Another Week, Another Hollywood Company Files A Takedown Against TorrentFreak

from the a-weekly-occurrence dept

The news site TorrentFreak tends to get more false DMCA copyright notices than other sites, in part because of its name. It seems that people who don't bother investigating anything jump to the wrong conclusion that because it has "Torrent" in its name, it must be a "piracy" site, rather than a news site that reports on news about copyright and filesharing. So last week, TorrentFreak got some attention after Starz not only sent a bogus DMCA takedown over a TorrentFreak news article about leaked TV shows, but then started DMCAing anyone who even tweeted that Starz was abusing the DMCA this way. Starz eventually admitted it had made a mistake and issued a pretty lame apology.

You might think that others in Hollywood would at least pay a little attention to this sort of thing -- but apparently not. This weekend TorrentFreak reported that yet another tweet of yet another of its stories was removed due to a copyright claim -- this time from Warner Bros. Just like last time, where Starz utilized an awful third party service (The Social Element) to handle these takedowns, this time Warner Bros employed a company called Marketly, one of a few such companies who claim they're in the "brand protection" business and go around issuing often dubious takedowns.

The takedown notice, sent by Warner Bros’ anti-piracy partner Marketly, accused us of posting a tweet that made “computer program(s)” available “for copying through downloading,” without permission of the copyright owner. “We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of this software via your company’s network,” the notice added.

Except that nothing in the tweet in question made a "computer program" available for copying. The tweet was pointing to a story from last month entitled Former Kinox.to & Movie4k.to Admin Freed, Tax Office Retrieves €1.75m:

While it is a story about former pirate streaming sites, you'd think it's the kind of story a company like Warner Bros. would like to keep up, as it talks about the operator of such a site going to prison and handing over a ton of money.

I sent Marketly a bunch of questions regarding this takedown, and the company got back to me actually defending the takedown and insisting it was appropriate. The argument was that because Twitter automatically turns URLs into links, so the headline itself was "linking" to two pirate sites:

The hyperlinks Twitter inserted in TorrentFreak’s tweet directed users to webpages that are infringing on Warner Bros. content causing Marketly to issue a notice as noted in TorrentFreak's article.

But that's questionable on multiple levels. First of all, no one is using those particular links to magically discover pirate websites. Second, they are still news articles, reporting on news about these sites, and the fact that those should be censored raises serious 1st Amendment questions. Third, even if those links do go to the sites, they are still not links directly to Warner Bros. infringing material. Instead, they are links to sites whereby people might find Warner Bros. infringing material. But that's also true of Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter itself and much, much more. Does Marketly take it upon itself to block links to those sites as well?

The DMCA does let you block links to specifically infringing content, but not to entire sites across the board, yet Marketly (and apparently) Warner Bros., don't much seem to care about the specifics of the law. Like so many in Hollywood, the incorrect assumption they make is that if a site has some infringing material, then there's no problem with wiping out the entire site.

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Filed Under: censorship, copyright, reporting, takedown, tweets

Companies: marketly, torrentfreak, twitter, warner bros.