?

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fs2
As the EFF reports: "Starz has no right to silence TorrentFreak’s news article
or block links to it. The article reports that there are people on the
Internet infringing copyright, but that is a far cry from being an
infringement itself"

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L_226
Serious question: could a hypothetical content host add a clause in their ToS
stating that frivolous DMCA takedown notices incur a "processing fee" of
$XXXXX? Or, DMCA notices that have been filed as a result of using a non-UI
automated tool constitute a violation of ToS and also incur a fee? Asking for
a friend.

~~~
colejohnson66
I wouldn’t do that because then the big players could add a “processing fee”
of some large number that keeps the little people from fighting them

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cabaalis
Isn't there supposed to be an avenue of punishment for knowingly submitting
false dmca claims?

~~~
Cthulhu_
What I read in this (or some other) account is that Twitter is the only party
that can sue over a false DMCA claim, which they probably won't do.

I really would like to see a party have to pay a processing fee for DMCA
claims.

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eeeeeeeeeeeee
I’ve never heard that. Just because the content is hosted on Twitter does not
mean it’s up to Twitter. It’s up to the target of the complaint to pursue a
lawsuit against the complaining party. I’m not a lawyer but I dealt with this
a lot as a service provider. We simply had to follow the law and take the
content down or else we would be held liable.

The system we had before — the court system — required processing fees simply
by the process of filing lawsuits. The DMCA was specifically made so copyright
holders can send them in high volume without any review by a judge. They don’t
want to be slowed down. That law is working exactly as they intended, even
though I strongly disagree with it.

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SpicyLemonZest
I don't think this has anything to do with Twitter. They got a DMCA notice, so
they're legally obligated to remove the content unless TorrentFreak sends a
counter-notice.

~~~
DannyBee
They actually are not so required. This is often thought to be true but is
very wrong.

The only thing that happens if they say no is that they may be held liable
later if the content is found to be infringing. So in a case like this, which
is nonsense, they could just say "no" without any fear because nobody is going
to find it infringing in court.

(This will likely surprise people or generate snarky responses, but oh well)
Back when we had code.google.com, the DMCA team at Google used to spend a
tremendous amount of energy and time evaluating requests to understand whether
they were reasonable/made sense, because code.google.com got a lot of baseless
requests to remove content.

Google said no to a large number of baseless removals.

Twitter could do the same here.

(in practice i assume the volume becomes completely overwhelming at some
point)

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eeeeeeeeeeeee
It’s semantics really. Yes, Twitter can stick their neck out and ignore it,
but it almost never happens. The end result is that Twitter understandably
doesn’t want to have their legal team review every single DMCA request for
validity.

The law is clearly broken but service providers like Twitter are caught in the
middle.

As someone that had to deal with these reports, and we were tiny, the volume
is insane. I cannot imagine the number of complaints Twitter receives.

~~~
DannyBee
"The end result is that Twitter understandably doesn’t want to have their
legal team review every single DMCA request for validity."

I mean, humans are still involved in the process almost everywhere anyway, so
it's not like they save a tremendous amount of overhead to flag weird ones.

"The law is clearly broken but service providers like Twitter are caught in
the middle."

Sure, that i'm not gonna argue with

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return0
Torrentfreak should pay Starz for using a frame from their unreleased work.

~~~
Intermernet
That's not how fair use works. They used a single frame to authenticate the
veracity of the claim.

~~~
return0
That s how it works in EU now

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linuxftw
Enforcement of copyright (if you agree such a thing should even exist) should
be an entirely civil matter.

There shouldn't be any special protections for the 'platform.' They host the
content, they should be liable. This would prevent the consolidation of the
internet into the first place.

