Is this really what lawmakers had in mind when they wrote the DMCA?
Seriously, it’s not that I just love spending my time bashing Google, but the fact is that this company deserves to be taken to task (every second of every day) for the lousy job it does dealing with the rampant piracy on its Blogger platform. The slide show below is simply more documentation as to just how absurd, convoluted and outright busted the DMCA takedown process is with the barnacle that is Blogger (Blogspot.com). While mothership Google pretends not to notice, web pirates grow and thrive in the waters of its safe harbor.
Not only does Blogger provide a sanctuary for movie pirates around the globe, but Google’s cloud-based storage Google Drive, often a host for the Blogger pirated movies streams, looks a lot more like Megaupload than a legit business. Figures, for a company trying to bust indie-musicians and rip-off professional photographers, developing slick and slimy ways to avoid the law seems about par for the crooked course.
Google makes billions leveraging content created by others. The least they could do is respect our right to remove it, but that would mean less content for them to leverage, and thus less money for them. For Google, though it regards itself as the emperor of tech, ever evolving to offer society the next big thing; it’s really just like many other multinational behemoths seeking to protect and its increase profits. Who cares where those profits come from? Given greed’s at the company’s core, I once again welcome you to another example of Google’s takedown labyrinth.
[rev_slider Google_DMCA_circus]
When Congress crafted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 they explicitly carved out “safe harbor” from liability for copyright infringement so long as the service provider, “upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material.”
Section 512(c) limits the liability of service providers for infringing material on websites (or other information repositories) hosted on their systems. It applies to storage at the direction of a user. In order to be eligible for the limitation, the following conditions must be met:
- The provider must not have the requisite level of knowledge of the infringing activity, as described below.
- If the provider has the right and ability to control the infringing activity, it must not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity.
- Upon receiving proper notification of claimed infringement, the provider must expeditiously take down or block access to the material.
The legislation also contains this language with regard to a service provider being eligible for limitations on liability, “: (1) it must adopt and reasonably implement a policy of terminating in appropriate circumstances the accounts of subscribers who are repeat infringers…
After you step through these slides and read my previous posts examining Google’s dysfunctional takedown procedures, can you really believe Google is “expeditiously” honoring the intent of the DMCA? If so, I’ve got a bridge to sell you…