Musicians, know who your friends are and are not. Here is another example of big tech money, corporate astroturf, attempting to remove your rights. In the last hours of the submissions to the Copyright Office for comments on the DMCA a webform was introduced.

Note the fear-inducing reference to “robots”–“robots” must refer to the tools that Google itself gives to big companies to automate sending DMCA notices to Google for infringing links.  So by definition, “corporations” use Google’s own “robots” at Google’s request.  80 million infringing links this month alone!  (And remember, the Google “transparency report” does not include DMCA notices sent to YouTube, Blogger or any other Google property, it just covers Google search.)  EEP! ROBOTS!  DON’T BREAK THE INTERNET!

This letter is exceptionally misleading because Google doesn’t allow independent artists to use these tools.  That means even the handful of artists who can monitor Google search 24/7 have to send manual notices.  So what the astroturf group is really complaining about is that EVERYONE should have to send notices manually which would increase the amount of time that Google has to profit from links to infringing content by data profiling or advertising sold on pirate sites.

This webform did not even verify if those sending the automated letter to the US Copyright Office were actually US Residents or machines…or made an intelligible comment on the questions the Copyright Office asked for public comment.  So, we had some fun with it, see bel0w.

David Newhoff at The Illusion Of More has an excellent piece looking much deeper at how these corporations and their funded organizations are working aggressively to take away the protections granted to individual creators in copyright.

Read it here, at the link below.

Astroturf Organizations Typically Hysterical on DMCA | The Illusion Of More