Comcast attempts to intimidate me into taking down a blog post
Comcast sent me two intimidating letters and a bogus DMCA takedown notice in a misguided effort to get me to take down content they didn't like because it has Comcast executive email addresses in it.
#Comcast #DMCA #TakedownReporting
https://blog.kamens.us/2025/03/16/comcast-attempts-to-intimidate-me-into-taking-down-a-blog-post/
"While books that come on audio CDs don't have DRM embedded in them, files downloaded from Audible or other for-pay sources often do. Audiobookshelf won't play books with DRM, which means you need a method of stripping that DRM out.
Unfortunately, here's where we run into a problem: removing DRM from your audiobooks is not universally legal. "In the US, the law against 'circumventing' effective DRM has no personal-use exemption. In Europe, it varies by country," explained the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Competition and IP Litigation Director Mitch Stoltz when Ars reached out for advice. "That's as silly as it sounds—stripping DRM from one’s own copy of an audiobook in order to listen to it privately through different software doesn’t threaten the author or publisher, except that it makes it harder for them to charge you twice for the same audiobook. It’s another example of how anti-circumvention laws interfere with consumers’ rights of ownership over the things they buy."
And that means you're kind of on your own for this step. Should you live in a jurisdiction where DRM removal from audiobooks for personal use is legal—which includes some but not all European countries—then sites like this one can assist in the process; for the rest of us, the only advice I can give is to simply proceed in a legal manner and use DRM-free audiobooks to start with."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/i-threw-away-audibles-app-and-now-i-self-host-my-audiobooks/
@br00t4c that is nothing new.
#GitHub, like any public platform that allows to store data, can be #abused for malicious use.
They do also #scan for #KnownMalware & #DMCA #violations in a #ContentID / #signature/#checksum-based #scanning type to prevent blatant #abuse by #Skiddies.
#Comcast didn't get a court order to support the #DMCA request they sent Linode regarding my blog post, because it was entirely bogus and they knew it. They were just hoping I either didn't know my rights or wouldn't take the time to file a counter-notice.
Well, I did, and the required waiting period has elapsed, so I've republished the post they tried to bully me into taking down.
Here it is, in case you want to remind them about the #StreisandEffect:
https://blog.kamens.us/2009/07/02/comcast-still-sending-service-announcements-to-wrong-address/
Cory Doctorow sees big business opportunities if countries change their laws in response to the kooky U.S. tariff climate.
Specifically, like Sec. 1201 of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act ( #dmca ), many countries passed "contempt of business model" laws that criminalize modding & tinkering to protect #Amazon & #Apple et al.
But now that #BigTech "disruptors" are disrupting international trade rules, what happens if countries change their #dmca style laws?
Cory Doctorow's (@pluralistic) blog post for today is a speech he gave last night at the University of Toronto, the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at Innis College.
It's worth reading:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
It connects the dots between anti-circumvention copyright laws like the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (and the Canadian copycat legislation) and the enshittification that ensues when Big Tech does ... well, practically anything. There's a specific example he uses that is horrifying. He also shows exactly how Big Tech has escaped what he identifies as the usual four factors for keeping the worst instincts of companies in check.
I agree with him that we should annul the anti-circumvention law on the books, and would go further in saying that we should explicitly enshrine in law the rights to alter, repair, remove etc. any functionality of products and services that we choose to use. I was one of the original 6,000 Canadians who submitted comments warning against the implementation of these restrictions to our government at the time, and my feelings in support of this are stronger than ever.
Give it a read.
Attached image: I think this is probably overdue.
The support folks at Linode / Akamai kindly gave me a brief tutorial on how to handle a bogus #DMCA takedown notice. They aren't allowed to decide themselves that the notice is bogus. I have to unpublish the blog posting and then file a counter-notice with Linode (which I've now done), which they then send to the complainant. Then I can republish the blog posting in 2 weeks if I haven't been served with a lawsuit by then.
#Comcast sucks ass for wasting my time like this.
#Copyright
DMCA Notices Took Down 31,151 GitHub Projects Last Year
https://torrentfreak.com/dmca-notices-took-down-31151-github-projects-last-year-250222/
For the record:
* They emailed me the same request again on January 1, 2025. I once again told them to pound sand.
* This morning they escalated by filing a #DMCA takedown request with #Linode, my hosting provider. Email addresses can't be copyrighted, so the request is totally bogus. Linode forwarded it to me and demanded that I take action rather than reading it carefully enough to determine that it's bogus. I just wrote back to them and told them it is. We'll see what happens.
#Comcast
I can now proudly announce that the Content Mafia has gone full circle.
Amazon Content Services Llc has filed a DMCA complaint against me for infringing the 2024 series "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" season 2.
