I need your help about DMCAs and risks, if you have competence in this
Hello there,
If you have knoweledge about it (not “I think that…” but “I know that, and I have seen examples”), I’d appreciate your opinion about something.
The biggest copyright holders in USA and Europe – released hentai movies are leading a crusade against those who share h-movies licensed by them, and I guess that a few of my shares risk to be in that category.
Look at hentai sites like browsehentai, 7chan, bluhentai, for instance, dead, suspended, or at least down for a while.
I really must know if :
– 1- I’m likely to receive a mail saying “please remove these videos, you’ve got 3 days before we make all that we can to kill your website”
– 2 – as soon as hentairules.net is spotted, the copyright holders are going to contact my host with a “kill please” request, and some day I’ll discover that my account has been suspended
Hypothesis 1 : I keep on sharing until requested to remove, I remove at once, and voila. Hypothesis 2 : I remove everything at once.
If you have trusted information about this situation and can leave it in a comment, i’ll be grateful, thanks
hey just got a question are is it you who have uploaded it to the servers or is it links you have found
sorry for the bad grammar
Hmmm… i dont know in the case of hentai and stuff, but ive been for some time in a comic book forum and over htere they had some trouble with marvel comics who wanted their material removed from the website.
For a week they were suddenly down, and after they reupped we were told how they had removed all that was marvel, and after struggling with the marvel ppl, they managed to convince them not to file a lawsuit, or kill their site because they no longer had any marvel material, and had complied to their demands.
So basically, ive seen stuff like this happen, and i strongly believe they’re gonna come all “we’ll down your site tomorrow unless…” and as soon as you comply, and give them a few “please dont kill my site i did what you asked of me” mails, theyll leave you alone.
I say it like that, but i think its gonna be a handful, but if you really want to keep this site up (I know i do) then i think you’ll manage…
my 2 cents
I wonder if this is why rapidsearch is down lately. Also if the movies are subed and not dubed it should be fine right?
First of DMCAs hold no power out side the US so in less you live in the us and/or HR is hosted on a US server dont worry about the US holders. I cant say about Europe.
You’ve asked a good question, and I’ll share with you what I know. The DMCA is a U.S. Copyright Infringement protection, and you would in essence need to be a U.S. citizen, or reside within the U.S. to be held responsible. However, the EU also possesses similar copyright protection under the EU Copyright Directive, if I’m correct. Unfortunately, there are cases of people being prosecuted for copyright infringement before either the DMCA or Directive were put into effect. The purpose of the two is to eliminate any loopholes or claims of ignorance when dealing with digital data, including media.
The good thing is that in order for someone to be formerly prosecuted under either, certain steps must be taken by the copyright holder before they can attempt any litigation. Just this past winter a fansubbing group received a Cease & Desist e-mail from a company that had recently licensed the Japanese Anime. I think it was for overseas distribution, but it doesn’t have to be strictly licensed for overseas distribution. The C&D is usually the first step taken concerning copyright infringement, and then it goes to domain hosting service or ISP, and then court. In the case of the fansubbing group, they complied with the C&D by removing all torrent links on their site and tracker, and dropped subbing the anime.
Don’t mistake what the RIAA has been doing with what is proper procedure for copyright infringement. The RIAA has been strong-arming individuals, and performed a roundabout C&D released to the general public via the news media. They then went after individuals who shared a large to extremely large amount of copyrighted media to try and intimidate everyone that had been sharing files. Some of the RIAA’s tactics are questionable, but many individuals cannot afford to fight a lengthy court battle. There was the case of the torrent search engine web site, I think it was TorrentSpy, that continued operations after being fined in court. Between the court and legal costs, fines, and continuing to operate, they not only had to shut down the site, they also had to file bankruptcy after the fact.
The thing is that you can reduce the risk of legal problems by following what many of the fansubber groups do, especially since in a sense you are doing the same thing. Make a link or e-mail address available on your site for someone to contact you concerning any issues of the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. Just say something like, “If you are the copyright holder, and you have issue with your material being on this site, please send a message specifying your company, contact information, material, and some form of verifiable proof of ownership or license, and we will attempt to comply with your request,” or something to that effect.
If you provide companies or authors/artists with a means by which to contact you, and you’re only asking for reasonable proof from them that they are really who they say they are, then the chance is better that they will simply send you a C&D. If you get one, then remove the file from the servers you uploaded it onto, and remove any links, galleries, and images found on your web site that belongs to them. If you do this, and you do it by the deadline they’ve specified, then when they look at your web site again they should find the material gone. If you’ve complied, and they see that you have in a timely manner, they usually won’t take it any further.
