Earlier this month, we discussed the “Six Strikes” Copyright Alert System (CAS) being used by the five major internet service providers (ISPs) to combat copyright infringement. On March 1, the technology blog Techdirt reported that MarkMonitor, the American brand protection company entrusted by the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) to identify instances of infringement under the “Six Strikes” program, sent out a notice that could create more questions about the CAS.
A Techdirt reader emailed the blog about a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice that he received that claimed that he was using his MediaFire account to host the television shows or movies “Downton Abbey,” “Contraband,” “Grimm,” “House M.D.,” “The Man with the Iron Fists” and “The Office.” However, the file “Cantha Cartography Made Easy 2009.tpf” was marked as one of those programs, when it is actually a game mod for Guild Wars. The reader told Techdirt that he set up his MediaFire account “solely to host game mods and has never hosted any other content there.”
Techdirt called this DMCA takedown notice the reader received “doubly important” because it came from Dtecnet, a division of MarkMonitor—or the company providing the key monitoring for the “Six Strikes” CAS. The CCI website links to a report from the digital risk management firm Stroz Friedberg entitled “Independent Expert Assessment of MarkMonitor AntiPiracy Methodologies,” but the CCI’s selection of Stroz Friedberg to investigate copyright infringement claimswas heavily criticized last November because of the firm’s previous lobbying history on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). A page on the CCI website with the same title as the Stroz Friedberg report is blank.
“Perhaps, if they’re looking to do an analysis, figuring out why they’re taking down content that has nothing to do with what they claim would be a good place to start,” Techdirt wrote.
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