YouTube Class Action: Same IP Address Used To Upload 'Pirate' Movies and File DMCA Notices (torrentfreak.com) 53
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: YouTube says it has found a "smoking gun" to prove that a class-action lawsuit filed by Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider and Pirate Monitor Ltd was filed in bad faith. According to the Google-owned platform, the same IP address used to upload 'pirate' movies to the platform also sent DMCA notices targeting the same batch of content.
In a motion to dismiss filed in November, Pirate Monitor said YouTube had provided no "hard evidence" to back up these damaging claims, demanding that the court disregard the allegations and reject calls for the right to an injunction to prevent Pirate Monitor from submitting wrongful DMCA notices in the future. YouTube now provides a taster of some of the supporting evidence it has on file. "Pirate Monitor devised an elaborate scheme to prove itself sufficiently trustworthy to use YouTube's advanced copyright management tools," YouTube begins. "Through agents using pseudonyms to hide their identities, Pirate Monitor uploaded some two thousand videos to YouTube, each time representing that the content did not infringe anyone's copyright. Shortly thereafter, Pirate Monitor invoked the notice-and-takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to demand that YouTube remove the same videos its agents had just uploaded."
In all, YouTube processed nearly 2,000 DMCA notices it received by Pirate Monitor in the fall of 2019. All of the targeted videos had a uniform length, around 30 seconds each, generated from "obscure Hungarian movies". They had been uploaded in bulk from users with IP addresses allocated to Pakistan. [...] While the nature of the uploads is indeed suspicious, YouTube says that it also found what it describes as a "smoking gun", i.e evidence that the uploads and DMCA notices were being sent by the same entity. "After considerable digging, YouTube found a smoking gun. In November 2019, amidst a raft of takedown notices from Pirate Monitor, one of the 'RansomNova' users that had been uploading clips via IP addresses in Pakistan logged into their YouTube account from a computer connected to the Internet via an IP address in Hungary," YouTube explains. The opposition to Pirate Monitor's motion to dismiss can be found here.
In a motion to dismiss filed in November, Pirate Monitor said YouTube had provided no "hard evidence" to back up these damaging claims, demanding that the court disregard the allegations and reject calls for the right to an injunction to prevent Pirate Monitor from submitting wrongful DMCA notices in the future. YouTube now provides a taster of some of the supporting evidence it has on file. "Pirate Monitor devised an elaborate scheme to prove itself sufficiently trustworthy to use YouTube's advanced copyright management tools," YouTube begins. "Through agents using pseudonyms to hide their identities, Pirate Monitor uploaded some two thousand videos to YouTube, each time representing that the content did not infringe anyone's copyright. Shortly thereafter, Pirate Monitor invoked the notice-and-takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to demand that YouTube remove the same videos its agents had just uploaded."
In all, YouTube processed nearly 2,000 DMCA notices it received by Pirate Monitor in the fall of 2019. All of the targeted videos had a uniform length, around 30 seconds each, generated from "obscure Hungarian movies". They had been uploaded in bulk from users with IP addresses allocated to Pakistan. [...] While the nature of the uploads is indeed suspicious, YouTube says that it also found what it describes as a "smoking gun", i.e evidence that the uploads and DMCA notices were being sent by the same entity. "After considerable digging, YouTube found a smoking gun. In November 2019, amidst a raft of takedown notices from Pirate Monitor, one of the 'RansomNova' users that had been uploading clips via IP addresses in Pakistan logged into their YouTube account from a computer connected to the Internet via an IP address in Hungary," YouTube explains. The opposition to Pirate Monitor's motion to dismiss can be found here.
deja vu (Score:4, Informative)
Re: deja vu (Score:5, Informative)
That case was worse because they were targeting and blackmailing individuals. But, yeah, the ideas between both scams are similar. If anything, it shows the flaws of the DMCA.
Re: deja vu (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't an issue with the DMCA, it's simply perjury, fraud, and harassment. This isn't the first time it's been tried, and if I recall a prior case similar to this was ruled "You had permission to upload those for free access, ergo you have no right to complain."
