Interesting tidbit: the hash they have for the infringed work it's the correct hash for ubuntu-20.04.2.0-desktop-amd64.iso [0] - this removes any good faith argument on their part.
There is an infinitely small chance of collisions - but I would like them to produce a DMCA notice with the actual name of the infringed upon protected media, not just the hash.
I believe Canonical should step in, since this is someone claiming to act to protect their interests.
Edit: searching for the hash returns two odd links; the first one is indexed by Google as a link to a software - Rebirth - that comes under the same hash as Ubuntu [1]; the other is the usual Lumen link for removed content [2] -- a DMCA notice from Disney.
Could this be a case of "automated DMCA notice" gone wrong?
You can see the results I see [0] -- and I am now on a different device.
That's the Ubuntu torrent - with the correct hash - but indexed by Google as a Rebirth torrent. At the bottom of the page [1] there is a link to the Lumen Database.
The first link has the hash in the URL. The Lumen Database one - even if I look at the full URLs - doesn't have the hash in the list. I am guessing that one of the pages had a link to the Ubuntu torrent.
This seems like a good reminder that Google decides what we see out of the interwebs!
Definitely a good reminder. I only see [0] (I'm only including the bottom bit, it doesn't appear in the rest of the page either) which doesn't appear to have it.
Thanks for resolving my "not happening on my machine" issue! :)
I haven't downloaded the torrent (and won't download it), but looking at the kat link, something weird is going on here. It says the torrent was uploaded and last updated 5 years ago in the video category of the site? Ubuntu 20.04 was released in, well, April of 2020. Unless I'm missing something that torrent can't possibly be Ubuntu 20.04, but it sure lines up that it could be Rebirth (2016) after all.
I downloaded the torrent from KAT and confirmed that the filename and hash match the Ubuntu torrent. It appears that some metadata on that site is incorrect.
If someone were to intentionally publish indexes that associate pirate titles with non-pirate SHAs, I imagine they’d be able to cause a lot of trouble for the DMCA takedown industry.
Who knows, maybe that's exactly what happened here. Could be a vigilante trolling the copyright trolls. (Not all copyright firms are necessarily trolls. The ones that recklessly automate things so heavily that they'd make this mistake probably are, though.)
Could it be some pictures or sound or some firmware blob or something like that this is in that particular ISO is the actual content they consider to be pirated ?
One doesn't know how stressful and infuriating these copyright notices are until one lived in a country with internet hijacked by copyright predators. From the moment of receiving such notice there is only stress, misinformation, and verbal abuse. Thanks Americans.
PS. It doesn't matter you downloaded free software, every person you'll contact in the process of straightening this out will be equally clueless and abusive.
This is the case with France, but as usual in France there is the law and then the reality.
We had HADOPI, an organization announced as the Hammer of Thor for pirates. Not related but one of the elected members of our Assembly was talking about the OpenOffice Firewall.
Many discussions started on how this is legal and whatnot, an ISP also sent the IPs they were required to provides hardcopied on paper.
People started to create anti-HADPPI pages, after a chaotic discussion the law was changed from "you are a pirate" to "you did not secure your WiFi enough" (literally).
People started to use VPNs and forgot about the organization.
Then million of euros were poured into that idiotic organization (ah, we also have a tax on empty CDs and DVDs because they are used to copy pirated stuff...) and the first courts hit with the Hammer of Thor.
If I remember correctly, one person was convicted to 2000€.
It has now been quietly merged with another organization and I do not know if it still exists.
So much money spent on idiots doing idiotic work for idiotic results. Garbage in, garbage out.
> a country with internet hijacked by copyright predators
Yeah, thank god my country is not among this group. We have better things to do than police imaginary american property.
I remember reading a news article years ago about some MPAA lobbyist who came here to do his thing. A journalist asked him point blank if intellectual property should be a priority in a country that can barely manage to provide basic infrastructure for its entire population. People are literally hungry and yet this guy is here talking about copyright bullshit. I wish I could find this article again...
This is an awful symptom of American cultural colonialism. They feed with one hand while slapping in the face with the other. Choke with your sitcoms and superheroes.
Yeah. And if you don't at least look like you're cooperating, the USA will put you in a literal naughty list of bad countries and develop "action plans" for dealing with it.
You can't just isolate yourself from them either without massive economic consequences. Even if you suffered through those consequences, they'll probably just force you to trade anyway just like they did with Japan once.
