HBO Asks Google to Take Down “Infringing” VLC Media Player

[Renegade]

From the "please-stop-trying-to-make-me-piss-my-pants-laughing" department...

http://torrentfreak....media-player-130715/

HBO sent a DMCA takedown to Google, listing a copy of the popular media player VLC as a copyright infringement.

Umm, yeah, there's a word for that. Around here we call it "criminal fraud".

Torrent Freak is far more understanding of the horrible and terrible hardships that HBO suffers than I am.

While I still primarily use ALShow, I use VLC on my Mac, and also have a copy on my main PC. It's a good program. But, it's also GPL'd, which makes the takedown request all that more repellent.

[Tinman57]

  Just another typical abuse of the DMCA.  I'm just surprised that the MPAA wasn't banging their pots & pans behind HBO at the time.....

[40hz]

^I think most people who looked at this have decided that the inclusion of VLC in that blanket take down request was most likely a mistake caused by the automated search routine that produced the list that made up the request. If they actually were targeting VLC, it isn't apparent when you look at some of what else is on the list.



Looks like the VLC dolphin somehow got caught up in the tuna net HBO likes to employ for this sort of thing.

Not that it makes it more acceptable that a robot screwed up since a human is still supposed to look at these things before they're filed right? Nope. Apparently a human doesn't. These things are 99.9% automated.

Be nice if there was some teeth to the penalties defined for filing a bogus DMCA notice. But the powers that be don't seem too keen on enforcing that provision in the act so it's going to continue until some judge looks down, discovers some kahunas, and works up the gumption to slap a few of these bogus filers with the fine. It will probably be thrown out on appeal. But at least it still send a message of sorts.

[Renegade]

Having programmed this kind of software functionality more than once, I am very far from "understanding" or "forgiving". "Automation" is not an excuse for incompetence.

If you run someone over in your car because you can't drive worth crap, you are still prosecuted. Why do these criminals get a pass?

[Edvard]

I got a DMCA takedown notice because some xplorer2 icons I had posted on Mediafire had the filename "xplorer2.zip".
Nikos was very understanding, but said as much; it was a dolphin caught in the tuna net, and there wasn't much he could do after the fact. 
Result: I still had to take the files down, but then I uploaded under a different filename and all is well.

[40hz]

An interesting case for DMCA abuse is the one of a "natural" childbirth blogger by the name of Gina Crosly-Corcoran (thefeministbreeder.com) taking on an obstetrician Dr. Amy Reid (skepticalob.com) when Reid took issue with some of Corcoran's words.

This is an unusual situation in that Ms. Crosley-Cocoran publically stated she filed numerous DMCA takedowns against the Dr. Reid (and is also using some of the money in a legal fund she set up for herself to file even more) with the primary goal of forcing Dr. Reid's site off the web.

And to compound this very obvious abuse of the DMCA, Ms. Crosley-Cocoran has also publically encouraged her friends to contact Dr. Reid's ISP and start filing their own DMCA claims against her. Eventually Dr. Reid got fed up with the constant groundless legal threats and ongoing DMCA nonsense and filed a lawsuit against Ms. Crosley-Cocoran.

TechDirt did one of their usual superb write-ups on it here. It would be worth reading, even if just for giggles. (Dr. Reid is a firecracker btw - check out her blog!) But it also will be interesting to see how this eventually plays out in court.

--------------------

Note: I was interested in seeing what each of these two had to say about this on their own sites. Dr. Reid's site (www.skepticalob) has a decent amount posted about all this. Gina Crosley-Cocoran (thefeministbreeder.com) is mostly sequestered behind a paywall, so I had to be content with what others have quoted her as saying. However, if the hip-jocular style of The Feminist Breeder's subscription page is anything to go by, I think I have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Addendum: the referenced picture of Cocoran flipping the bird to Reid which apparently started the whole DMCA takedown campaign (when Reid put a copy of it up on her own site) has since been taken down by Cocoran. But on the Internet, nothing is ever truly gone. A google for "Gina Crosley-Corcoran" will dredge it up.

It's a very nice picture IMO. Funny how something this innocuous could be the catalyst that set so many wheels in motion...

There's a lesson in there somewhere.