RIAA Can't Figure Out Google's Takedown Tools; Blames Google

from the pebkac dept

We have never imposed any limit on the number of DMCA notices that a copyright owner or reporting organization may send us, although we do have some technical safeguards in our trusted partner program (where submitters may be using automated mechanisms to send large volumes) as a safeguard against accidental flooding of the system.

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With the release of Google's copyright transparency report recently, which helped highlight some astoundingly stupid DMCA takedown notices -- including a few from the RIAA -- you just knew the RIAA would have to lash out in response. But the question was what angle would it take. Now we know: it's simply making things up.The RIAA put up a blog post in which it listed out "five facts" to attack Google's transparency report claims . Except, this is RIAA math. If you actually read the "facts" you realize they're basically two points repeated over and over again: (1) Google limits how many searches they can do to find infringing material. (2) Google limits how many infringing domains it can report via its Webmaster tools.There's a big problem with both of those claims (beyond the fact that "two" does not equal "five"). It's that neither "fact" appears to be really accurate. Googlehave some tools that limit crawlers fromsearches, and perhaps the RIAA has been using such tools to try to find infringement. That would certainly explain its decision to DMCA reviews from media sites of musicians, or official release videos from artists' own accounts. Of course, that would also subject the RIAA to claims of falsifying DMCA notices, since they have to swear that they have a good faith belief that there really is infringing material on those sites, and they can't do that if they don't actually look at them.As for the limits on, well, as Ars Technica points out the only "limit" appears to be how many URLs can be submitted in a single submission. That seems to be 1,000 per shot:But there's no indication that you can't just go back and then list out the next 1,000. There may be a few other safeguards within a separate program that Google has with "trusted" partners, but even then it appears to just be how many URLs can be submitted in a single batch, rather than a total limit. In fact, as Google told SearchEngineLand , the RIAA is simply wrong, and there are no actual restrictions besides how many URLs can be submitted at once:And if you need any more proof that the RIAA is completely full of it, you just need to look at Google's own transparency report, where it shows that Microsoft filed more than five times as many DMCA takedowns as the RIAA and NBC Universal filed twice as many:It seems that even if there was "a limit", which there does not appear to be, then the RIAA is not coming anywhere close to that limit anyway.In other words, we can sum up the RIAA's complaint about Google's copyright transparency report as being "the transparency report is wrong, because we're clueless about how to work your tools." Given the RIAA's general (lack of) understanding about technology, perhaps that's not too surprising. But it is amusing to see them so stringently and publicly display their ignorance.

Filed Under: dmca, takedown, transparency report

Companies: google, riaa