I couldn't believe Canada was on this list and just had to take a look, considering they're one of our closest allies. The entire section is a somber example of how screwed up our medical system is.
The section on Switzerland is just about how annoyed the government is at their privacy protections.
Basically the USA won't rest until the entire world becomes america. God forbid US corporations actually adapt to the countries they want to sell their products in. Better to leverage the US government's power in order to pressure other countries into adopting american laws.
For example, search the document for "right holder". It's full of this. Rights holders are concerned about this, rights holders are concerned about that... Why does some corporation's "concerns" matter at all? It's mind-boggling. This entire document is just an endless list of complaints from US corporations about countries that aren't playing by their rules. They want the US government to "fix" the other countries so they can turn a profit there.
It's even worse than that. They get other countries to make harsher laws than the US has, then when they try to pass similar laws in the US, they argue that it's just normalizing our laws with what other countries are doing...
I'm not sure if this is what aidenn0 was talking about but I think Australia can be considered an example. The Five Eyes seem to be using Australia as some kind of legal testing ground. Not too long ago Australia introduced incredible laws such as legal requirements for companies to serve as state-sponsored malware vectors. Australian companies are now required to compromise the security of their own customers if so ordered by law enforcement. Presumably the other Five Eyes are watching to see how that plays out before attempting similar shenanigans. If it works, I have no doubt they'll use Australia as a shining example to justify implementing the same changes elsewhere.
My own country is an example. The government really likes to copy whatever it is developed countries are doing. Watching how other countries regulate stuff is a great way to predict what I might have to deal with in the future. We created our own GDPR after Europe did it. Telecommunications companies tried to lobby against net neutrality here citing the US as an "industry standard" example.
That's why Biden while being a relief to north-americans(and i completely agree) its worse for the rest of the world at least from the perspective of enforcing north-american policies and legislation worldwide (read big-co, intelligence agencies).
Given Trump focus on the internal affairs of the US, while the political climate was toxic at home, at least it let all others breath a little.
Now with Biden it will star all over again.. North-american companies, intelligence agencies, basically the status-quo interests being enforced all over..
At least now the government is caring about the environment and as while at home the policies are more left-leaning, i bet the will not be the same for foreign countries, and i expect things like copyright enforcement to gain more strength (basically all the traditional corporate and government bullies)
From the perspective of international political affairs its the resurgence of the good'ol "United Corporations of America" policy enforcement.
Strangely, the term "two party system" might lead one to assume there's a meaningful difference in real-world policy outcomes. Sadly, this is all too rare and, in practice, the differences are mostly in the claimed intentions and not the delivered results.
As an American, please accept my apology for all uninvited interference in the economic and political affairs of other nations.
Nah, it's a symptom of America mostly producing TV shows and Movies as opposed to actual physical products that people need or love in their lives.
That particular business (Hollywood) happens to also be the propaganda arm for the current power, so naturally it's protected ham-fistedly by policy makers.
At the 90's, under heavy US lobbying, my country made copyright infringement a crime.
What that means nowadays is that those people would now need to talk to the police. That implies in bringing some very good evidence, because our criminal system isn't antagonistic, and also facing the criminal consequences of false allegations.
As a result, some foreign companies tried very hard to create a copyright predator industry shortly after the criminalization, but had to abandon it. There are still copyright protections, mildly enforced, but not that kind of thing.
My GF got one, and spent a few days worried sick about it. She researched the correct response (iirc it was "don't admit liability and ask for proof that it was her that actually pirated the content" - basically exploiting the flaw that you are not your IP address and they don't know how many other people could have used that IP address). Haven't heard back from them.
Yes! I find it so ironic, in a country that prides itself for it's stance for "privacy", that random predatory lawyers can just get from ISP's the personal details behind any IP address on the basis of potential IP infringement. It is really infuriating...
They need to go and get a court order, and with that they request the personal data from the respective ISP. The whole process is pretty steamlined and partly automated though.
Source: have been through many copyright claims and currently have a supreme court lawsuit pending.
Many claims by copyright predators go through the courts in Munich and Koeln which seem to rubberstamp every case. Cunts from Waldorf Frommer being among the most notorius. If only the healthcare, local administration and other services in Germany were working so seamlessly...
Even worse, they are given free access (no warrant) to ISP information about the individuals they presume to be infringing so they can tie an identity to an IP linked to infringing material.
