February 3, 2014 by Michael Sauers

DMCA Take Down Tom Foolery

Two recent headlines showing the utter preposterousness of automated DMCA takedown notices:

HarperCollins Accuses Apple of eBook Piracy

Due to so many news outlets reporting on this story, Digimarc Guardian released the following statement “recently issued requests to Google to remove a number of URLs from their search index related to Agatha Christie titles being sold without license on iTunes in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, due to a technical error, these 123 total URLs included some links related to valid iTunes content. We regret the error and have addressed the issue.”

Sony Claims Hulu is Hosting a Pirated TV-Show

This week we stumbled upon a recent takedown request that was sent by the Spanish division of Sony Pictures Television. The notice lists several links to the Fox’ show “Almost Human,” which they distribute locally. Most of the links do indeed point to pirated content, but Sony also requests the takedown of a perfectly legal episode on Hulu, claiming it infringes on their copyrights.

Published by Michael Sauers

Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year. View all posts by Michael Sauers

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