At least once a month TorrentFreak reports on the often crazy world of DMCA takedown notices. Google is kind enough to publish thousands of them in its Transparency Report and we’re only too happy to spend hours trawling through them.
Every now and again a real gem comes to light, often featuring mistakes that show why making these notices public is not only a great idea but also in the public interest. The ones we found this week not only underline that assertion in bold, but are actually the worst examples of incompetence we’ve ever seen.
German-based Total Wipes Music Group have made these pages before after trying to censor entirely legal content published by Walmart, Ikea, Fair Trade USA and Dunkin Donuts. This week, however, their earlier efforts were eclipsed on a massive scale.
wipedFirst, in an effort to ‘protect’ their album “Truth or Dare” on Maze Records, the company tried to censor a TorrentFreak article from 2012 on how to download anonymously. The notice, found here, targets dozens of privacy-focused articles simply because they have the word “hide” in them.
But it gets worse – much worse. ‘Protecting’ an album called “Cigarettes” on Mona Records, Total Wipes sent Google a notice containing not a single infringing link. Unbelievably one of the URLs targeted an article on how to use PGP on the Mac. It was published by none other than the EFF.
Tag: Vuze
Tumblr Censors “Torrent” Related Tags and Searches
It appears that piracy is becoming a growing concern for micro-blogging platform Tumblr.
Earlier this week users panicked following an increase in takedown notices, which resulted in the termination of several blogs.
While this uproar was rather public, there are also better concealed changes that seem to target pirated content. Tumblr’s decision to hide posts mentioning the word “torrent” for example.
Those who search the site for “torrent” related queries will notice that there are no results displayed, even though there are plenty of posts mentioning the word. The same is true for posts tagged with “torrent.”
Tumblr is hiding the results in question from both public and logged in users but the latter can make the posts show up if they switch off the “safe mode” lock on the right hand side of the screen.
Tumblr’s “safe mode” was turned on by default over a year ago to hide offensive “adult oriented” content from the public view. The same filter also blocks words such as “penis” for the same reason.