You’ll remember last month’s news that Fox had sent fraudulent takedown notices regarding my novel Homeland. This is hardly an isolated incident: the studios routinely exhibit depraved indifference to the inaccuracies in their automated censorship threats to search engines and webhosts.
This is especially troubling when the studios’ notices catch media made specifically to criticize them and their legal strategies. When that happens, they haven’t caught a few dolphins in the tuna net — they’ve caught some rival activists in the net, activists who’re trying to get them to take more care with their dragnet techniques.
A case in point: TPB:AFK a brilliantly made documentary about the MPAA-directed attacks on The Pirate Bay’s servers in Sweden, funded through a highly successful Kickstarter. The documentary is Creative Commons licensed and can be freely distributed across the Internet, but Viacom, Paramount, Fox and Lionsgate have been sending takedown notices to services all over the Internet — notices in which they aver, on penalty of perjury, that they have a good faith basis for asserting that they represent the people who made “TPB:AFK.”
Which they don’t.
Over the past weeks several movie studios have been trying to suppress the availability of TPB-AFK by asking Google to remove links to the documentary from its search engine. The links are carefully hidden in standard DMCA takedown notices for popular movies and TV-shows.
The silent attacks come from multiple Hollywood sources including Viacom, Paramount, Fox and Lionsgate and are being sent out by multiple anti-piracy outfits.
Fox, with help from six-strikes monitoring company Dtecnet, asked Google to remove a link to TPB-AFK on Mechodownload. Paramount did the same with a link on the Warez.ag forums.
Hollywood Studios Censor Pirate Bay Documentary
[Ernesto/TorrentFreak]