WordPress Dismisses 43% of Piracy Takedown Notices

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has published the number of DMCA takedown requests received during the last few months. Between January to June, there was a total of 4,679 copyright claims submitted but only 57% were successful. Why? A large proportion of these were inaccurate and more than 10% of cases contained an abusive agenda. Interestingly, the figures below show that over 50% of requests were rejected during February and April.

A representative from the company said,

“We work hard to make our DMCA process as fair, transparent, and balanced as possible, so we stringently review all notices we receive to quickly process valid infringement claims and push back on those that we see as abusive,”

While WordPress do not currently publish the specifics of each request, they are considering making an example out of those who abuse the system. Sifting through thousands of DMCA submissions is an extremely time-consuming task and becoming more unbearable as each month progresses. Copyright holders are taking a proactive approach to remove illegitimate content from a variety of websites. This is extremely problematic with websites which host user-created photos, videos and other material. There’s still a legal ambiguity in regards to who the onus for illegal content is on. Additionally, the internet is an open ecosystem and fixating on removing content is a lost cause.

Thank you TorrentFreak for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of WordPress.org.