Automated Copyright Takedown Requests Are the Bane of the Civilized Web ⇥ 404media.co

Emanuel Maiberg, of 404 Media, published a pretty good story with a pretty bad headline. Here is his core argument:

Porn piracy, like all forms of content piracy, has existed for as long as the internet. But as more individual creators who make their living on services like OnlyFans, many of them have hired companies to send Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices against companies that steal their content. As some of those services turn to automation in order to handle the workload, completely unrelated content is getting flagged as violating their copyrights and is being deindexed from Google search. The process exposes bigger problems with how copyright violations are handled on the internet, with automated systems filing takedown requests that are reviewed by other automated systems, leading to unintended consequences.

Ignoring the titillating associations with porn, this is a new and valuable entry into the compendium of articles about failures in the automatic handling of DMCA complaints. The headline on the article, however, gives no indication of that and is, I think, misleading:

How OnlyFans Piracy Is Ruining the Internet for Everyone

Here are my problems with it:

  1. The piracy itself is not doing anything. It is the automation and mishandling of takedown requests for copyright claims.

  2. This is only slightly related to OnlyFans. It is more broadly applicable to the increasing appeal of solo or independent producers in music, video, podcasting, etc.

  3. If I am being pedantic, it is not the internet which is being ruined, but the web.

This headline is kind of clickbait, but it is also simply inaccurate in describing the subject of the article. I do not often flag issues with headlines, especially since they are typically written by editors instead of reporters. In this case, though, Maiberg is a co-owner of 404 Media, so I am sure he had some say in choosing a headline.

Do not let that criticism steer you away from what is otherwise an excellent article, however. Maiberg interviewed the CEO of Takedowns AI, a platform which used to be involved in generic material removal and reputation management before pivoting to a service focused on OnlyFans piracy specifically. I am linking to the Wayback Machine there because the company’s site is currently offline, perhaps its own attempt at reputation management after Kunal Anand, the CEO, explained what seems to be a loose approach to validating takedown requests.

This is an old problem, as Maiberg acknowledges:

It’s an issue at the intersection of several critical problems with the modern internet: Google’s search monopoly, rampant porn piracy, a DMCA takedown process vulnerable to errors and abuse, and now the automation of all of the above in order to operate at scale. No one I talked to for this story thought there was an easy solution to this problem.

I obviously have no answers here, only two observations. The first is that it shows a limitation of offloading legal processes to corporations. Fair use is, famously, a nebulous concept, and trying to figure out whether a single YouTuber’s video is in violation would take significant time and expense — and this simply is not feasible at YouTube’s scale. Second, automation has made some of this easier — it is harder to find full-length Hollywood films on YouTube than you might expect for a video-based website — while also requiring each party to more carefully check their work.