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Re: deja vu (Score:5, Informative)
As I understand the DMCA, they would not be able to do such a thing and avoid culpability. If that was the case, then platforms like Napster and Limewire would not have had to face the music (pun intended). It's actually worse for YouTube, as they are using their own servers to host the content rather than just routing P2P connections.
Re: deja vu (Score:5, Insightful)
That's my take as well.
What I would like to see is for all successfully challenged takedown notices to automatically trigger a government counter-suit of the person who issued the notice. The DMCA makes provisions for such suits to discourage abuse, but thanks to the economic inequality involved, the victims of such fraud rarely have the motive or finances to pursue it.
It seems to me that any law that gives more power to the powerful, should include a fully integrated system to discourage abuse of that power. Otherwise the little people inevitably get screwed, and any theoretical limits on abuse will rarely if ever be used since the victims can't afford the fight.
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That's my take as well.
What I would like to see is for all successfully challenged takedown notices to automatically trigger a government counter-suit of the person who issued the notice. The DMCA makes provisions for such suits to discourage abuse, but thanks to the economic inequality involved, the victims of such fraud rarely have the motive or finances to pursue it.
It's not economic inequality. Otherwise, you'd have groups like the EFF offering to help bridge that gap. The problem is that the law was very deliberately designed to provide unequal protection.
The DMCA (presumably deliberately) requires only one small part of your copyright claim to be stated under penalty of perjury — that you are the copyright holder or an authorized representative thereof. It does not require you to state that the material being taken down incorporates your copyrighted materia
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I'm pretty sure there's something in the DMCA that requires a good-faith belief that your copyright has been violated. That bit might not be under penalty of perjury though.
> The purpose of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful.
You're optimistic, I like that. Though I would revise that to democratic government. A monarchy obviously has no such goal.
I've gone cynical: The purpose of government is to preserve the power and privilege of the elites. Any semblance of justice is just the
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I'm pretty sure there's something in the DMCA that requires a good-faith belief that your copyright has been violated. That bit might not be under penalty of perjury though.
> The purpose of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful.
You're optimistic, I like that. Though I would revise that to democratic government. A monarchy obviously has no such goal.
Not necessarily. I mean yes, the authoritarian perversion of government that many modern monarchies have become certainly have no such goal, but most of those are arguably illegitimate governments to begin with, existing only because the individuals in question started out with enough power to assert authority over others without their consent. The world would be better off (at least in the medium to long term) if none of those governments existed.
But when you look at the history of monarchies, they were
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You'll forgive me my cynicism if I suspect the protection offered by early monarchies was not unlike the protection offered by the mafia. Yes, accepting the protection of one warband reduces the danger from other warbands - but it's also a choice made at spearpoint. Pay for protection, or pay more, and with blood, when your wealth is taken anyway.
Ask yourself this - who exactly put the first monarch in any particular lineage in power, and what were their motives? Answering those questions is the only wa
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Re: deja vu (Score:5, Insightful)
People are kind of missing that this is really serious criminality, to fabricate false evidence in order to manipulate the courts and legal system. It is a crime against the justice system more than just a crime against google. Serious stuff, done across borders, national and state, work for the FBI, people should be gaining custodial sentences for the abuse of the courts in fabricating and submitting false evidence.
It is more an attack on the US legal system, than on google, it is really, really bad stuff to do, with regards to filing the case, not being naughty in court latter in the piece which is really dangerous but right from the get go.
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I agree that it's a "serious criminal offense," but I guess I just don't consider it to be as morally reprehensible as ruining people's lives. Kind of like a bank heist—if no one gets hurt, I do not view it as bad as scamming someone out of their retirement. Obviously both should be illegal, and I won't quibble on whether the penalty should be worse for one than the other, but I still view the con artist as a bigger pos than the bank robber.
Basically, I place more moral weight on individuals than corp
It's both. We did not foresee this (Score:5, Insightful)
> it's simply perjury, fraud, and harassment
Oh it's definitely that. Courts don't take that lightly, knowingly filing false claims is a fraud on the court.