The tweet (from 2020) merely cited the names of "notorious markets" exactly as found in the official public #MPA filing.
@mago leider scheinen die #ÖRR recht faul zu sein was #DMCA & Co. gegen diese "#PropagandaEdit|s" angeht...
Copyright madness: YouTube seems to doubt whether Shakespeare is in the public domain
One of the darker threads of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is how complex copyright enforcement systems can be abused, for example by sending Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests for material that is perfectly legal. A recent post on the Public Citizen blog offers an extreme example of this blight. Here’s the summary of what happened:
When […]
#counternotice #dmca #google #infringement #nonProfit #publicDomain #registration #shakespeare #takedown #usCopyrightOffice #youtube
Honestly, anyone who studies a bit about the history and law-based enforcement of copyright will immediately conclude that copyright is just another form of rent extortion from the public domain and the commons...
You can commit the greatest atrocity against the democratization of access to culture and knowledge and justify it by claiming that you are only defending the interests of authors.
"Copyright owners have intimidated researchers away from disclosing that their software spies on users or is full of bugs that make it unsafe. When a blockbuster entertainment product inspires people to tell their own stories by depicting themselves in the same world or costumes, a letter from the studio’s lawyers will usually convince them to stay silent. And whose who sell software write their own law into End User License Agreements and can threaten any user who disobeys them with copyright damages.
These are only a few of the ways that copyright is a civil liberties nightmare in the modern age, and only a few of the abuses of copyright that we fight against in court. Copyright started out as a way for European rulers to ensure that publishers remained friendly to the government, and we still see this dynamic in the cozy relationship between Hollywood and the US military and police forces. But more and more it’s been a way for private entities that are already powerful to prevent both market competition and contrary ideas from challenging their dominance.
The imbalance of power between authors and the owners of mass media is the main reason that authors only get a small share of the value they create. Copyright is at its best when it protects a creator from being beaten to market by those who own mass media channels, giving them some leverage to negotiate."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/copyright-civil-liberties-nightmare
Sony doing Sony things... Modder Behind Bloodborne 60FPS Patch Finally DMCA'd By Sony Four Years Later https://kotaku.com/bloodborne-60fps-mod-hack-remaster-sequel-ps5-dmca-1851752593 #game #games #gaming #retro #retrogaming #sony #bloodbourne #dmca
Nintendo Piracy Lawsuit Defendant Makes Dire Situation Even Worse
https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-piracy-lawsuit-defendant-makes-dire-situation-even-worse-250128/
I don't understand how people can be so sympathetic towards record labels and music publishers. As the owners - and not the authors! - of copyrighted works, they are most often mere parasites. Pure rent-seeking entities that seek to extract licenses (rents) from every online use of a copyrighted work. As such, historically they've been against any effort in favor of democratizing access to culture and knowledge. They should be denounced as censors and feudal lords.
"In a major win for creator communities, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has once again handed video streaming site Vimeo a solid win in its long-running legal battle with Capitol Records and a host of other record labels.
The labels claimed that Vimeo was liable for copyright infringement on its site, and specifically that it can’t rely on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor because Vimeo employees “interacted” with user-uploaded videos that included infringing recordings of musical performances owned by the labels. Those interactions included commenting on, liking, promoting, demoting , or posting them elsewhere on the site. The record labels contended that these videos contained popular songs, and it would’ve been obvious to Vimeo employees that this music was unlicensed.
But as EFF explained in an amicus brief filed in support of Vimeo, even rightsholders themselves mistakenly demand takedowns."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/second-circuit-rejects-record-labels-attempt-rewrite-dmca
Copyright: Vimeo gewinnt erneut gegen Plattenlabel
Seit 2009 versuchen Plattenlabel, Vimeo für Videos mit unlizenzierter Musik haftbar zu machen. Die Rechteinhaber sind erneut gescheitert.
"A brave YouTuber has managed to defeat a fake Nintendo lawyer improperly targeting his channel with copyright takedowns that could have seen his entire channel removed if YouTube issued one more strike.
Sharing his story with The Verge, Dominik "Domtendo" Neumayer—a German YouTuber who has broadcasted play-throughs of popular games for 17 years—said that it all started when YouTube removed some videos from his channel that were centered on The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Those removals came after a pair of complaints were filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and generated two strikes. Everyone on YouTube knows that three strikes mean you're out and off the platform permanently.
Suddenly at risk of losing the entire channel he had built on YouTube, Neumayer was stunned, The Verge noted, partly because most game companies consider "Let's Play" videos like his to be free marketing, not a threat to their business. And while Nintendo has been known to target YouTubers with DMCA takedowns, it generally historically took no issues with accounts like his."
¯\_ (ツ) _/¯ 
