Copyright Infringement Advisor

DMCA Takedown Notices Being Abused

By John Whitaker on Posted in DMCA Safe Harbor, Interesting Cases, Online piracy

Yesterday I posted a blog article about how the DMCA takedown notices are being so heavily abused these days that it amounts to extortion. The good folks over at FightCopyrightTrolls tweeted about my post, it came to the attention of someone at Takedown Piracy, and their owner called me a hack.  Well, here’s my take.  As I said yesterday, DMCA takedown notices have exploded in the last year about twelve fold. Yesterday, this Takedown Piracy company was the number one reporting organization for those takedown notices, at least to Google.  They aren’t as of today, but they are still number two.

So if you think about it, Takedown Piracy is probably a one-man shop, or at least it appears to be.  Yet Takedown Piracy submitted over 400,000 DMCA takedown notices to Google last month. So if this guy Nate Glass works about a 10-hour workday 5 days a week, that’s about 215 work-hours a month.  So Nate is sending out about 1,860 DMCA takedown notices per hour, or about one DMCA takedown notice every two seconds.  You tell me, do you think Nate is doing his homework on those notices?

The Courts have held that before someone issues a DMCA takedown notice, they have to make a determination whether the use of they copyrighted material is a ‘fair use.’  Does anyone think that Nate Glass and his Shakedown Takedown Piracy company are performing an actual ‘fair use’ analysis of every allegedly infringing work before a DMCA takedown notice is served?  In two seconds, Nate and his crew can actually visit a site, confirm that a copyrighted work is being used, and determine that it is not a fair use?

Poppycock.

Takedown Piracy is a shakedown racket plain and simple.  Don’t let the smoke and mirrors fool you. They might not get paid directly by the innocents that they shake down, but they are profiting from bogus copyright trolling just the same.

  • http://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/ SJD

    Because this avalanche of takedown notices cannot possibly be conceived in good faith, could Google show some guts and ignore clearly automated requests treating them as spam? Sure it would prompt some lawsuits: there are many vultures watching Google and wanting to strip its safe harbor status, but aren’t these lawsuits easily winnable?

    What if I automate 911 calls every time my smartphone detects the sound of tires squeal? You can imagine what will happen to me. And this is a perfect analogy: while in many cases emergency breaking can indicate an accident, relying on an algorithm is nothing more than abuse, and will be quickly dealt with.

    Absolutely agree that this is a racket as to the owners of URLs being taken down, but as to Google, it is spam. Ans should be treated as spam.

    It is very sad that lopsided laws make even giants like Google hesitant to halt unambitious takedown abuses.

    Just a thought.

    • John Whitaker

      Completely agree. Google has its systems pretty automated too, but still all these bogus notices have to be costing people something in time as well as money.

  • Noneyabusiness

    AMEN……f’ing scumbag trolls. I hate them all. Only thing worse than DMCA trolls are the porn trolls adn their extortion scheme.

  • Perfect Sinner

    It is regrettable that you percieve someone doing a good job in an efficient, effective manner as a “shakedown racket.” Do you think the car industry is a sham, as well, because they build cars en masse in a factory, instead of by hand, one at a time? Just because TDP is proficient in utilizing the DMCA process does not make them less valid. Claiming that they are “profiting from bogus copyright trolling” is libelous, at best. The reason the numbers have increased so exponentially is because the violations have increased exponentially.
    You have completely lost any perspective of journalistic integrity with this reader!