Automattic, WordPress's parent company, has a new transparency report that shows that they've bounced 43% of their 2015 copyright censorship demands for being frivolous or invalid.
The figure climbs to 67% if you lump together requests for individual files and for whole sites.
Most of the frivolous takedown sites come from companies that sell copyright policing services to rightsholders, and use armies of automated takedown bots to generate censorship demands without human oversight. The leaders in fraudulent, abusive takedown requests are Web Sheriff, Audiolock, and Internetsecurities.
Automattic also maintains a Hall of Shame listing the worst copyfraudsters it has to deal with. A particularly egregious offender is Attributor.com, which sent a takedown for a scholarly paper that was being hosted on the rightsholder's own page.
Wordpress stands out among hosting companies for actually examining incoming censorship demands to determine whether they pass the giggle-test before acting on them. Knowing this makes me glad that both Boing Boing and my personal site all run on WordPress software.
WordPress Rejects 43% Of All ‘Piracy’ Takedown Notices [Ernesto/Torrentfreak]
So far, WordPress denied 43% of DMCA takedown requests in 2015 [Nathan Mattise/Ars Technica]