> This isn't an issue with the DMCA
It's also that. I was involved in the discussions around DMCA at rh time it was passed (it had comment periods and pre-bill debates that were actually useful, with discussion of the best way to handle different things). At the time, BEFORE we saw how DMCA would eventually work out, we thought a fairly reasonable balance would be that someone can send a claim, and whoever was supposedly violating copyright could send a letter right back saying "nope, I'm not violating copyright" and that would be the end of it unless the claimant wanted to make a federal case of it. That's the beautiful part of DMCA that nobody hardly talks about- the content doesn't come down if the person who posted it just replies saying it's not infringing. That's called a counter-notice.
I don't recall anyone at the time foreseeing the number of totally reckless and occasionally fraudulent claims people would file, often through fully automated means. The DMCA contains no provision for reckless claims - nobody thought that would be a significant problem. Sure if you can PROVE the claim is straight up fraudulent you can sue them. Obviously that's not sufficient because as a factual matter people are not careful to avoid sending improper DMCA claims.
The number of improper DMCA notices shows that a penalty for doing so is needed, to discourage that. The law should be amended.
Ps automated locating vs automated notice (Score:4, Interesting)
Ps, what happened at first was people was use automated tools to FIND copies of their work in unexpected places, posted somewhere infringing. Then a person would look to see if it was infringing.
Somewhere along the line, people started sending DMCA notices automatically. That's no good because while a software program can detect the fact that a work is present, it can't make the legal judgement of whether it's fair use. The software can't know if the copy / posting is authorized. So sending automated notices meaning often sending notices carelessly. The DMCA as currently written doesn't have any penalty for sending notices carelessly.
It does have a penalty for lying about being the creator of the original work. If I send out DMCA notices claiming to be the author of Michael Jackson's song "bad", I could be in trouble for that. However as an author of Apache, I could carelessly send out take down notices claiming that people are infringing the copyright on Apache and the DMCA wouldn't penalize me for being careless.
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2. Automatically send takedown notices to anything on the list.
3. Search results now only show your product.
4. Profit!
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... we thought a fairly reasonable balance would be that someone can send a claim, and whoever was supposedly violating copyright could send a letter right back saying "nope, I'm not violating copyright" and that would be the end of it unless the claimant wanted to make a federal case of it. ... The law should be amended.
What if there was an automated mechanism for sending a counter-notice?
I don't know anything about DMCA etc -- maybe there's a legal reason why this cannot be automated?
I suppose YouTube might not want to implement something like a per-video-setting where the uploader can check a box that says "Yes, this is really my video - please automatically send a counter-notice upon receiving a take-down notice"...
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>I don't recall anyone at the time foreseeing the number of totally reckless and occasionally fraudulent claims people would file, often through fully automated means. The DMCA contains no provision for reckless claims - nobody thought that would be a significant problem. Sure if you can PROVE the claim is straight up fraudulent you can sue them. Obviously that's not sufficient because as a factual matter people are not careful to avoid sending improper DMCA claims.
I was also around when the DMCA was bei
Hollywood blockbusters in dial up? (Score:2)
Sure you're not thinking of SOPA?
The DMCA discussion was 1997-1998, the days of dial up that maxed out at 56Kbps.
As I recall, MPAA first noticed the internet in 2002, after people starting getting cable modems and RIAA was awakened by Napster.
It would take about 100 hours to download a Hollywood film (MOAA) in 1997-1998. Only about 10 minutes for a song, though.
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Yes, DMCA. A lot of people had high speed internet already - I had a cable modem then.
The fact that they would abuse takedown notices was an obvious issue we discussed here.
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You were lucky if you had a cable modem then.
That would have DOCSIS 1.0, maximum theoretical upload bandwidth 10 Mbps raw. (Around 8Mbps maximum data).
I would hope (Score:4, Interesting)
I would hope that YouTube will now refuse to honor any DMCA notices from that organization. All requests from them should be tossed right into the bit bucket.
Alternately, require a $1000 good faith fee for each request, non refundable.
Re:I would hope (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think they can unilaterally decide to not honor DMCA requests from an entity. The DMCA has specific requirements for how requests must be handled. They certainly can't legally charge to file DMCA takedown notices. They obviously can sue if they're violating their ToS though, and surely this company did so at various points in conducting their shenanigans.
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Google has an interesting way of handling this. Companies can request access to the DMCI API and spam take-down notices in bulk. If Google notices that a high proportion of them are rejected they remove access to the API but keep accepting properly formatted DMCA notices, processing them by hand.
