Les plateformes sociales stars des années 2000 se sont trouvées une nouvelle manne financière à l'éthique discutable.

As one of the leading niche blog platforms, Tumblr receives thousands of DMCA takedown requests every year. Many of these point to copyright-infringing material, but not all.

Tumblr’s parent company Automattic is known to inspect all takedown notices carefully and has a track record of defending its users, whether abuse is intentional or not.

To set an example, the company occasionally highlights the worst offenders in its “Hall of Shame.” This overview of the worst offenders welcomed a new entry last week; triggered by the unlikely confusion between a Star Trek fandom blog and an adult entertainment actress.

La Sirena

The recent Hall of Fame entry centers around “La Sirena,” which is Spanish for The Mermaid. Aside from being a dictionary term, Star Trek fans will know La Sirena as the Kaplan F17 Speed Freighter featured in the Picard series.

This starship is more than just another prop for die-hard Trekkies. The person behind the Tumblr blog “ Mapping La Sirena ” has spent countless hours and dedicated dozens of posts to the iconic Speed Freighter.

The term “La Sirena” isn’t exclusive to the starship, however. Others have adopted it too, including Venezuelan adult actress Antonella Alonso who picked La Sirena 69 as her stage name.

In theory, such diverse uses of “La Sirena” should never cross paths. According to Tumblr’s parent company Automattic, third-party takedown service ‘DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc’ has trouble distinguishing between the two, earning it a spot in the company’s ‘Hall of Shame’.

Hall of Shame

DMCA Piracy Prevention began sending takedown notices to Tumblr at the beginning of the year and has since submitted over 300 complaints. While Tumblr users occasionally post copyrighted content without permission, in this case many of the reported blogs were not infringing at all.

Instead, DMCA Piracy Prevention appears to confuse the ‘La Sirena’ fandom blog with their client ‘La Sirena 69’ based on little else than the similarity between the names. This resulted in a flurry of inaccurate takedown requests.

“In one recent copyright claim, the monitoring service targeted over 90 Tumblr posts that matched a keyword search of “la sirena,” Automattic’s Emily Fowler writes .

“But instead of alerting our team to La Sirena 69’s allegedly infringed content, the company reported a wide array of mappinglasirena.tumblr.com’s original posts—like a short essay about a new La Sirena booklet, an article analysis of the starship’s design, and even the blog owner’s thoughts on the fourth trailer for Picard season two.”

None of the reported links from the fandom blog contained anything that would even remotely violate the rights of the adult performer. As such, Tumblr’s takedown team rejected the notices and kept all the posts online, adding DMCA Piracy Protection to its “Hall of Shame” instead.

Prevent DMCA Abuse

The Trust and Safety team at Automattic hopes that by calling out these overbroad takedown campaigns, companies will review their processes and do better going forward. In this instance, there is plenty of room for improvement.

“Copyright monitoring services should not flippantly report content entirely irrelevant to their clients’ content; that is an abuse of the DMCA. These companies have a responsibility to verify that the content targeted in their takedown notices is actually owned by their client.”

Automattic’s team reviews DMCA notices meticulously and spotted that “La Sirena 69” is not “La Sirena” but that’s a difference takedown companies should notice, before sending their takedown requests. If not, independent creators such as “Mapping La Sirena” are at risk of being needlessly censored.

“Whether it’s an improved algorithm or more human eyes on every notice that they’re submitting, guardrails must be implemented to prevent DMCA abuse—otherwise, these monitoring services risk unnecessarily burdening innocent content creators, or removing innocuous content,” Emily continues.

“Tumblr is a special place—not only for Trekkies, but for anyone who writes prose, creates artwork, constructs moodboards, or expresses themselves in their own unique way. This mission is why we do what we do, and we will never stop fighting for users to champion this right in our little pocket of cyberspace.”

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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Automattic , the company behind the popular blogging platform WordPress, receives thousands of takedown requests from copyright holders.

For several years the volume of notices continued to increase , with a peak in 2018, after which the trend slowly went in the other direction.

This week, the company published its latest WordPress.com transparency report , revealing that it processed 2,412 takedown notices during the first six months of the year. That is a significant drop compared to a year earlier when over 3,321 notices were handled.

These data only apply to the number of DMCA notices that are directed at WordPress.com services. Each of these notices can contain multiple URLs, in some cases even dozens. In future, Automattic plans to release more granular data.

Abusive and Incomplete Takedown Requests

Aside from the continued drop in takedown volume, the high rejection rate clearly stands out. Of all notices received, only 14% result in any content removals; the vast majority are rejected for a variety of reasons.

In the reported period, 77% of all notices were rejected because they were incomplete. An additional 9% was labeled as ‘abusive’ and dismissed for that reason. The remaining 14% was processed as usual.

The number of rejections is significantly higher than in the same period last year. According to Automattic, this is mostly due to more incomplete notices, which are often sent by specialized ‘removal companies’.

“Most of these incomplete notices were submitted through seemingly automated processes that are provided by content removal companies which often charge content creators to exercise their rights,” Automattic notes .

These ‘faulty’ notices also include requests to take down content that’s cached for other hosting providers, through WordPress’ Jetpack service , for example. Since WordPress is not the original host it doesn’t take action in response to these.

The high percentage of ‘faulty’ notices is a source of frustration for Automattic, which indirectly criticizes the companies that largely rely on takedown bots and automated processes.

Tumblr

Automattic also owns the blogging platform Tumblr, which it purchased in 2019. For this service, it releases a separate transparency report.

The Tumblr report shows a similar decline in DMCA takedown notices. In the first half of 2023, 2,278 takedown notices were sent to the platform, a significant drop from the 3,362 requests it received a year earlier.

A detailed breakdown shows that these DMCA notices targeted 2,369 posts and 11,146 pieces of other content. The majority of these notices, 78%, were valid and processed accordingly.

“This type of careless use of the DMCA makes it harder for platforms to efficiently process valid takedown notifications. In the past, we have highlighted similar problematic trends such as the negative impact of automated takedown notices submitted by bots,” the company writes.

All in all, the transparency reports show that the major DMCA takedown surge of a few years ago has subsided. However, Automattic stresses that it’s important to remain vigilant to ensure that content isn’t needlessly removed.

“For our part, we meticulously review each takedown notice we receive so that we can identify the validity, push back on abuse, and help our users understand their rights such as Fair Use,” Automattic writes.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Entre Reddit, Twitter et Tumblr, une certaine vision du web communautaire est en train de disparaître. Mais, est-ce vraiment un problème ? C'est la question que se pose cette semaine Lucie Ronfaut dans la newsletter #Règle30. [Lire la suite]

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