Lawyers win either way, via the fines that they ask for (people are scared that this could escalate and just pay), or the fees to fight the fines (usually a letter highlighting the situation that personal information was obtained without a court order). So they have all the incentive to propagate the practice.
There are ISPs who provide that information based on agreements with the law firms (what you called the automated process - quite literally there's no meaningful human intervention at any point which goes against every principle). Those cases will be dropped as soon as they receive a counter letter from a lawyer because it's the kind of thing that's supposed to stay in the shadow.
A court order is not supposed to be automated because it's exceedingly simple to make it output whatever you want while still claiming good faith.
Ah I did not know that, thanks! - My dozen or so cases have always had a court order attached. Worrying that there are ISPs that hand out data without one...
The copyright predators Waldorf Frommer [1] and their representatives are, or at least were, using services of ipoque GmbH [2] to impersonate peers in BitTorrent networks and collect IP addresses. Then the subscribers' personal data are obtained from ISPs with the court order by the court in Munich. Finally Waldorf Frommer attempts to extort money from individuals on the list. Lawyers from Waldorf Frommer and professionals from ipoque GmbH are participating in racketeering of residents in Germany on behalf of Twentieth Century Fox.
Both copyright predator and counter copyright predator industries are huge in Germany. These two together will absorb any volume of money you'll throw at them.
Yes, they represent large content owner conglomerates and have the permission to go after pirates.
The shady part is where they can just go to the ISP and request the personal customer information associated to an IP they believe is transferring the infringing content.
In Germany the law allows lawyers to ask and get this info from the ISP purely based on suspicion. This is the dirty secret related to how Germany enforces piracy laws. Getting internet access is predicated by accepting that this information will be passed on to private third parties (imagine getting internet access only if you agree to send your identity to Facebook if they want to check you are not violating FB rules by using a fake name).
Between this and the fact that a lawsuit is expensive and time consuming, they probably never pursue minor infringement in court if they get a counter from the user's lawyer.
I used to work for an ISP and had to deal with copyright notices (99% DMCA) a lot. This caused me so much anxiety and rage because DMCA is an American law not British, but the management decided to "just take the website down, it's easier than having to go back and forth arguing with the copyright trolls". The amount of legitimate websites we had to take offline was incredibly huge, because the decision was to never question a copyright notice - just do it. So if someone wanted to take someone out they would just send us a DMCA notice and we would do it no questions asked. From all those years and hundreds of cases I would say maybe one or two website owners had the means to fight back.
If this is indeed a case of someone trolling the copyright trolls and not a mistake then good for them, I hope they win!
Let's be clear that there is, for individuals. For firms maybe not, but they could also rely on just never going to court - because it costs too much for who would take them to court.
In Britain there’s the concept of a ‘vexatious litigant’ a person or other entity who makes frivolous legal actions for purposes other than seeking redress for a wrong that has been done to them. You can be put on a register which makes it much harder to bring legal actions in future. There is a broad civil law legal principle that damages paid to you should put you back to where you started before the bad thing happened. So you can’t take out a legal action to get revenge on someone or to frighten them. This is also why we don’t have punitive damages here.
I doubt it, they'd probably end up with some pausible deniability framework in place that still funnels the upside to them while eliminating any downside risk.
Maybe if copyright claims needed to be bonded to cover any counter claims, it might get somewhere.
How could they possibly argue any sort of plausible deniability?
If DMCA notices are automated, and the automation is producing false positives, then they should still be held 100% liable. Fix your automation or remove it entirely. The potential ramifications of a false positive (Massive fines, getting banned from your ISP when they're the only option in town, and more) are too severe to allow any number of them greater than zero.
EDIT: And I think the penalty for a false DMCA takedown request needs to be gargantuan. Seven figures, minimum. DMCA trolling should not be profitable.
I went to a store recently and asked why they haven't a product I ordered a time ago, listed on the website anymore. She said, she used pictures from the producing company. But now she got a letter, so she is now not anymore allowed to use the pictures. She can't make all pictures by herself because there are so many models and colors, so she just stop sell products from that brand complete. I didn't ask if it was really the company itself or just a lay firm.
Shoot in foot, nail to the floor, repeat on other foot. It is quite possible that a free lance copyright drone did this. The company would hardly do it to themselves = kill all sales as per example.
Yes, it would be interesting. This copyright trolling based on false rights has become a growth industry. Almost all you tube creators have stories to tell about fake trolling DMCA demands. Every new you tube creator is assured of being trolled and unless they are able to get them to back down, the trolls grab the monetization revenue portion youtube grants.
