Tag Archives: Takedown

The indie game website Itch.io was temporarily taken offline over the weekend due to an automated takedown request triggered by a fan page for a Funko Pop video game. The incident stemmed from a fan-made page for the Funko Fusion game. According to PCGamer, Itch.io creator Leafo described the fan …

Bungie found itself in the hotseat recently when a wave of copyright takedown requests were sent out against Destiny 2 content creators on YouTube. Bungie quickly admitted that it was just as confused about the situation as the rest of us and now, the studio is suing a number of …

One of the tactics that movie studios, music labels and copyright trolls use in taking down sites, having them blocked or attempting to extort money, is to find links to infringing content and either use them as court evidence, for DMCA takedowns. It turns out though that some groups manufacture …

Some of the world's most successful musicians, including the likes of Elton John, Bon Jovi, Taylor Swift and U2 have sent a petition to the United States congress, demanding the DMCA takedown system be given more power. As it stands, they claim to be concerned about the ability for musicians …

Be careful with how clever your predictions of upcoming Game of Thrones episodes are, as if you're spot on, HBO might use copyright law to take your content down, even if you don't use official show footage or audio. With episodes of the show being pirated as much as ever, …

It's not every so often that two entities that aren't well liked go at each other, but that's what happened in the past 24 hours, when EA Games filed a copyright claim against a Tweet made by Republican presidential hopeful, Donald Trump. The man had retweeted a fan-made video that …

It has been known for some time that blanket piracy takedown notices are becoming a bit of an issue, Google on its own gets hundreds of takedown requests per minute but after further digging, most of these takedown requests don't hold up to scrutiny. A new study published by researchers …

Media companies have lumped Google with a lot of responsibility when it comes to fighting piracy, so much so that Google now handles two million takedown requests every single day. According to Google's own transparency report, the company received 65 million takedown requests in the last month alone. The math …

Reddit, “the front page of the internet,” has been going through some changes in the past few months, in an effort to open up some of its decision making and staff dealings. It released a transparency report earlier this year, which gave users an idea of how often it complied …

The EFF and the Entertainment Software Alliance are currently battling it out over the need to preserve past games that have since been abandoned by their publishers or developers. The EFF wants an exemption to the DMCA to keep older titles alive once its servers are shut down but the …

The internet was pleasantly surprised last week when a fan-made, HD remake of Mario 64's first level was made available online for people to play in their browser. Thanks to the power of the Unity engine, we could all be whisked back to the mid-90s, where Nintendo was ruling the roost …

Although anti-piracy efforts tend to be mostly focused on tackling those that upload and download Hollywood's big, blockbuster movies, they do have other interests too. For example, Karaoke, which along with almost every form of entertainment has been digitised in the past decade, which means it's rife with piracy as …

Phony DMCA takedowns have been a staple of anti-piracy lobby groups for years, the debate often being not whether they did it, but whether it was their fault or the over-zealous reporting of their automated takedown tools. Even in the case of clear unjust use of the law however, it's rare …

The hacktivist movement Anonymous has made good on its promises to target those associated with the violent extremist organisation, ISIS, by taking over and knocking out hundreds of websites and social media accounts that help promote the organisation and encourage recruitment from new members. Apparently though, this is just the …

Yesterday the world of peer to peer sharing held its collective breath, as several of the world's largest Torrent sites, including the iconic Pirate Bay, disappeared from the internet. Nobody has been able to let it out yet either, as despite a proxy .CR PirateBay domain springing up, an official …

Google has a lot to deal with when it comes to complying with Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) law. It gets hundreds of thousands of takedown requests every single day, all of which it must address at some point if it is to toe the line of the law. Most …

Google has turned down the request from the MPAA to blacklist the homepage of a number of sites in its search results. While it has yet to publish a response as to why it turned down this particular request, it's been speculated that it could be because any pirated content …

Running an online drug marketplace like the Silk Road is always going to be a risky endeavour. Not only does it make you the head of an organisation that makes millions through facilitating the sale of substances deemed illegal in many countries around the world, but its mere existence is a …

Google recently made some changes to its search algorithm, which meant that sites that are on the receiving end of too many DMCA takedown requests would have their search engine ranking downgraded significantly. While you would imagine most people don't find their illegal downloads through Google, it actually had a …

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, …

Boy oh boy does the music and film industry love DMCA takedown requests. Since Google began publishing the requests it receives in an effort to be more transparent, we've become privy to the millions of URLs that automated tools working on behalf of the BPI, MPAA, RIAA and other such …

In a move that shouldn't be a surprise at this point, several major movie studios have asked Google to remove Kim Dotcom's Mega site from its search engines, claiming that the file locker is hosting copyright protected content without permission. However, it's not individual file links that the studios want …

Movie studios aren't keen on having people share their content illegally online, they've made a big point about this. However, now they're claiming that their takedown requests are actually infringing themselves, with several asking Google to remove them from the transparency reports. In an effort to name and shame companies …

Kim Dotcom has hit out against GEMA, a German performing rights group, for apparently having his video of the Mega.co.nz launch ceremony pulled from Youtube on copyright grounds. The video has now been reinstated, but that hasn't stopped him tweeting about it. Incredible: The GEMA in Germany took down our …