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EU Website Links Keep Getting Delisted Over Piracy Advertisements
from the nice-website-you-have-there... dept
Policing copyright infringement is hard. Hard for those operating websites that allow for the public to input content and hard for the rightsholders that far too often use automated systems that suck out loud at determining what is actually infringing and what isn’t. This is a lesson currently being learned by the European Union, as its website is being bombarded with DMCA notices that are getting parts of the site’s search results delisted.
The European Union recognizes that online piracy poses a serious threat to copyright holders and the public at large. In recent years, Europe has updated legislation to deal with modern piracy threats. This includes a requirement for large platforms to deter repeat copyright infringers.
Copyright holders have sent hundreds of DMCA notices flagging alleged copyright infringements on Europa.eu, the official website of the European Commission. The EU seems unable to deal with a recurring piracy spam problem on its own portal, up to the point that Google has begun removing Europa.eu search results.
I actually reversed the order of those paragraphs from the TorrentFreak post I’m quoting. Why? Because it highlights a problem that not nearly enough people recognize: regulations putting the burden of policing copyright infringement on otherwise innocent websites is a recipe for absolute disaster, as the EU is now learning with respect to its own website.
So what’s actually happening here? Is the EU website actually serving as a repository for infringing material? Nope!
Over the past few months, we have documented how scammers are exploiting weaknesses in various Europa.eu portals including, most recently, the European School Education Platform. These scams exploit public upload tools to share .pdf files, which in turn advertise pirated versions of the latest blockbusters. People who fall for these scams are in for a huge disappointment. Instead of gaining access to pirated movies, they are redirected to shady sites that often promise ‘free’ content in exchange for the visitor’s credit card details.
Meaning that in these cases the EU site isn’t hosting any actual infringing material, but is instead getting inundated with documents advertising links to other, supposedly/likely infringing websites. The webmaster for the site has said they’re aware of the problem and are trying to solve it, but the only real solution is almost certainly to shut down the kind of document submissions that is allowing for this to occur in the first place.
The lack of actually infringing material isn’t keeping the DMCA notices at bay however.
In several instances, the European Commission isn’t able to spot the problematic uploads. For example, a .pdf advertising a pirated copy of the film “The Last Manhunt” remains online today, more than two weeks after it first appeared. Following a DMCA notice, Google decided to remove the link from its search results.
In other cases, the Commission spots the scammy ads and removes them. When that happens, Google typically takes no action. According to Google’s records, the company has removed roughly two dozen Europa.eu URLs from its search results thus far.
Turns out this is all very hard to police. Something the EU should keep in mind when crafting its new piracy policies requiring more of the websites within its jurisdiction.
Filed Under: copyright, dmca, dmca abuse, eu, european commission, links, piracy
Comments on “EU Website Links Keep Getting Delisted Over Piracy Advertisements”
Hard as the scunthorpe problem
Both swear words and infringing content to be filtered have in common are that people can bypass the filter by altering it in many ways: swear words can have its characters being substituted, rephrased, use homoglyph characters like cyrillic, accent letters and infringing content can be placed inside an encrypted zip file, be split into multiple files, using steganography. Both also prone to false positives for ordinary users: wordfilters think you say “ass” when you say “pass”. And copyright filter on youtube think using white noise is infringing.
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Seems like these filters are going to make a clbuttic mistake and violate the EU Consbreastution. Because they’re that offended by tits and ass
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I’ve never understood why some people get so upset with pictures of Parus Majors sitting atop a big Equus Asinus. It just goes to show that some people are majorly asinine.
C'mon EU...
If it’s soooo easy, why don’t you just fix it? Just wave your magic wand and fix it!
If only someone hadn’t decided that links (rather than content) could be infringing…
The ones most guilty of “infringing” are the rightsholders themselves. You know, the ones who go around saying “Mine! … Mine! … Mine! …” whenever they look at something.
“online piracy poses a serious threat to copyright holders and the public at large”
Well there’s a load of bull. Especially how they try to frame it as somehow being a threat to the common folk (as if they ever cared about the public to begin with.)
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Considering that I give away my music with a Creative Commons license and I still get checks from CDBaby every now and then from people who listen to my music on Streaming services, I know for a fact that that sentence is a load of baloney.
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That’s not piracy, though. A pirate, by definition, would be someone who didn’t follow the terms of your license. CC licenses are generous, but they are not unlimited.
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You missed the point, he gives his music away and still earns him some money.
It is a minor threat to legacy publishers, while self publishing is an even bigger threat to their business. It is not much of a threat to actual creators, who can identify themselves in their own content, so long as they can connect with their fans.
Wrapping scams in with content piracy is scare mongering, as advertising scams are quite common, and malware delivery vi ads is not unknown. If you hadn’t clicked on that link strikes me as being victim blaming.
Isn't that the same as torrent indexers?
Isn’t the site hosting document full of links to pirated material the exact same thing as a torrent indexer is doing? The only real difference being that europe.eu doesn’t actually want to host those links?
There are legitimate torrents that don’t involve copyright infringement (I’m fully aware that is the excuse).