Copyright Bot Can’t Tell The Difference Between Star Trek Ship And Adult Film Actress

Given that the overwhelming majority of DMCA takedown notices are generated by copyright bots that are only moderately good at their job, at best, perhaps it's not terribly surprising that these bots keep finding new and interesting ways to cause collateral damage unintentionally. From publishers taking down YouTubers because of an oopsie to Viacom DMCAing its own Star Trek Comic-con panel thinking it was infringing content, the point is that these bots kinda suck.

And speaking of Star Trek, this story involves that franchise, in a roundabout way. See, that franchise being what it is and has been for some time, there are a ton of fan sites and blogs out there that cover and discuss every aspect of the shows throughout the years. One of them was a Tumblr site, called Mapping La Sirena." If you're a fan of Star Trek: Picard, you will know that's the name of the main starship in that series. But if you're a copyright enforcer for a certain industry, the bots you've set up for yourself apparently aren't programmed with Star Trek fandom.

Transparency.automattic reportsTumblr has received numerous DMCA takedown notices from DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc, a third-party copyright monitoring service used frequently by content creators to prevent infringement of their original work. And these complaints occurred all because of the name La Sirena which also happens to be the name of an adult content creator, La Sirena 69 who is one of Piracy Prevention's customers.

In one copyright claim over 90 Tumblr posts were targeted by the monitoring service because of the keyword match to la sirena." But instead of Automattic being alerted to La Sirena 69's potentially infringed content, the company reported many of mappinglasirena.tumblr.com's original posts.

Pure collateral damage. While not intentional per se, this is obviously still a problem. One of two things has to be the case: either we stop allowing copyright enforcement to be farmed out to a bunch of dumb bots that suck at their jobs or we insist that the bots stop sucking, which ain't going to happen anytime soon. What cannot be allowed to happen is to shrug this sort of thing off as an innocent accident and oh well, too bad, so sad for the impact on the speech rights of the innocent.

There was nothing that remotely infringed La Sirena 69's content. Everything about the complaints and takedown notices was wrong. And we've been at this long enough at this point that we know the enforcement bots are so bad that they can't tell the difference between an adult content actress and a fucking spaceship. With that knowledge, allowing the status quo to continue is a choice, and not a good one.

And the team at Automattic wasn't happy about the reports as they manually investigate each notice of copyright infringement which takes a lot of time. The company suggests DMCA Piracy Prevention do a little more investigating of their own prior to making a copyright claim. A quick look at mappinglasirena's tumblr site would have proven that the blog was discussing a speed freighter not their client's customer.

So much wasted time and effort. The only other remedy would be to have the DMCA takedown notice rejection process also farmed out to bots that equally suck at their jobs. Then we can just let the robots fight and get back to studying our starships.