If you want, you can run searches concerning fansubbing groups receiving C&D orders, and just follow the same steps they use to keep from being taken to court. I don’t think you need to worry about closing the site, as long as you show that you’re willing to co-operate, and still have material you can post on the site. Most fansubbing groups just move onto a different anime, and most companies treat the C&D’s to the fansubbing groups on a case by case, or anime by anime basis. Sometimes they send out a list of titles, but as long as you comply with the list, you should be fine.
might solving, use IRC channel, or direct ftp (no web pages), or if they’re searching through using a search engine, you might want to change/rename every single H title eq: karada-no-koi became: 4-r4-d4-n0-K01. like that.
Well, I think that since you have work from so many authors and publishers, I doubt they will tell you to remove all the info. I have a pal who works in a company the publishes comics/manga’s and asked him about this. He told me that unless you have manga/hentai from a sole publisher they will not tell you shutdown or remove.
Man that suks cause i love wat u do and yeah ive seen a few of my fav sites get shut down my advice do it before u get into legal trouble
Thanks for the input, guys
FYI, hentairules.net is hosted by an american company, and the domain was bought off a french domain handler.
The most important part of my comment :
Please, correct me if I am wrong, the conclusion would be that
-> I can keep on sharing stuff,
-> The editors are not likely to contact my host and successfully have hentairules.net closed
-> There is just the possibility that I get a cease and desist (aka “remove at once please”) email, and if I comply to it, i’m clear ?
But then, how could you explain that some websites like browsehentai or rapidshare have had to close in a same week ?
Browsehentai was a proffitable website, its admin once contacted me to suggest I would publicize one of his “join now” offers, so I guess his service was rolling. I see no reason it would have decided to stop service.
Rapidsearch is more of an UFO, but I don’t see why it should have chosen to close without being forced to…
Maybe because, as link aggregators, they couldn’t possibly filter out every link they showed, and that didn’t please copyright holders ?
haha, not rapidshare, rapidsearch (.yi.org), my mistake, massive typo
I’m pretty sure browsehentai didn’t take down any of their content despite the DMCA and C&D stuff which resulted in the suspended domain.
If worse comes to worse just do as they say and you should be in no trouble at all.
Well, the Rapidshare down time was only temporary, and there has been a lot of speculation as to why, but I can’t see an official notification as to the cause direct from Rapidshare. However, it could be related to the GEMA case, and that involved the German copyright holder/licensor, GEMA, or a simple equipment failure.
http://rapidshare.com/news.html
As to browsehentai, an account can be suspended for a variety of reasons: lack of payment, non-compliance of the terms of agreement, excessive bandwidth usage, tired of paying out of pocket for expenses.
Personally, I wouldn’t worry about it until there’s something to actually worry about. I’ve lost track of the number or sites that come and go, are down for a bit, or are blocked by the ISP’s for whatever reasons. Anime is traditionally bigger than Hentai, and Manga even bigger in popularity. Yes, some licensors or copyright holders are coming down harder recently, but most still agree to follow etiquette. It makes no sense for anyone to go directly to your host without first contacting you, simply because you can easily change hosts. So it’s better to send you a C&D because how you fail to co-operate can be used in court against you. If you’ve never been contacted by anyone as yet, you might just want to ride things out a little longer.
A couple of thoughts.
First, on browsehentai, x-shinigami.com which was on their service posted a message a couple of weeks ago saying they and browsehentai had gotten several DMCAs, not just one, over an unspecified period of time (my guess, a few months) and their host notified them they were being kicked for multiple DMCA issues. (they may be back if they can raise the funds and find a new host)
Second, the most common way for copyright holders to check the web for ‘violators’ is auto searches, so, many sites, DS*ist for example put nonsense characters into names that may pop up on such searchs (Na*ru*o or B*each for example) ,which throw bots like that off.
As for proactive responses, like removal, don’t seem to work for long, since I assume browsehentai would have removed such material (the double prob being a number of people could setup downloads there so it was hard for them to control what was on their site)
I’d just make it harder to find your site, and harder for auto or google like searchs to browse your content, and have an emergency fund for eventualities
do like ryushi said put in **** it makes it impossible to track tried it myself once it works
I’m heavily involved with fansubbing and dvd-ripping anime community.
The bottom line is that lawyers are really fucking expensive. Companies would rather resolve the issue quickly, painlessly, and without a court order. Hentai/anime companies don’t have huge amounts of money to throw around suing people who pirate their stuff.
There’s has not been an anime group in my memory who has been explicitly shut down. They are always threatened first. Anime-supreme got an e-mail from Funi or something a while ago saying “Please remove such a such content.” They’re a dual-audio anime releasing group. They just removed the materials and stopped doing bit-torrents in general. And they still release things sometimes.
Don’t worry about it. It’s EXTREMELY unlikely that you are going to be at in risk. If you are, they will give you a cease and desist before the outright shit you down.
Some good news, x-shinigami.brows*hentai is apparently up again, they must have found a new host