I had this happen to me. I made an original cat video and put it up, it was challenged by a troll, and I was unable to reach a human to redress matters, so I just removed it. I later found that someone had copied it and was monetising it for themselves. Since it was just a cute thing I did a few years ago and not my living income I too the fuckit POV and never bothered again.
>This copyright trolling based on false rights has become a growth industry
Truer words have never been spoken right there. I feel like there’s an industry of folks that will perform DMCA takedowns on anyone’s behalf and they don’t care if they are correct or not. The onus is on the defendant. It’s sick.
Sad indeed, there is a huge problem lurking for youtube as this industry spreads and too many creators will get pissed off and move on they will have to find a way to factually deal with it or die a lingering death.
The Chinese way has some merit. True verified name only and one account will cut out a lof of the anonymous arracks. Look at how many people get throwaway HN accounts...
Why is it that as citizens we are powerless against such clearly broken laws as DMCA? Can't we do something about the situation, declare it unconstitutional or something?
Because the copyright industry is worth literally billions of dollars and they invest a good chunk of that money into lobbying the government. They essentially buy the laws that they want. There's no way any individual can possibly hope to compete with that. Better to make subversive technology instead. We neutralize their ridiculous laws by making it impossible to enforce or punish anyone violating them.
You will be powerless if you explicitly ELECT a few people to assume power over you on your behalf. Which is what electoral democracies are. Add in the real power of wealth and influence mixed with corruption, it is laughable to think we're free societies. We're sold little trinkets of make-believe "freedoms" while nothing of real importance is ever left to the hands of commoners.
It's not obviously so - which articles/amendments do you think it violates? In any case, it's insufficient for us to declare it unconstitutional, that's for a judge to decide. In the absence of such a ruling, we can elect legislators to repeal it. But that seems terribly unlikely unless you can pose new legislation to take its place.
If you follow the DMCA takedown process, then you are shielded from liability for the copyright violation.
If you don't follow the process, then you are back to exactly where you would be if the DMCA didn't exist. You have to be taken to court to actually face any penalties.
That principle of jurisprudence is for criminal matters. The DMCA issues at hand are for civil issues: providing relief to a copyright holder against a potential infringer. The DMCA shields a provider like ISPs/Dropbox/Google/etc and compels them to take down content that a copyright holder claims is infringing (or provide counter-notice).
I'd suggest an improvement to the DMCA would be to hold copyright holders responsible for claims determined to be made in bad faith, or even just an "excessive" number of false claims.
> I'd suggest an improvement to the DMCA would be to hold copyright holders responsible for claims determined to be made in bad faith, or even just an "excessive" number of false claims.
Yes, that would be a good idea. But it still leaves a bad taste, as it makes one wonder why we had to deal with the DMCA in its current form in the first place. Perhaps there should be a constitutional law which says that when it comes to things like entertainment and culture, then the benefit of the doubt should go to the people, not corporations. Imho, the US is taking the value of entertainment way too seriously.
> I'd suggest an improvement to the DMCA would be to hold copyright holders responsible for claims determined to be made in bad faith, or even just an "excessive" number of false claims.
I'd suggest extreme penalties for false DMCA takedown requests. Seven figures minimum for the first offense.
Because the American citizenry has relatively little power over the actions of government in general. Thanks to a system of representative democracy, Americans can only really choose from a limited pool of politicians to influence the law-making process -- and there aren't any major politicians there which want to change copyright law (that I know of!).
The main alternative to engaging in electoral politics are protests, demonstrations, general strikes, etc.
We aren't. It just takes time and money and people.
To have it declared unconstitutional would require taking a case to the supreme court.
But we can change the law. Write a law, then get enough people to vote for it
It seems to me that they shouldn't be fighting individual cases, but rather the entire principle behind DMCA.
DMCA limits my right to free speech. That could be still justifiable in case of copyright violations, but at least invalid cases of copyright notices should be punishable. Also, companies like Google/YouTube play a dubious role. No takedowns should happen unless the defendant agrees, because again, that limits free speech.
interesting that Comcast immediately directs the user to delete the file and doesn't even list an option to counter the claim. The trolls are constantly looking and probing for a weak spot, and with high probability they have just found another one - large stupid ISPs like Comcast. Now they only need to scare Comcast into automating the disconnections YouTube style and/or collecting the small settlement fee under the threat of disconnection (or for reconnection) and bingo - perpetuum mobile of a money printing machine.
