Film studio Warner Brothers hired Vobile, a company that tracks down illegally-streamed copyrighted material online and files hundreds of thousands of takedown demands every month, to find which sites were stealing WB’s property and to handle the miscreants.
Vobile, on behalf of its client, asked Google to ban many websites from search results, because they violated copyright laws by containing Warner films and videos. Among the sites targeted: legitimate movie streaming websites run by Amazon, Sky Cinema, the film database IMDB….and Warner’s own websites. For example, Google was asked to remove links to the official websites for Warner films like “Batman: The Dark Knight” and “The Matrix.”
Nice job, Vobile!
Warner Brothers has yet to comment, although I would guess its comment would be along the lines of “#!%@*&!”
This is what comes of letting robots do human jobs, while charging fees as if humans were doing them. To be fair to Vobile, one sure way to stop illicit streaming is to block all streaming, just to be safe.
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Pointer: Fred
Ethics Alarms 
DMCA takedowns are sent under penalty of perjury.
How much would you like to bet that no one at Vobile gets so much as a slap on the wrist fine while everyone who’s stuff was taken down or who got a copyright strike on YouTube has to fight for months to get their sites/videos restored.
Ostensibly. But can you cite a single perjury case stemming from a false DMCA claim? Because I can list an easy dozen that didn’t.
Morning writing… sorry. That last line should have been something like: Because I can easily list a dozen false DMCA claims, obviously false DMCA claims that did not result in perjury charges, or even penalties.
No I can’t, because they never do because the DMCA can be flagrantly abused without repercussions, because the DMCA is so much bullshit.
Which is what I was hinting at when I said not even a slap on the wrist fine.
Did the Clintons hire this outfit to delete Imelda’s “personal” emails?
It’s hard for me to see where the description of the incident ends and your ethics analysis and comments begin.
I think that would be obvious. Vobile files computer generated legal notices in a slipshod manner. Ethical implications abound given that the innocent are getting swept up and having to deal with it, and as their own employer are getting hit by their shotgun approach.
Add to that WB who, Ken White might say, outsourced their reputation, and their own ethics by not doing their own due diligence before empowering ethicsless hacks to act on their behalf.
Does that episode really need analysis? Red ipsa loquitur.
Red ipsa loquitur. I like that. Sounds like a description of anything Noam Chomsky, Stephen Cohen or Katrina van den Heuvel write or say.
It’s in the space between the last set of quotation marks.