Sony phony DMCA takedown blocks freely available movie

DMCA takedown requests, especially the one for content that doesn't belong to the complainee, have repeatedly been shown to be ridiculous since their implementation. Google has had to deal with tens of millions of the things and even some automated takedown tools demanding their own takedown requests be taken down, but now Sony has gone too new heights of ridiculousness, by managing to block a video that not only had nothing to do with it, but was deliberately made freely available by the creators.

Oh Sony, even the film itself is disappointed in you

Update: The video now appears to be back up. No word from Sony on the matter as of yet. 

The video in question was Sintel, a creative commons licensed short film by the Blender Foundation which has for the past near-decade, been producing free films like Sintel and Big Buck Bunny, in order to promote its open source, 3D graphics tool, Blender. It's entirely free and the foundation is a non-profit organisation funded by donations, DVD sales and how-to tutorials.

Sintel was its 2010 release and it's generated almost four million views since then, but no more. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ']

Somehow Sony's automated takedown tools have spotted this 3D gem and decided that it somehow infringes upon Sony Pictures. It then sent out a DMCA takedown request and the film's been removed from Youtube.

KitGuru Says: There is no way Sony should be able to take this down. You can understand why Google is keen to prevent infringement and god knows there's a lot of video theft on Youtube, but automatically taking them down without any mediation is going to impact the innocent far more than letting some video pirates slip through the net. [Thanks TorrentFreak]

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