Tracking the trackers

The University of Washington study on the methods used by anti-piracy organizations to find copyright violations has a sample DMCA takedown notice, received by the University during the study, from which they’ve removed the names and addresses. After a few paragraphs of legal threats, the letter contains this gem :

” Further, we believe that the entire Internet community benefits when these matters are resolved cooperatively. We urge you to take immediate action to stop this infringing activity and inform us of the results of your actions. We appreciate your efforts toward this common goal. “

For people who are paid to spy on and denounce other people’s Internet use, they seem pretty clueless.

Hello, recording industry, and welcome to the 21st century. It’s not called ARPANET anymore, Internet users aren’t an obscure subculture, my dog has a website, and people don’t buy CDs. This is the world you live in, and it’s too late to prevent what’s already happened.

Not that we’d want to, anyways. Most of us don’t own a record label with an anachronistic business model.

“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.