Re:I would hope (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, doing either that would strip YouTube of their legal protections under the DMCA, and make them directly responsible for copyright infringement if the claim was valid, with the huge penalties that entails (up to $150,000 per infringement). Since they have much to lose, and nothing much to gain, they're extremely unlikely to take such a position.
What we need is to revise the law in light of the endemic abuses. Asking corporations to put their profits on the line for the sake of justice is never going to work.
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No, Youtube can't ignore the law.
... a $1000 good faith fee ...
No, Youtube can't ignore the law, even if it costs them money.
You identified one of several problems with DMCA. There's no cost for filing against fair use, for filing 'good faith' claims that aren't, for the damage done to law-abiding parties. The law wasn't designed for the (cost-saving) automated tools that Youtube provides for filing claims and take-down.
This is a badly written law where Youtube is held accountable for the actions of uploaders. That's why Pirate M
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You identified one of several problems with DMCA. There's no cost for filing against fair use, for filing 'good faith' claims that aren't, for the damage done to law-abiding parties. The law wasn't designed for the (cost-saving) automated tools that Youtube provides for filing claims and take-down.
That's not entirely the fault of the DMCA. Unless I'm missing something, nothing in the law requires any website or ISP to accept electronic takedown notices. So in principle, there's nothing preventing a content distributor or ISP or whatever from allowing only trusted third-parties to deliver takedown notices via a login-protected website (and terminate the account of anyone who sends out too many bogus notices), and requiring all other takedown notices to be shipped via a package delivery service (FedE
Very Clever (Score:5, Insightful)
The MPIAA and RIAA have long claimed that an IP address = person that can therefore be prosecuted.
But now they are hoist by their own petard - are they the same person, as they claim when sending out threatening letters, or perhaps, just maybe, is an IP not a unique individual.
Either way, they are screwed.
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If you read the whole summary it is mentioned that the IP address re-used was among a block of of addresses all from the same region, (Pakistan) who were all sending a lot of this type of traffic over the past couple years, which they were then able to correlate with a specific YouTube account one day when one of the sweatshop workers forgot to log out.
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So I'm sure the sweatshop has many Youtube accounts of the same address, probably double-NATted. Now what?
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They are not concerned. During their attempts to make VHS illegal, several key people delivered sworn statements that if recording equipment becomes common place, the entire industry will go bancrupt.
No one ever called them out on that blatant lie (and, since the industry still exists, proven falsehood).
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Otherwise known as all the movies ever produced in Hungary.
I suppose Budapest isn't on your radar 'cause they're not known for gay porn.
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If they're not known for it then why would it be on his radar?
I've been to Budapest. Got invited to a strip club but the leaflet had pictures of women on, not men, no mention of cameras.
Maybe I don't look gay.
Re: Lets see ... (Score:1)
Maybe I don't look gay.
You sure look pedantic.
Pirate Monitor warning sign #1: (Score:2)
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Old news (is news because it still is a problem). (Score:2)
I remember Warner being caught uploading their entire catalog to YouTube because it raised their profits, while at the same time calling people they could not steal from "thieves" and "pirates" publicly.
I remember that company that was paid by the film industry to run eDonkey and BitTorrent servers with their movies on it, to entrap people. It was caught. And sued. And lost. And "died". And re-emerged as another company. To go through it again. And then re-emerge again, but sneakier.
It's a dirty industry se
Is That Not Fair Use? (Score:5, Insightful)
> All of the targeted videos had a uniform length, around 30 seconds each,
That sounds like a highlight, which is considered fair game in every case I have ever heard off.
The PirateMonitor Motive (Score:5, Insightful)
But behind this, I find myself intrigued by the motive and “end game” that PirateMonitor had in mind when they chose to take this action against YouTube. At issue is that PirateMonitor has requested access to automated tools, developed by YouTube, to allow content creators to track and identify potentially infringing copies of their works being re-posted to the platform.
