Windows 8 pirates: No noose is good noose

It appears everybody is so hopped up for the coming of Windows 8 that they can’t wait for the official release and are splattering illegal copies all over the Interwebs.

At least, that’s what you might think if you look at the DMCA takedown notices Microsoft has recently filed to Google. As TorrentFreak reports, over the last year Microsoft has sent nearly 5 million takedown requests to Google claiming that hundreds of sites are illegally distributing its software. Among the alleged miscreants: BBC, CNN, the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Wikipedia, and the U.S. government.

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According to Microsoft, you can find copies of Windows 8 on a BBC guide to TV programming, an AMC Theaters page listing show times for “The Dark Knight Rises,” a Washington Post article about Spain’s financial meltdown, an EPA page on coke oven emissions, a page on RealClearPolitics on Ohio’s presidential polls, and a RottenTomatoes review of the movie “Brake.” (Critical consensus? It sucked.)

All of that is, of course, dead wrong. You can’t find copies of Windows 8 at any of these places; this is an algorithm gone wacko. As TorrentFreak’s Ernesto explains:

… many rights holders use completely automated systems to inform Google and other sites of infringements….Claiming to prevent the unauthorized distribution of Windows 8 Beta the software company listed 65 “infringing” web pages. However, nearly half of the URLs that Google was asked to remove from its search results have nothing to do with Windows 8…. Judging from the page titles and content the websites in question were targeted because they reference the number “45.”

Because as we all know, if you add 4 and 5 together you get 9, which is really an upside-down 6. Triple that and — voila! — you get the mark of the beast.

It gets even sillier: turns out that on several occasions Microsoft has even targeted itself, asking Google to censor its own search engine, Bing.

That wasn’t really Microsoft’s doing, though; it is most likely the work of the folks Microsoft hired as copyright rent-a-cops, an obscure firm run by a former Microsoft employee called Marketly LLC. Marketly files more than 40,000 DMCA takedown requests with Google every week on Microsoft’s behalf.

While some sites (like Wikipedia and the BBC) are whitelisted by Google and immune from automatic shutdown, others aren’t so lucky. TorrentFreak reports that the sites AMC Theaters and RealClearPolitics were inaccessible for a while before they got things sorted out.

This points out one of the more egregious flaws in the DMCA: the Safe Harbor provision that gives service providers like Google a free pass if they comply with takedown requests without any fuss.

Like in the Old West, every site accused of piracy is entitled to a fair trial followed by a hanging; only under the DMCA the judge can skip right over the trial and head straight to the noose.

As I noted here a while back, the number of alleged copyright violations filed with Google has skyrocketed since last spring. The graph charting the number of removal requests per week now looks the slope of K2. During the last week of September rights holders submitted nearly 1.8 million takedown requests to Google; that’s six times as many as they did during the last week of April.

At the time I thought it was the Copyright Cartel opening yet another front in its war on the Internet. But now I’m thinking this may also be due to some really wonky algorithms used by these copyright rent-a-cops that trap an enormous number of false positives.

Extremely aggressive policing combined with flawed software and brain-dead legislation — it’s a perfect storm of stupidity. In theory, our judicial system at least attempts to avoid punishing the innocent, even if it doesn’t always succeed. The DMCA has no such restrictions.

It is yet another reason why Congress needs to flush that law down the toilet and come up with a better way of protecting the rights of both content owners and the rest of us. If that’s even possible, of course.

Is Congress capable of passing a copyright law that’s fair to everyone? And if so, what should be in it? Submit your legislative proposals below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Windows 8 pirates: No noose is good noose,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.