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DMCA Notice in Google Search Results

   January 23rd, 2014

rise of the sea dragon coverHere's something a coworker relayed to me that I thought was interesting. We just got a copy of Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon into the library - she thought the cover looked familiar, but couldn't place it, so she searched Google for "rise of the sea dragon cover looks like."

Her logic, quite sensibly, was that someone else might have noticed a resemblance to an existing cover, and commented on the two looking alike.

But here's the interesting part: when she scrolled to the bottom of the first page of results, she noticed this message:

googledmca

Here are those two links:

It doesn't really surprise me that a search for DVD cover art would bridge the gap between the casually legal and copyright-infringement, but I had never seen this before. And clicking into the complaint itself is the first time I've actually seen what the complaints look like (and that they apparently allow made up words, like "commulative").

From my reading, it looks like Well Go USA Entertainment owns the copyright for this item, and Remove Your Media LLC is submitting takedown notices to Google, presumably on their behalf. Or rather, "remove from search results" notice - I didn't actually visit any of the 521 "Allegedly infringing URLs" to see if they were still live. And I have no idea which of those 521 was the one site removed from these search results.

I thought this nicely dovetailed with the EFF's Copyright Week last week. Copyright isn't just some esoteric notion, it's really happening every day.

And I know there's a lot to it, but here's what bothers me most about DMCA and takedown notices: it seems to be built on the idea of "guilty until proven innocent."* It's not unlike my neighbor going to the police and saying, "hey, that's my bike," and without question they take it away from me - and in order to get my bike back, I have to prove that I own it. I don't like that the burden of proof is on the accuser in our justice system, but is the complete opposite online.

After a quick skim of those "allegedly infringing URLs," it wouldn't surprise me that if there is lots of copyright infringing going on. However, I hate the idea that the solution to rampant piracy is the rampart revocation of freedoms.

And: I got so caught up with the novelty of this notice that I completely forgot to ask my coworker if she figured out which cover this one reminder her of.

Update: Maybe this one.

 


*And don't even get me started on the TSA.


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