That is interesting. Does the DMCA not require the takedown notice to inform of the right to file a counter-notice? I always assumed it did because that seems to be the usual practice. I wonder if Comcast is being unusually aggressive in their interpretation/lax in their compliance or whether most companies are going beyond what is required in their takedown notices?
From what I remember Comcast already has the "Sandvine" technology that automatically disconnects torrent clients. I have no idea if it is in use any longer.
I would imagine so, because the firm's bogus notices are detrimental to Canonical, the copyright holder. But the recipient is not interested in responding to the claim.
Having worked at one point for several years in the "antipiracy industry, it's basically a burlap sac full of rabid ferrets. Te client base is mostly crazed studio execs who want to DDoS the internet, and the DMCA farms that service them ham-fistedly.
These firms are bullshit shakedown operations. You are actually not the target though. The real target is large copyright holders who are sold a copyright enforcement service that doesn’t work and is completely incompetent.
Related, an interesting side effect of CGNat use by ISPs with limited IPv4 space is an unreliability (without spending slightly more effort/money) in determining which customer was downloading at a particular time.
ISP's already need to keep that accounting for "normal" abuse handling and a lot of countries have data retention laws, so I doubt it will make any difference.
No, you have to demonstrate that it is actually in bad faith rather than just a cock up, and that's not going to happen (especially given it very likely is just a cock up).
They have to state under penalty of perjury that they're authorized to act on behalf of the owner of some relevant right. While that might not necessarily involve the right to the Ubuntu ISO itself (e.g. they might have pattern-matched something else that they're acting on behalf of) they do need some good cover story to avoid perjuring themselves.
"Accurate Multi-Level Verification
Use swift and accurate multi-level cyber verification techniques to confirm copyright infringement"
It sure doesn't sound to me like a company that would like it on record that they aren't as good as they think they are. Have them publicly admit the cock up.
>> (especially given it very likely is just a cock up
"Here's the hash of the file you're infringing." I mean, where did they get that from? It's a rather specific thing for a very specific file from a very specific source. How can that possibly be a mistake? At best it's a result of some automation that indiscriminately makes these claims, which doesn't fall under "cock up" in my book.
i vaguely remember a project that was developing a file from hash application, the idea was to use an provided hash, and an arbitrary file to accompany a generated padding file that would be packed in so the whole torrent matched the hash.
at about the same time there was a practice of a running padfile, that you would ammend every time you retorrented so that the hash would change and make it hard to kludge out the distribution network by tracking known hashes.
in summary it think it is very possible to "forge" hash numbers and impersonate or obfusicate the content
hash collision is rare, intentional hash mimicry maybe is not so rare.
Does the link to alledged infringing content say what? It would be interesting to see what they say is their copyright which was violated by ubuntu.iso
yes messed up, how could we point this the other way?
if we held a copyright to kittehpix and took measures to monitor for infringement, could we not just claim that opsec has been flagrantly and repeatedly violating our copyright and have thier ISP disconnect opsec. It all seems to be set up "sos a good old boys word is all thats nessecary" fashion
i have 3 machines each running 2 clients and seeding OSS ISO's ubuntu being among them, im waiting for a DMCA notice, and a very amusing phone conversation afterward, i suspect however that wont happen as im not on comcast
I should say my personal hobby is walking into libertarian communities, asking if there's such a thing as intellectual property, then walking out whistling.
Licensing and copyleft are a necessary aberration because even if you are a hardliner that IP isn't a thing, enough of the world is staked into it, all you can do is try your best and play the civil disobedience card as harrd and often as possible.
It's not even a debate as at this point. More just sadness.
There is an infinitely small chance of collisions - but I would like them to produce a DMCA notice with the actual name of the infringed upon protected media, not just the hash.
I believe Canonical should step in, since this is someone claiming to act to protect their interests.
[0] https://torrent.ubuntu.com/tracker_index
Edit: searching for the hash returns two odd links; the first one is indexed by Google as a link to a software - Rebirth - that comes under the same hash as Ubuntu [1]; the other is the usual Lumen link for removed content [2] -- a DMCA notice from Disney.
Could this be a case of "automated DMCA notice" gone wrong?
[1] https://kat.rip/torrent/4ba4fbf7231a3a660e86892707d25c135533... [2] https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/22636605?access_token=...