In a Monday court filing, Warner Brothers admitted that it has issued takedown notices for files without looking at them first. The studio also acknowledged that it issued takedown notices for a number of URLs that its adversary, the locker site Hotfile, says were obviously not Warner Brothers' content.
Hotfile has been locked in a legal battle with Hollywood studios since February; the studios accuse the site of facilitating copyright infringement on a massive scale. Hotfile counters that it is immune from liability for the infringements of its users because it complies with the notice-and-takedown procedures established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But Hotfile has also tried to turn the tables by arguing that one of the studios, Warner Brothers, has itself violated the DMCA by issuing bogus takedown requests.
In a September filing, Hotfile described how it provided Warner Brothers with an automated takedown tool to enable the studio to rapidly remove content it believed to be infringing. As we described it at the time, the studio doesn't seem to have used the tool very carefully:
Hotfile alleges that Warner Brothers abused this tool by submitting thousands of takedown requests for files it didn't own. Hotfile suggests these requests were generated by automated crawlers without adequate human supervision. For example, Warner Brothers owns the copyright for the 2009 movie The Box. Hotfile alleges that Warner Brothers scraped websites for hotfile.com links containing the phrase "the box," which of course led to takedowns for dozens of files that were clearly not Warner Brothers content. For example, Warner Brothers sought the removal of an audiobook called "Cancer: Out Of The Box" and a BBC production of "The Box that Saved Britain."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/warner-admits-it-issues-takedowns-for-files-it-hasnt-looked-at.ars
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