Fox sends fraudulent takedown notices for Cory Doctorow's novel Homeland, because whatever pattern-matching software they're using is not smart enough to tell the difference between an ebook and a video file.
It's clear that Fox is mistaking these files for episodes of the TV show "Homeland." What's not clear is why or how anyone sending a censorship request could be so sloppy, careless and indifferent to the rights of others that they could get it so utterly wrong. I have made inquiries about the possible legal avenues for addressing this with Fox, but I'm not optimistic. The DMCA makes it easy to carelessly censor the Internet, and makes it hard to get redress for this kind of perjurious, depraved indifference.
Actually, the last half of that paragraph answers the question posed in the first half.
Companies send out massive numbers of takedown notices, with no human being involved, just an automated system searching for keywords.
And the perverse thing is, the DMCA actually ENCOURAGES them not only to do that, but to make those programs as rudimentary and sloppy as possible.
Because of the word "knowingly".
Via
Ars:
It's hard to see how anyone at Fox or Warner Brothers could have a "good faith belief" that these works infringed their copyrights. Unfortunately, while the DMCA does include a provision punishing misrepresentations by copyright holders, this provision is basically toothless. Punishing a bogus takedown request requires proving that the sender "knowingly materially misrepresented" information in the takedown notice. But proving knowledge is difficult; the sender can always chalk bogus takedown requests up to carelessness rather than fraud.
In other words, if you're sending out DMCA takedown notices and are worried about liability, the absolute BEST thing you can do is write a program to send them out automatically and ensure that as few human beings as possible even look at them.
And, moreover, you want to make that program cast as broad a net as humanly possible, to MAXIMIZE your ability to claim any false positives are entirely unintentional.
We'll see where this goes. It's a pretty clearly-cut case of abuse, and if anyone's got the resources and inclination to prove it in court it's Doctorow. If it can be done, he'll be the guy to do it -- but I still don't like his odds in a copyright system that is clearly and deliberately designed to protect corporate interests over individual ones.