In the PDF pleading (which you can find linked to the article), YouTube’s counter-claims allege that the sole shareholder of “PirateMonitor” is Hungarian film director Gabor Csupo. Reading the material and speculating, it looks as though Csupo’s motive might have been to obtain access to YouTube’s content creation tools for the specific purpose of then being able to issue takedown notices and sue people, perhaps with the objective of either being able to offer this service to other creators via an agency arrangement (i.e. charging a fee for challenging YouTube content on their behalf), attempting to repeat the tactics of Prenda Law (i.e. creating content for the specific purpose of having it re-uploaded to YouTube and then using that to sue), or perhaps even to attempt a variation on the strategy of “nuisance” law-suits as seen from e.g. the MPAA or RIAA, in which the MPAA or RIAA as plaintiffs would sue the holder of an internet service account based on nothing more than an IP address and set up a self-funding pyramid scheme of cases where it was easier for the defendants in these individual actions to pay up and settle rather than gamble with heavier penalties by taking the case to court.
Having read through the content, one thing is clear. PirateMonitor have put this before the court in bad faith. Given that their counsel are, by law, “Officers of the Court”, reading YouTube’s response would leave me concerned that if they are not *very* careful, their PirateMonitor’s counsel could easily find themselves sanctioned over this. Either way, it looks as though Csupo was attempting to set himself up with a fully functional shakedown service, provided free by YouTube.
Let’s all hope that the court throws the book at him, and his lawyers.
*THE* Gabor Csupo?!? (Score:4, Informative)
"YouTube’s counter-claims allege that the sole shareholder of “PirateMonitor” is Hungarian film director Gabor Csupo."
I guess you're too young to know who he is (assuming there is just one), namely one half of the famous animation duo of Klasky-Csupo responsible for much of the animation on Nickelodeon in the USA and elsewhere:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Klasky is his ex-wife, who divorced him. It was 25 years ago now or so but I seem to recall it being kinda nasty although Wikipedia has been expunged of the details & I'm too tired to look.
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We know from the details that the allegedly infringing materials all appear to be 30-second clips of "obscure Hungarian movies"... but that doesn't explain how Schneider features here, unless those same clips featured some of her music as part of the movie score.
Even if that were the case, it would be interesting to see what the fair use doctrine would have to sa
A Different Smoking Gun (Score:5, Interesting)
If you follow the link in the OP, you will reach a summary article on the TorrentFreak web site. That article contains numerous links, the first of which is to an earlier (July 3rd) TorrentFreak article that covered the original complaint and which is entitled "YouTube Hit With Class Action Lawsuit Over Copyright Enforcement, Repeat Infringer Policy".
Right at the bottom of that article you can find a link to the original complaint before the court, provided as a PDF document [torrentfreak.com]. This is the submission to the court my Maria Schneider (Grammy-winning artist) and PirateMonitor for Class Action status in their complaint against Google, YouTube and Alphabet.
And the interesting part?
Their counsel for this complaint is Boies, Schiller and Flexner, LLP. The same Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP that represented "The SCO Group" against IBM, in which TSG claimed that IBM had illegally copied source code from Unix to the Linux Kernel.
A couple of things strike me as interesting about this. First is that here, again, we find BSF representing a client in a case where even as it is becoming clear that their client is not acting in good faith, BSF themselves appear to be perfectly willing to go along with what looks for all the world like a shake-down. ("Officers of the Court [thefreedictionary.com]", anyone?). Second, the almost-hypocritical position BSF is having to take here: after literally years of arguing against IBM that they didn't need to provide specific details of an alleged infringement until a case went to trial, here they argue that YouTube's counter-claim isn't valid because it isn't explicit enough.
In an earlier post, Tokolosh pointed out that this could be a case of the MPAA and RIAA getting hoisted by their own petard. Lets hope the same thing happens to BSF. They deserve eachother.
Google is good at this (Score:2)
A lot of people don't realize it, but Google is very, very good at this sort of thing. Google makes their billions selling clicks on advertisements. The only way that has remained profitable over the years is through the development of analytical tools to detect fraud [google.com]. Google has spent decades refining their automated technology to detect click fraud [wikipedia.org] (people / bots clicking on ads on purpose to increase the income for the site or app displaying that ad) and similar behavior.
Applying that technology to th
Pointless defense (Score:2)
Real defense:
Do we have a DMCA takedown process? Yes
Does it get actively actioned? Yes
Dear record industry: Go fuck yourself.