Trying To Take Down A Negative Movie Review

Found on Techdirt on Monday, 14 January 2008
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All too often, we're seeing the DMCA abused by people who aren't using it to takedown copyright infringing materials, but to shut down sites they don't like. The latest example involves some filmmakers and a movie review site. The review certainly was not particularly positive, leading to a rather random series of complaints and threats against its author.

It's difficult to see how a review of a movie can infringe on the copyrights of that movie unless it was showing the movie itself (which does not appear to be the case). It's worth pointing out that a DMCA takedown notice is only supposed to be for copyright infringing material, so including charges of libel and defamation in the takedown seem rather unnecessary. Even more amusingly, though, the takedown notice includes a bunch of random charges that aren't actually illegal, such as: "linking to other websites without any authorization to do so."

Some people are just amazing. Instead of living with the fact that his movie obviously totally sucked, he got on a little soap box. Of course, as mentioned in the article, this could be a try to make use of the Streisand effect. Still, it's somewhat hillarious. Oh, and if you think about watching "Forget About It": just forget about it.