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WB's Takedown Notices Aimed at Entertainment Co.'s Own Websites
Critics of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) got some ammunition recently, when Warner Bros. Entertainment (WB) asked Google to take down hundreds of copyright-infringing websites ' only to later realize that it had included legitimate sites and some of the entertainment company's own official pages. The blunder dredges up questions about whether the current notice-and-takedown system is working for both copyright owners and service providers.
Section 512 of the DMCA provides the notice-and-takedown process that allows copyright owners, like WB, to protect their works from online infringement. WB, via its hired DMCA agent Vobile, sent a DMCA takedown notice to Google listing over 300 allegedly infringing sites. As tech blog TorrentFreak discovered, legitimate domains were targeted, such as an Amazon page selling WB's The Dark Knight and an official IMDb page for Batman Begins. Also listed were some of WB's own official websites for movies such as The Matrix.
The episode highlights how the DMCA notice-and-takedown process can be used to take down non-infringing content, says Paul Sieminski, general counsel at Automattic, the company behind the online publishing company WordPress. “There's kind of this spray-and-pray effect of sending out a huge volume of notices without any human review,” he says. “In addition to the infringing matches, there's a huge volume of mistakes like in this [WB] one.”
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