
Universal asks Google to take down 127.0.0.1 for piracy - davidgerard
https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/10969223#
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yread
Already submitted and discussed yesterday

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9931404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9931404)

TLDR; there is a sharing program which installs web service on localhost:4001
that handles sort of magnet links

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yason
This underlines the craziness of copyright and intellectual "property".

If DMCA claims were expensive, companies would bother requesting takedown for
the most profitable movies/albums/games only and they wouldn't go on
autopilot, claiming whatever they think might infringe their copyrights. But
then the garage bands and individual artists/musicians would be left out of
the game completely, they couldn't use DMCA to take down their music.

On the other hand, how do you prove you are the author unless you have lots of
money for lawyers? If you say "I composed this song at home, and published it
under CC licensing" and MAFIAA say they represent the copyright holder, is it
not clear who owns what?

If there was a digital notary service where you could digitally sign and
timestamp a file, that might help a bit. But the downside is that people could
take public domain works or someone's un-notarized works, claim ownership,
have it stamped and they would begin to hold a stronger position pretending to
be the author.

I think this is somehow similar to how indigenous people wondered how the
white man could possibly think of owning forests, rivers, and land. They
considered Earth unownable, not belonging to anyone but rather people
belonging to the Earth. Similarly, natives to the digital world wonder how
somebody could possibly think of owning bits, numbers, and copyable files.

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eli
I've sent DMCA takedown notices. A garage band could too. You don't have to
prove you're the author to send a takedown notice, you merely have to assert
it.

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emodendroket
I'm thinking the parent comment's point is more that if I upload an original
composition on YouTube and someone else issues a takedown request claiming to
own the copyright it'd be really hard for me to dispute that if the person
making the request had deep enough pockets. Not sure whether that is true
though.

~~~
jacquesm
It's not true. All you have to do is to assert that _you_ instead have
copyright and that you indemnify the hosting party from any fall-out and your
content will be right back up. They can still sue you after that but they
could do that regardless. So the DMCA is actually pretty good when it comes to
this aspect.

And in the case above you'd have to sue the party claiming to have copyright
on your creation but that's optional.

~~~
emodendroket
Well, that's the way the law works, perhaps, but is that the way it is
generally implemented? You occasionally hear about Kafka-esque takedown
request disputes with big services like YouTube and I guess even if they're
indemnified there's no obligation to put your stuff back up.

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tomkwok
In another DMCA take down request [0], Universal included a URL to an entry on
IMDB.com, which is obviously a legitimate site.

Now that's not so funny.

[0]:
[https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/10951315](https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/10951315)

~~~
sp332
That IMDB page
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2820852/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2820852/)
has several videos on it. It's possible that one of them was infringing. But
even if it was, I doubt they would really want to delist the whole page from
Google searches.

~~~
dogma1138
Just as a likely scenario that there could be a comment with a download link
in it, download links are very commonly shared on twitter and Reddit so who
knows...

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gnu8
Where are the criminal charges for purgery? This kind of abuse has gone on
long enough. We need to start sanctioning every DMCA claim that has the least
error in it. Every copyright agent should be living in fear of having their
company fined and being jailed personally whenever they send a DMCA claim.

~~~
MagnumOpus
FYI: The term is "perjury".

And to answer your question, it's only perjury if it is a deliberate
misstatement - which WB will argue this isn't.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
Which means that when you get an automated system to file the legal documents,
you'll never get a deliberate misstatement. If this was a lawyer going through
one by one and making a statement, this couldn't happen because the lawyer
could only request a take down on 127.0.0.1 after giving some thought to it,
denoting either negligence or deliberate misstatement to create such a notice.
But because a machine can do it, we get all sorts of crazy stuff that are
accidents of an algorithm and that is acceptable under law.

~~~
jsprogrammer
Algorithms don't make accidents. There is a non zero probability of a cosmic
ray flipping a bit and corrupting the operation of the machine, but those
events are quite rare. In normal operation an automated software system will
do exactly what it does, nothing more or less.

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codeshaman
Do they still actively issue these takedown requests, even when faced with the
fact that it has zero effect on weather the movie is pirateable ? I mean, I
can download _any_ movie in a couple of minutes from one of the torrent sites
that I usually use anonymously. I do this because it's convenient and because
I seldomly watch the movies till the end - many of them are not interesting
enough to keep me awake.

I stopped pirating music since Spotify came along - the price is right and the
selection is good enough to keep me engaged for several lifetimes. There is no
such thing for movies.

Maybe iTunes, but I'm not willing to pay their price and the selection is far
from complete.

So instead of paying lawers and acting like clowns, these guys should invest
in a startup which is the Spotify for movies without all the jurisdictional
limitations that usually come with such services, because their lawyers are
busy fishing pirates on 127.0.0.1...

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sombremesa
Netflix?

~~~
rglullis
Geofenced catalogs, two-year delays between bluray releases and getting to
netflix, lack of blockbusters because they are too expensive to license...

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venomsnake
Can anyone index the chilling effects DB ... it seems like a great place to
find content ...

~~~
corobo
Plus you know they're legit, WB's robot says so. That's like what, at least a
green skull and crossbones?

Why aren't they submitting DMCAs to the places actually hosting the files?

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sudioStudio64
I love this story. I believe that the Church of Scientology did the same thing
a long time ago in the early days of the internet.

~~~
davidgerard
e.g.,
[http://lists.ding.net/geeks/96/dec/msg00007.html](http://lists.ding.net/geeks/96/dec/msg00007.html)

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josteink
Now if that doesn't start raising some questions, I don't know what will :)

~~~
davidgerard
Nothing will until there's any sort of penalty for grossly incompetent and
fraudulent DMCA notifications.

~~~
dspillett
In this case they have effectively asked Google to de-list themselves. I
suggest Google (temporally at least) does exactly that for all their
properties and sends then a message to the effect that "the entity hosting the
pages you asked to be de-listed also listed these <list of millions of
entries> and we de-listed those also, please let us know which, if any, of
these assets should legitimately be included in our index".

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PaulHoule
It reminds me of the time that I unloaded the loopback driver...

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x5n1
i run 127.0.0.1 can i sue these geniuses? this has caused trillions of dollars
of economic loss to my business.

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shashwat986
And Universal isn't alone:

[https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%9...](https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sort_by=date_received+desc&term=127.0.0.1&term-
require-all=true&term=127.0.0.1&term-require-all=true)

EDIT: Also, Universal's been doing it LOTS of times before too (via above
link).

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sarciszewski
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/23/movie_studio_finds_p...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/23/movie_studio_finds_pirated_jurassic_world_on_localhost)

The lawyer sending these automated DMCA searches tagged their own computer,
implying they were pirating the movie.

That's hilarious if it's true.

~~~
wang_li
Since these are requests that google take down links from it's index, it is
much more probable that someone somewhere has a page where they have a link to
localhost with the anchor text matching the title of a movie.

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smanuel
Google, you can take _127.0.0.1_ down, but please leave _localhost_ alone.

~~~
zeckalpha
They're just taking a progressive stance against IPv4.

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ousta
put in the wrong hands at google this could be the end of the web as we know
it if some intern decide to take down 127.0.0.1

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bcruddy
127.0.0.1 is purely a virtual loopback within your own system. Google can't
take it down.

~~~
hamiltonkibbe
Which is presumably one of Universal's machines in this case... Better be safe
and take down all universalpictures.com properties

