What could be done with the simple word DID? In 2018, the owner of Two-Bit History, a website dedicated to the history of computers, wrote a very nice article about 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 of every day of every week of the year, anti-piracy companies send alerts DMCA to remove allegedly infringing content from the Internet.
Many of these are content takedown 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 they can happen Mistakes. 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: Sinclair 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 might infringe someone's copyright, but many times they are completely nonsensical. Sinclair's article was deleted because an anti-piracy company acting on behalf of a telvisualof the series ruled that Ada Lovelace's title, which contained the word "DID", is illegal.
This monumental "potato" was announced on Twitter by Sinclair himself, who complained that “Computers 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 people who felt an earthquake and creates maps 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 coronavirus 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 just one choice, to file a counterclaim with Google in hopes of getting his page reinstated.
