DMCA weirdness

[(*steve*)]

I am writing some code to edit and convert gerber files into a useful format. (If the bloody software won't do what I want, then I'll fix it myself!)

Google for "The gerber file format specification" and you find that there's a DMCA complaint removing something (that's strange).

Investigate further and you'll find it is in a complaint which seems to deal with people posting links to some German TV show. Maybe they were making PCBs in that TV show?!?!?!

 

[Ian]

Unfortunately, what may have happened is that a large company that may often need to takedown content (i.e. TV/Movie Studios, Software companies, etc...) will have have handed a contract to a DMCA "specialist" to protect their content. In some cases this means that someone has typed a couple of words in to Google that will provide a 95% match for illegal content (for example "illegal-download-movie-title" + "download").

They then compile almost all of these hits in to a list of 1000's of urls to remove and send it en-masse to Google in a DMCA takedown request. This scattergun approach means that they'll end up removing 5% of these pages from Google for no reason, but there is very little reasonable recourse to prevent this from happening. It it possible to file a counter-claim to Google and get the page re-instated - although this takes some time and isn't always successful.

The only reason I know this is that it's happened to this site several times over the past decade. Sometimes we're told a page has been removed and we don't even know why, but eventually the DMCA takedown request list becomes available and then I can find the problem. Almost all of the time it has been a false positive, as someone just happens to mention the wrong keywords and a DMCA filing company are too lazy to manually check things.

I'd be that Gerber page happened to contain the title of a German TV show and the word "download" or similar - it can be as simple as that to get a takedown request, even if it's a false positive.

 

[Ian]

I just checked the query and see that Google now link to the DMCA claim - that's much easier than it used to be. Here's the claim:

https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/15850408#

They're blocking this page:

https://www.ucamco.com/files/downloads/file/81/the_gerber_file_format_specification.pdf

and claiming that it's an illegal download of (or link to) the TV Series "Deutschland 83"... hmmmm . Looking at the rest of that list, they must have used a really broad term as there are TONS of false positive urls there - news articles, GitHub repositories, HP support website links. It's so frustrating, as this isn't uncommon at all and all of those pages will have been removed from Google without much effort at all (yet it's very time consuming to get re-instated) .

 

[shrtrnd]

... you probably knew this was coming. I'm just a tech, not an engineer like you smart people.
What's DMCA?
'Didn't Make Careful Analysis'?

 

[bushtech]

I've just downloaded and opened that ucamco pdf without any problems

 

[(*steve*)]

DMCA is the US government saving the world from copyright infringment.

"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)."

Amongst other things, it allows "content creators" to tell search engines to remove entries to things they allege infringe their copyright. There is absolutely no penalty for them if they get it wrong, and very few options to get things re--listed.

 

[shrtrnd]

So you're saying all the whining we Colonists hear about Facebook and Google censoring stuff they don't like, is also allowed by the US Government itself to humor who knows who?
For shame. Hackers hacking the hackers, along with innocent third parties.
Sounds like the internet is not as 'open' as most people think it is (or ought to be).