Paramount Pictures Thinks A Discussion Of GhostVPN Is Really A Pirate Link To The Movie Ghost

from the dmca-all-the-things!! dept

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As you may remember, Viacom once sued YouTube for $1 billion dollars over video clips on the site. Right before the case was set to start, Viacom had to scramble and remove some of the alleged infringements from the complaints, because the company realized that Viacom employees had uploaded the clips as part of their marketing campaign. Suing YouTube over clips that you yourself uploaded is not a good look, and it's a big part of the reason why Viacom's arguments fell flat in court. Viacom owns Paramount Pictures, and it would appear that the "level of care" that the company takes in sending DMCA notices has not improved much over the years.Torrentfreak has the latest round of ridiculously bad DMCA takedown notices coming from a major Hollywood studio. Whereas in the old days, we'd see takedowns occur based on a single word, it appears that here, Paramount has upgraded its auto-censorbot to use two words. Here it appears that anything that is vaguely associated with a movie, plus the word "utorrent" must automatically be wiped from the internet. Take, for example, this conversation on the utorrent forums about how to configure Cyberghost VPN. It's all pretty innocuous, but Paramount Pictures apparently hired one of these fly-by-night censorship outfits by the name of IP-Echelon to take it down , because clearly any use of the word "Ghost" and "utorrent" must be infringing -- even when "ghost" isn't even written out as a separate word.The Torrentfreak article has a number of similar situations, including one where someone said "imagine that" in a comment, and another where someone used the word "clueless" and Paramount/IP-Echelon insisted they were linking to infringing copies of the movies "Imagine That" and "Clueless." But that's clueless.And, yes, it's certain that many of the other links in these notices were to actually infringing files. But just because you legitimately take down some links, it doesn't excuse trying to censor perfectly legitimate content.

Filed Under: dmca, forums, takedowns, vpn, words

Companies: ghostvpn, ip-echelon, paramount pictures