“Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice”

Oh, this is good. The University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering recently released a study investigating the methods used by anti-piracy organizations to find people who share copyrighted material.

During their investigation, they received hundreds of legal threats in the form of DMCA takedown notices, despite never having shared any actual copyrighted material. Some of these threats involved alleged copyright violations by things like networked printers supposedly hosting movies.

Of course, the people/spambots who work for these anti-piracy organizations don’t need anything resembling proof before they threaten legal action. When you don’t care about serious investigation and your only concern is meeting your Bad Guy quota, the throw-’em-all-in-Gitmo approach works fine.

In any case, no law needs to have been broken before these people try to confuse a judge into ordering a teenager to pay thousands of dollars to their multinational media company. All they need is two things.

A string of text like “Iron_Man-(2008).[xvid].ScrEEnEr”, and the most ruthless lawyer goons that a bottomless wallet can buy.