Movie Studios Ask Google To Censor Their Own Films, Facebook and Wikipedia

I wish Google would use a strategy that a former colleague used in an upper year Physics course. While encouraging students to discuss problems, he informed them that plagiarizing assignments was not allowed. When he got the first assignment, he noticed that the solution handed in by one of the top students in the department was identical to the one handed in by a much weaker student. So, he gave zero to the top student and full marks to the weaker student. (It should be noted that the contribution of each assignment towards the final grade was likely less than 2%). As he expected, the student who got zero went to see him. My colleague told him that he had no foolproof way to show that it was the other student that plagiarized the assignment and that the best method to prevent another zero being given was to not allow other students to plagiarize his assignment - if indeed this is what had happened. This solved the problem for that year ... and for many years after as word got around.<p>So... I wish Google would selectively remove links that are clearly submitted erroneously (claiming that, since the studios own these sites, no third party is claiming fair use) whereas preventing links where fair use appear clearly reasonable (such as wikipedia and reviews from news outlets) from being removed.

&#62; <i>The company appears to present itself as a DMCA remover on the website yesitis.org but lists no address. Considering the many mistakes made by the firm, one has to wonder whether their “under penalty of perjury” statement that they represent the copyright holders above is accurate.</i><p>I think this has to be a prank. The website was generated with a GoDaddy website builder, filled with laughable plagiarized boilerplate, and doesn't include any information that would identify a particular company. All of the photos are stock photos. They include 'Adoption' and 'Personal Injury' under their list of services. I think someone is seeing if they can get Google to take down obviously legitimate websites when an obviously illegitimate source asks them to.

Strictly obeying someone's instructions is a well known technique for sabotage.<p>Google really should just comply with any validly formed DMCA request they're given, but put information links about that fact. (Which they do, to "chilling effects".)<p>And someone really needs to start tackling blatantly false requests too.<p>Google has already taken big steps to please copyright holders. Their detection stuff is remarkable.

<i>Interestingly enough, they above examples were all sent by an outfit called “Yes It Is – No Piracy!” which we’ve never heard of before.</i><p>Didn't stop you attributing the behavior to the rightsholders in the headline and most of the article, though, even though there's no way of knowing whether they were actually involved.

I sometimes get the feeling that the movie studios could be outsmarted by a box of rocks. This example doesn't really do much to change my mind.

Google should comply. If the rightsholders want to give their titles the internet death penalty who are we to argue?

The solution should be pretty simple. Apply same damages rules currently used in IP infringement for any false claim that tries to apply ownership over someone else work.<p>So if a false DMCA is made over a news article or review, then who ever did it will have to pay damages as if he took exclusive ownership over the news article, and thus pay what ever the sell price is for complete transfer of copyright. If buying complete exclusive rights to a news article cost say, $1 mil, than that's the damages to be payed.<p>After all, that would just follow the same concept being pursued in court cases by the same companies filing those false DMCA's.

Google should just completely censor all MAFIAA content. Let's see how long it takes for these fuckers to back down. One week? Two weeks? I bet they'll never submit another DMCA complaint agian, legit or not.

This is just a whole other level of stupid that I would have never even thought possible.