If someone puts up a 600mb file called 'Thor (2011)', what do you think it's going to be. Do you need to open and watch it? 10s or 100s of times on 10s or 100s of sites?
On the one hand many sites are making no attempt to stop the flood, pointing at the DMCA, on the other the film and music industry want to legitimately stop these files being shared.
I guess what I'm saying is are they supposed to download and watch every single file?
As that's precisely what the website owners have claimed is something they can't do, but the music/film industry suddenly has to do that on 100s of sites?
You're still giving the industry way too much credit for being reasonable. This is not a case of 600MB files named "Thor (2011)" that aren't Thor. In the link above, you can see that Warner Bros., having the copyright to the film "The Box" and the Harry Potter films went on to issue takedown notices for:
- Things that sounded sort of maybe like "The Box", like "The Box That Changed Britain" and "Cancer Step Outsider of the Box" (sic)
- Portuguese Harry Potter fanfiction unrelated to the films
- Open-source software that Warner Bros. didn't approve of since it might speed up downloads
- "URLs" such as "http://hotfile.com/contacts.html and give them the details of where the link wasposted and the link and they will deal to the @sshole who posted the fake."
Does that really represent a reasonable effort on their part to get it right?
Yes, I do agree somewhat, there should have been someone checking the matching as well as some oversight on the employees. I find it odd that someone would get so indignant that they'd take down an OSS piece of software.
But in the end the music/film industry has been asked, with little to no programming skills, to try and regulate the web industry, who's livelihood depends on lots of programming skill.
I think YouTube have moved strategically as they can see where that's ultimately going to end up, with a swing back towards sites doing the filtering.
The music/film industry has not been asked to try to regulate the Web industry. Instead, the music/film industry has demanded the right to do whatever the hell they like, with no oversight, no due process, and no hindrance, to ensure their own profits to the exclusion of all other considerations. It's bad for the artists, bad for consumers, extremely bad in terms of collateral damage to the Internet and society alike, and ultimately bad for the music and film industry themselves. Every study done by independent observers, every bit of evidence that is examined by people not being paid for alarmism, every new scandal that comes out, underscores the short-sightedness, venality, and sheer moral failure of the bozos running that show, and yet true to form, Congress continues to lick their spittle for a couple nickels come payday.
I guess what I'm saying is are they supposed to download and watch every single file?
No. But they could at least glance at the titles to make sure they're not firing off takedown requests for content that is quite obviously unrelated to the IP in question. Instead they're doing mindless searches for words that appear in their movie titles and submitting takedown requests automatically, which is pretty obviously an abusive practice.
If you want to use a legal mechanism to force a company remove content from a site, you should be required to put in at least the most basic good faith effort to make sure that you're actually forcing them to remove something that is your IP.
Sure, I get the whining about how it's a lot of work, but look...if enforcing your property rights is too much of a burden to be realistically achieved, then your business model is broken and you should find another type of work.
> If someone puts up a 600mb file called 'Thor (2011)', what do you think it's going to be. Do you need to open and watch it?
One problem is that they weren't even doing that well. I mean, they tried to take down things that weren't even files. They weren't just being fooled by deceptive files, they acted against correctly labeled items they did not own.
Now, if you're saying that it's totally impossible to police this, then I agree with you. The problem is that no one can do better than them in terms of knowing who has permission to do what. Yeah, they could be a lot less sloppy in their copy-pasting, but if even they don't know what they own, who does?
Now, there are still ways for artists to get paid in spite of this impossibility, and I think everyone wholly supports that. Everyone wants to see the artists succeeding. If not for them, there would be nothing to enjoy. But that impossibility of enforcement isn't going to go away no matter how much power we give them to censor stuff.
The more power we give these labels, the more innocent people are going to get caught in the crossfire.
On the one hand many sites are making no attempt to stop the flood, pointing at the DMCA, on the other the film and music industry want to legitimately stop these files being shared.
I guess what I'm saying is are they supposed to download and watch every single file?
As that's precisely what the website owners have claimed is something they can't do, but the music/film industry suddenly has to do that on 100s of sites?
It's a rock/hard place scenario.