In a twist of irony, the music industry group IFPI has sent not one, but two separate take down notices to MEGA about Kim Dotcom’s own album, Good Times. In one of the instances they were successful and the link to the Album stopped working last Monday. Of course the album was hosted on MEGA, and it shows a bit of how the music and movie industry abuses the takedown system with auto-generated, and often false, takedown requests.
With the ongoing lawsuit and the reputation the old Megaupload had, copyright holders are keeping a close eye on MEGA, though so far the takedown request have been relative small. On that note, I might point out that the the U.S. government just has joined the MPAA and RIAA in a new lawsuit in an attempt to get liquidised assets from Dotcom.
Torrentfreak noticed the file was missing and contacted both MEGA and Kim Dotcom for statements. Mega replied back that the explanation was a takedown notice from IFPI on September 1, claiming the link infringed on the copyrights of one of their artists. They listed a whole bunch, but didn’t specify which one, and Kim Dotcom wasn’t one of them. When Kim heard of this, he contacted Mega and got them to reinstate the link, but it was down for a day.
“This is an indication that someone at the IFPI is not doing their homework and that their takedown notices in general cannot be trusted,” said Mega’s Chief Compliance Officer Stephan Hall to TorrentFreak. IFPI’s actions have been sloppy, to say the least, and there is little faith to be put in the accuracy of the music group’s other takedown requests. Mega have also analysed big samples of notices and found most were automated keyword based takedowns that largely affected legitimate files.
Thank you TorrentFreak for proving us with this information
Images courtesy of TorrentFreak.
