DID: forbidden word because stupidity is human

What might have become of the simple word DID? In 2018, its owner -Bit History, a website dedicated to the history of computers, wrote a very nice article about the mathematician Ada Lovelace, who is considered the first computer programmer.

Unfortunately, if you search for Google article you will not find it. An anti-piracy company deleted it because it dared to use the word "did".

Every hour, every day, every week all year round, anti-piracy companies send out DMCA alerts to remove content that allegedly infringes on the Internet.

Many of these are content withdrawal requests, targeting movies, TV shows, music, games, software and anything else that can be played digitally. For copyright holders it is now a duty but mistakes can happen. The scale is such that mistakes are almost inevitable.

Unfortunately, some of these mistakes are so ridiculous that they seem unacceptable, especially when they target people who had no intention of breaking the Law.

Case: Target, owner of the Two-Bit History blog

In 2018, Target wrote an article about Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who is often cited as the first programmer in the world, despite being born in 1815. Unfortunately, if you search the article today via Google you will not find it .

The image below shows the original Tweet that the article announces and still exists on Google, but the article itself has been removed, thanks to a copyright infringement complaint.

There are dozens of reasons why an article may infringe on someone's copyright, but many times they are completely absurd. Sinclair's article was deleted because an anti-piracy company operating on behalf of a TV series decided that Ada Lovelace's title, which contained the word "DID", was illegal.

This monumental "potato" was announced στο Twitter από τον ίδιο τον Sinclair, ο οποίος παραπονέθηκε ότι “ are stupid folks. Too bad Google has decided they are in charge.”

Of course people are stupid, not computers. The proof is in DMCA complaint submitted to Google by RightsHero, an anti-piracy company working for Zee TV, an Indian pay-TV channel that airs on Dance India Dance.

It is now in its seventh season. The Dance India Dance series is a dance show that is often referred to as DID. So because Target and at least 11 other websites dared to use the word in titles, RightsHero listed the pages as illegal and asked Google to remove them.

Let's see what happened.

Below are some of the other articles that allegedly violate the Law:

-USGS Earthquake Hazards Program of the US Geological Survey (Did You Feel It? (DYFI) collects information from felt an earthquake and creates that show what people experienced and the extent of damage)

- The US Department of Education (Did (or will) you file a Schedule 1 with your 2018 tax return?)

– Nature.com (Did pangolins spread the China to people?)

The Torrentfreak tried contact RightsHero. However, the only anti-piracy company that bears this name has a useless website that does not provide information about where the company is, who owns it, or how someone can get in touch with them.

So without RightsHero, Sinclair Target was left with only one option, to file a counterclaim with Google in the hope that his page would be restored.

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Written by giorgos

George still wonders what he's doing here ...

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