This week WordPress released the latest edition of its recurring transparency report, revealing 43 percent of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests it received have been rejected in the first six months of 2015. It’s the lowest six-month period shown in the report, though it only dates back to 2014. However, WordPress said this headline figure would be even higher if it “counted suspended sites as rejected notices.” That change in calculation would bump the WordPress DMCA denial rate to 67 percent between January 1 and June 30, 2015.
In total, the publishing platform received 4,679 DMCA takedown requests as of June 30, identifying 12 percent of those as “abusive.” The top three organizations submitting these requests were Web Sheriff, Audiolock, and InternetSecurities. “Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by third party take down services, many of whom use automated bots to identify copyrighted content and generate takedown notices,” WordPress noted. The company wrote at length about this practice in April, both explaining and condemning the general procedure.
“These kind of automated systems scour the Web, firing off takedown notifications where unauthorized uses of material are found—so humans don’t have to,” WordPress wrote. “Sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t always work out as smoothly in practice. Much akin to some nightmare scenario from the Terminator, sometimes the bots turn on their creators.”
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