Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

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

(1/2) > >>

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

http://torrentfreak.com/hbo-asks-google-to-take-down-infringing-vlc-media-player-130715/

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

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

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

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.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page