WordPress parent company denies bulk of DMCA notices
The parent company of content management system WordPress, last year rejected 83% of all takedown notices it received from copyright owners under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it has revealed.
In a new report published last week, Automattic confirmed it had received 18,594 DMCA takedown notices during 2020, a 50% increase compared to last year.
This year Automattic expects to reach a 100,000 takedown notice milestone. Since the company began counting complaints in 2014, it has processed 93,430 DMCA takedown requests, turning down 70%.
Inaccurate takedown processes
The company confirmed that it had turned down more than eight in 10 of DCMA notices in 2020 as result of inaccurate automated takedown processes.
The study, first reported by blogging site Torrentfreak, shows the company’s rejection rate is high when compared to other online services. Last year Reddit rejected 27% of all takedown requests, Google turned down around 10%, while Bing rejected less than 0.5% of all requests.
Stephen Blythe, community guardian at Automattic, told TorrentFreak that the surge in rejections was due to an increase in automated takedown notices.
“Many of these are duplicates, target content which has already been removed, content which we do not host, or content which the notices haven’t accurately identified,” Blythe said.
He added that Automattic uses people to process these requests, who are able to spot more errors than an automatic process leading to a relatively high rejection rate.
“Our team manually scrutinises takedown reports and rejects any which we identify as failing to meet the requirements of the DMCA, rather than simply processing takedowns automatically. By its nature, that will result in a higher rate of rejection,” Blythe said.
New approaches
Automattic is trying to get a number of prolific takedown senders to change their practices to reduce these kinds of notices, and has succeeded in persuading Spanish anti-piracy company 3Ants to adjust its takedown process.
However, the company complained that others were not as receptive to new approaches.
“Unfortunately not every complainant is as cooperative as 3Ants. For years we’ve been speaking out against abuses of the DMCA such as the use of automated systems which flood platforms with takedown notices regardless of context,” Automattic said.
“These methods are often prone to error and make it difficult for platforms to prioritise valid notices submitted by individual rights owners.”
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